James Nicoll Reviews

Harmony
Project Itoh (Trans. Alexander O. Smith)
Haikasoru/VIZ Media LLC
252 pages
$14.99/$19.99/9.99 UK
ISBN 9781421536439

I’ve reviewed to this before. I don’t know how people feel about me just reposting old reviews so I will link to that one and add some notes.

[Added in 2024: in the absence of a working link, the first review is appended at the bottom of this review]

Satoshi Itō, who wrote under the pen-name Project Itoh, died in 2009 at the age of 34 from the cancer he had struggled with since 2001. His first novel was Gyakusatsu kikan (Genocidal Organ) published in 2007. I believe in the time between his first novel and his death he had time for two novels (Gyakusatsu kikan, Hāmonī), one video game novel (Metaru gia soriddo ganzu obu za patoriotto), and two collections (Itō Keikaku Kiroku and the posthumous tō Keikaku Kiroku: Daini Isō). Also, as far as I know, Hāmonī (Harmony)is the only work of his to be translated into English thus far.

Harmony was written while Itoh was effectively on his death-bed and he was aware of it. To quote his father’s acceptance speech for the Philip K. Dick Special Citation:

Read more ➤

Dragon Sword and Wind Child/Tales of the Magatama, Book I

Noriko Ogiwara (Trans. Cathy Hirano)

VIZ/Haikasoru

$13.99 USA / $18.99 CAN / £8.99

352 pages

ISBN: 978−1−4215−3763−4

I don’t know why but recently I’ve been encountering fantasies where the existence of marriage counselling services would have avoided a lot of bloodshed and misery all round.

Read more ➤

The Book of Heroes
Miyuki Miyabe (Trans. Alexander O. Smith)
VIZ/Haikasoru
$23.99 USA/ $32.00 CAN/£16.99
352 pages
ISBN: 978 – 1421527758

There are definite similarities between this book and Brave Story but I enjoyed this one more.

Once again, we have a young protagonist who finds themselves caught up a mundane crisis that becomes entangled with supernatural matters; Yuriko Morisake is sent home from school, where she learns that her older brother committed a violent assault on his schoolmates, killing one outright, and is now missing. Nobody has any idea why 14-year-old Hiroki would do this; a popular, accomplished student, he doesn’t seem the sort to suddenly snap.

Unsurprisingly the explanation has a fantastic element, one that ties into what begins as a faintly disturbing cosmology that with time becomes much worse: 

Read more ➤

Brave Story
Miyuki Miyabe (Trans. Alexander O. Smith)
VIZ/Haikasoru
$16.99 USA/$23.00 CAN/£9.99
816 pages
ISBN: 978 – 1421527734

This begins with a Weird Crap Accumulates plot that gets run over an entirely mundane crisis and then moves on from there:

Timid, self-doubting fifth grader Wataru Mitani slowly becomes aware that there’s something extremely peculiar about the never-finished Daimatsu building and his schoolmate Mitsuru, a young man who is far more popular than Wataru and who appears to be in every way Wataru’s superior. Peculiar escalates into extremely weird as Wataru encounters what appears to be a genuine wizard and witnesses Mitsuru feeding some local bullies to a demonic figure (for good reason but it is something of an overreaction).

Read more ➤

Battle Royale: The Novel
Koushun Takami (Trans. Yuji Oniki)
VIZ/Haikasoru
$16.99 USA/$23.00 CAN/£9.99
608 pages
ISBN: 978 – 1421527727

I was going to assert that this is one of the books published by VIZ pre-Haikasoru but I see this is a revised text from 2009, one that includes an introduction by Max Allan Collins, an interview with director Kini Fukasaku and an afterword by Koushub Takami. 

This is one of those books whose craft I can admire without in any way enjoying the experience of reading it. 

Read more ➤

All You Need is KILL
Hiroshi Sakurazaka (Trans. Alexander O. Smith)
VIZ/Haikasoru/$13.99 USA
$16.00 CAN/£8.99/201 pages
ISBN: 978 – 1421527611

Keiji Kiriya is a Japanese man who has the misfortune to be a typical soldier in the forces fighting a desperate action to prevent Japan from being overrun and ecoformed by alien mechanisms the humans have called ​“Mimics“¹. Even with high-tech powered armor — ​“Jackets” — and heavy rifles, the humans are hard-pressed to hold their own again the tide of Mimics and in fact in the first battle we see, Kiriya’s entire unit is wiped out, including Kiriya himself. This would make for a very short novel except to Kiriya’s surprise he wakes to find it’s the day before the battle.

Read more ➤