erie’s 2024 in fiction

Posted: 2025-01-19

Updated: 2025-01-19

Tags: criticism

"Fiction" is probably a misnomer. Here's an incomplete list of stories I liked this year.

Anime

Revue Starlight

In personal notes I referred to RevStar as being “apex predator anime for trans lesbians” which seems problematic and un-PC. That’s partly because as a work of fiction it comes across as kind of derivative - it’s hard to avoid comparisons to Sound! Euphonium (Karen/Hikari = Kumiko/Reina) or even to some extent Madoka Magica, with Nana and Hikari being kind of like Homura, and the giraffe being Kyubey. Claudine and Maya have a dynamic that reminded me of Sayaka and Touko from Yagate Kimi ni Naru.

That said, the overall effect of this series and the theatrical films is still pretty impressive. I thought that “mythopoeic” wouldn’t be a bad adjective to describe the franchise because its seeming lack of originality also seems to scrape away the details of its characters in a way that just leaves schematics of character archetypes and relationship dynamics that undergird so many other works of fiction. Another good point of comparison is Sound! Euphonium spin-off movie Liz and the Blue Bird, with the titular fairy tale/musical piece and its correspondences with Nozomi and Mizore as they face the uncertainty of graduation serving as narrative scaffolding much like how the roles in the play Starlight reflect the RevStar cast’s self-understanding which is only won through the adversarial casting process. In fact this trick of using a school play to mirror the personal development of its school-aged actors is also in YagaKimi, (which probably got the idea from KareKano if I had to guess), but depicting the competition to be cast as literally a shounen-style tournament arc complete with set-piece battles is a great spin on the conceit.

Being probably one of the most aggressive yuri-baiting shows I have ever seen, RevStar organizes its cast in pairs, which I found kind of interesting. There’s an anime about distance running called Kaze ga Tsuyoku Fuiteru in which most of the series is about building a cohesive team dynamic and a sense of camaraderie out of reluctant participants, but the final relay race that they train for is deeply lonely, with each character’s only relief from the physical demands of the race being the possibility of an unobstructed introspection that might be as painful as the race itself. In contrast, RevStar is all about couples (with Mahiru being the exception), perhaps because the dyad is the smallest unit you need to achieve… enlightenment? self-knowledge?

For the most part, I’ve passed over the references to the “real world” in favor of expositing mostly formal characteristics of the work, but suffice it to say that the setting is heavily influenced by the Takarazuka Revue and its notion of the “top star”. Like Blue Lock, the competition for Top Star in RevStar is brutal and zero-sum, although again the focus on dyads rather than individuals suggests that even within a hierarchical system of ranking, horizontal relationships might wind up being the most valuable part of the experience or provide grounds for rejecting such a worldview entirely. The Madoka Magica-like elements of the series (the auditions secretly being about draining the girls’ glimmer) are also a not-so-subtle commentary on the sacrifices that the entertainment industry and its valorisation of youth and beauty impose on girls and women.

The sequel movie, Revue Starlight the Movie, is great. Between the end of the series and the release of the summary and sequel movies, a gacha game was released which must have been a money printer because the sequel movie is so glossy and slickly animated. Like the series, the film is omnivorous when it comes to ingesting references, but the bigger budget translates to a bigger appetite. Claudine and Maya’s revue stage is obviously a reference to Faust and the score references Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. There are transparent references to Mad Max Fury Road, and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. At one point Kaoruko is sitting in the palm of a Buddha statue, a nod to Sun Wukong and Journey to the West, but it’s just one shot in a sequence paying homage to Seijun Suzuki yakuza flicks. While this project at times seems like it was conducted by a tribe of cultural magpies, the sum total of all its disparate influences is totally compelling. Formally, RevStar is unusually intentional and thoughtful about abstraction and metaphor.

Also interesting is the morbid visual language. Obviously there is a lot of swordplay in the original series, but when Nana cuts down most of the class during the Revue of Annihilation, sending sprays of blood all over the screen, it’s a sharp reminder that this set of revues will not operate under the same rules as the revues of the show. This metaphor of killing is kind of perfect both for actors risking new roles as well as students entering adulthood. Is your attachment to the way you are now preventing you from realizing you’re already on a new stage? Have you realized that failing to remake yourself means becoming a bystander in your own life once this next stage begins? Have you become an impediment to the ones you love? RevStar explicitly frames the decisions the girls make, sometimes casting off the partners who’ve become as indispensable as their own limbs, as violent conflict. Transforming these interpersonal conflicts into spectacles of sword and spear is kind of brilliant and the revues capture the soul of battle shounen (at least, good examples) while the premise throws out all the tedious build up.

