So what do you think of the first volume of Maohden?
As should be clear by now, this novel shares the same main characters as the first volume of Demon City Blues. The obvious difference in the two titles is that the latter was a serialization, while Maohden was written as a novel (though the second part was published in Non Novel magazine).
But in terms of style, I chose to make sex and violence the centerpieces of Maohden, Vol. I, as opposed to the more lyrical prose of Demon City Blues.
I enjoy both approaches, though for an “adult” novel, Demon City Blues, Vol. I has received an unusually warm reception from my female readers.
This goes back to discussions from my college days. Originally I was all about the poetics of the prose. My favorite science fiction author was Ray Bradbury and my favorite book was The Martian Chronicles. Those old-school stories were all I wrote back then.
Which, to be honest, didn’t amount to a whole lot. The longest thing I did was a ninety-page supernatural script that was staged at a creative retreat I attended.
Kodansha eventually published it in an anthology of my past work. Rereading it now, I can’t help blushing a bit. Suffice it to say that the lyrical mood therein expressed was probably a close reflection of the author’s real self at the time.
In any case, both works play out on the stage of Demon City Shinjuku. This time, though, I wish to devote a few words in this afterword to the secret details of its genesis (I suppose it can be called as much).
✦ ✦ ✦
First there is the influence of film. Here I’m not talking about specific movies, rather the more general problem of the set itself. An editor pointed this out to me and I’ve taken note of it since, but my stories predominantly take place in confined spaces.
Of course, that hardly sums up the entirety of my oeuvre (a fan magazine has put my current total of mass-market paperbacks, including translations, at forty-two). Some like Makaiko span the Pacific from Los Angeles to Japan. But compared to the rest, these are indeed rare.
For example, Journey through Hell, from the young adult Alien series, takes place on a ten-mile long Noah’s Ark, and in Mystery Mountain from the same series, the circuitous passageways winding through the mountain.
In the adult category, the action in Makaiko, Vol. III never takes a step away from the shores of Lake Towada.
Even in stories where the protagonist is given comparably more room to maneuver, an underground labyrinth or palace fortress or similarly enclosed metaphorical space is sure to show up.
Taken together, this is what I mean by the problem of the set. As a theatrical stage, the set exists as a place to build other worlds, the modern art of cinematography then being used to display the most ancient of scenes.
Applied to the novel, it becomes possible to write action scenes impossible even today, and precisely because of that, I believe, all the more real.
Within the pages of a novel, the author breathes life into the characters of his own choosing, and places them on a set of his own design. Perhaps the epitome of this in manga form is Go Nagai’s Violence Jack. He combines the western and the samurai film and contemporizes them to great effect.
I populated Demon City with my lovable assassins, ghosts, gremlins and monsters. Not a whole lot should be read into my choice of Shinjuku. Ginza and Roppongi were out. Shibuya didn’t quite make the grade. Shinjuku was the logical choice.
The result, though, is that real places and buildings become stars in their own right. I’m sure some will find such references morbid, but that only reflects the power the author has in dressing the stage to his own satisfaction. It’s all an artifice, after all. I invite you to consider everything with a charitable eye.
And that brings us to Maohden, Vol. II. The short-term serialization begins with the September edition of Non Novel (going on sale July 22), and will eventually become a novel.
What locations will become the next set, and what special effects and gizmos will populate it? Well, we’ll have to wait and see.
✦ ✦ ✦
Hideyuki Kikuchi (while watching Last Year at Marienbad)
Early in the morning of June 11, 1986