Our latest rountable, the subject of which you can read in Book-Off without paying or just find the scanlation on the web. I recommend the first.
Kyoko Okazaki, still recovering from the car wreck that ended her career, plastered “I Wanna Be Your Dog” on one of her books. It wasn’t Pink, the work that made her name, which features a girl who buys brand goods in her favorite color by selling her body. It wasn’t her last book Helter Skelter either, though the Stooges would fit it better than the Beatles.
Helter Skelter, serialized in FEEL YOUNG in 1995 & 96, follows Ririko, a model and “talent,” as the Japanese call their starlets (without irony). You get new models like sushi on the kaiten. They pose, pout, squeal. The lucky ones marry their managers; the unlucky are disappeared on their expiration date. Everything’s managed by a paternalistic network of talent agencies. It’s quite efficient, as if Hollywood applied kaizen, Toyota’s art of continuous improvement. Starlets assembled by robotic arm.
The story’s part TMZ, part theater of cruelty, as Ririko goes from spoiled brat to unhinged maniac. She rebels against her manager, seduces her makeup artist, breaks things. Her fall starts in three deft pages, when she finds a bruise near her hairline. Jump to Tokyo Tower scraping clouds while she screams; then the broadcast needles on top of a TV studio, echoes of the surgeon’s needles that can no longer freshen up her plastic body.
Things get arch and ragged. The melodrama occasionally seems telegraphed to this jaded member of a media culture. Fame’s Faustian, yes, and the odd subplot with a detective/stalker seems grafted on. He’s stalking Ririko because something’s amiss at her plastic surgeon’s, with hints of Fruit Chan’s 2004 movie Dumplings if not its logical conclusion. An opening and almost-closing page do what they have to: frame Ririko’s story with materialistic girls nattering over the fashion magazines she used to rule.
What they don’t do is prepare you for the off-the-rail moments, like the what-the-hell coda. Or the half-flaming, half-tiger rug when the 60s take over. Or Ririko’s kinky sadism, a WTF smack in the face for the jaded.
Or, most of all, the signature. Okazaki’s an auteur, this is her handwriting. The art reminds that she worked as a fashion illustrator. Her line’s lively and precise: Ririko’s body, for instance, seems plastic yet inhabited. Compare most manga’s art, lifelessly stamped out on an assembly line to fill those 23 volumes in 3 years.
And Helter Skelter feels like a very personal work. If it were “about” celebrity, then it would be seriously dated by real-life stars’ ever bizarre meltdowns. If it were just groundbreaking, it would look weak, since latecomers always finish the excavation. Since it’s about whatever on earth goes on inside Kyoko Okazaki, it’s still fresh. Rather like Iggy Pop, slathered in burning wax, no pants, reminding all the youngsters they have no idea what punk is right before the saxophone (the saxphone!) kicks in.
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Dovetail! Seemed appropriate to listen to Ringo Shiina while writing this, because she’s the anti-Ririko in just about every way. Then I found out that Shiina recently did the music for the movie Sakuran, adapted from a Moyoco Anno manga. Anno was Okazaki’s assistant, and helped prepare Helter Skelter for publication.
Update (by Noah): Tom’s contribution to the roundtable is here; Noah’s is here.
Wow, you’ve really got the expertise. So the title is really “Blistered Fingers”? I was trying to figure out why the thing was called “Helter Skelter.” I thought maybe it was a statement of the work’s tone, a warning that horror and comedy were going to be mixed together and everything was going to move very fast. Now I find out that’s not really the title.
So why “Blistered Fingers”? There’s the way the flesh is damaged by giving in to temptation, I guess, what with the plastic surgery’s aftereffects and the suckers’ basic tradeoff of their flesh for an image. In English blistered fingers bring to mind a couple of old sayings — never touching a hot stove twice, etc. But in Japan I have no idea.
the odd subplot with a detective/stalker seems grafted on.Wow, it seemed pretty inevitable to me. Somebody’s breaking the law, and we have a cop to get to the bottom of things. The cop also serves a purpose by not being a total jerk, which provides the book with its one touch of relief from all the moral shittines on display.
If it were just groundbreaking, it would look weak, since latecomers always finish the excavation. Since it’s about whatever on earth goes on inside Kyoko Okazaki, it’s still fresh.Oh boy, we’re headed for a collision on this one. The theme of the book did strike me as very personal but not at all fresh. “Hot girls have bad values! Let’s look at the hot girl and think about how bad her values are! Don’t get plastic surgery!” It’s like Ugly Betty (or the episode I saw of Ugly Betty). I’m not exactly against all the ideas above, but they are dinned into the population’s head almost as often as their counterparts (being sexy makes you powerful, being thin makes you sexy). What does Okazaki bring to the ideas that isn’t summarized here?
“I’ve got blisters on my fingers!” is what Ringo Starr shouts at the end of the song Helter Skelter.
Helter Skelter was also Charles Manson’s favorite Beatles song. The song lyrics themselves are about a children’s slide.
Probably Paul’s best song. One of the best songs ever by anybody, for that matter.
Noah’s got it, it’s just my snappy title. Now you’re all stuck with it. The damaged flesh stuff, all that, it seemed to fit. (And it is a great song.)
The cop becomes integral, I’ll admit. At first I was like, “What? Police procedural?” He did seem like a total jerk to me. Maybe I don’t like cops, or maybe it’s all his stalky “tigerlily” crap.
I’m looking forward to the collision rather than preemptively suss it out in the comments here, but my understanding of H.S. in particular and Okazaki’s career in general is that she was the first to lance this particular boil in manga. FEEL YOUNG is a young women’s comic monthly that feels like a fashion mag, still. I do think that counts for something, as cultures go through cycles from wide-eyed to jaded at different speeds. When did we start to get media-jaded? Around when Frank Tashlin was working? And Japanese media images of women haven’t benefited from a widespread feminist movement as in the West. Just a couple of years ago the health minister called women “birthing machines.”
Of course, I wasn’t there for the US 50s or Japanese 90s, so this is as best I can reconstruct it. (I have less of an imaginative feel for Okazaki’s milieu than others, which is one reason I’ve never written on her in TCJ.)
Another note: Okazaki gets mentioned in the same breath as Shungiku Uchida. They were contemporaries, and frank feminists.
(And as a general side note, I’m well aware that it’s onerous for a Westerner to get off the plane and declare Japan sexist because things don’t flatter my presumptions. I’m not interested in laying down laws as much as seeing how things play out differently in different contexts.)
I forgot all about Ringo. Yeah, “Blistered Fingers” works nicely.
Back to my old question, why the title “Helter Skelter”? Is that title basically accurate? Doing the most literal translation you can, what does the title calligraphy say?
About the series covers — can I assume Okazaki is responsible for the colors? The art in HS proper gets such great effects from black and white, and I like the idea that Okazaki also excelled in color.
The title’s just “Helter Skelter” transliterated in the phonetic characters used for foreign words. It’s the same as the song. Why? I don’t know– “I will you won’t you want me to make you/I’m coming down fast but don’t let me break you”?
And her color work is nice, isn’t it? I looked for a gallery of it and found nothing but this picture of her mother accepting the Tezuka prize. Hmmm.
i like the cop, he’s not really a jerk but he is a creep. i like that about him.
-David Alex.
Yeah, creep’s a much better word for him.