This is to say RevStar is one of the best coming-of-age stories I’ve ever seen handled in anime. Like in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour, honesty is a destructive virtue, but a virtue nonetheless. Recognition of falsehood means commitment to destroying falsehood. This can mean exploding the relationships that have been the foundations of your identity in order to, for the first time, take a breath for yourself and by yourself. Living honestly is uncomfortable and the truth that the girls discover is that “there are no more rehearsals”. (I’ve spent days and weeks thinking about everything I would’ve done differently and that time has all been wasted because there are no second chances - you have to live not just with the decisions you’ve made but also all the outcomes that chance and circumstance have made. In a sense the desire to “re-do” things is a form of dishonesty, because it confuses foreknowledge with virtue and presupposes a warped and impossible concept of self rather than confronting the person I actually am.)

For the girls of RevStar leaving the cloistered world of their performing arts school means opening up to new risks, trials, pains, and profound ambiguity on what even qualifies as success. In-story this is handled elegantly by the borderline nonsensical revues. Disconnected from the brilliance-harvesting shenanigans that justify the original series, the revues are now implied by fourth-wall breaks to be happening only because we the audience demand more RevStar content. Even the worldlier goal of simply deciding a top star for their year is no longer in play (as emphasized by Kaoruko’s desperation to audition one more time and run that shit back). There isn’t really such a thing as winning or losing anymore, and once again the combat simply becomes another form of communication. It’s a perfect metaphor for how standards of achievement change as we age - the top star competition is regimented and explicit (just win more revues!) but in adult life there’s never such a simple criterion for what it means to be “the best”, or even what it means to be “good”.

The Apothecary Diaries

leftpain put me on. In a way the series is similar to Hyouka in tone, but given the vicious politics of the rear court never feels as aimless. I particularly like that all the smaller mysteries and nagging details come together at the end of the series into a more complex conspiracy plot. It’s not the most baroque or ornate, but has enough moving parts that you get the pleasure of seeing the mechanism operate. Lakan is a great character.

Novels

K. J. Parker

I read a lot of K. J. Parker early this year. A good place to start for people interested in fantasy that contains supernatural elements would be his recent novellas Prosper’s Demon and Inside Man, stories about demons and exorcists that display his talent for black humour and vicious plotting.

I also read the Fencer trilogy (Colours in the Steel, The Belly of the Bow, The Proof House) which contain one of his most compelling characters, the fencer-at-law Bardas Loredan. A typically hyper-competent Parker protagonist, Loredan is unfortunately talented at killing, and continually deludes himself into thinking that this aptitude is merely a result of external circumstance rather than personal choice, leading to sickening results.

A good starting point for someone interested in reading Parker’s low fantasy (i.e. mostly free of magic or the supernatural) would be The Folding Knife, a novel about the brilliantly talented First Citizen of the Vesani Republic, Basso the Magnificent. Basso has about enough humanity in him to love his sister, who hates him for killing her husband in self-defense after catching him in bed with his first wife (very 狗血 stuff). Her son Bassano turns out to be an ideal product of the Vesani upper crust: talented, beautiful, poetically inclined. Trying to find a suitably illustrious career for Bassano, Basso makes the rather unfortunate decision of sending him on an imperialist expedition overseas to pacify a backwards trading partner. I have been thinking a lot about Bassano’s letters home this year.

I feel like there’s two of me. One of me finds this whole business indescribably horrible and barbaric. Because of a conscious decision by you (in which, of course, I am entirely complicit), people are dying who needn’t die; people are getting cut up, losing limbs, losing fathers and husbands and sons, losing their homes and livelihoods; which is appalling, when you stop and think about it. Earthquakes and tidal waves, plague, fire; and us. What could possibly justify doing something like this on purpose?

The other me wants us to win; feels an extraordinary kind of joy when the shower of arrows pitches and the charge goes home and the artillery balls plough huge gashes in their shield wall; hates the enemy; can look at a hundred dead Mavortines twisted on the ground and think, that’s a hundred who won’t give us any more grief; cheers when the general rides past; wishes he had the balls to stand in the front rank alongside the Cazars and kill a couple of dozen bad guys; can see nothing whatsoever wrong in a war that is, after all, being fought against the enemy.

