Sunday, April 08, 2007

Sehen Sie mich! Sehen Sie mich! Das Monstrum in meinem Selbst ist So groß geworden!

A last post (and a super long one at it, too) to wrap it all up. This has really taken a while, and posting about what happened in the break 2 weeks after it ended is a little silly, but oh well, it's for remembrance's sake. I don't expect anyone to scroll back and read this anyway.

I sort of settled into a nice schedule during this break: Wake up at approximately 8 a.m., have breakfast, shower, then read a book until about 10 when I watch crappy Taiwanese variety programmes on cable until 11 or 12 when I switch on the comp, then spend the rest of the afternoon vegetating in front of the computer watching anime, jap drama or Lost/Heroes. Nice and relaxed, and I get at least some reading done haha.


Some reviews for books, anime series and other stuff I read/watched during the break:


Urasawa Naoki's Monster

This is a 74 episode-long anime, the longest I've watched other than Bleach. It's adapted from a manga by Urasawa Naoki, that is 18 volumes long. Well, not exactly adapted as it is a transcription, because according to Wikipedia it's scene for scene identical to the manga with only very minor changes in certain parts. The story tells of a brilliant neurosurgeon, Dr Tenma, working in a hospital in Dusseldorf, Germany, who one day chooses to operate on a little boy brought in with a gunshot wound to the head instead of some mayor/bigshot whom the head of the hospital (also the father of his fiancee) orders him to operate on, simply because he's had it with the notion that there are people more worth saving than others, and also because he was about to operate on the boy when he got the order to go save the bigshot.

Turns out the boy he saves (one of a pair of twins, with a sister) is some kind of psychotic murderer (explaining the title Monster), and he got the gunshot wound because his sister shot him (yes). Predictably Dr Tenma loses his standing in the hospital because the bigshot died and the head is very angry with him, and his fiancee breaks up with him. Then the head of the hospital and the head of surgery are found dead (thanks to the boy, Johan) and Dr Tenma finds himself miraculously catapulted into the position of head of surgery, while the boy and his sister disappears. 9 years later Johan appears before Dr Tenma again when he shoots dead one of his patients before the doctor, and this begins Dr Tenma's quest to find Johan and stop the monster he brought back to life, while escaping the pursuit of the police because he was implicated by Johan's murders.

Sounds like an interesting premise, and it is. The beginning of the anime is somewhat rambly though, with Dr Tenma travelling from province to province in Germany looking for Johan and meeting people along the way that he helps/saves with his medical skills (he's really good at treating everything, even though he's a neurosurgeon, apparently). These people he's helped end up helping him in the end so I guess it's all linked together. I would say the story's so-so, and I probably only finished it only because I started haha. The ending wasn't even definitive (kind of like those cheesy horror stories where the monster comes to life again in the end) but still happy for the main characters. And I still didn't understand Johan's motivations in the end, though I guess perhaps he didn't really have any.

The drawing is simple and life-like, a departure from the usual anime fare where everyone has big eyes, multicoloured hair, pretty faces and flashy costumes. This is definitely a more adult-ish kind of anime, especially with its heavier themes. Music is good though often missed in its great supportive role. Later in the series there appears a few picture books which are key to the plot as they are written to reflect the dark nature of humankind, which Johan seeks to bring out in the people he encounters to result in the destruction of humanity. I quite like the stories of the picture books, even though they are quite disturbing.


Black Blood Brothers

Another vampire anime series in the vein of Chrno Crusade and Trinity Blood. The protagonist is similarly a vampire fighting against dark forces (also comprised of vampires). This series introduces a new concept that normal vampires, or Black Blood, do not turn humans into vampires by drinking their blood, but only when a vampire's blood is drunk by a human is that human made a vampire; there's another breed of vammpire (the bad guys) called Kowloon Children who convert humans and vampires to their kind by simply drinking their blood, thus making their taint similar to an infectious disease. The plot and concept is highly interesting, much more so than Trinity Blood or Chrno Crusade, but it disappoints by being too short, at only 12 episodes, which gives it only just enough time to wrap up the most superficial of plot lines without covering the background of the main characters very much, as well as the crucial story behind the Kowloon Children, and their leader the Kowloon Lord. The ending seems to suggest a sequel, so I hope that manifests in the near future, or at least a movie.


The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards

One of the books I finished during the hols. I picked it up because its premise sounded interesting in the blurb. An orthopaedic surgeon living in suburban America has to help his wife deliver one stormy winter night because her obstetrician became stranded in the storm. He delivers a healthy boy, then realises his wife has twins, and when he delivers the second twin, a girl, he discovers to his horror that she has Down's Syndrome. To save his wife from the pain of what he believes is an ultimately fatal condition (heart defects and all), he asks his nurse to bring the child to an institution. She can't bear to do it and runs away to another part of the country to bring up the child on her own. The rest of the story details how the doctor's life with his wife and son breaks down under the strain of the secret he keeps from them both, a wall that none of them can ever cross, while the nurse brings up the girl, healthy but with her own challenges to overcome.

Sounds like a tearjerker, and I was hoping for it to be, but it wasn't really that much of one. The story is composed of vignettes at different points of time from the viewpoints of each of the main characters, the nurse, the doctor, his wife, and later in the story, the doctor's son. Each vignette reads like a descriptive essay (that I'm so fond of, haha), poetic in its simple descriptions and sometimes achingly beautiful, but you can't help but get the feeling that a novel made up of descriptive vignettes loses the narrative that is necessary to carry the plot of a 400 page-long book. As a result the story falters in many parts. I think the author deserves credit for not making the story overly soppy or melodramatic as I would be so tempted to do if offered the same premise, but makes it realistic. I think I'm too used to soaps where families unravel in a tempest of violent emotions and disaster that this story was a bit tepid for me. Haha.


Other random, miscellaneous stuff

The opening sequence for Death Note from episode 20 onwards is gawdawful, it makes me feel like I'm going to get an epileptic fit. And the song is worse, it sounds like random synthesiser sounds rather than actual singing, and the overabundance of profanity is really uncalled for. Is this the kind of stuff that causes people to go berserk and shoot random others? I prefer the previous opening sequence infinitely more. The new ending sequence is okay, but only barely.

Finally finished reading A Breath of Snow and Ashes, a year after I started. The ending seems to suggest it's the end, but Diana Gabaldon's website says there are at least 2 more books to come. Hmm. Loved it, though; Diana Gabaldon is a real master at narrative, especially at inserting light-hearted moments throughout the book to make you smile.

Did some more painting for my room on one of the Sundays during the break, because the last time I only did the dark blue parts but hadn't painted in some other details, which I did in a golden-brown coffee colour this time. Some pictures below, courtesy of the new phone's 2 megapixel camera:

Central Aoi (the Tokugawa kamon) and surrounding momiji


A pine tree (I think) and surrounding paulownia



Finally, I'm done! Now, to resume my normal posting.

The title of this post, in case anyone was wondering (and which also appeared on my MSN nick many times during the break), comes from Monster and means "Look at me! Look at me! The monster in me has grown this big!". Sometimes, I do think there's a monster in me that's growing ever larger. The scary thing is that I occasionally feed it.

Avaris / 4/08/2007 10:34:00 PM

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