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Adapted from a Rakugo play from what would appear like ancient times, Koji Yamamura's 2002 tour de force of allegorical dungeoneering into the murkiest depths of the ailing human psyche is nothing short of poetic. The way he weaves sometimes trustworthy, sometimes unreliable visual correlation with the written form enthuses, all while viewers are left by their lonesome to decode what's really to be taken as fact within the mental strain of the character's descent into maddening despair.

One major takeaway would be the integration of motifs as the crux of all chaos that is seen to its causal endpoint on the artifice of destiny. ... Every swath of misfortune that befalls the man with the cherry tree growing from his bald head is caused by his indignation to resign and uproot it before tertiary problems begin to take root (giggles) and drive him into a corner. The little people frolicking by the "tree" on his head? They seem unfazed by what self-inflicted mockery he has to put up with on a daily basis, and as if it couldn't get any worse for him, they act out every destructive impulse known to humankind on his shrivelling epidermal "zenshin taitsu", if only out of a complete disregard for the host on which they thrive. They're parasites, and this man refuses to do a thing about it. Why wouldn't he cut down the cherry tree? Why did he think it wise to chew on a cherry blossom seed which fruit came from an unknown place, where nutrients in the soil beneath were likely scarce? And above all, why was the man so god-damned stingy?

All of these we don't get a concrete answer to. But what we do get in return however, coalesces into something beyond even our wildest imaginations. Something beyond even my own imagination.

What a bloody masterpiece by Yamamura-sensei this turned out to be. Thoroughly recommended. Through and through.

This was recommended to me by a friend whom I had told not long before being instructed to wander this rabbit hole out of plaintive desire that I was only into animated shorts now and that I had long worn thin of the longform narrative in cartoons. I sensibly wanted a respite from the inconsolable might the average 12-24 episodes had on my fragile emotional state, and thus didn't want to have to deal with any potential long-term investment in established worlds and mundanities associated with "the continuity", so to speak. This friend of mine, you see, was a major Tezuka enthusiast. He would collect ... supply drop after supply drop of commemorative Osamu Tezuka memorabilia be it autobiographies or secondhand accounts of the man's working life through the late 20th century, and at the same time, urge others like myself who could muster an appetite for all things nerdy and secular in terms of interests to read Tezuka manga if only to glimpse the master at work through the lens of a reader living in modern times. Of course, I abstained for the longest time since I was not ready to hop aboard the "be all end all" express where the finality of art could be grasped by even the layman. NO, I WAS NOT READY TO FEAST MY EYES ON HIS BODY OF WORK JUST YET. I needed a bit more breathing space before I could.

And then it clicked in my head. What if I started not with his written oeuvre, but his directorial craft? That would be conducive for a first-timer like myself, would it not? Heh, talk about a dash of adept decision-making, that one. I decided to take my aforementioned friend up on his suggestion to check out this short after another I'd already seen beforehand, Broken Down Film, and what a buffet for the senses it was! The editing was supreme, and not to mention (likely) instrumental in the pioneeering and subsequent realization of Satoshi Kon's inimitable magic with the camera and how he plays around with the editing in his films. I'm sure many other industry creatives were inspired by Tezuka's work in the early phases of their careers.

And now on to the short itself, which i will keep concise and to the point. It is simply a masterstroke of technique. Secondary to the already prominent displays of gyroscopic camera movement which would immediately pass for peer review by academics at the time of its release, coupled with the unconventional angles the pov of both character and viewer introduce whilst mid-air and on the ground, the short's defining quality is how attention to detail is NEVER ESCHEWED, regardless of what you may opine quietly by yourself. Denial only results in misappreciation for this particular vision of Tezuka's, and how could one not stand in awe at the glory of those towering cityscapes beholden to a regressing society, not one that is privy to change and environmental preservation? All of it amounts to a perfectly illustrated premonition of a future yet to come and everything from its charm to its grievous fixations on death and dysfunction paints a forlorn picture of the human race's trajectory at the height of the global economic boom in the 80s. Do yourself and your kindred a favor by watching this short, but do so at your own discretion seeing as the takeaway may alienate some from what it ultimately dares to convey.