I’m both those people, equally, simultaneously, indivisibly. I used to tell myself it was survival instinct; when the battle’s on and the other side are dead set on killing me, naturally I’m all in favour of us, because we’re all that stands between me and them. But that’s not how it works. Before the fighting, after it, during it, makes no odds. I think the truth is, you can’t just observe a war. It changes you. Just being here makes me a soldier. Define soldier, in this context: someone who can be both of me at the same time, and not even notice the contradictions.

Later on:

Which worked fine. We charged in on three sides, making a hell of a noise. The women and kids ran like hell out the fourth side. Naturally, we didn’t pursue. We had no interest whatsoever in massacring innocent, harmless civilians. I expressly ordered, not one of them to be harmed, if at all possible. All we wanted to do was steal all their food and livestock and leave them alone in the heart of the merry greenwood to fend for themselves. I regard that as the mark of a civilised man. Of this particular civilised man, at any rate.

Who knows? Some of them may make it, especially if they figure out their own version of the game. Point is, they may be women and kids, but they’re still the enemy. Or at least, they’re not Us. Us and Them. Sides.

Dear Uncle Basso, I know perfectly well what I’ve become, what I’ve turned into. Maybe it’s an effect of the place, or the situation. Maybe, when I’m home again, I’ll get better. Right now, I really don’t care. No: rephrase. I really don’t mind. There’s a difference.

Mieko Kawakami

I read two novels by Mieko Kawakami this year, Heaven and Breasts and Eggs. In Frank Guan’s excellent review of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, he suggests what distinguishes Stendhal or Dostoevsky from Batuman or the MFA program graduates she scolds in her earlier critical essays is a particular way of handling the relationship between literature and ideology. In The Red and the Black, Julien Sorel is a fan of Napoleon, whose life and deeds he thinks of as forming a model for his own unscrupulous social climbing, and the thrust of the novel is the collision between worldview and social fact. I find this framing particularly useful as it clarifies what I like about certain works like 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, which I thought was competent and interesting on first read, but I think about far more often than some novels that I thought were masterpieces on first read. Heaven and Breasts and Eggs can also be approached from this perspective.

Heaven is a novel about school bullying. Our protagonist-narrator is a boy with a lazy eye who finds solidarity in a female classmate, Kojima, who comes to school dirty and disheveled. Kojima, who strikes up conversation by leaving notes, professes a belief that their bullying is a sort of moral purification, and that passive acceptance is in itself a moral act. By witnessing and tolerating their own abuse, they are choosing to, in some abstract sense, stand with other weak and trampled people rather than fighting back, which would entail entering a moral universe of might makes right that inherently produces injustice and oppression. This is attractive to the narrator, who gradually comes to realize that he doesn’t share the same capability to inflict pain as his bullies, whose actions their nihilistic second-in-command explains as simply being the logical exercise of a capacity for violence that others may lack.

Breasts and Eggs (Natsu Monogatari) can also be read as a novel of ideology. Richly polyphonic, the novel considers first breast augmentation and then artificial insemination. These technologies provide women with new ways to control and reshape their womanhood while reflecting social pressures that influence the formation of “womanhood” as a coherent concept in the first place. In the first part, narrator Natsuko hosts her sister Makiko, who has come to Tokyo in search of a plastic surgery clinic with daughter Midoriko in tow. Having grown up in poverty with Natsuko, Makiko still works a precarious job as bar girl, but her motivation for breast augmentation is not merely economic but perhaps bound up with a crisis of selfhood. Meanwhile, Midoriko has not spoken to her mother in six months, and writes journal entries bemoaning the onset of puberty, which has made her body strange and hostile. In the second half Natsuko considers the prospect of motherhood without a father. As she conducts research, she meets a group promoting the rights of donor-conceived children. This results in long conversations about parent-child ethics, bioethics, and anti-natalism, as well as an encounter with a very weird sperm donor. To some extent the “novel of ideology” frame doesn’t fit as strongly with Breasts and Eggs, which is more abstract and relies on dialogue more than action to present the conflict of ideas at the heart of the novel. However, it also seems possible to argue that for adults socialized in a consumer culture where every aspect of your identity from taste to gender can be dissected into commoditized services and market mechanisms govern the interface for self-possession, the scope for action in a novel is diminished.

Korea

This year (before the Nobel Prize, I may add) I read Han Kang’s Human Acts, which centers around the Gwangju uprising of 1980. A survivor of Chun Doo-hwan’s torturers remarks that the point of the pain and starvation seems to have been to reduce the prisoners to atomic organisms incapable of anything resembling altruism or solidarity. I think this relationship between the brute facts of biological life and the possibility of morality is something that Han has written about with admirable clarity and forthrightness both here and in The Vegetarian.

