Category Archives: Helter Skelter

Mary Stu and Marty Sue

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This is the latest in our ongoing roundtable on Mary Sues. So far Tom has written a kick-ass essay about Michael Corleone as a Mary Sue. And Miriam has an essay which I talk about below.
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In her effort to define Mary Sues Miriam argues that the point is not author insertion:

Mary Sues happen when the author becomes concerned with making her protagonist likable to readers. Symptoms include overcompetence, unearthly beauty, and other characters taking time out to admire the protagonist’s awesomeness. I don’t think a Mary Sue has to be the author’s self-insertion in the sense that Mary has anything in common with the author, and if the test is “created with likability too much in mind, to the point where the opposite results”, that covers Snapper Sues just as easily.

In other words, it’s not about putting yourself in the story so much as it is about overweening affection: “Don’t love your characters too much!” as Miriam quotes Leigh Dragoon as saying.

I think Mary Sue is often about love, in one way or another. A good example is Dorothy Sayres’ Lord Peter Wimsey. I mentioned him before as a possible Mary Sue; in various of his tedious adventures, he manifests an unlikely ability at cricket, at bell-ringing, and lord knows at what else. one Phil Jimenez Wonder Woman story, but it was about as Mary Sueish as it could be. The whole comic was, literally, a puff-piece feature story about how great Wonder Woman is. It’s a pretty lousy idea for a narrative, in my opinion …but part of what even makes it tolerable, I think, is the glee with which Jimenez, who is gay, plays with the idea of thinking of Wonder Woman as a gay man, or of himself as Wonder Woman, or of both at once. He dresses her up in fabulous clothes, for example; he makes her bitchy and funny; he has her actually banter (i.e. flirt) with other gay men. There’s a real love for the character there, and the gender slippage, the tension between loving her as an object of desire and loving her as an aspiration or ideal self, is part of what gives that love a texture and a weight. In short, there’s something singular, or queer about Jimenez’s Wonder Woman which makes her (within limits) enjoyable to read. (As opposed to the WW in League of One, who has no discernible personality except for her allegiance to her equally boring league comrades and her quest for self-purity via the-lasso-that-has-nothing-to-do-with-bondage.)

One more for instance might be Kyoko Okazaki’s manga, Helter Skelter. In our roundtable on the manga, I expressed a good deal of animosity towards the detective character, Asada, who gets to figure everything out and has some special and unearned connection with the main character Ririko. Thinking about it some more, it seems like Asada might be considered a Mary Sue; Okazaki seems to have a weird, overweening interest in his well-being. But what exactly is her investment in him? Is he supposed to be an object of desire? Of envy? And what would she envy him for, anyway?

One possible answer is…she might find him appealing because of his connection to Ririko — a connection which is, in various senses, perverse. Asada admires Ririko for the fact that her face doesn’t fit her bone structure; she’s fake. His recognition of her fakeness gives the two their unexplained and creepy connection; they seem to have been together in a past life, or to have shared feathers, or something. In my earlier posts I tended to interpret this as a stalking scenario…but thinking about it again, it seems like it could also be a metaphor, or a glance, at a gay relationship. Ririko — the out of control diva with a terrible secret involving the falsity of her appearance — could certainly scan as gay or transvestite — and the secret’s fascination for Asada, provoking a submerged connection, is suggestive as well. Okazaki does have explicit gay content in the manga; there’s a lesbian relationship which is treated with a combination of voyeuristic excitement and moralistic contempt. Given the gay themes, and the anxiety around them, it doesn’t seem impossible that part of Asada’s Marty Sue status, part of why he gets favorable treatment, is that he’s a fantasy means for lesbian and/or straight women to imagine themselves as gay men desiring a beautiful androgyne of indeterminate gender.

If that sounds far-fetched…well, it’s a fair thumbnail description of the gender dynamics of yaoi — or of slash-fiction, one of the Mary Sues’ natural habitat. For a particularly vivid example, you could try this fan fic by Vom Marlowe. It’s called “Girl Yoji” and it’s about a male assassin who turns into a girl and then has lots of sex with his male partner, who he has long loved. Did I mention that he’s pregnant with the other assassin’s child? It’s written by a woman, primarily for other women who enjoy a fun fetish story about imagining they’re men turning into women. The line between wanting to be someone and wanting to be with them is crossed, recrossed, blurred, and gleefully bounced upon; indeed, violating that line seems to be much of the point of the story.