There are two gripes that I have with stories that take place after their protagonists awaken from cryogenic stasis. One, they tend to be about the unending sliding scale of reinvigoration, the ripple-like but otherwise fruitful clamoring for sustenance, the acceleration and exacerbation of discord on top of fringe ideas, followed by the eventual time of reckoning, where either the “heroes” live to tell the tale, or do not. They -- methodically and generously filling us in on the various trajectories heralded by these pioneers by whom we are cordially invited along to invest our energies into providing affable running commentary lest their prayers go ... unanswered and no one is present to cry out in anguish alongside them -- drone on for proverbial eons about which path is the right one for them and ultimately waste our time by handwaving us through a oceanic cistern of been-there-done-thats that, understandably speaking, we do not recall asking for in the first place. This feeds directly into my second gripe. Maybe instead of pooling ambition and scope into the fold and making the linearity of all progression so patulous and dependent on the whims of authorial intent, why not spare beguiled audiences the narrative sprawl of cursory tales of personal growth and learning to graft oneself onto communal values and in a certain regard, allow the pages of a concisely outlined work to be occupied with the held beliefs of its pertinent author. Despite how conceited such an undertaking may seem at a glance, when you account for the flexibility of creative expression in a medium as sorely underutilized as manga, you immediately begin to wonder where its imaginary boundaries lie and how much an author; an illustrator; an AUTEUR can push the envelope before being urged to tone down the overflowing madness that is spontaneously birthed and spurted from the crest of his noggin.

Shotaro Ishinomori. His was a name that I'd already been acquainted with since my early days on the internet, scouring for all manner of rubbish to latch on to and make my temporary personality before letting it all fade into obscurity. Kamen Rider was one of these things. As a nine year old with all the world in the palm of his hand, i’d binge 20-30 episodes of varying Rider shows across the Heisei era of televised broadcasts at a time, proceed to tell my besties about it -- to which they’d just nod in solidarity and just go about whatever it was they themselves were fixated on at the time -- and elaborately recite aloud the transformations sequences from heart. With unbridled glee no less. I'd watch these crime-fighting heroes go about their perennial duty of painting the not-so-savory personifications of disorder in a monochrome light, with none of these framed evildoers ever being gift-wrapped the opportunity to make amends for what they've done and so forth. Straightforward, morally linear stuff. Indeed, the series has always postulated the idea that the wants and needs of "justice" or the vague feelings of warmth and premeditated comfort beheld by society at large come ex aequo. Which drives home the personal significance of it all to me; I would graciously stomach, with a tinge of admiration ever-more, stories about the partisanship and ironic duality between the forces of good and evil. Both are like two sides of a seemingly lunar-draped coin. What constitutes "good" things? An innate sense of purpose? The parallels between a person/object and its role in the natural order? And conversely, does a fundamental vacancy for interest in cohabitation occupy the root of all evil? It cannot be proven for certain. Everyone has conflicting views on what they describe as the "truth" regardless, so defining such equivocal concepts in equally reductionistic terms would be counterintuitive to the single most ingrained tenet of the written form.

I happened across Ryuu no Michi as do many other readers do. Observe a group of individuals discuss the body of work of a sole man, become curious myself, do a little bit of digging on who said man might be and what he has published to date, and then realize he was someone whose name I’d known about since forever ago, and at last select from his hefty collection of stories and accounts of real world happenings at their time of conceptualization. With 28 chapters spread across 8 volumes, I went into it expecting it to be a cakewalk considering its diminutive length and that it was the first in a long line of manga Ishinomori would go on to stamp his name on. I couldn’t be more wrong.

To start with, the art is, to put it lightly, majestic as the Aether, consistently fluid in its depictions of busy limb-to-limb action, and achingly rapturous in how it’s illustrated for close to every spread you’ll lay eyes on insofar as your attention is kept sailing over the course of the read. Not once will you ever work your across landscapes devoid of soul poured into every miasma of uniformly repeating squiggles and the mark of while yet an accomplished artist, but truly bewildering talent of the highest pedigree. To think he managed to achieve this much while only still in his early thirties.