I also read I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Kim Young-ha based on the recommendation of TripleS’s SoHyun. I didn’t find this particularly sticky - there’s some nice ekphrastic writing on Klimt’s Judith and the Head of Holofernes but the casual sex and low-key philosophizing struck me as just Kundera-lite (and there are those who will say Kundera is no heavyweight himself, I’m sure).

Finally I read Winter in Sokcho, originally written in French by Elisa Shua Dusapin. The much-touted comparison to Duras struck me as a bit superficial. While both have a somewhat telegrammatic style and flat affect, I find Dusapin warmer and less habitually vicious, although in the relationship between the narrator and her mother the mix of warmth and disappointment was a bit reminiscent of the part in The Lover when the family leaves Vietnam by boat. I also saw the film adaptation, which I thought had one excellent, memorable shot in a public bath but otherwise made me think that the best parts of the novel were unfilmable.

Asian America

For some time I’ve been threatening to write something about Asian Americans from the perspective of an evil failed STEMcel (as opposed to that of a nationally syndicated columnist or ivory tower feminist) and may still do this at some point, although between Pankaj Mishra’s excellent, magisterial Run and Hide and this Frank Guan review of Tao Lin’s bibliography up to Taipei I might not have much left to say except my bit about AMWF couples. In any case, this year I read two books that also exhibit some overlap with this subject.

I was shocked that I finished Leave Society by Tao Lin, let alone enjoyed it. In some ways it’s remarkably stupid, being a document of the author’s credulous explorations of bullshit science, bullshit medicine, and bullshit history, yet the basic critique of mainstream “dominator” society is hard to rebut. (Frequent descriptions of the blue field entoptic phenomenon come with theories about aliens or DMT elves.) The repeated visits to his parents in Taipei gradually shift from harrowing to sweet, and form a case study in interpersonal dynamics. I’ve never felt so much cringe from a novel before, but I suspect cringe is something like recognition. You cringe at bad pickup lines because you recognize their speakers’ hidden desperate horniness and you cringe at the worst Reptilia cover because you recognize the band’s (barely hidden) dawning horror that people are watching them fuck this up. You cringe because you’ve seen too much, looked too deeply. I thought about “communication” in broad terms a lot over 2023 and 2024, and Leave Society’s endless and frequently cringeworthy conversations and crashouts serve as the perfect grist for that particular mill. The documentary quality of the novel (and much of Tao Lin’s bibliography), mined from endless recorded conversations and email archives, reminds me of Japanese documentarian Kazuo Hara’s early work. Is the novel as self-absorbed as the critics charge? I disagree. If anything, it’s a documentation of the work it takes to try and mend your relationships with others, and the impossibility of untying that task from your own “healing”. It doesn’t seem to me that this inward-looking emphasis on excluding vicious and toxic components of mainstream society both literally through changes in diet and abstractly through changes in interpersonal conduct is necessarily inferior to other models of sociability. Finally, at one point protagonist-author Li is in Hawaii and suggests that a dog sniffing around and peeing is refereshing and replying on the dog internet, an idea whose genius is self-evident.

The last book I read this year was Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, a series of sort-of connected stories. I remember when “The Feminist” came out in N+1 it was all over Twitter, partly because around the same time a mass shooting bearing some similarity to the final scene of the story had occurred. As a provocation it’s immensely successful. It’s hard to argue against the point that your niceness and goodwill is orthogonal to sexual and romantic success, contra right-thinking moralisms which mistake normative theory with actual advice. That’s because your beliefs about niceness and goodwill are only ever inward-facing, since obviously you are the only person who ever has access to your true intentions (if there even is such a thing), and only intermittently. On the other hand, qualities that actually matter, like having a presence that rises beyond background noise or wallpaper, are things that actual human beings learn so naturally that it doesn’t occur to anybody to teach you them or even diagnose their lack. So instead, you hold on to brittle platitudes and watch the mass of humanity recede towards a point on the horizon, while you slowly but perceptibly warp into something suitably inhuman, something that could only ever speak in television static and look like a void in empty space. “Pics” is pretty good as well and the pet crow is hilarious. The stories kind of get worse and worse until the lame final bit where the author attempts to pre-empt all criticism. This is cringe. I recognize myself in the author’s struggle to separate the written self from the waking self that you actually have to cohabit with and try to plan a future for. Some moron on Goodreads cited David Foster Wallace and disapproved of the “irony” of the lame final part. I don’t think there’s anything ironic about an author with this set of neuroses writing some crap ventriloquizing another fictional voice to get out ahead of any unflattering readings of his work. It’s pretty much exactly what you’d think someone like that would do, i.e. the opposite of ironic. That said, I do think this set of complaints is interesting since I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anybody else writing explicitly about the desire to be totally de-identified and efface all markers of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, etc. Another aspect of cringe/recognition is the Twitter stuff in “Main Character”. This dude is a fucking oldhead posting some “Weird Twitter” shit and would never have been anything but peripheral to erie Twitter. I’m not sure how to wrap this up so I’ll also cite Don Lee’s The Collective which I read as a teenager and features a character who, like Bee in “Main Character” obsessively sorts his fellow Asian Americans into a psychosexual social taxonomy.

