Ascendance of a Bookworm

That's the title of a Japanese novel, manga, and anime series by Miya Kazuki. (I've been reading/viewing all three formats simultaneously, as installments become available, with the result that I sometimes get confused as to the progress of the plot since they've all reached different points in the story.) I've never come across anything quite like this story's intriguing premise: A Japanese college student obsessed with books—even more than I am, if that's possible—ironically gets killed by having a bookshelf fall on her during an earthquake. With her dying breath, she prays to get reincarnated in a world full of books. The gods apparently have a dark sense of humor, for she wakes up in the body of a sickly five-year-old girl named Myne, the younger daughter of a poor, illiterate family in a preindustrial world. (It's implied, though never explicitly confirmed, that the "real" Myne died during her latest attack of illness, leaving her body vacant for the heroine to enter.) Books are rare, hand-copied, expensive, and owned only by the clergy, nobles, and very wealthy commoners. Myne determines that if she can't acquire books any other way, she'll make them herself. Paper and ink, however, are also scarce and expensive, so she has to figure out how to make those products first. Fortunately, she gets a head start from extensive reading about the history of printing, along with her prior-life varied experience dabbling in arts and crafts. Still, as a five-year-old girl prone to collapsing whenever she exerts herself, she has an uphill battle even convincing anybody to take her wishes seriously, much less gathering the materials she needs. In the course of her "ascendance," she not only manages to introduce movable-type printing to her new environment and spread literacy, she also achieves what I think the "gods" might have intended by placing her in this world: As well as continuing to love books, she also learns to value relationships with people. Along the way, readers pick up a lot of incidental knowledge about the manufacture of paper and the process of printing.

The further I delve into this series, the more Myne's plight seems to resonate with some real-world analogs. While she knows herself as an educated adult on the inside, at first everybody else sees her as a lower-class, perpetually sick, fairly useless child. In this quandary, she brings to mind people suffering from disabilities that make communication painfully difficult even though their minds are as sharp as anybody's. Or transgender people whose outward appearances conflict with their core gender identity.

On a more personal level, I can identify with Myne from childhood and teen years as a bookish academic overachiever who got no respect from her parents aside from a few minutes once every six weeks during the school term, when report cards were distributed. Now, in old age, I realize the adults knew many important things to which I, as a child and teenager, was oblivious. Yet, in retrospect, I remain aware that I wasn't totally wrong to think I did know some things my parents didn't.

This heroine also reminds me of my early experiences as an avid reader of horror, fantasy, and science fiction—all that "crazy stuff." Nowadays that field of interest is probably considered less "weird" than in the 1950s and 60s. Nevertheless, I believe most lovers of speculative fiction share the feeling of not fitting into the mundane world around us, of being aliens whose true home is elsewhere. Maybe that's why we started to read fantasy and SF to begin with.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Yokai Among Us

If you're looking for unusual, non-European creatures to use as fictional characters, check out the yokai of Japan. This word, often translated "demon," is a broad term covering all sorts of spirits and supernatural beings, not only malevolent, scary entities but also mischievous and benevolent ones. In the animistic world-view of traditional Japanese culture, almost anything can be a spirit or become imbued with one. Human-made inanimate objects a century or more older can become animated (tsukumogami). If you don't treat your personal possessions with respect, they may come to life and take revenge. There are yokai animals, plants, natural phenomena, and personifications of abstract qualities. There's a yokai that looks like a walking paper umbrella and another that blocks travelers' paths in the form of a wall. There's even one that flips your pillow in the night. One of my favorites, the akaname, exists for the sole purpose of cleaning bathrooms. In some versions, failing to keep your bathroom clean will incur its wrath. The shiro uneri is an overused dishtowel, reduced to a dirty rag, that comes to life and attacks servants. Both of these legends, obviously, act as cautionary tales to warn against neglectful housekeeping. There are also legends of more conventionally frightening spirits, such as the ghosts of women who've died in childbirth and demonic wolves that chase people on lonely roads. Japanese folklore is highly eclectic, including not only yokai from centuries-old tradition but also monsters from urban legends that have sprung up within recent decades and even individual writers' original creations incorporated into popular lore. If we lived in the universe of this belief system, we'd have yokai thronging around us almost everywhere.

Some of the best-known creatures often found in fiction, anime, and manga: Kappa, water monsters, often depicted as resembling turtles, that try to drag victims under and drown or devour them; kappa love cucumbers, and you can defeat them by tricking them into spilling water from the bowl-shaped depressions on their heads. Kitsune, which literally means "fox" but also refers to supernatural fox spirits, seductive and often very powerful. Tanuki, likewise a real animal, the "raccoon dog," and also supernatural shapeshifting tanuki with trickster habits. Tengu, crow-like humanoids sometimes rumored to spirit people away.