In one spread of Ryuu, our titular character sits alone in a field of dust and debris with plumes of smoke filtering into the atmosphere in excess. The aftermath of the carnage is rendered in such a way that the largest objects take up most of the frame and are consequently blackened out either completely or partially to show the difference in distance between the foreground and background.

Another of Ryuu no Michi’s inferred strengths is its arc-by-arc structure of showing how the planet got to the point it did where it became virtually inhospitable for further human progress. Instead of being shown bits and pieces of survival bravado and what each character introduced is supposed to help with in Ryuu’s bearing of the torch and ultimatum for a better tomorrow, we are graced with the fallout of a once-shimmering and once-prosperous cluster of evolutionary ingredients, now desecrated and in a state of monumental disrepair. Well, not quite but the gist is that the food chain’s disrupted and predators once have now become the hunted and vice versa. Likened to many myths of ancient origin, the individual tales told within these arcs put on an air of postmodernity atypical of the espoused schools of thought made ubiquitous in the 1970s. The god(s) guiding him by the hand on his journey for resettlement lay the brickwork for what is expected of him as a future bastion for the declining remnants of the civilized man, reminding him that if he is to perform at an acceptable optimum, he should pay no worry to his worst critics and just go about ruling with loose morals, implying that he should first establish sunny relations amongst peoples of the gamut of gene pools there now fill up the (un)earthly landscape. Projecting his own set of beliefs and moral axioms has to be the least of his responsibilities given that propounding forward-thinking or backwards arguments for an entire populace’s worth of tunnel-visioned faculties to hear would most certainly stoke the flames of discord, not to mention the unintentional conundrums that doing so would inevitably leave on the table. He has to earn these dispersed men and women’s trust and adulation if he seeks an opportunity to round them up and have them get along with one another.

The extent of Ishinomori’s knowledge of divergent species and the enumeration of specifics that come with it is definitely something that cannot be overstated. He repeatedly brings into focus concepts pertaining to how a demarcated civilization may unexplainably exploit the use of the limited resources and realize their potential as a society by having a democracy in place to decide upon what’s best for themselves and other subservient species that live alongside them. He clearly acknowledges that preexistent systems that have been lost to time due to the devastation of their forebearers will spontaneously crop up again at a certain point along a linear flowchart of time, also due to the cycle of causality and how things repeat themselves after enough time has passed.

All in all, i have to say that I’m fairly pleased with this manga. It has all the hallmarks I often associate with tales taut, ambitious in scope and yet comfortably reminiscent of an idealized (my perceived ideal) manner of storytelling that pulls no punches. Would I have wanted more of this, padded out to include at least a dozen more chapters to wrap certain plot points revolving around a number of the side characters whose final appearances were so unnecessarily far back from when the finale was finally set in motion? Of course! But what it all does right for me greatly outweighs what it doesn’t.

~ this review contains a fair amount of spoilers. reading it ahead of the manga may very well sour your experience so it's thoroughly advised that you go over at the bare minimum three quarters of the material beforehand. you have been warned. ~

i have always been fascinated by the prospect of dystopias, especially those with a particular emphasis on the potential for technological advancement the further we plunge our necks into a convergence that never comes, or at least isn't prescient enough to warrant a look back at certain bygone epochs. you know, works of such sophistry and wonder that you can't help but ... get lost in the possibilities that may come true many years down line. hell, you may live to see them play out before your very earthly visage. the feeling of knowing the unknown will incontrovertibly morph into what's in the now and consequently known, is one that parallels few others. Eden is a manga of that such ilk, with brand-spanking highlights of the technobabble of future civilizations manifesting themselves as narrative, it harbors no shortage of idealistic navel-gazing for pompous geeks such as myself. teeming with applications of cyberization and basic tenets of the proliferation of inorganic matter and life alike, it lacks nothing in terms of what may be explored in hard sci-fi -- or perhaps that seems so.