And I think it may be part of the point of the Mary Sue as well. “Don’t love your characters too much!” sounds like good advice…but the persistence of Sues in canon and out, and their popularity with both authors and readers suggests that loving too much is one of the things we have fiction for. And, often, the “too much” is not just a quantitative excess, but a qualitative one. It’s a way to try on different patterns of desire — envy, lust, gay, straight — that you usually have to keep separate in real life. The appeal of Mary Sue, in other words, is that she is a love you can wear like drag.

Update: Kinukitty says leave me alone about the Mary Sues already; Bill concurs; but I won’t shut up about Mary Sue and loooooooove.

Better the Misogynist You Know

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The entire HU crowd has been debating Kyoko Okazaki’s fashion and feminism classic manga Helter Skelter in the comments to this post. If you have any interest, you should scroll down through the whole comments section; Miriam, Bill, and Tom all make really interesting points.

Anyway, where we ended up was with this comment from Tom, suggesting that I don’t like sexist stories:

As we discussed upthread, it doesn’t matter to you what the rights and wrongs of the matter are within the terms of the story; you just dislike stories that are arranged to put men in the driver’s seat at the expense of women.

There’s some truth to this. But for me I don’t think it’s only, or solely, about stories that are arranged to put men in the driver’s seat. Such stories do tend to be sexist, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I won’t like them.

D.H. Lawrence’s stories are an example; he’s ideologically committed to male supremacy. But he’s also intensely interested in gender politics and sexuality. As a result, he tends to have interesting things to say about those topics, even in the context of male supremacy. There’s generally a recognition in his stories of women’s perspectives or women’s voices.

As an example, if Lawrence were writing this story, Asada’s sexual investment in Ririko would almost certainly be a lot clearer, and she’d get at least a moment or two where she explicitly resisted the logic of male supremacy. Ultimately, the final story would be even more explicitly male supremacist — but there’s be a much firmer grasp on the dynamics of how that works and what that means for people’s lives.

My objection here isn’t (or isn’t solely) that Okazaki gives the man control of the narrative, but that he’s given unquestioned moral carte blanche. There’s not even a recognition that his actions could be morally questioned or contested, really. That’s what’s so infuriating about it. Someone like Lawrence is interesting because, while he’s a male supremacist, he recognizes that that doctrine can be questioned — therefore he defends it, and in so doing brings up interesting issues and even allows the other side a voice, if only to quash it. Okazaki just blandly accedes in male supremacy; she seems not even to realize that she might need to make a case for it.

That’s why it’s very hard to see this as a feminist book. Not just because no feminist argument is made, but because Okazaki doesn’t even seem aware of what the sides in the debate would look like. Again, that could well be for cultural reasons…but for a Western reader (or for me) it’s still really irritating to see the male detective treated as the long, courageous crusader for justice at the same time as he’s acting like a stalker, and not see any suggestion on the part of anybody in the manga that this might be creepy or wrong or, you know, kind of stupid.

MR3 Part Too Late: the devil wears lancome

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Firstly, as a non-manga-reader undergoing continuing education in these blog series, I want to agree with Tom that the Okazaki’s artwork shocked and thrilled me at first glance. Her art looks more gestural than any other manga I’ve seen, and the thickish lines and largish facial features were much more relatable, for me, than the pin-thin perfect lines i’m used to seeing from our eastern brethren.

When manga characters elsewhere are composed so meticulously and in such delicate detail, it seems weird that their faces and bodies look all flat, whereas here, the flatness is right, cause they’re just shorthand sketches (I think it’s an important connection Tom makes to Andy Warhol: these characters strongly suggest 50s American gag and advertisement cartooning, which is a lot of why they felt so warmly familiar).

Of course, after the initial glow of recognition, Helter Skelter gave me the same problems I’ve had with most manga, namely the diffuculty of telling characters apart and the difficulty of distinguishing men from women. At first, I thought the makeup artist and the ingenue personal assistant turned sex slave turned hitwoman were different people, then I thought they were the same person, then at the end of the book I again thought that they were two people, and the makeup artist was in fact a man (reading Nana I learned to check for neck girth to determine a character’s sex, here that doesn’t work). But, I am still an outsider to the art form, and people have said my characters are hard to tell apart, so.

Like Noah and Tom, divasploitation doesn’t read as particularly feminist to me, or particularly new. Okazaki does a lot of telling-not-showing, in the form of the voiceovers, the quotations, and then the burning-tiger lsd scenes, that she’s getting at something bigger, deeper, more meta, but that part never really intrudes on the divasploitation enough to matter.