Genre

I liked Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios. It’s an old school thriller from 1939 about a mystery writer who learns about a notorious criminal found drowned in Istanbul and gets embroiled in his unfinished business while retracing his steps across Europe out of biographical curiosity. The description of the sacking of Smyrna is particularly striking, and it’s a shame that thriller shlock today doesn’t have any of Ambler’s historical imagination or gift for prose:

A man’s features, the bone structure and the tissue which covers it, are the product of a biological process; but his face he creates for himself. It is a statement of his habitual emotional attitude; the attitude which his desires need for their fulfilment and which his fears demand for their protection from prying eyes. He wears it like a devil mask; a device to evoke in others the emotions complementary to his own. If he is afraid, then he must be feared, if he desires, then he must be desired. It is a screen to hide his mind’s nakedness.

Mystery novels I read this year were a mixed bag. Joel Townsley Rogers’s The Red Right Hand from 1945 is a pulp banger, John Dickson Carr filtered through a nightmarish stream-of-consciousness. Like A Coffin for Dimitrios it gives you the probably mistaken impression that popular taste used to be better. Stuart Turton’s The Last Murder at the End of the World was a bit worse than The Devil and the Dark Water, and a disappointment compared to his debut, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, a troubling trend. I read some Japanese mysteries that didn’t leave much of an impression. It was a good year for reading self-published stuff: A. Carver’s The Author is Dead is suitably tricky, while DWaM/H.M. Faust’s The Gospel of V shows off his love and mastery of the genre and a frame narrative executed so well it reminds me of Keigo Higashino’s brilliant Malice.

Films

I watched way too many movies this year. Here are some brief thoughts on a few of them.

Monster (2023), dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda

I saw this in January and immediately told several people it would probably be my favourite film of the year. Kore-eda’s first film, Maborosi, is one of the most beautifully photographed debuts ever. His recent work, which could be reductively described as centering around “social issues” and their effects on family relations, have generally not contained as many awe-inspiring shots. Monster ties his recent “social” filmmaking to a sleek perspective-shifting thriller structure while producing some of his most indelible images since Maborosi.

long and long-ish movies from Asia

Eureka (2000), dir. Shinji Aoyama, features Koji Yakusho and Aoi Miyazaki in a story about the aftermath of violence. Thinking about it now, the way the survivors of the busjacking are treated is almost reminiscent of the stigma faced by hibakusha. Introduced me to Jim O’Rourke. The ending is gorgeous and transcendent. 218 mins.

Platform (2000), dir. Jia Zhangke. For whatever reason left me kind of cold, but I want to rewatch soon. Really captures a sense of anomie. If you like this, I strongly recommend watching Qiu Jiongjiong’s 179 minute A New Old Play (2021) following a Sichuan opera troupe from the Republican era to reform and opening-up. 155 mins.

Voices in the Wind (2020), dir. Nobuhiro Suwa. Stars Hidetoshi Nishijima, perhaps best known as the lead in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021). A lowkey exploration of grief and survivor’s guilt after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Has a few scenes depicting Kurdish immigrants facing deportation, which is not the sort of thing that usually shows up in Japanese film exports. 139 mins.

Intimacies (2012), dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Conceived as a graduation project for his film school students, Intimacies is massive, unwieldy, and not entirely successful. It depicts the production of a play, then the performance of the play in its entirety (2 hours and 10 minutes) before a short, sweet epilogue that brings to mind the ending to Edward Yang’s A Confucian Confusion (1994). Imperfect but I’m still thinking about it. In a way anticipates the 5+ hour length and thematic concerns of Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour (2015), with lots of individual scenes paralleled, and of course the broad strokes of the plot anticipate Drive My Car. The film is juvenilia but (therefore?) it gave me strength and courage. No clue what to make of the Korean war background plot. “A feeling starting out as uncertain evolves to become certain, doesn’t it?” 255 mins.

