And in the process inventing a distinct and fertile “Shinjuku culture”: a jumbled mixture of all the regional cultures around it, fermenting one hybrid after the other, bursting forth in luxuriant growth, revealing at last the structure of the “proto-Shinjuku metropolis.”
Shinjuku at the beginning of the 1980s, or more specifically, the Shinjuku at the moment of Demon City’s creation, itself inspired by Escape from New York (which, it should be pointed out, had stolen a march on the whole cyberpunk milieu)—that Shinjuku had already ceded its sense of the “now” to Shibuya.
With the arrival of the consumer culture in the 1980s, the jumbled hybrid culture that made Shinjuku the center of attention during the 1960s was supplanted by Shibuya’s fashion scene.
Shinjuku at the moment of Demon City’s creation was perhaps a space sealed up together with the dreams of the 1960s, making it, in a way, a depiction of the ruins of the 1960s culture.
So perhaps, by analogy, it can be said that during the 1970s, about the same time the place called “Shinjuku” was surpassed by Shibuya and so separated itself from the zeitgeist, it began its journey into the demon realms.
And ruins are where monsters will always find a room to call their own. Yashakiden illustrates another of Kikuchi’s main themes, placing that vampire imagery within the large temple sanctuary that Shinjuku has become.
The story begins with the arrival of an unusual demoness and her vampire brood in Demon City Shinjuku from China and its heralded five thousand years of history and civilization. Although “made in China,” this decadent band has appeared here and there in world history, and now toys with Shinjuku as a child torments a fly.
The citizens of the city, beginning with Setsura Aki, have no choice but to get up close and personal and face off against them.
The objective of these vampires seems to come down to ruling Shinjuku. But not necessarily. Beginning with Princess and her whimsies; the mad scientist that is Kikiou; Ryuuki and his feelings for Princess; Shuuran, with her crush on Ryuuki—when the city assimilates them, the changes begin to emerge.
With the city and the outsider, the effects go both ways. The processes by which the fantastic and the grotesque replenish Shinjuku’s imaginative powers and are absorbed into Demon City are felt down to the cellular level.
The city and the outsider—it’s the quintessential Shinjuku story: to reject or to incorporate; to become an offshoot or an appendage. This meeting, this collision of cultures, richly mingles with all the attendant nuances. Thought of that way, the striking black and white combination—Setsura Aki and Mephisto—only deepens the curiosity and the questions.
The slightly “retro” occupations of senbei shop owner and private investigator Setsura. Doctor Mephisto, the Demon Physician who can cure any disease. Setsura with the ability to cut anything into pieces, and Mephisto with the ability to put those pieces back together again.
Known equally in Demon City for their comely countenances, when the demonic realms disgorge some new creature and the city swallows it up, their complementary talents to disassemble and reassemble kick into high gear. And through their mutual touch, those foreign monsters become naturalized citizens of the city.
The year 1997 marked the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As Hideyuki Kikuchi has frequently noted, Dracula has had an enormous effect on his life and career. It’s hard to miss the parallels with the foreigner Count Dracula visiting London at the end of the last century.
Needless to say, there is a surprisingly deep literary perspective lurking in the background of this novel.
The monsters of this city aren’t simply stuck with the label “vampire” because they hail from some unknown quarter. They spring forth from deep strata of established culture.
Dracula arrived in London in a dashing fashion, and coming from where Eastern Europe crossed into Asia, was himself the personification of a nineteenth-century version of internationalism and globalization. Princess and her cohorts make a great display of their past five thousand years of accumulated information.
The overriding nuance here though, is less the usual behavior of ghosts and goblins and more the construction of an artificial environment based on the acquisition of technical expertise, and to a rather excessive degree at that.
Beginning with Kikiou, who is revealed to have an android body, showing the extent to which literary monsters have become connected to the technological imagination. In other words, these demons that escape easy classification are, more than anything, the product of our own manmade inventiveness.
And so the city appears before us in the pages of this book, the dramatic blending of monsters and machines.
The other day, the hundredth anniversary of Count Dracula’s “birth” was celebrated with the publication of Blood (Hayakawa Books), an anthology of vampire stories. On the very first reading, the impact of Kikuchi’s contribution, “An Irreplaceable Existence,” raised the hairs on the back of my neck.
The reverberations in the literary world arising from the high-tech revolution of the 1980s have of course been felt across the science fiction spectrum, from the fantasy to the horror genres. However, those more polished descriptions emerging in the 1990s could yet be discerned in that same work.
A beautiful mechanical doll tossed onto a scrap heap of iron. The unmistakable nature of the pair of symmetrical holes puncturing the lustrous metal skin of her throat—the eerie aura raised by the introduction alone escapes easy description.
I can only recommend that you read this gem of a story. Weaving a nineteenth-century steampunk graveyard together with today’s postmodern high tech landscape unmistakably echoes and extends the kind of speculative thought that went into chimerical beings that come to life in Yashakiden.
Within the works of Hideyuki Kikuchi spring to life extraordinary imaginative worlds that even voracious writers of cyperpunk and techno-chic rarely come into contact with.
Yashakiden describes a monster metropolis while examining the world at the end of the century. Appearing at a rare millennial turning point, this urban epic has become a monster of a novel in its own right.
Mari Kotani
Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 5 Omnibus Edition Page 40
