Prose Fiction

Spice & Wolf is a series that I’ve wanted to write about for a long time, but I’ve struggled with actually putting pen to paper for it. It’s like the Haruhi series in that it’s charming and competently written, but lacks the subtlety and complexity that make for a great, re-readable novel series.

Spice & Wolf’s basic premise is that Lawrence, a traveling merchant in a world loosely based on late Medieval or Renaissance Europe, meets Holo, a wolf-spirit and harvest goddess in a village he does business in, and agrees to help her return to her homeland of Yoitsu, far in the north. The overall plot is a promising one, but author Hasekura Isuna has also set up a potentially major story-writing problem, because one of our protagonists is an almost literal deus ex machina.

This past week, I read through William Golding’s Lord of the Flies for the first time. It’s been a few years since a book held my interest so firmly, and I made it through the novel quickly. It’s the sort of book that reminds me of why I love literature so much, being symbolic but not presumptuous, intense, and realistic. It does have a few problems, but overall I loved this novel.

Much like my experience with moe my interest in the Haruhi Suzumiya franchise has suddenly waned to the point that I just don’t much care about it anymore, despite enjoying the series, both the anime versions and Tanigawa Nagaru’s original novel series, for the first time since I first encountered it in my college anime club six years ago.

[]Part of this may stem from my general fatigue with high school settings in anime and its related media, but since I still enjoy several other ongoing series with such settings, that doesn’t seem to be the reason. Neither does the possibility that even after seven novels, two television seasons, and one film, I’ve just burned out. After all, I’m still following Oh, My Goddess!, which is far longer and less interesting, especially in recent volumes. I just finished The Intrigues of Haruhi Suzumiya, the seventh novel, and it wasn’t any better or worse than previous volumes. So, these two are, at most, minor factors.

In his mostly autobiographical comic Disappearance Diary, Azuma Hideo notes that in order to maintain an optimistic outlook on life, he’d removed as much realism as possible from his book. Azuma’s dry humour and cartoony art style make what should be a depressing story about a man running away from his responsibilities and living homeless seem rather light-hearted and funny.

Author Takimoto Tatsuhiko, in the afterword to his novel Welcome to the NHK, notes that his book also has a fair amount of autobiography. NHK also has a depressing subject, a twenty-two year old college drop out living as a shut-in (Japanese: hikikimori). Like Disappearance Diary, there’s a dry sense of humour, but here it serves to sharpen, rather than dull, the story’s edge, and though well-written, that edge makes it a sometimes difficult book to read. Our protagonist, Satou, meets a young woman named Misaki who decides to cure him, and he also spends a lot of time with his extremely nerdy neighbour and former high-school underclassman, Yamazaki. Takimoto pulls no punches in describing Satou’s life, from his social awkwardness, to his compulsive lying, to his drug trips, to his thankfully brief obsession with, um, pictures of little girls (if you’re thinking of Chris Hansen’s old show, yes, they’re those kinds of photos).

So, I didn’t flunk out of any classes on the first day, but I did encounter another unprecedented situation.

In my American Modernism class, my professor told us that if we have the time we ought to read The Sound and the Fury now, even though it’s not due until later, so that we will have time to re-read it. Figuring that Faulkner’s novel must be quite the beast to warrant such advice, I took the time to read it once through.