Drive My Car, dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi. This is not the film of his that I think about the most often, but rewatching it this summer confirmed its place as still my favourite work of his. The way Uncle Vanya is stitched throughout the film is such a comfort. Genius script. Once again I was deeply moved by the scene of Janice and Yoon-a playing Elena and Sonya in the park. 179 mins.

Heaven’s Story (2010), dir. Takahisa Zeze. When I was looking for a link I came across a dude on Discord called “stream dall by artms” looking for subtitles, which I thought was a good sign. I wound up being disappointed, unfortunately. The first 90 minutes I found overlong, and I dislike the extensive use of handheld. However there are a few great images, and the place “closest to heaven”, an abandoned mining town, is very cool. So props to the location scouts. As a depiction of retributive violence, suitably intense and punishing, but doesn’t quite come together for me. 278 mins.

Heat (1995), dir. Michael Mann

“For me, the action is the juice.”

two low budget Japanese genre flicks

One Cut of the Dead (2017), dir. Shinichiro Ueda, is fucking gas. It’s only 96 minutes long, so watch it asap without any knowledge. Hilarious.

Like the previous entry, Junta Yamaguchi’s Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020) really expresses the joy of filmmaking. A low-budget but rigorous time travel flick.

Zhou Dongyu

The Breaking Ice (2023), dir. Anthony Chen. What a fucking screen presence. Excellent photography. This film is like a gentler An Elephant Sitting Still (2018). In this film you can look forward to the day the ice thaws, but Elephant’s grey skies seem omnipresent and omnipotent. I rewatched this in January and found this comparison still relevant and unflattering, although it doesn’t stop me from liking the film.

Better Days (2019), dir. Derek Tsang. Again, Zhou Dongyu is magnetic. First hour or so kind of meanders, and the film doesn’t rise above competent.

TIFF

I was lucky enough to catch a few films at TIFF this year.

Caught by the Tides (2024), dir. Jia Zhangke. Strange, amorphous. I’m surprised I liked this as much as I did given my lukewarm response to Platform. This is a project assembled from extracurricular shooting Jia did throughout his career, and the march through various filming formats gives the plotless first part’s video collage an almost tactile texture (like Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s 2018 short film A White Butterfly on a Bus). Once the “plot” starts, the film is at once a tour through Jia’s filmography and a document of time’s passage that I found much more compelling than Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), for example. Not everyone likes the idea of a COVID film but I think this was perfect. I also watched Female Directors (2012) by Yang Mingming around the same time, so maybe check that out if you’re interested in Chinese indie DV (digital video) stuff.

The Brutalist (2024), dir. Brady Corbet. Hard to avoid architectural metaphors talking about something so grandly conceived. A monumental achievement. Thoughtful about history, art, work, money, race. Corbet had a brief Q&A afterwards and I was impressed by his demeanour.

Happyend (2024), dir. Neo Sora. My favourite of the festival. I mentioned earlier that most Japanese films that make it to Western audiences seem to be an extension to some extent of Cool Japan, or at least rarely challenge the Western view of Japan. Tokyo-based writer and translator (and my GOAT) Dylan Levi King has a lot of writing on what Japan really is, and how strange it is for us in the West to be so “knowledgable” about its pop culture ephemera while being largely ignorant of anything else. This film is based on the director’s experiences growing up in New York yet by setting it in a near-future Tokyo somehow depicts a truer Japan than most of the films that a Western audience might think of as being typically Japanese. While it is largely a teen coming-of-age flick (and a very funny one), the way that repressive adult forces and the struggle against them are tied to anti-Korean racism, the tradition of student radicalism expressed in the 1960 and 1970 Anpo Protests and Sanrizuka struggle is evidence of a more careful engagement with Japanese history. Particularly illustrative is a scene in which the right wing PM claims on television that earthquakes are an opportunity for immigrants to cause chaos. The multiracial cast is an artifact not just of growing up in New York imo but Japan’s recent, deliberately unheralded rise in immigration as it imports both wealthy professionals to tap the dregs of a sclerotic economy and poor migrants to carry out menial tasks, unseen and unwanted. I find these correspondences interesting for a film that is to some extent post-national despite the specificity of its setting and characters. Happyend loses a bit of steam in the back two thirds or so but the loss of focus isn’t all bad. It helps get across the way that when you’re young there are a million things pulling on your attention and trying to shape your soul, whether it’s parental expectations, racial discrimination, first love, or just a sweaty night out, and that the things that wind up having the most influence might not be the great structural forces pushing along the wheel of history but something smaller and more personal, like your sense of solidarity with the kid who explained how to jack off for the first time. I loved this merger of the social and the personal and look forward to being able to see this again.