It’s funny, though, and probably telling of our different gender-coloured perspectives, that I had a different conviction from my co-utilitarians of where this awfully tired and predictable story was going.

Tom says, “Hana was there to be a doormat and let us see what a beast Ririko was. The cop was there to delve into the dark doings behind Ririko’s creation, to bring about justice at the end of the story, and in the meantime to give us some relief from Ririko’s twisted bitchiness and that of her milieu.” Cause I was sure that the cop was just an expositional device and a looming threat, whereas Helter Skelter would really be Hana’s story, the old “innocent, better-than-that girl is tempted by shallow beauty & riches, almost succumbs, but manages to triumphantly turn her back on it in the end” (hence my title). I really thought that’s where the Lancome-loaning scene, in particular, was going. (“No, Hana! She’ll get you hooked on the devil makeup!”)

But even though Ririko does talk about harming other people because she has been harmed, and refers to Hana in that context, she never actually harms Hana in the same way that she herself had been harmed. The makeup scene is actually just about Ririko’s bait-and-switch affections; Hana never gets designer clothes or a makeover, let alone surgery (Ririko encourages her sister to get surgery, but it reads as misguided empathy rather than cruelty). She uses Hana for nonconsensual but mutually enjoyable sex slavery, and for inappropriate errands up to and including grevious assault, but she never tries to remake Hana in her own image.

But that’s exactly what our conquering hero, the detective, does to Ririko. He renames her (it’s interesting how men in literature who set out to objectify, remake and possess a woman often start with assigning her a new name… was Lolita the first or just the most famous example?), stalks her all over and announces they were feathers together in a past life, before (as Noah so powerfully pointed out) tearing down her whole life, ruining her body’s chances of survival, and leaving her no recourse.

He’s as bad as “Mom,” maybe worse, because he’s an outsider who gets to lecture smugly as he objectifies, rather than being down in the beauty trenches (“Mom” reveals offhand that she’s surgically generated herself, so she is harming Ririko exactly as she was harmed). This is a feminist parable?? (This isn’t really undone by the darkly happy-ending epilogue, which goes against all the established rules about the sinister abortion surgery.)

Sigh. I might as well conclude with some more clueless-outsider bitching about manga. Okazaki pays lip service to it’s-bad-to-starve-yourself-to-get-supermodel-thin, but then every default female character has the same figure as Ririko, minus the breast implants and a couple of inches of height. Why aren’t we concerned about how all of them, by extension, are starving themselves? All the highschool girls we occasionally cut to, absorbing bad values from their fashion magazines, already look like fashion models (the only women with any fat on them, are the women whose fat is integral to the plot). That’s what happens when you draw a whole world in fashion illustration style, and that’s what all shonen and josei manga i’ve ever seen does.

Also, how every woman shown having sex has to explain at least once that she’s Not Really Into This Sort of Thing. Maybe it’s the innocent 50s romance referred to in comments, back before they discovered the female sex drive, or maybe it’s just another culture’s gender norms, which who-am-i-to-say are more fucked up than ours, but the good girl who has to be coerced is so not a turn-on for me. (That was one of my favourite things about Nana, even though it has the fashion-illustration crap in spades: it seemed to not share the above sexual hang-up at all. The good-girl-naif is actually shown to be pretty promiscuous in high school, and it’s just not a thing.)

MR3, part 2-c: Helter Skelter by Okazaki (cont.)

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meta-UPDATE:  I analyze Helter Skelter‘s art, with a helpful image bank of the work’s visual characteristics, right … about … here.
UPDATE:  Bill and Noah are agreed that the “To be continued” notice is a joke only. Ah well. The story still winds up in a very odd and unexpected place, the Asada-Ririko connection is not explained (as far as I could tell), and the story is apparently continuing full steam ahead even if the author never intended to tell more of it. So maybe we don’t have a fragment, but, uh, it ought to have been a fragment. Oh, never mind. 
UPDATE  2:  The dialogue in Helter Skelter is quite good, very much especially Ririko’s interview patter and the teen fans’ little exchanges. I have no idea who the translator is, but as well as being a public benefactor he/she has a good ear. 
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A couple of cleanup points.