Here's the general Wikipedia page about yokai:

Yokai

A Wikipedia list of many different yokai and other creatures from Japanese folklore:

Legendary Creatures from Japan

And here's a comprehensive, illustrated website on the subject:

Yokai.com

For an informative, lively, in-depth reference work, see THE BOOK OF YOKAI, by Michael Dylan Foster.

The Studio Ghibli animated movie SPIRITED AWAY, brought to the U.S. market by Disney, showcases a wide variety of yokai.

My recently published light paranormal romance novella, "Yokai Magic," features a talking spirit cat in a contemporary American setting, along with a small menagerie of other yokai:

Yokai Magic

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Reboots and Remakes

You've probably heard about the projected "reboot" of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. I'd call it a "remake" instead, since the intent seems to be to start the series over with Buffy in high school, but in a 21st-century setting and played by a black actress. Judging from the few online comments I've read, I'm not the only fan whose first reaction to this proposal was, "Why?" A remake isn't likely to surpass the excellence of the original. While I'd be thrilled with a return to the Buffyverse, a far better approach (as has been suggested by others) would be a "next generation" series, spun off from the original story with new characters. If we want to see another black Slayer, introduce a new one instead of calling her Buffy. Because the series finale created hundreds of Slayers throughout the world in place of a single Chosen One, the potential exists for a rich variety of stories, taking the mythos in a different direction from the comic-book continuation that followed the end of the TV series.

I've come across speculations about remakes of CASABLANCA and GONE WITH THE WIND. In the former case, a resounding "Good grief, why?!" seems the most appropriate response. The original is as nearly perfect as humanly possible; tinkering with the plot and characters to produce a new version could only go downhill. As for GONE WITH THE WIND, the only thing "wrong" with the classic movie is that, even at its great length, many details from the book had to be omitted, including two of Scarlett's three children. A miniseries instead of a feature film could remedy those omissions, but could it ever be as good as the existing movie otherwise? Furthermore, present-day technology doesn't allow the resurrection of Clark Gable to play Rhett, and the role wouldn't be the same without him. (When the sequel, SCARLETT, appeared on TV, I had a very difficult time accepting Timothy Dalton as Rhett.)

One remake that I thought worked well was the prime-time DARK SHADOWS with Ben Cross as Barnabas. The production values, naturally, were superior to those of the vintage soap opera, and the story moved along more briskly. It also focused on the plot thread of greatest interest to fans, the arrival and possible redemption of Barnabas. It was disappointing that the series didn't last long.

The new STAR TREK films qualify as a true "reboot," an alternate-universe iteration of the original setting and characters. Although I'm lukewarm toward this movie sequence, at least it began with a believable SF rationale for the new version.

The futuristic anime series NEON GENESIS EVANGELION may hold some kind of record for remakes, reboots, and alternate-universe story lines produced by the original creators. The plot of the series was condensed into a movie version. Another movie expanded upon the confusing ending of the TV series. Several different manga (graphic novel) variants exist, featuring the characters in different settings and situations from the one established in the original.

The most pointless remake I've ever heard of was the filming of PSYCHO with not only the same script as Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation but shot almost frame-by-frame identically to the earlier version. Couldn't they have made a brand new adaptation, returning to Robert Bloch's novel for a fresh take on the story?

In general, remaking films based on books is a different matter. If it wasn't done "right" the first time, a fresh attempt could be worthwhile. GONE WITH THE WIND as it stands adheres as closely to the novel as can reasonably be expected of a feature film. Lots of other book-to-film transformations, though, haven't been done "right" and could benefit from another try. (My concept of a "good" film adaptation means one that follows the book as closely as the film medium allows. When I watch a movie based on a novel, I want to see the novel brought to life, not some director's personal "vision.") No perfect adaptation of DRACULA has ever been filmed. The BBC TV miniseries with Louis Jourdain comes closest. Coppola's so-called "definitive" DRACULA, however, does include more of the book's characters and plot points than any other, including the Louis Jourdain version. Unfortunately, Coppola adds a love story between the Count and Mina that has no basis in the book. If he wanted to do that, he should have adapted Fred Saberhagen's excellent reinterpretation of the story, THE DRACULA TAPE. In one of my favorite series, the Narnia books, PRINCE CASPIAN has suffered most in the adaptations filmed so far. The BBC version, aside from its dated special effects, renders the book with more fidelity and respect than the dazzling feature film; even the former, however, leaves out an important sequence toward the end that's also omitted from the big-screen movie.

What movies or TV series would you like to see remade? What do you think should never be remade?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt