MR3 stands for Manga Roundtable 3. We did one on Manga: What Is the Point?, another on YKK by Ashinano. Now it’s our third and we’re doing Helter Skelter by Okazaki. Bill did a free translation of the title and came up with his own freehand version of the title, namely “Blistered Fingers,” which I like better. But since I find the work a bit alien and baffling, I’m going to keep things simple and stick with the original title. It’s a clue and I need clues.
I admire Helter Skelter a lot. As lines on paper, it’s exceptional. As words, well, maybe not so much. But the comic’s layout, drawing, and use of black and white are beyond admirable. All right, not the faces, and good caricature would have been useful for this work. There’s still a lot to look at.
Bill and I talked a bit about how trite I find the book’s theme (look at that hot girl! her values are terrible!). The thing is, I’m willing to buy the theme because it comes with the package. That’s how much I like everything else about the book. I see Helter Skelter as an example of high-style assault, of art that uses velocity, technical skill, and shock to impose itself on the audience. You have to be very good to pull it off, and Okazaki does. I think that even though I read the book, naturally, in translation. The words chosen were not her own, and her high-design pages had to function after having a fleet of prominent design elements — I mean the calligraphy — ripped out and replaced by little piles of English words.
Okay, about Helter Skelter as an exercise in style and shock. In Comments to his post, Bill made this point:
The title’s just “Helter Skelter” transliterated in the phonetic characters used for foreign words. It’s the same as the song.
So Okazaki didn’t use some Japanese word similar in meaning to “helter skelter.” She meant the song title. I would guess she wanted her book to have the same feel as the song; it’s not so much that the Beatles song states some theme or connects to some event that she wants to reference. She’s just telling us that reading her comic will be like experiencing the Beatles song. So, if that is the idea, she’s making a bold claim.
I imagine the comic as being a sensation when it came out. This is all guesswork, but Okazaki appears to have been popular and to have been very distinctive, maybe out of step with most other manga artists aiming at the same audience. I take her audience to have been teenage girls, since Helter Skelter was serialized in a teen-girl magazine 20s-chick magazine. [my thanks to Xavier for the correction. I’ll note here that Bill says the magazine in question has a fashion bent] According to Helter Skelter, and most other sources, teen girls young women who care a lot about celebrities and fashion tend to be on the lookout for sensational new events and personalities to get excited about.
Helter Skelter may have been meant to hit them like a bomb, the way the song hits listeners. The sex scenes (in a kids magazine? no! but those scenes are still, what is the word, a bit nasty), the carving up of bodies, the characters’ default bitchiness and cruelty, the wild surrealism (Bill references it as “the half-flaming, half-tiger rug when the 60s take over”), the way the plot veers at the end … and all this was for kids [no! girls in their 20s].
Another shocker, for the audience in question, would be the theme. Here I’m taking Bill’s word. From the ’70s on we’ve heard a lot about the hellishness of messing with your body so you can look like a model. Bill says the case is a bit different in Japan and that Okazaki’s theme in Helter Skelter was something new for her readers.
The sell-your-soul/vanity-vs-natural theme is all thru Helter Skelter, over and over. Subtle it ain’t, and I don’t see Okazaki adding anything to the idea; if you’ve read a few magazine articles in your life, you’ve probably come across what she has to say. In a way, Helter Skelter is like the world’s most badass Ugly Betty episode.
Still, being the world’s most badass anything isn’t easy. Okazaki did it thru using powerful skills in subtly aggressive, unnerving ways. Which means that now I’m going to talk about her artwork. Or I will tomorrow … hope you tune in.
Update: Noah’s take is here
Update 2: Noah and I agree about the story’s triteness, anyway. A Helter Skelter haiku:
Look at that hot girl.
Her values are terrible.
Keep looking at her!
Hi Tom,
Just a little note to clarify things: Helter Skelter was serialized in Feel Young (over 1995-1996), which is a josei publication — basically, it is targeted at young women (aged 20~30) rather than kids or young girls. For reference, the Japanese Magazine Publisher Association has a nifty age chart showing that only 1.1% of the readership is under 17. So you can rest safely about “sex in a kids publication” — definitely not the case.
