Kyoko Okazaki’s Blistered Fingers: Part 3

This is the third in our roundtable on Kyoko Okazaki’s classic 90s mana Helter Skelter. Bill’s appreciative opening discussion is here; Tom’s enthusiastic post is here. Which leaves me being the sole irritating voice of cantankerousness (unless Miriam, up tomorrow, also has a more skeptical take.)

I should first say that as we were working this roundtable out, Bill commented a couple of times that he’s not as familiar with the background and intellectual milieu of Okazaki and her manga as he likes to be when he writes about an artist. That kind of cracked me up…because, good lord does Bill know more what he’s talking about here (or just in general really) than I do. I’ve read some manga at this point, and I’m definitely fascinated with Japan and its history but…the state of feminism and/or the fashion industry and/or body image in Japan in the 90s? I mean, I know nothing.

Not that I’ve let that stop me before. And, having expressed all those caveats, I do have to say that even though I don’t know the world that Kyoko Okazaki is coming out of, the manga she’s written is awfully familiar. Admittedly, it’s not much like other shojo stories I’ve read — it’s not girly or sweet or frilly; there’s little interest in clothing design (kind of ironic (and probably intentionally so) for a comic about fashion); there isn’t a lot of patterning or intense detail work. Instead, Okazaki draws outlines filled with mostly white space — it looks like the inks for a color comic book, rather than the fully realized art for a black and white one. There doesn’t seem to be a ton of width variation either, though (as Bill notes) the lines are certainly mobile, especially when she renders faces. Overall the effect if of energy and expression surrounding a blank; the world she creates seems more like a mask placed atop a hollow. I can’t say her style transports me, exactly — the lack of contrast and variation ends up being a little monotonous and prevents anything from really popping…though when it does it can be striking:

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That’s a creepy image; the elegant line follows the frankly sexual contour, but also frankly flat; those lips look like they crawled onto her face and died. She captures a repulsion at artifice and beauty; a sense of a gorgeous surface covering decay. So…yeah, I definitely appreciate her skill, and the care with which she has matched her visual style with her themes.

(Part of the reason her work looks so different from shojo is, a commenter notes, because it’s not shojo, but josei. See what I mean about not knowing what I’m talking about?)

Unfortunately, as I said, while the art is distinctive, the themes themselves, and how she handles them narratively, aren’t nearly as idiosyncratic. Basically, this is pretty much divasploitation (to coin a phrase), all about admiring/deploring/getting off on the personal idiosyncracies, tragedies and sexual peccadilloes of a fabulous larger-than-life female icon. It reads like Valley of the Dolls, or a Paul Verhoeven film — shocked disapprobation concealing a knowing leer, and vice versa, in a gleeful orgy of camp hypocrisy. On the one hand, the manga wants to satirize the shallow celebrity culture of beauty and fame, suggesting that the model agencies use the glands of children (an old sci-fi staple) to transform ugly girls into perfect starlets…until the treatment fades and outer decay starts to mirror inner corruption. And yet, even as it gestures at exploding the beauty myth, it revels in it; Ririko (the main character, pictured above) is in fact, fantastically attractive with an otherworldly beauty that allows her to virtually mesmerize those around her. On the strength of her mystical attractiveness, she seduces her (seemingly straight) make-up artist Hada-chan and Hada’s boyfriend both, using them for sado-masochistic thrills and eventually sending them off to toss acid on the face of a romantic rival. Ririko keeps saying that these acts of despotic eroticism are pleasureless or boring…but surely these disavowals serve only to intensify the verisimilitude of the S&M for the reader’s voyeuristic consumption. The whole thing just seems tawdry and overdetermined — the manga fashionista equivalent of an episode of VH1’s “Behind the Music.”

Bill argues that Helter Skelter’s jaded take on celebrity was unusual in Japan, and that the exposure of the corrupt underbelly of the fashion industry was at the time a feminist statement. That may well be, but…the book is very, very hard to read as a feminist statement in our cultural context. It’s true that Ririko is a powerful woman of a sort…but she’s corrupt and cruel, and moreover, her body is actually falling apart form the plastic surgery. The horror movie imagery, and Ririko’s monstrous fascination and cruelty, ties the book, in my mind at least, to horror movies like Carrie, with their not-especially-feminist anxieties about female bodies and female power.