uncapping my verbatim reflective of Endless World, one takeaway i've periodically had with respect to the ostensible “what is lacking" happens to be what isn't retroactively shown in further depth. sure, many of the theories and machinations seem plausible at a glance, but that only really scratches the surface of what can be parsed within a web of congregating vignettes, each of which encloses a facet of post-modernity as a focal point of the uncollated tale's significance in the grand scheme of things. the reason i say "a" instead of "the" is simply that there's greater thematic depth to Eden than mere photon beam emitters that penetrate even kevlar-reinforced armaments. like, is that all? what is aptly annotated superseding this markedly shoddy attempt at textual digression is the following soliloquy i had when blazing through some of the more middling chapters smack dab bookending continually fracturing episodes starring a throng of relegated cannon fodder that also somehow take comparatively major precedence to the progression of the underlying subtext of neverending despotism:

"i hope more of the inner workings of this phenomenon is explained later on but for some out-of-touch reason, i keep getting the irreverent hunch that deluding myself into believing i'll get more coverage of that as i make ordinate progress across the manga's run is conceited and asking too much of the author."

Endo, if you knew this was going to become a bump on the road in the long run then why opt to make this so heavily mired in the fauxscientific. a fine example of balls-to-the-wall cyberpunk would be Shirow Masamune's Ghost in the Shell, wherein he goes into dizzyingly succinct depth about how he envisions a japan that's not grounded in present times and tries to convey the silliness of sudden drastic changes in modern society that would entail either mass skepticism or unanimous acceptance, each depending on the sign of the times to determine which is more amiable and attuned to the world as it is at any given fixture. Hiroki Endo's Eden does not do this at all. He tries to capture the dreary aesthetic of post-economic bubble japan circa the late 90s through a bevy of variegated stances, for one there’s the political framework of a slew of governing bodies that reeked of unbounded corruption and bore a tint of manipulative mannerisms that those in charge of running the country at the time never admitted to. similarly, the globalist faction Propatria does this albeit to much broader degrees. now, its discrepancy in relation to GITS' is as follows: GITS has every reason to wax philosophical while not needing to go ham on the technobabble throughout its runtime whereas Eden plays into the conceit that it may be obliged to do the same. this is where things begin to go awry. GITS has few unchanging rules to its structural components so working with those rules all while revelling in self-indulgence is fair, but in the case of Eden you’ve got so many different tenets that often act disproportionately to one another so they clash. a lot. hence creating an induced fear of imbalance, with contradictions and inconsistencies becoming increasingly prevalent as more and more of the world therein starts to unravel.

with that being said, the other thing i can ceremoniously praise Eden for is its handling of core thematic threads and messages that weave into the narrative at large. one such theme is the importance of familial bonds and the curious ways in which they ultimately transcend innately altruistic worldviews. now i know what may be suddenly crossing your mind? what does altruism have to do with family ties, especially in as majorly complex a narrative as Endless World? well, the first of my points has to do with the Ballards, the main provocateurs of each of the stories. Comprising 5 members, each replete with distinct backstories and moments of clarity, all of them are tied by the events that transpire around them, whether they be the perpetrators or unwilling participants in them, they inevitably seem to be latched firmly in place by the world over, never once being granted control over affairs regularly galvanized by them. yes, they serve as catalysts for the dozens upon dozens of botched operations and devious schemes devised by the higher-ups of Propatria or as stated, them.

Enoa comes off at first as this idealistic child commanding this sense of anti-nihilism as he grabs whatever opportunity that dangles in front of his face by the hand. a naive opportunist, he appears readily adamant about jettisoning the paradisiacal eden that both he and his future wife Hana are stranded on. Later on, as he redebuts as a jaded revolutionary assuming responsibilities in the form of orchestrating a large scale coup’d’etat against Propatria that takes ages to reach some semblance of a conclusion, he wavers and grouchily catapults back and forth between sabotaging Propatria from within and caring for his family before settling on a definitive calling card. and thus winding up choosing his family over downing the megaestablishment douches. how very admirable. it sugarcoats the thin facade of fickle relationships and immortalizes it as something that transcends even time. who you are in the present, what forms of treachery and deceit you dare commit out in the open, how much you value everyone else more than you do your birth parents because of how much insurmountable grief they might have caused you for not having been there in your most vulnerable hours, it all doesn’t matter. family comes first and should any bad omen come their way, you must act expeditiously to endeavor and deflect whatever that imminent danger is.