Given that the plot of Helter Skelter leaves us unimpressed, it’s worth noting that we have only the first half of the book. The first half of a routine action movie, to take one example, might be all you needed to tell that the second half would also be routine. But Helter Skelter has some odd things going on in its story, and during the second half they might have led the book into territory that created an entirely new context for the elements that Noah and I found so trite. Or maybe not. But we are forming our judgments about the story and theme on the basis of a very large fragment, not a whole.
When I say “some odd things,” I mean two things: 1) the nutty police detective, and 2) Ririko’s sadomasochistic affair with her gofer, Hada. The roles of the detective (his name is Asada) and Hada seemed clear enough thru the first few chapters. Hada was there to be a doormat and let us see what a beast Ririko was. The cop was there to delve into the dark doings behind Ririko’s creation, to bring about justice at the end of the story, and in the meantime to give us some relief from Ririko’s twisted bitchiness and that of her milieu. By chapter nine my assumptions had all been undermined. The cop wasn’t just a quirky Joe Sensitive with his own intuitive way of getting at a problem; apparently he and Ririko were supposed to share some sort of telepathic connection and to have known each other in past lives. Hada wasn’t just getting stepped on, she was also — how does one say? — getting into the relationship. This second point doesn’t receive a lot of airtime in the story, but stray captions and pieces of dialogue indicate that the erotic power games forced on her by Ririko added up to the best sex of Hada’s life.
To tell the truth, I don’t especially like either development and they don’t seem all that original. They strike me as baroque flourishes of the sort indy films over here use to tickle their audiences. But I didn’t see them coming, and the business with the detective certainly indicates that there’s a lot more we have to learn before we really have a line on Ririko.
The end of the first half, with Ririko still alive and beautiful years after her day was supposed to be done, points up a theme that is certainly present in the book but that I assumed was subsidiary. I mean the theme of the star as survivor who will do whatever it takes to stay on top and will not allow herself to be beaten. There’s a reason Mama chose Ririko for starmaking when there were so many other desperate, homely girls. Presumably, the reason is that Ririko just won’t quit, will not let herself sink. The theme is a perennial in star biographies and divasploitation, so seeing it here is not a surprise. But I assumed the main point was that the sinister beauty clinic had made Ririko and that the end of the story would come when Ririko and the clinic were both undone. Get to chapter 9 and those assumptions are in very poor shape.

MR3, part 2-b: Helter Skelter by Okazaki (cont.)

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It looks clear that I liked Helter Skelter more than Noah or Bill did. (Me here, Noah here, Bill’s first here and second here.) Apparently, the big difference is the art. Noah and I agree the fake beauty/diva-bitch material is pretty tired; Bill is more indulgent toward it, but a good deal less enthusiastic about the book than I am. At any rate, Bill tells us that “the art lacks the patchwork quilt of pattern common in girls’ and women’s comics.” That surprises me. From what I see, patterning runs thru the book like an electric current; maybe manga art delivers more of a jolt to newcomers. But before I get tangled in cheesy metaphor, I’d better back up and address my subject as a whole.
I want to write about Okazaki’s artwork and especially her page design. In my last post I talked about the high probability that she intended Helter Skelter to be a visual blast on the order of the sonic blast delivered by the Beatles song “Helter Skelter.” Everything is taken to a high pitch, hysterically high. The epigraph sets the tone: “A word before we start: laughter and screams sound very much alike.” 
The book, according to my theory, is supposed to be a shocker but one that doesn’t count on a simple bludgeoning of the audience to get results. To quote myself, it’s “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.” What do I mean by all that?
I mean those pages move fast and they take a lot of hairpin curves. I’m talking about layout and page design here. The eye isn’t wafted from panel to panel; the eye has to hang on like hell. On a given page, the eye will go thru zigzags and ups and downs and bounce its way from the top of the page to the bottom, and then on to the next page and the one after.
But when I say the eye has to hang on, it’s more like the eye doesn’t have a choice. Do a middling job of roller-coaster page design and it’s easy enough to look away. Do a first-rate job, one where all the panels and visual elements lock together, and looking away gets ruled out. The reader is in for the ride and it’s a blast. At the same time, Okazaki varies the eye’s pace: the densest page will have panels that open up some space, a little here, a little there, sometimes an unexpected gulf of sky in the page’s upper left or right. But then the gulfs create offbeat page balances that also pull the eye. Okazaki lets up, but then she’s right back at you.
Let me underline a point. There are different kinds of speed in comics. Most manga, from what I hear, features biggish panels and smallish word balloons and therefore moves at a good clip. The speed achieved in Helter Skelter is different because it involves so much eye movement per page. You never float, you zip. And you’re intruded upon; in a way, you’re interfered with — your eye gets runs ragged and there’s nothing you can do about it. Not that that’s a bad thing, or at least not here.
Underlining a second point: this isn’t just a case of speed metal play it fast, play it loud, and run down whoever’s in front of you [Noah says a lot of speed metal is highly crafted. Ah well]. Without Okazaki’s high degree of technical skill, the pages would be reader repellent. The Beatles’s “Helter Skelter” is similar. That is one loud, fast fucker, but it’s also a highly designed fucker. I’m no music expert, but anyone can hear the song’s variations in texture.
Moving on. I mentioned that the eye gets intruded on in Helter Skelter. Visually, it’s a bitchy sort of work, bitchy toward the reader. You’re always getting jabbed and needled. Here we get into the patterning mentioned above, into visual texture.  Helter Skelter works with right angles and straight lines, with grids and needles. There’s a shortage of gentle curves; the only softness in the book comes from the round, blurry street lights that surface in the smaller city-at-night panels. Mainly, the book’s curves get yanked into long stringy lines or segregated as pure circles, banks of them to go with the banks of squares and rectangles. These banks, the gatherings of hard-edged geometric shapes, keep popping up in different sizes and configurations thru the book. When I was talking about electricity up above, they’re what I had in mind. It’s not just a matter of shape, of course. Black and white are played for high contrast, crowded together in checker patterns. 
Finally, I have to agree with Noah that Okazaki is good at drawing bodies (well, he cited Ririko’s body only, but I’ll extend matters a bit) and not so good at faces [Wait, he says he does like her faces! Well, that’s his problem]. In fact I would say her faces are not good enough; at their worst, they remind me of a drawing I once saw of a shoe that Andy Warhol did as a young freelancer.
All right, some examples of what I mean. Let’s start with Okazaki’s visual repertoire. 
String:
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Grid and needles:
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Circles and grid:
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High-contrast black and white:
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 The whole visual scheme condensed (we even have the stringy lines, what with the way the tower curves):
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Now layout. An example of a very dense circuit:
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And it’s only one part of the page. Take a look:
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That page is high density, even by the book’s standards. Here’s a medium-density page:
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And down a notch (notice the low-freight middle panel; the lack of detail allows the page to move):
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And now opened a lot wider. It’s also a good example of the missing-calligraphy factor. With the calligraphy there, that central panel’s void would lighten the page, not empty it:
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And, by the book’s standards, pretty damn wide. You’ve still got the dense grids to liven up and anchor the page:
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Now some bad caricature. Dig these shoe faces:
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But it’s not like Okazaki is a page engineer who doesn’t know how to draw. Buildings, bodies, etc., are great. And though she doesn’t go in for heavy detail, she has a knack for the right detail. My example is this dream corridor. A weirdly configured hallway is not the most original item in a dream sequence, but I like the way Okazaki gets this one on paper. The image appears just twice in a very busy book, but she’s taken the trouble to rig the details so that perspective gets thrown off in a few different ways:
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All right, e-frigging-nough. I’m out of here.

Kyoko Okazaki’s Blistered Fingers: Part 3

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This is the third in our roundtable on Kyoko Okazaki’s classic 90s mana Helter Skelter. Bill’s appreciative opening discussion is here; Tom’s enthusiastic post is here. Which leaves me being the sole irritating voice of cantankerousness (unless Miriam, up tomorrow, also has a more skeptical take.)

I should first say that as we were working this roundtable out, Bill commented a couple of times that he’s not as familiar with the background and intellectual milieu of Okazaki and her manga as he likes to be when he writes about an artist. That kind of cracked me up…because, good lord does Bill know more what he’s talking about here (or just in general really) than I do. I’ve read some manga at this point, and I’m definitely fascinated with Japan and its history but…the state of feminism and/or the fashion industry and/or body image in Japan in the 90s? I mean, I know nothing.

