Last November I visited Asia for the first time, specifically
Japan. From the moment that I learned I would be going to Japan, I began to
look more and more forward to it. One of the things I wanted to do in preparation
was read a couple of SFF books from Japan. Not just the big stuff by the likes
of Murakami but something that was maybe a bit more authentic, and even pulp-ish.
So I turned to the specialty publishing house of Haikasoru and browsed their catalog
for interesting sounding books. Of course I found many, but had to limit to a
couple of choices.
One of those choices was MM9
(Monster Magnitude 9) by Hiroshi Yamamoto. I chose it because it’s more or less
contemporary, plus obviously from the same lineage as Godzilla and just sounded
fun. MM9 tells a series of related
stories (think pulp fiction here) of a special unit called the Meteorological
Agency Monsterological Measures Department (MMD) as they protect Japan from the
growing threat of natural disasters in the form of giant monsters, or kaiju. Of
course there’s a grand conspiracy at foot.
As I said above, this is pulp fiction – it feels as if it were a
series of episodic short stories that were brought together. It also feels
snarky – this may be a translation issue, but I really think that these stories
don’t take themselves entirely seriously. It’s especially interesting (or
funny) how so much emphasis is given to ‘rating’ the size of the monsters and
then gifting them with a name (nice and corny – names like ‘Princess’, ‘Megadrake’,
and ‘Seacloud’). And it really does fascinate me to wonder if it’s something lost
in translation, that the book is truly snarky, or if like the first, this is an
aspect of Japanese pop culture that just feels snarky to us in the USA.
MM9 has all of the campy fun of good pulp fiction and it provided
exactly what I was looking for. Something a bit different than I usually read
as well as a different sort of perspective of Japan in advance of my trip. And
yes, it did give me some interesting perspective that I wasn’t going to find in
the Lonely Planet guides. Specifically some ideas on the general economic malaise
of a country that has been in one recession or another for almost 20 years, and
a bit of hint on just how much the pop culture in Japan leans in its unique
direction (in addition to the snarky fascination I mention above). I will not
even try to describe that uniqueness of the pop culture in Japan beyond an
image I saw on my first evening – a man of around 40 dressed in his every day
suit (much nicer than the one I own), reading a graphic novel on a bullet train
while eating a quick meal and drinking a beer, with a very loud, cartoonish advertisement
on the wall above him.
Anyway, MM9 was a fun
book to read and just what I wanted. I certainly recommend the books of Haikasoruas a source of some great Japanese SFF.
MM9 by Hiroshi Yamamoto: Amazon