Not that Ririko (or Carrie, for that matter) is wholly unsympathetic; her backstory is sad, and you can see why she wanted to be rich and famous. But object of pity isn’t any more liberating than object of (even admiringly pleasurable) loathing. Moreover, the moral center of the manga is a man — a police detective who is trying to shut down the evil plastic surgeon. The detective is smart and determined and he sacrifices his career to end the surgery; he is presented as admirable and clever; certainly nobody in the manga ever makes any explict case that he’s a creepy shithead. And yet, to this reader, at least, a creepy shithead is what he manifestly appears to be; he essentially stalks Ririko, muttering about their deep connection and past lives and blah-blah-blah; his efforts to shut down the clinic doom the women who need repeated treatments to keep from decaying. The book, though, as I said, seems firmly on his side; the tragedy of the abandoned, decaying women is presented as one of those things, or maybe even their fault. Certainly, the crime is never laid at his doorstep; he’s just the good patriarch, out doing his duty by saving women from themselves…or, you know, not saving them. Who really cares? He made his superiors angry at him, damn it. What more do you want from him?

If I encountered this in the U.S., in other words, I’d assume it was technically accomplished, intellectually shaky, duplicitous exploitation schlock, using “big issues” as a cover for titillating sleaze and gore, and hypocritcally sneering at the marginalized groups it fetishizes. Not as good as I Spit on Your Grave or Ms. 45, better than Beyond the Valley of the Dolls or Basic Instinct. I’m willing to accept on Bill’s say-so that in context it was a pioneering auteurish blow for feminism — but I don’t think that’s how it translates.

0 thoughts on “Kyoko Okazaki’s Blistered Fingers: Part 3

  1. there isn’t a lot of patterning or intense detail workTrue about the detail, but the checkerboard patterning ran thru the book and was used very well, I thought. Maybe next to other manga this wouldn’t seem to be so much the case. I lack any context here.

    As for the detective, I think he’s an x factor for us. I had no idea what all that tiger lily and reincarnation stuff was supposed to mean. Or the meaning of the dream sequence that erupted at the end. Asada (the detective) would be a bit less irritating if the book let us in on the secrets he’s always being so gnomic about. But we only have the book’s first part, so we’re left with what amounts to a huge loose end that appears t be somehow integral to the book.

  2. Noah, I’m curious what you would think of Mitsuru Adachi manga, maybe H2. it’s high school romance/relationship stuff with more-conventional manga art (not really shoujo, playful and funny, most of the characters are designed to be likeable… to my mind it’s successful. This has nothing to do with Helter Skelter, and little resemblence to it. I’ve just read a lot of manga and am always curious what other people think of ones that I like. on a little bit darker note, i’m also curious what you’d think of naoki yamamoto’s manga (best to start with his best, Arigatou).

    you can find fan-translations of both of these online.

    -David Alex

  3. Hey David. Thanks for the recommendations; I’ll keep an eye out for both. Bill may well have read them already….

  4. David, I’ll second the Adachi, mainly for Touch, his best work. Masterful storytelling, well-drawn characters, baseball. It’s one of the best and most representative manga of the 80s in any genre. I’ve got a note on the Touch TV series, and I'm pretty sure Xavier has mentioned it before as a key work.

    & let me try to tie it back to Helter Skelter: I went to an academic conference (yeah, one of those) on J-pop years ago, and someone presented a psychoanalytic reading of Sailor Moon. While her PhD empowered her to find phalluses in places I didn’t know to look, I did nod in total agreement to her claim that a key to J-pop’s popularity was the old-fashioned gender relations. Romance is usually very 1950s, which is great for genre convention and Western folk uncomfortable with post-60s gender roles. At the time of the conference (98, 99?), most everything translated was SF/porn/fantasy or kids’ stuff, so she didn’t have to account for works like Helter Skelter that throw those relationships out the window.

    But I just reached for a book to back up what I’m saying, which means if I’m going to dig in deeper I need to make another post…