Banana Fish # 1, by Akimi Yoshida: Read-a-thon # 1

This is for Day One of a two-day read-a-thon to benefit disaster relief. Click on the link for details. It’s not too late to sponsor me!

This manga was sponsored by cyphomandra.

”When you meet the ‘Banana Fish,’ you want to die. It’s the fish of death.”

This is the first volume of a manga from the mid eighties, which I read in an old, flipped Viz edition. I can’t tell if the more recent printing I link to below is also flipped, sorry.

In 1973, an American soldier in Vietnam suddenly turns on his buddies and kills three of them before being taken down. His only explanation is the muttered words “Banana Fish.”

In 1985, where the rest of the story takes place, he’s catatonic and never says anything else. Meanwhile, his teenage brother Ash, a gang leader, is given a vial of a mysterious substance by a dying man who also whispers “Banana Fish.” At the same time, cops are investigating a series of unusual suicides, and two journalists from Japan show up to write an article on American gangsters. Naturally, they decide to interview Ash.

If you’re reading this summary and thinking, "20th Century Boys meets Miami Vice," add in a little more homoerotic subtext plus 80s manga art, and you won’t be far off. For the first half of this volume, while the story and intricate storytelling was intriguing, I wasn’t grabbed by any of the characters. Then Ash, his gang buddy Skip, and the teenage assistant journalist get kidnapped, enabling male bonding, hurt-comfort, and heroic pole-vaulting. At that point, I was hooked. I’ll definitely read more of this. (After the read-a-thon.)

Caveats: So far, there are no female characters unless you count a few walk-ons. The African-American characters are drawn with prominent pale lips, which makes some panels edge into caricature. They’re not particularly stereotypical as characters – okay, they are mostly gangsters, but most of the total characters are also gangsters – so I found this more distracting than horrifically offensive, but your mileage may vary. I did like that there are major white, African-American, and Japanese characters, and Latino and Chinese-American characters who seem likely to become major later.

The series is complete at eighteen volumes. Has anyone read the whole thing? What did you think? Please don't give away major plot points, but I am curious - does the gay subtext and discussion ever become an actual gay relationship?

Banana Fish, Vol. 1 (Banana Fish (Graphic Novels))

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And for the bonus books...

[Poll #1719047]

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Redemption in Indigo, by Karen Lord. Read-a-thon # 2

Sponsored by tool_of_satan. Great rec, thank you!

And what of Paama herself? She said little about the husband she had left almost two years ago, barely enough to fend off the village gossips and deflect her sister’s sneers. She didn’t need to. There was something else about Paama that distracted people’s attention from any potentially juicy titbits of her past. She could cook.

An inadequate statement. Anyone can cook, but the true talent belongs to those who are capable of gently ensnaring with their delicacies, winning compliance with the mere suggestion that there might not be any goodies for a caller who persisted in prying. Such was Paama.

An adult fantasy novel loosely based on a folktale from Senegal. When a spirit called a djombi gives Paama a probability-altering Chaos Stick, a series of events spin out to change her life, the lives of her family, the lives of a great many innocent and not-so-innocent bystanders, and even the undying lives of several djombi.

I loved this book. LOVED it. The absolutely wonderful prose and the humor kept me reading with a huge smile on my face, and occasionally laughing aloud. I could pull quotes from every single page that would make people who enjoy this sort of thing rush out to buy it, though the funniest bits are best read in context. (The bit where a trickster spirit cleverly disguised as a very large talking spider has a deadpan conversation with two men in a bar was one of my very favorite scenes.) The very knowing and slightly defensive narrator cracked me up, and the more serious second half, while not quite as purely enjoyable as the first, is poignant and lovely.

If you enjoyed the elegantly mannered prose, metafictional commentary, and sly humor of Michael Chabon’s The Gentlemen of the Road or William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, you are almost certain to like Redemption in Indigo.

The plot falls apart for about twenty pages or so after Paama confronts the indigo-skinned djombi, but it picks up after that (so don’t give up.)

