I’m aware there’s another episode of Durarara!! out, but I haven’t seen it yet; it may show up in my next bout of catchup posts, after my next post-schoolwork marathon. Or maybe that won’t be necessary — spring break is coming up, and it’s not as if I have any plans.

Katanagatari 1-2

From Twitter:

2.26.2010 5:08:20 Katanagatari 1: So, uh, what keeps them from just killing their opponents during those 5-minute speeches? Dramatically convenient bushido?

2.26.2010 5:09:20 Katanagatari 1 cont.: Stupid complaint, since it’s sort of played for humor, but I like plausibly brief fights to the death these days.

2.26.2010 5:39:41 One thing I’m coming to love about Nishio Ishin: really twisted romance.

2.26.2010 6:45:24 Katanagatari 2: Haven’t decided how I feel about the author surrogate thing, but I definitely like this enough to continue.

As it says. There’s enough for me to like about this — the art, the music, the humor and general delivery, the fact that Shichika is basically Sabin/Mash from Final Fantasy 6 — that I’ll be trying to keep up with it. But I do want to talk a little about the author surrogate issue.

I raise a brow at Katanagatari’s author surrogate with the understanding that, in my current fiction-writing project, I’ll need to introduce an author character some 35,000 words ahead of where I am. And I want very much to avoid turning him into an author surrogate, so it’s probably worth considering at this point what, exactly, constitutes such a thing.

Consider Stephen Dedalus — not the mopey one from Ulysses so much as the…somewhat less mopey one from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen is, quite literally, a surrogate of James Joyce; the Portrait is semi-autobiographical. And he gives voice to a good bit of metafiction, some of which is probably concurrent with Joyce’s opinions on fiction and the writing thereof. But what keeps Stephen from being an author surrogate of the sort I mean here is that he never really comments upon the texts in which he appears. As far as literary art goes, he holds drama in the highest regard, so he doesn’t talk about novels much at all. Togame, on the other hand, remorselessly kicks the fourth wall down — and it can be funny, I’ll grant, but it can also be distracting, and the line between the two is thin.

So, what I mean by “author surrogate” is a character who (being written by the author) speaks with an authorial voice on matters of the text at hand, and does so in a moderately explicit way. This is problematic for me for two reasons. Firstly, until I’ve finished reading a thing at least once, I generally don’t want to know what it means to the author, lest my reading be affected. I’d rather not have my hand held. And secondly, I consider it a little irresponsible on the part of an author to indulge those readers who would limit their readings (and those of others, when possible) based on the author’s opinions — but, as that basically amounts to a complaint that writers too often give the majority of readers what they seem to want, I’ll accept that I’m being somewhat unreasonable here.

Or perhaps what I’m complaining about is simply the inward-looking text. A text’s commentary on itself is text, isn’t it? But a text can look inward, I think, without “reading” itself — without telling its reader how things should be interpreted. One reason I generally don’t read high fantasy anymore is the tendency of some authors in that genre to make all the requisite moral judgments for the reader. Perhaps, then, I’m leveling a complaint at unambiguous texts specifically. Or texts unambiguous in a specific way.

Suffice to say that I think Katanagatari is doing okay so far, but that I have my concerns.

Durarara!! 3-7

What was the last episode I wrote about? I guess it was the second, regarding all that interstitial mapping business. Which has more or less carried on as expected, but I haven’t felt the need to write a post for each episode telling Durarara!! to keep up the good work.

The third episode was good. But, I have to admit, the fourth put me off for a while. It occurred to me that I didn’t want any backstory for Celty — I didn’t want her to have a definite name, even. Episode seven gives another supernatural entity human roots, but I’m alright with Shizuo being half-human. Celty, on the other hand, is the ur-faerie. She doesn’t do extraordinary things with mundane objects; she doesn’t throw vending machines, or move quickly and knife people — she rides a motorcycle that’s actually a spirit-horse, and she pulls a scythe out of her smoking neck-hole. Somehow I wanted her to remain wholly magical, and by that I mean I wanted her existence to be a matter of “just because.” She’s less impressive now that we know how she got to where she is, and what she means to do there. But maybe that’s the point, as she’s made more human with each episode, it seems. We may as well let her be human, or humanized. It’s not as though we have anyone to blame for magic and myth but ourselves.

Speaking of ur-faeries and half-humans and such, I’m noticing a hierarchy of mysterious characters emerging. Toward the bottom, or human, end, we have Kida, who knows more than he lets on, but doesn’t seem to be actively involved in the unusual; the Dollars are somewhat higher up, and Simon, Shizuo, and Izaya higher still; and at the top we have, perhaps needless to say, Celty, the dullahan herself. With each episode the strange elements of Ikebukuro look more like a proper mythology.

