Golden Kamuy, 16.

- Golden Kamuy, vol. 16. Satoru Noda. 

An assassin long faced into senility… a circus act gone very wrong indeed… and a journey through frozen landscapes that serves as an exploration of memory —and as a bargaining chip for shady business…

Noda’s adventure tale expands its eye across all Japanese territory and slowly drifts towards Russia. Towards riddles that lead to increasingly complex realities. For example, the weight of history and politics, which no one can avoid. Hired assassins may have once been instruments of change, now abandoned and forgotten. Some people may be not even a traitor, but somebody fleeing from the role they played in the recent history of a whole nation. And the young may prove not the hope for the future, but the instrument to settle scores with the past. 

As always, quite recommended. 

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Beastars, vol. 17

 

- Beastars, vol. 17. Paru Itagaki. 

C. 143

- The feline (a cheetah?) who takes a seat next to Louis, perhaps hung over or perhaps coy, is the same one who in chapter 130 (vol. 15) asked him about his past. 

- There is a propaganda channel for herbivores, complete with (likely fake) scientists advocating for species separatism. 

144 

- The superstitious nature of the Shishigumi, up to using their whiskers for “divination”, is not too different from that exhibited by some real-life criminal organizations. Look up terms like “La santa muerte” or “El santo de Malverde”…

145 

- Decico, civet leader of the fascist organization “Kopi Luwak”, an excellent example of a kind of banal evil that seems harmless at first sight. 

- The other example is Melon, here presented as a simple college teacher who expounds off-beat theories such as the impulse to kill and the impulse to fuck being the same. The kind of thing that many college students find deep so long as they don’t actually look that deeply into it. 

146 

- The meeting between Haru and Melon and their exchange of borderline nihilistic philosophies, would fit right in a movie thriller…

147 

- To such a degree that it ends with Melon stabbing himself in the thigh, as if out of a slasher movie proper. 

148 

- Then we go back to authentic sexual themes: That Legosi prefers to be dominated, even openly admitting that he’d almost rather be an herbivore, prey. 

- Then a moment of horror, in which Legosi thinks he’s eaten Haru in his sleep…

149 

-…it turns out to be a misunderstanding. But it hurts him both physically (his fur turns white) and mentally (he obsesses even more with the idea of marriage). 

150 

- Did Melon really kill his schoolyard bullies when he was nine? Because of the way this flashback is presented it could either be true or be a sick fantasy he can no longer distinguish from reality, not unlike quite a few real life serial killers. 

151

- Legosi still has plenty to learn, as he still thinks that social class divisions are valid, and is shocked that the police are more interested in saving face than in truly stopping crime. 

- And thus, it makes sense that he briefly returns to the school where he began. 

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Night of the mannequins.

 

- Night of the mannequins. Stephen Graham Jones. 

Five childhood friends, high school sophomores on the verge of ending their childhood for good. One final prank to end them all —when everything that could go wrong, does. And now, five friends being killed one by one by a living mannequin. Or perhaps by an all too human menace…

Excellent, deceptively shot and simple horror novella from Graham Jones, at present one one of the most intriguing “genre” (and out of genre!) writers. What at first appears to be a winking, tongue-in-cheek B-movie plot soon reveals itself as an extended meditation on the loss of childhood masquerading as pop culture fodder. 

And so here, MAJOR SPOILERS come, because it’s almost impossible to talk at length about this novella’s themes otherwise. 

Much has been made about what becomes obvious halfway through —that Manny the mannequin isn’t actually out there, magically come to life, but that narrator Sawyer has gone insane, hallucinating a giant monster on their trail and using it to justify his murderous actions. 

There are hints carefully placed throughout the novel right from the start: Sawyer is on medication due to a “highly active” brain, and in the opening chapter stopped taking them three days ago, plus he never takes them again. Hence that moment of vertigo before their prank does not work the way they expected it to. He’s placed on AP classes for the same reason, and informs us that his brain constantly sees conspiracies where there aren’t any, making things more complicated than they really are. 

Then, some reviewers point out that this still does not explain a few details in the novel —who DID steal all that Miracle-gro? How did Manny walk out of the theater on his own, which at least three characters seem to agree happened —though one does not, and at the end Sawyer hints that he knows perfectly well that was itself a different prank (“I did not need to know about any mannequins in Lost and Found down at the movies”). Does it not seem too much of a coincidence that the exact same superhero movie is playing somewhere as everyone dies? It’s not impossible, but…

I think that this isn’t just a puzzle to solve, what happened and didn’t and how —I think the real point of the novel lies in its use of symbols, in this case taken directly from, again, pop culture. 

One thing we DO know is that Sawyer is quite childish from the start and only regresses more and more as the story advances. He cherishes his childhood bond with his friends to such a degree that any of them drifting apart from the group means they “had it coming” —indeed at first he makes it Manny’s entire motivation. “He was our best friend and then we forgot about him”. He elaborates for pages that Danielle, and even his cousin Shanna, can never be romantic options because they know each other way too well, yet he never stops resenting Steve for dating her. 

Steve, whom we are told is a crummy boyfriend but who in the book never seems to act as anything but a good guy —he tries to comfort Sawyer after a crying fit only to be pushed away. Sawyer describes his hatchback car as ‘a wimpmobile’ while adding, how telling “Of course he’d drive something like that, not anything cool and outlaw like a wrecked motorcycle” —like the one Sawyer is currently driving, the one that his father was almost killed in, the one that almost causes his parents to divorce. But back to Steve for a moment: Compare the moment before Steve is killed, where to Sawyer’s eyes it looks like he’s about to masturbate, versus Sawyer in one crucial scene taking off his underwear in front of the others to “show he’s not afraid”. It’s sex that Sawyer fears, like in so many horror and other genre stories, sex that keeps him away from the girls he wished would choose him, and that for him is the end of childhood. 

And then that childhood, as is often the case, is not remotely as idyllic as Sawyer appears to think. His father tried to leave them on a middle-age-crisis motorcycle, fell into a ditch and spent three weeks in the hospital. His mother “cooked everything in the pantry and threw it away”, meaning they themselves are prone to manic behavior not unlike their son’s. Cousin Shanna took her own parents’ divorce so badly she had to attend counseling regularly in grade school, which for Sawyer only confirmed his worst fears —family breaking apart. And his friends, he informs us directly, *were* his family. Until they weren’t. And so he started killing them one by one. 

Sawyer, whose name recalls Tom Sawyer, the perpetual child (the American Peter Pan, almost). Who glosses over JR’s gun-nut father with “crazy eyes”, who attempts to shoot a man out of suspicion. Who also glosses over Tim and Shanna each being in deep trouble at work and with family due to their “pranks”. Sawyer who loves his mannequin friend, with only a bulge ‘down there’ and not, as JR mimes, a garden hose. Sawyer, who at the end believes himself to be turning not just into another mannequin but into “A Boy Mannequin”, waiting for his father / friend to take him “home”, where summer with childhood friends will never end. 

Notice, by the way, that one moment when Sawyer, Danielle, JR and, yes, even Steven, briefly do gain their childhood innocence back, swimming in their underwear (naked, in Sawyer’s case) in a pond, wherein Sawyer briefly forgets his delusion that a giant Manny lies underneath the water. And that spell is only broken once he figures that his friends lie to him about helping with a project —the way their own parents do, all the time. 

There are still more ways to read the story. There is Graham Jones, a Blackfoot Native American man, talking about the ‘band-aid transparent’ mask that is Manny’s face and eventually Sawyer’s. There is the explicit tribute to so many classic Slasher films with their seemingly ambiguous supernatural killer turning out to be hallucinations of the main character. There is the use of Superhero films, the 21st century symbol of infantilized mass-marketed products. There is the final hurricane serving as metaphor for a destroyed mind…

…or maybe it really is a story about a killer mannequin’s revenge on his former human friends…

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