I’ve just finished reading the eight volumes of the paperback pocket edition of Yashakiden: The Demon Princess.
I have a hard time talking about my actual writing, but I can say it now: this is Hideyuki Kikuchi’s most powerful work, and of the two hundred some odd books I have written, contending to be ranked as my best.
(Warring with the opinions of my readers, who will come to their own conclusions in that respect.)
Yashakiden was born out of what has since become a worldwide infatuation with vampires. There is the belief that an artist is born to create a particular work of art. Call it fate, and I’ll say I came into this world to write about an otherworldly genie wrapped in black.
I’ve written about this before, but the one thing that fostered my fascination with vampires more than anything else was a single movie, the 1958 production of Dracula from Hammer Films, running only eighty-one minutes.
The six-foot-three Christopher Lee plays the Count of Transylvania, and like the original, never wears anything but black.
That is why my first vampire novel, Vampire Hunter D (or rather, my first novel about a vampire hunter), featured a man in black.
I’ve touched on this before as well, but the character in the movie I find myself empathizing with the most is not Count Dracula, but Doctor Van Helsing, played by Peter Cushing.
When I was in fifth grade, I was still drawn more to the light of wisdom than the monsters of the night, to good more than evil. While I say that I prefer vampires, accursed beings, and ghosts and goblins as my superheroes, it’s because in the end, that same ordinary sense of justice still rules.
As I’ve grown older, my affection for the otherworldly has grown stronger. My long-held dream of creating a vampire hero, arising out of those dark and evil mists, finally came to fruition in Vampire Hunter D, albeit with a bit of a twist.
Perhaps due to a deep-seated and lingering fear toward the monstrous, the protagonist, D, was not a “true” vampire, but remained half-human. I named his fierce antagonist Count Magnus Lee. Dracula still held me in its thrall.
Ever since Christopher Lee’s depiction of Dracula was etched on my soul, my pen has traced his outlines.
Tall, lean and refined, and yet turning into a ferocious and ruthless predator and destroying his opponents when the rock meets the hard place. Clothed in black, shunning the light and haunting the night, his only true abode. In particular, those sharp and bitter and often bitingly humorous words, disconnected from the mundane world, issuing at times from those bloodless lips.
And—this a personal preference and a “service” to my readers—possessed of beauty. A person is his face. The same goes for magic and evil. What’s inside should come later.
Applying these ideas to Yashakiden must have raised elementary questions in the reader’s mind.
Even if I clad Princess all in black, she nevertheless hails from Asia and isn’t exactly known for her sense of humor. And, of course, she’s a she. The European General Bey, bearing the blood of Dracula in his veins, also differs considerably from my “ideal” of a vampire.
The answer is—Setsura Aki.
My child of Dracula isn’t Princess or General Bey. It’s Setsura. He doesn’t drink blood. But he doesn’t need to. Setsura is the direct descendant of my Dracula, the “grown up” version of D. D’s beauty, ruthlessness and gentleness, and dressed in black—I distilled all those qualities into a senbei shop owner in Demon City.
Princess, General Bey, Gento Roran, Galeen Nuvenberg, Yoshiko “Urp” Toya—it is only natural that they all be drawn to him.
In any case, Demon City Shinjuku does make an ideal stage for storytelling. And I have to say it comes together quite nicely (though the original credit goes to John Carpenter’s Escape from New York).
Old-fashioned black capes, blindingly handsome young men, overly dramatic monologues, beautiful women with skin like pearls sailing ancient ships, pale-faced men and women attending black-tie affairs, coffins hidden in the basements of western-style houses—nothing is out of bounds or off the table.
A city where a sports car rocketing down Shinjuku Avenue passes a black carriage pulled by six horses coming the other way and nobody bats an eye.
I believe the vampire story has become the modern version of the epic romance, in the classical sense. And for an epic romance, the right stage is necessary. That’s why I’ve said that I created Demon City Shinjuku in order to write Yashakiden.
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That conviction hasn’t changed.
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Hideyuki Kikuchi (while watching Dracula)
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September 30, 1997