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krpalmerAfter sweeping one side of the “manga shelves” at the area bookstore without much luck finding the titles that should have shown up one week, I emerged from the narrow aisle to see a lone manga volume sitting out on a display table, and was inclined to think someone had taken it off the shelf and not put it back. It just happened to be one I’d taken a little notice of before without actually seeking copies out, probably weighted by the way even “read” volumes pile up for me. Now, though, my mood was a little different. I went ahead and purchased the first volume of Emanon by Shinji Kajio and Kenji Tsuruta, knowing little more about it than it was a period piece set in 1967, the art looked good to me while tilting towards realism (there’d been an excerpt in the “turn the magazine upside down” centre section of Otaku USA), and Dark Horse seemed the lone “publisher of manga” in English for which that was a side line (I’d recently bought the “trade collection” of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 comic from them to see how things ended). The volume turned out interesting, although being surprised by just how it might be classified leads once more to the apparent threat of “to talk about my own surprise risks denying others their own.”
Emanon (“Spell it backwards.”) is a long-haired “hippie chick” (although her sweater and jeans look tidier to my eyes than the traditional Western “hippie” image) who meets a college-age SF fan (and the narrator) on a long ferry ride. Over the course of an evening, she drops some hints and then explains she’s managed to inherit three billion years of memories back to the first microorganisms, and they get to discussing what purpose preserving that weight of time might carry before she tosses in “So how was my story? Original?” She then vanishes before the end of the voyage, but there’s a coda in 1980 that restores the science fiction aspect. It was, perhaps, the ambience of the story and artwork more than the idea that made it interesting to me, but the afterword was another surprise in explaining the manga was an adaptation of a short story. The back pages do dwell quite a bit on the first period reference being to Robert A. Heinlein’s contemporary The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; I’m conscious of how many people seem to have fallen down his rabbit hole for having read some of his stories while young only to grow a bit cautious of everything wrapped up with them later on (even if I might be accused of taking note of his critic Alexei Panshin). Anyway, I know there are already a few more volumes of Emanon manga translated, even if I forgot about seeking them out the next time I was in the bookstore.
Emanon (“Spell it backwards.”) is a long-haired “hippie chick” (although her sweater and jeans look tidier to my eyes than the traditional Western “hippie” image) who meets a college-age SF fan (and the narrator) on a long ferry ride. Over the course of an evening, she drops some hints and then explains she’s managed to inherit three billion years of memories back to the first microorganisms, and they get to discussing what purpose preserving that weight of time might carry before she tosses in “So how was my story? Original?” She then vanishes before the end of the voyage, but there’s a coda in 1980 that restores the science fiction aspect. It was, perhaps, the ambience of the story and artwork more than the idea that made it interesting to me, but the afterword was another surprise in explaining the manga was an adaptation of a short story. The back pages do dwell quite a bit on the first period reference being to Robert A. Heinlein’s contemporary The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; I’m conscious of how many people seem to have fallen down his rabbit hole for having read some of his stories while young only to grow a bit cautious of everything wrapped up with them later on (even if I might be accused of taking note of his critic Alexei Panshin). Anyway, I know there are already a few more volumes of Emanon manga translated, even if I forgot about seeking them out the next time I was in the bookstore.