The ending was moving (which is not a code-word for “sad”), and very satisfying. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that we get a touching psychological explanation for her ex-husband’s compulsive gluttony, so I’ll say so here for the benefit of anyone who might find the very beginning, which is based on a folktale about a man who gets in comic trouble by eating everything in sight, fat-phobic or anti-eating. I loved the way Lord preserved the non-realistic qualities of the original folktale, while the narrator invented realistic justification until it became impossible, and then resignedly advised the readers to just go with it.

Highly recommended. This is the kind of book where I feel constrained in reviewing lest I over-sell, but if you like this sort of thing at all, go out and get it.

Redemption in Indigo: a novel

Blowing my Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy, by Lindsay Moran. Read-a-Thon # 3

I decided I felt like reading some nonfiction before I plunge back into the fictional waters. This memoir by a CIA agent was just the thing.

I once knew a man who used to refer to the company he used to work for as “The Company.” My Dad used to insist that meant he’d worked for the CIA. I didn’t believe him, until one night the Company man drank a lot at dinner and said, without noticing it, “the CIA,” before he switched back to “the Company” in the next sentence. My Dad brought it up later, but the Company man insisted that he’d been joking…

Moran’s book is entertaining and often quite funny, especially the first two-thirds, which concern her training, most of which involves skills she will never need and much of which has a distinctly Keystone Kops air. From crashing cars through barriers to being “imprisoned” by cafeteria ladies, the training sequences are uniformly worth reading (if you like that kind of thing.)

The book loses steam when she’s sent to Macedonia, where she is instructed to work on extracting information from useless contacts who clearly know none. The last straw is when she and everyone else at the CIA are blindsided by 9/11, and then (in Moran’s opinion) support going to war against Iraq in an effort to cover up their utter failure to know or learn anything about actual terrorist threats. The end, in which she quits the CIA and gets married, is a bit of a whimper. I’d have been more interested to hear about how she managed to get permission to publish this book at all, and what sort of hoops she had to jump through to do so.

Still, I did quite enjoy the first two-thirds. Worth getting from the library.

Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy

Matched, by Ally Condie. Read-a-thon # 4

A YA dystopia in which a computer arranges marriages for everyone. Since I spent much of my childhood in India and my own culture invented the yenta, the concept of the arranged marriage, despite being obviously horrible if non-consensual, does not exactly spell out “terrifying dystopia” to me.

janni has mused that dystopias tend to be either extremely ordered or extremely chaotic. This is the most orderly dystopia I’ve ever encountered.

Things which are chosen for people by the Society:

- The food they each individually eat at every single meal. They are not allowed a single bite of someone else’s food.

- The clothes you wear. You can only select the color on very special occasions. Otherwise, red, yellow, pink, and purple are banned.

- The day you die. Everyone who survives so long is euthanized on their 80th birthday.

- The total art of the society. All art has been destroyed except for the 100 Best Poems, 100 Best Paintings, 100 Best Songs. Etc. No new creation is allowed.

- Love letters, farewell letters, etc, are clipped and pasted from official templates. Handwriting and pens are banned – only typing is allowed, presumably so they can track everything you write.

- Your job, your entertainment options, your schooling, the mysterious pills you must carry at all times, where you live, what you can know, what you can own, how many kids you can have and when, and of course, who you marry.

Teenage Cassia Reyes is happy to be Matched with Xander, her childhood friend. But the computer briefly flashes an image of Ky, the neighborhood oddball, who is forever forbidden to marry because his father committed an Infraction. Cassia is told that it was a prank or mistake, but she begins to wonder.

I expected the book to be amusingly awful, but to my surprise, I liked it. Despite the anvillicious premise, it’s also a sweet, well-observed romance and coming of age story, detailing all the fleeting emotions of teenage love and personal growth with earnest, heartfelt delicacy. Cassia, Ky, and Xander are well-meaning and likable, which made the inevitable love triangle less annoying than usual.

Given the total lack of conclusiveness, I’m guessing this will have a sequel.

Matched