The Dirties (2013), dir. Matt Johnson

Totally gonzo zero-budget film about school shootings. These dudes were putting it on the fucking line. Strangely enough its passion for filmmaking means it fits in with the two low budget J-indies from earlier, a connection I just made.

Moving (1993), dir. Shinji Somai

Masterpiece. Hope to see Typhoon Club (1985) sometime. Structurally similar to Ryusuke Hamguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist (2023) (which I guess I forgot to write about) in their dreamlike last acts featuring humans lost in a hostile or indifferent natural landscape and the association of the landscape with fantasy but also acceptance of a painful reality.

Games

I wasted time on League and Dota (to a lesser extent) last year. I liked No Case Should Remain Unsolved, a short Korean puzzle/mystery. I loved two Ace Attorney fancases submitted to a contest called “Broken Commandments” which required submissions to break some of Knox’s rules. DWaM’s A Turnabout With Too Many Faces is exhilarating although apparently contains some spoilers for later AA games (I’ve only played the first one from the original trilogy). As soon as you think you know what’s going on he pulls the rug out from underneath you. Blackrune’s Turnabout in the Lighthouse of Lunacy deserves its name. Puzzling out the reveals at the end of Act 4 literally gave me chills when I got it, and the timeline reconstruction that opens in Act 5 is very cool and also gives you a similar shock when you realize what must have happened. Both are audacious and honestly I think you have to really love mysteries to successfully break one of Knox’s rules and still have your story work as well as these do.

Manga

Just gonna go over stuff I finished this year, only briefly touching on ongoing series.

Birdmen, Tanabe Yellow

Kids become “birdmen”. The birdmen look cool. Perhaps the first strand-type manga. It’s not immediately obvious but Birdmen actually features relatively little violence, as birdmen cannot fight or harm other birdmen. As it turns out, the next step of evolution means a prohibition on violence against your fellows. Once a character explicitly lays this out I realized how unique of a series this is. Pretty much every other shounen author would make Eishi and Sou fight each other at some point on some Naruto and Sasuke shit. Eishi is probably the most compelling edgy teenager protagonist I’ve ever read, and the way he grows into the leadership role thrust upon him is easy to root for. There is some stuff that could be explored with more depth, like his home life or the mutant terrorists, but overall I think it was a good tradeoff to leave certain things alone in service of the optimistic tone. Definitely something comforting to read.

Ikoku Nikki, Yamashita Tomoko

Perfect. A novelist, Makio, adopts her niece Asa after a traffic accident kills her parents. Makio and Asa’s mother had a terrible relationship, and Makio’s prickly personality makes the situation even more precarious. I want to write more on this at a later date. The characters are so thoughtful, honest, and well-meaning that you wish everyone could be like this. The adult cast instantly convinces you that these are people with real histories with one another, and feel like people that you might know or love. I like how open-minded Makio is, and the way she gives Asa a chance to see adults don’t belong to a different species, but have their own hangups and fears to deal with. There aren’t really arcs, and the repetition of daily life gets at the sense of aporia the characters have. Maybe you never “move on” or “get over” anything - life gives you a set of Big Questions, and living well is finding new answers, not effacing the questions themselves. I found stubborn, awkward Makio to be a deeply compelling character. Living among people means recognizing you can hurt others unintentionally, just because you didn’t understand them, and you can’t take back your mistakes. Yet at the same time to “understand” another person might be futile, or an act of aggression, flattening them into a convenient caricature, or else result in compromising your own individuality, principles, sense of self.

Shimeji Simulation, Tsukumizu

Got more engrossing the more I read. The setting is fascinating. I think to some extent the end is about the fear of codependency. There isn’t such a thing as a sense of self which predates sociality. Our goals, desires, self-images, are all shaped, restricted, given new life by how we relate to others, so individuality is always threatened by the closeness of others. Former shut-in Shijima has a special ability to maintain her individuality once individuals start merging together, but intimacy requires a more malleable sense of self, more porous boundaries. The art teacher and the art student who stick each other into their art to preserve their distinctness yet remain as close as possible form such a striking image. The ending really makes use of all the possibilities of the medium with its mix of 4-koma and more expansive panelling. The chapter with the book girl Yomikawa that has a section of just text is also a good place to stop and reflect on the difference between prose and image.

