Over at Journalista, Dirk very kindly joins the roundtable discussion. More specifically, he thunders his fist down upon our placid roundtable and accuses us all of being insufficiently mellow:

I must confess that it’s a bit weird reading multiple reviews of the series from people who don’t sound as though they’ve enjoyed many quiet moments in their lives. That sounds like a value judgment, but that’s kinda the impression I’ve gotten this week. None of these reviews found the critics connecting the work to anything in their own experiences, which tells me that the stories didn’t work for them the way Hitoshi Ashinano intended them to work.

Alternate theory: My own perspective is off-kilter by comparison, and I shouldn’t be so goddamned presumptuous. I suppose the reason that I enjoy YKK so much is that I spent a great deal of my childhood outdoors — and since I’m from Arizona, “outdoors” meant “way out in the middle of the fucking desert.” …..

The need to get out and wander has never really left me. I recall one of the ways that I pulled myself out of my post-adolescent funk was to grab a thermos, a pipe and a bag of marijuana and jump into the car around 1AM. I’d drive up to Flagstaff, stop at a convenience store and fill the thermos with coffee; then I’d get back on the highway and keep driving until I was in the middle of Monument Valley, where I’d pour a cup, light up and wait for the sun to rise. I did this three or four times in the space of six months. It was glorious.

Dirk has me dead to rights, at least; I’ve never really smoked pot. (Though Pink Floyd was my favorite band for a while back there…so maybe that counts.)

More seriously…it is true that landscape as such doesn’t play a huge, huge role in my childhood memories in quite the way Dirk describes. My most important meditative recollections involve, not looking quietly at the desert, but thrashing repetitively through the water — I was on a swim team for much of the time I was growing up, and the sense of isolation, of time as elastic, and of connection to a very physical reality which was also spiritual is probably my closest analogue to the kind of romantic sublime that Dirk (and many others) link to contemplating nature.

So is it because I lack the requisite personal experience that I’m not as into YKK as Dirk? I don’t know…I tend to mistrust the kind of aesthetic argument that says “if you’d only been there, you’d understand.” Experience does shape one’s aesthetic responses — but aesthetic responses also, and perhaps even more thoroughly, shape experience. Which memories define you and which get forgotten or seem less important — obviously that’s partly out of your hands, but I think there’s some dialogue there as well. If you’re going to admit free will at all, you’ve got to leave room for the possibility that you make your memories, not just that your memories make you.

Anyway, where I’m going with this is that, to me, it seems like the issue isn’t necessarily what experiences we have or haven’t had, but how we see YKK intersecting with those experiences, and what it seems to be saying about that. And in that context, I think the important factor may not necessarily, or only, be where we’ve lived, but what our ideology is. Which is to say, Dirk’s a good bit more conservative than the rest of us in this conversation, and I think that may matter a fair bit. Bill’s explicit about this when he says of YKK that:

I find it reactionary. Compared to other manga like Hanashippanashi (TCJ #280), which deals with the tensions between a feel for nature and actually living in Japan, YKK feels like a retreat. It’s a fantasy of a return to simpler times and does away with urban complexities with a flood.

Miriam’s less direct, but what she calls her mild “impatience” with the book seems to have at least something to do with feminism and with the portrayal of the main robot female character. Tom’s too; as he says in his post “Fulfilled fantasies tend to be banal and that goes for fantasy girls. Alpha’s a mannequin doll who’s there to make the old guys feel good. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a limiting thing.” Certainly for me, at least, the way the romanticized past seems to hinge on the infantilization and (literal) objectification of the female lead is one thing that makes it hard for me to embrace the series fully. (I had similar problems with the similarly nostalgic Ugetsu; though, as I said in my own post on YKK, I also have at least some sympathy for reactionaries.)

LIke Dirk, I don’t want to be presumptuous. I don’t necessarily think that politics wholly determines aesthetic reaction any more than experience does. Moreover, I have a healthy respect for Dirk’s politics in general and for his take on gender issues in particular, not to mention for his understanding of manga. I’m much more inclined to read more of YKK knowing that it’s Dirk’s favorite series ever I was before he said that. But I do think one reason for, at least, my relative lack of enthusiasm is that, whatever my flirtations with C.S. Lewis, I find YKK’s determined idealization of a conservative traditionalism hard to swallow without at least a couple of murmurs of protest.