I mentioned before that I’m particularly interested in Durarara!! because it deals with something I’ve been calling, reluctantly and for lack of a better term, “interstitial urban mythology” — that is, the magic that lurks in the places between the everyday, and takes forms consistent with the world we live in. The first episode introduced us to the Durarara!! mythos; the second, in providing another angle on certain events of the first, allows us a more intimate look at those interstices in which physics and logic become malleable.

First, though, what is an interstice? That is, is it necessarily a physical place? Maybe, but there’s a distinctly personal element to it, too. Consider this:

As the story develops, I can see that a lot of it will be about slowly peeling the layers off the people who inhabit this crazy neighborhood — waiting for the right moment when “reality” decides to reveal itself, to use the show’s words. In the first episode, Certy seems to be this completely otherworldly entity who is running roughshod on the town at random and according to her will alone. But in this episode, she’s shown to be a Badass for Hire of sorts, maybe doing a bit of work on the side while she looks for her head. [Shinmaru, "Durarara!! – 2"]

Interesting observations here — namely that the legends, the urban fae, can be as “layered” as more recognizably human characters, and that, depending on how one looks at it, the interstices revealed by chance or design are perhaps more “real” than, say, the normal school life with which the episode opens. I wonder, though, to what end the aforementioned layers are peeled. If the layers beneath layers are yet more layers, do they reveal more than the layers above them? Or is truth to be found in the spaces between layers, in the positions of layers relative to one another?

When Rio learns of her father’s infidelity, her concept of family life acquires a new dimension. But I don’t think that what she’s doing throughout much of the episode amounts to coping with this heretofore unseen dimension, or at least not directly. I’d say she’s simply trying to figure out how the new dimension and the old coexist, how they even can coexist. She tries to ignore the undesirable dimension, but she can’t; she tries to bring the dimensions together by letting her mother in on the secret, but this fails. The dimensions, the layers are what they are, and all Rio can do is try to keep from losing herself in the labyrinth between them.

It is, of course, while navigating her personal, internal interstice that Rio meets Izaya Orihara, alias Nakura (see 名/na and 倉/kura), the “informant” or “information-dealer” who lures her into the realm of physical interstices we’re introduced to in the first episode — first into the space between Ikebukuro and Shibuya, from which she’s spirited away, so to speak, then, via the friendly Dullahan, to an out of the way rooftop with a brief but bloody history of suicide.

At first glance it almost seems as though Nakura simply craves emotion of the sort he inspires in Rio (was he, I wonder, responsible for the revelation of her father’s secret to her in the first place?). But he’s not interested in emotion for emotion’s sake, or so he claims; he’s interested in the “ecology” of worry, the system of worry — much like this episode, in fact. It’s not clear whether this is typical of the sort of information informants deal in, but of course it wouldn’t do to have our Unseelie Court all figured out this early on.

By “interstitial urban mythology” I mean the magic that happens around and between the more obvious bustle of city life (suburbia included). As Cuchlann puts it re: Bakemonogatari, it’s “the weird underbelly that, it turns out, lurks below everyday life.” He adds that, for Koyomi Araragi, “the spiritual realm is…overlaid on top of the mundane one” — maybe there’s a distinction to be made between overlay and interstice; Durarara!! seems pretty self-consciously concerned with the latter.

The Dullahan strikes in abandoned warehouses and beneath overpasses while, elsewhere, perhaps mere yards away, life carries on as usual. Shizuo Heiwajima (who, allegedly, probably won’t talk to you if your life is normal enough) throws vending machines and people down side roads, and the Ikebukuro crowd, concerned with mundane business, doesn’t seem to notice. People disappear between Ikebukuro and Shibuya. Magic isn’t everywhere at once — it’s not so obvious, and if you aren’t careful, you may discover too late that you’ve stumbled into Faerie.

Of note, also, is the “urbanness” of the magic at play here. That is, it’s seated in the symbolism of city life. Our faeries and fiends are gangsters and general troublemakers, or hide their headlessness with motorcycle helmets. On the other hand, we’d have something like Ookami Kakushi:

Here, magic “happens” in an urban setting, but it’s far more traditional in the imagery it invokes. We learn that those who live in the old side of town aren’t even particularly fond of the developed area across the city. But in Durarara!!, as in, say, Aria, we see how people continue to bring their creative agency to bear despite living rather differently than they did a thousand years ago. In a place like Japan, where geography begets myth, it’s only natural that cities would have their own kind of magic.