My Dearest Self with Malice Aforethought, Inoryuu Hajime and Itou Shouta

Excellent mystery thriller. University student Eiji wakes up having lost three days of memories but having gained a girlfriend. When a reporter reveals he’s the son of a serial killer, madness ensues. Pitch-black and very gory. Impressed by the efficiency of its cast. This genre has been beaten half to death at this point, so execution is everything and this manga is as slick as it gets. The epilogue chapter is gorgeous.

Concubine Walkthrough, BongBong

This is probably as good as Korean webtoons get. Carefully plotted, and the art is all done in a somewhat minimal palette. Good if you like pseudo-Chinese court politics, villainness isekai, or sci-fi about virtual reality.

Inside Mari, Oshimi Shuuzou

One of the best things he’s ever done. Doesn’t pull any punches. Komori is so fully realized as a character I find it hard not to relate to his life, which is sketched with such clarity and economy that it reminded me of the page or so in Madame Bovary about Charles Bovary at university receiving cheese in the post from his mother and failing his medical exams.

Jujutsu Kaisen, Akutami Gege

The pinnacle of JJK is when Yuuji and Nobara fight the blood brothers. There are plenty of fights that are supposed to have higher stakes, but the way this one reveals Nobara’s latent insanity in combat and forces Yuuji to do something cruel and underhanded to survive the encounter actually develops the characters while proving just how desperate their situation is a million times better than having Yuuji hit by a bajillion slash attacks that don’t really compromise his movements anyways. Totally lost its way after the Shibuya arc. I don’t know if Gege started spending all his time reading powerscaling wankery Reddit threads or what. Randomly kills a bunch of characters for basically no payoff since he then introduces a bunch of literally whos to sandbag for Sukuna, many of whom survive anyways. This is a bit like Eliezer Yudkowsky-approved web serial Worm after the timeskip which introduces a bunch of unmemorable, personality-free Chicago capes only for most of them to be totally irrelevant or forgotten as soon as they’re offscreen. Worm is longer and has the ability to handle an even bigger cast, though, so even a minor character like Vista from early on in the story you can root for late in the story. Compare this to the principal guy who randomly turns out to be “the strongest Grade 1 sorcerer” or whatever the fuck so Sukuna can beat the ever-loving dogshit out of him and look even cooler or something. By the way, Worm is not that good, which makes JJK just straight up bad.

Oshi no Ko, Akasaka Aka and Yokoyari Mengo

It’s okay. Once we got into the home stretch it deflated a bit after you learn the solution to the overarching mystery, which is basically some guy you never would have guessed because he hadn’t been introduced yet. Peaks during the reality show arc maybe but I like Akane the best so I’m biased. I admire her intelligence and insane willingness to shoulder other people’s burdens. Part of why I’m lukewarm on the ending is that it feels like you could write a dozen different endings and they would have all felt equally plausible and definitive.

Hinamatsuri, Ohtake Masao

Funny and cozy. Because it’s basically a gag manga, character development seems deliberately stunted so that Hina can keep smashing Nitta’s urns, which makes it feel like there’s a ceiling on how good the series can be. Anzu is cute. Doesn’t overstay its welcome even though it’s 117 chapters long.

Ongoing

I think Magilumiere is getting close to completion. I love all the magical girl designs and it’s great that the main character’s ability to RTFM is almost a superpower. My Boy/Watashi no Shounen author Takano Hitomi is currently working on Gene Bride. I’m liking the little I’ve seen of it so far. If you’re interested in acting/stage settings or BL, Double by Noda Ayako is excellent. Zenbu Kowashite Jigoku de Aishite, variously translated as If That’s Love, Break It or Destroy It All and Love Me in Hell is an angsty, savage yuri that reminds me a bit of Oshimi Shuuzou’s masterpiece Aku no Hana in tone. I fell off of Choujin X but hope to catch back up this year because I really liked what I read.

Webfiction

I haven’t really kept up with webfiction this year. I’ve been liking Chains of a Time Loop. I binge read a lot of Time to Orbit: Unknown by Derin Edala but it seems like it has been finished and self-published since the last time I looked at it in July. The best discovery I made was Upon the Mirror Sea, which is the incomplete draft of an awesome sci-fi novel about Shanghai “neikonauts” (as in 内空人, a spin on 太空人/“taikonauts”, Chinese astronauts) using psychedelic drugs to interface with supercomputers for scientific research and prop trading while everyone around them is going a bit crazy watching the Mirror Sea, a weird construct knitting together all the hashed feeds of privacy-protecting CCTV cameras dotting the city that seems to be refracting the very consciousness of the city and its population. The prose, at turns abstract and hyper-kinetic, reminds me of M. John Harrison’s Light.