kicking back the dilemma of parenthood for a bit, Eden also spares no mercy on the part of the reader as it constantly inundates them with fleeting passages of fornication. in this context specifically, prostitution. Enoa’s son, Elijah, is a disenfranchised youth. he yearns for a place to belong since losing both his younger sister and mother to a remotely spearheaded division of Propatrian lackeys imparted a toll all too hard for him to cope with. so he wanders the incan mountain range aimlessly, happening upon barren cities every so often, reminding us, the audience, that this is a war-torn future full of callous decisions and hasty science-y shenanigans condoned by glory-seeking scientists that teeter on the very brink of collapse and failure every time they experiment on a newly discovered strain of virulent microbes. that is, until he crosses paths with the mercenary group Nomad and is blackmailed into doing their bidding lest he barrels off in the opposite direction when they’re not monitoring his every misstep. fast forward some odd four years later, Elijah is now a proficient contract killer worthy of the mantle "Lecherous MacGyver”. he is serendipitously tasked with investigating a lead discovered after some of the Nomads discover a trail of blood within an Australian bioelectronics firm that indirectly stems from Propatrian soil, and so he, along with a ragtag crew of misanthropic and disgraced law enforcers plus an incubated a.i. that takes corporeal form, sets out to find what it is that they have decidedly chosen to associate themselves with. and now, for the reason as to why all of this is lost on me: the sex interspersed throughout. yes, you heard me right. there are way too many sex scenes accompanying a majority of the events i have described above, and sometimes you may even spot some instances of recreational drug use, though not for meditative purposes, mind you. the people in this manga all happen to be debaucherous animals who crave carnal pleasures and Sabbath-like epiphanies where they rather waste their lives living from one moment to the next without care for anything that does not inherently concern them. selfish, and above all, blind to the crushing realisations and expectations present only within reality. what they are and who they were before are not two inextricably linked concepts as far as they’re concerned.

i do not reserve the right to riff on about the art as gushing about manga aesthetics from a strictly technical point of view does not fall within my area of expertise, i'm afraid. although, i will comment on the general "feel" of the style Endo fosters throughout. it is predominantly consistent, and while it does dip at points, it stays very much in line of the scope of ambition and range of prose and constructs that it postulates. smooth as silk at times, and rough as sandpaper as well as soulless at others, it is truly commendable that Endo managed to work up this much of an appetite for consistency of delivery over the 10 or so years he spent writing and illustrating this wondrous piece of dystopian sci-fi.

additional notes: does anyone else feel that the exact genre that Eden is supposedly classified under should be be up in the air rather than be defined as plain cyberpunk? this does not read like how conventional cyberpunk would. rather, i infer that it jumbles up and decompartmentalizes subgenres across all basic gists native to storytelling and bastardizes and pokes fun at them individually, and one at a time. for closure, volumes 9 and 10 read like something out of a flick centered around a geopolitical turf war between unruly occupying forces and those who seek to bleach their lands of the aforementioned scourge, so to speak, with a backdrop incumbent on a non-specific locale, much akin to how a game of cat and mouse would unfold but only with no intentionally divulged number of sides to the unending pursuit. conversely there's nonsense like volume 14, where the better half of it is spent on a bunch of random field agents pursuing a duo of schoolgirls, one of which is a trained assassin unafraid to exercise lethal force on her foes. the thing with its tone is that it's almost school comedy-esque, with many of the shenanigans happening over the course of it being reminiscent of tacky self-aware comedies with school as the main focus a la Cromartie High School. yeah, it's kooky, i know.

[This review accounts for both seasons of Oregairu]

As much as I'd like to give the prior season a higher rating, I just can't bring myself to do so for a number of reasons. First of all, the first season felt like it lacked exuberance in a multitude of different ways. A large majority of the characters seemed uninteresting, the animation felt languid in some places and even the dialogues of all things didn't feel all that special. While I do think the interactions between the main trio of characters had their share of redeeming qualities, namely the pseudo-intellectual prattle between our main protagonist, Hachiman and ... the lass with a stark sense of noblesse oblige, Yukino, the rest of the dialogues, especially between the members of the supporting cast felt somewhat pointless and inane.