Not that I’ve let that stop me before. And, having expressed all those caveats, I do have to say that even though I don’t know the world that Kyoko Okazaki is coming out of, the manga she’s written is awfully familiar. Admittedly, it’s not much like other shojo stories I’ve read — it’s not girly or sweet or frilly; there’s little interest in clothing design (kind of ironic (and probably intentionally so) for a comic about fashion); there isn’t a lot of patterning or intense detail work. Instead, Okazaki draws outlines filled with mostly white space — it looks like the inks for a color comic book, rather than the fully realized art for a black and white one. There doesn’t seem to be a ton of width variation either, though (as Bill notes) the lines are certainly mobile, especially when she renders faces. Overall the effect if of energy and expression surrounding a blank; the world she creates seems more like a mask placed atop a hollow. I can’t say her style transports me, exactly — the lack of contrast and variation ends up being a little monotonous and prevents anything from really popping…though when it does it can be striking:

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That’s a creepy image; the elegant line follows the frankly sexual contour, but also frankly flat; those lips look like they crawled onto her face and died. She captures a repulsion at artifice and beauty; a sense of a gorgeous surface covering decay. So…yeah, I definitely appreciate her skill, and the care with which she has matched her visual style with her themes.

(Part of the reason her work looks so different from shojo is, a commenter notes, because it’s not shojo, but josei. See what I mean about not knowing what I’m talking about?)

Unfortunately, as I said, while the art is distinctive, the themes themselves, and how she handles them narratively, aren’t nearly as idiosyncratic. Basically, this is pretty much divasploitation (to coin a phrase), all about admiring/deploring/getting off on the personal idiosyncracies, tragedies and sexual peccadilloes of a fabulous larger-than-life female icon. It reads like Valley of the Dolls, or a Paul Verhoeven film — shocked disapprobation concealing a knowing leer, and vice versa, in a gleeful orgy of camp hypocrisy. On the one hand, the manga wants to satirize the shallow celebrity culture of beauty and fame, suggesting that the model agencies use the glands of children (an old sci-fi staple) to transform ugly girls into perfect starlets…until the treatment fades and outer decay starts to mirror inner corruption. And yet, even as it gestures at exploding the beauty myth, it revels in it; Ririko (the main character, pictured above) is in fact, fantastically attractive with an otherworldly beauty that allows her to virtually mesmerize those around her. On the strength of her mystical attractiveness, she seduces her (seemingly straight) make-up artist Hada-chan and Hada’s boyfriend both, using them for sado-masochistic thrills and eventually sending them off to toss acid on the face of a romantic rival. Ririko keeps saying that these acts of despotic eroticism are pleasureless or boring…but surely these disavowals serve only to intensify the verisimilitude of the S&M for the reader’s voyeuristic consumption. The whole thing just seems tawdry and overdetermined — the manga fashionista equivalent of an episode of VH1’s “Behind the Music.”

Bill argues that Helter Skelter’s jaded take on celebrity was unusual in Japan, and that the exposure of the corrupt underbelly of the fashion industry was at the time a feminist statement. That may well be, but…the book is very, very hard to read as a feminist statement in our cultural context. It’s true that Ririko is a powerful woman of a sort…but she’s corrupt and cruel, and moreover, her body is actually falling apart form the plastic surgery. The horror movie imagery, and Ririko’s monstrous fascination and cruelty, ties the book, in my mind at least, to horror movies like Carrie, with their not-especially-feminist anxieties about female bodies and female power.

Not that Ririko (or Carrie, for that matter) is wholly unsympathetic; her backstory is sad, and you can see why she wanted to be rich and famous. But object of pity isn’t any more liberating than object of (even admiringly pleasurable) loathing. Moreover, the moral center of the manga is a man — a police detective who is trying to shut down the evil plastic surgeon. The detective is smart and determined and he sacrifices his career to end the surgery; he is presented as admirable and clever; certainly nobody in the manga ever makes any explict case that he’s a creepy shithead. And yet, to this reader, at least, a creepy shithead is what he manifestly appears to be; he essentially stalks Ririko, muttering about their deep connection and past lives and blah-blah-blah; his efforts to shut down the clinic doom the women who need repeated treatments to keep from decaying. The book, though, as I said, seems firmly on his side; the tragedy of the abandoned, decaying women is presented as one of those things, or maybe even their fault. Certainly, the crime is never laid at his doorstep; he’s just the good patriarch, out doing his duty by saving women from themselves…or, you know, not saving them. Who really cares? He made his superiors angry at him, damn it. What more do you want from him?

If I encountered this in the U.S., in other words, I’d assume it was technically accomplished, intellectually shaky, duplicitous exploitation schlock, using “big issues” as a cover for titillating sleaze and gore, and hypocritcally sneering at the marginalized groups it fetishizes. Not as good as I Spit on Your Grave or Ms. 45, better than Beyond the Valley of the Dolls or Basic Instinct. I’m willing to accept on Bill’s say-so that in context it was a pioneering auteurish blow for feminism — but I don’t think that’s how it translates.