Yet, you are right when you say that Okazaki had a strong influence on a whole generation of manga-ka, in the freedom of her strong female characters. Nananan Kiriko often mentions her as a major source of inspiration. Anno Moyoko was one of her assistants.
it is targeted at young women (aged 20~30) rather than kids or young girls.Thank God!
Too bad Blogger doesn’t do strikethrough. Well, I’ll think of something.
Hey, that chart is a ripoff. They don’t do it in English someplace?
That’s not my free translation, it’s just my snappy title! Picking nits.
Xavier’s right as usual. You just have to trust him on the chart. (Best part: “Sex of readers: 100% female.”)
If you look at FEEL YOUNG from the link I posted in the comments of Part 1, you’ll see a bunch of art that looks like Okazaki at first glance. It’s Naito Yamada, Moyoko Anno, and others. Also more trendy/shallow authors like Maki Kusumoto, whose book Dolis has been translated. I’ve always meant to write about it.
I’m with you on the “world’s most badass Ugly Betty episode.” I tipped the pen to old punk because H.S. reminds of how that works: the lyrics are stupid, but the energy’s there. Something’s at stake, even if you have to get past the “themes” to find it. It also reminds me of certain old Hollywood movies, once I actually started watching them. Stuff like He Who Gets Slapped or Sam Fuller, very melodramatic, very shallow in their way, very affecting.
I tipped the pen to old punk because H.S. reminds of how that works: the lyrics are stupid, but the energy’s there. Something’s at stake, even if you have to get past the “themes” to find it.I think we’re arriving at a consensus. Of course, for me “what’s at stake” is simply the overwhelming thrill the comic may well have delivered to its target audience. Kind of an aesthetic/emotional experience that was powerful on its terms but with the brain of a hen (if an experience can have a brain). Like the Beatles song “Helter Skelter” or, sure, punk, at least the better-quality punk.
I’m really ambivalent about punk too.
Did the Beatles coin the term "helter skelter"? I thought it was kind of slang, roughly synonymous with "bedlam" or something like that. Is the song its actual origin. If so, interesting. Shows what I know.
Is Okazaki dead? Neither of these two posts mention it right out, but you guys do seem to be speaking as if she is no longer alive. Just curious.
And you can do strikethrough in blogger, using html. The code is [s], replacing the brackets with <>. Does that make sense?
Okazaki was injured in a car accident, apparently, ending her career, though she is still alive.
Oh yeah, Bill mentioned that in the opening of his post. Dammit, apparently I have terrible reading comprehension.
Did the Beatles coin the term “helter skelter”? I thought it was kind of slang, roughly synonymous with “bedlam”The Brits have a fairground ride called the helter skelter, which is where Paul got the title. Riders get whirled all about and turned upside down.
Does the ride get its name from the term or the term from the ride? That I don’t know; in fact I’m not 100% sure about the fairground ride, but I think I remember reading as much in a Paul interview years ago when I read a lot about the Beatles.
i’ll have to read helter skelter again. i liked it a whole lot 4 or 5 years ago. i will say that it’s interesting that both you and noah have focused on the gawkish/tut-tutting aspect of the narrative which i didn’t really notice but, you both build a somewhat compelling case. i look forward to reading it again (eventually if i ever read anything ever again). i wasn’t really looking for much of a point to the drama when i read it, i think what drew me in other than the art is the layers of manipulation that okazaki writes into her characters.
could you go into the plot about the doctor/clinic? i don’t remember how this is treated, but i remember feeling like it was noticeably fantastical or science-fictiony, with the surgeries causing their bodies to literally start coming apart. i know next to nothing about actual cosmetic surgery or the fashion world so this seemed to me to be a bizarre fantasist’s skewed reality rather than a polemic. (then again, given what i just said, maybe anything about that world would appear as such to me. any suggestions on better reading?)
and fwiw, i found ririko more attractive (both aesthetically and as a fake-personality) at the end than at the beginning of the manga… the eyepatch.
-David Alex
Hey David. The plastic surgery is definitely exaggerated for satirical effect.
In manga, Paradise Kiss is a less jaded take on the fashion world. I liked it better than Helter Skelter, for what that’s worth.