To make matters worse, the situations in which our main trio are placed aren't really all that interesting to begin with. While some of them are worth noting, such as the looming onset of the cultural festival towards the end of the first season where our lovable dolts are coaxed into partaking in a series of discussions to unanimously decide on a list of festivities that would be brought to the attention of the student council, helmed by the notorious ice queen herself, others are far from having any semblance of actual significance as a fair chunk of them can be rather silly and asinine. On top of that, the show's inherent surplus of fanservice can be quite obnoxious as well. I loathe how almost every character with the sole exception of Hachiman is downplayed as vacuous and generic cutouts of their respective archetypes. You'd be hard-pressed to find a romcom MC as distinct and invigorating as Hachiman nowadays given how just about any light novel the industry manages to get its normie-infested hands on has the possibility to be greenlit for an anime adaptation. While this is certainly commendable in more ways than one, it also comes with its share of drawbacks.

And so, without batting an eye, I merrily continued my viewing of the series and moved on to its second season, expecting the same sort of hijinks to ensue. What I got in kind was something beyond my wildest expectations; a full-fledged character drama with plenty of characterisation to boot. The characters in this season felt more down-to-earth and fleshed out considering the development they received throughout the course of the previous season. What really appealed to me this time around, however, was the more solemn approach the show decided to take. The palpable absence of crude humour was a rejuvenating touch as the supporting cast was relegated to the background of the show's premise(and for good measure too). Besides that, the animation took a turn for the better as well, which came as a pleasant surprise as the studio behind the visuals this time around wasn't the same as before.

Apart from the visuals, I discerned that the sound design in this season had a certain distinctiveness to it, especially in the voice acting department. The VAs of Hachiman and the girls respectively put up a fairly visceral display of voice acting. As I mentioned hitherto, I abhorred how the characters in the season prior to this one were all stencils of already established archetypes of modern-day high school students. While that hot take holds true to some extent, my issues with their contemptible depictions were wholly disregarded this time around. As much as I would've liked to make a complete mockery of the aforementioned character archetypes in a show like this, I don't think that would've been feasible in any way considering the unquantifiable enjoyment I got out of watching it.

With that said, this marks the end of my review of the show as a whole. It certainly had a bunch of things that kept me from enjoying it in its entirety, but, nevertheless, it was a worthwhile experience, with its plus points greatly outweighing the pitfalls that riddle it.

Disclaimer: I wrote this review when I was still fairly new to anime so the languid pace of the writing is to be showered with a cackling roar of mockery in this particular instance. Go ahead and laugh at my inexperience evident below to your heart's content. Haha.


I'd like to start off by saying that I'm by no means a hardcore anime enthusiast. Therefore, it is strongly advised that you take whatever I'm gonna be scrutinising in this review with a grain of salt. Now then, with that aside, let us briefly talk about the premise of the show.

To put it simply, this show is ... about a pair of siblings whose lives take a turn for the better (or worse, which of course depends on each person's interpretation of the matter) after receiving an email from a self-proclaimed 'god' of games, whose world is in dire need of newer, far less idyllic dwellers who also exhibit an affinity for games. The cast is mainly comprised of the two aforementioned characters; Sora, the compelling strategist who is in fact the foundation that binds together the framework of Blank, and Shiro, the child prodigy responsible for nearly all of Blank's fruitful endeavours. The chemistry between the two is also somewhat turbulent, such as having to rely on each other for mental reassurance when things go awry. It is because of this fact that the duo is almost always never seen away from each other, otherwise Blank would hardly be capable of functioning as a single, independent unit.

One of the primary reasons I find this show appealing is because of its nice blend of ecchi and fanservice elements and intellectually stimulating references which otherwise wouldn't be discerned from watching other similarly produced shows. In spite of the at times somewhat cringe-worthy banter between some of the characters in the series, it is all around an extremely well put together chain of claustrophobic and frenetic events, most of which discreetly foreshadow the flow and direction of the plot in a hilariously clever fashion.

All in all, I would recommend this show to anyone looking for something that's both equally interspersed between the bold and crude fanservice areas as well as the profound undertones and implications the series brings to the table.