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In comments to Miriam’s post, Derik B says that Alpha avoids the fantasy/girl trope. I think what he means by that is that she doesn’t have a relationship or isn’t explicitly sexualized. I’m not sure that that would really allay my concerns entirely, though. There are different stripes of fantasy girls; some like the subservient sexual plaything, others prefer the idealized eternal innocent. I can believe the book avoids the first, but I have trouble, giving what I’ve read and later plot summaries, that it avoids the second.

Though I should probably read more before I crawl further out on that limb…not that I usually let mere ignorance stop me, but still….

Update: Bill and Derik both have thoughtful responses in comments, so be sure to scroll down….

We’re doing a roundtable on YKK. Bill provides some background and a slightly acerbic take here. My starrier-eyed view…written before reading Bill’s…is below.

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It’s an odd experience going into a series with no expectations at all. I read the first volume of YKK because Bill recommended it and provided scans. Before I opened it up, I’d never heard of it and had no idea what it was about. It was only when I got to the end of the first volume with its (very mild) cliffhanger ending that I even realized that there might be more than one book in the series (I kind of enjoyed thinking that the whole thing just ended on the cliffhanger, actually…but Bill assures me that it doesn’t.)

Anyway, that sense of disorientation — of not being sure what’s going to happen next — was certainly part of manga’s appeal to me initially. The first manga series I saw, I think, was Ranma 1/2, by Rumiko Takahashi. Everything about it caught me flat-footed. I know how romantic comedies work, and I know how action/adventure works, and I even have a sense of how they can be fit together in various ways. So Ranma looked familiar — but then the main character kept changing into a girl…and his adversary kept changing into a pig…and his Dad kept changing into a panda…and there were bizarre martial-arts-figure skating battles…or cooking fights….. It was all just vertiginously, gloriously wrong.

As I’ve read more manga that sense of giddy alienation has died down somewhat; manga has it’s own cliches and interests, and you do eventually start getting a feel for what they are. Ranma does remain fairly bizarre by any standards, though, and YKK does as well, though in a quieter way. Indeed, the determined quietness is itself the strangeness. The series is set (as Bill pointed out) in what seems to be a post-apocalyptic future. Much of the countryside is under-water; travel is difficult, civilization has devolved back to an at least somewhat pre-industrial level. At the same time, remnants of high-technology persist; one of the main characters, Alpha, is a human-looking android.

So…post-apocalypse, dying civilization, androids…we should strap ourselves in for pulp adventure, right? Well, not quite. Alpha, is an unassuming young women who owns a coffee shop; at least in the first volume, her robotness has almost no practical effect on her life (her biggest hurdle is that she effectively has food allergies because of the way her digestive system is designed.) The only gun in sight isn’t fired, or even loaded; Alpha keeps it as a token of remembrance. The narrative drifts forward through mostly mundane episodes; Alpha goes shopping and meets a gas station attendant; Alpha goes to a council meeting and dances and gets drunk. Even when there is something that could loosely be described as “action” it’s played down and smoothed out. Alpha is hit by lightning at one point…but a friend takes her to the hospital, and she’s fixed up in no time. A water spirit appears — but she’s harmless, a passing stroke of beauty, unattainable but mysterious.

I like especially the way that the boy’s stance does and does not echo the water spirit’s; on the one hand, he’s stiff and awkward, while the lines of her body are fluid, lithe, and animal…but on the other hand, his back is bent in a way that ends up being almost unconsciously graceful, while his hair blows to the right, slanting like the mountain and like the water spirit’s body. He’s watching her, and distanced form her, but he’s also part of the whole picture; integrated into nature and watching it, too.

The water spirit seems to encapsulate the book’s theme and it’s purpose; she’s a mythological embodiment of nature, seemingly unaffected by the cataclysm which has transformed the world. The book is suffused with a longing that goes not so much forward or backward in time, but outside it; a sense that human struggle will end in nought, where it began, and that that’s fine, or good even. Rather than an apocalyptic vision of man destroying the world, YKK presents a world that, at bottom, man can’t affect all that much. That sense of disempowerment doesn’t alienate man from the world, though; on the contrary, it makes him (or her, or it) more at home. And indeed, the water spirit comes, later, and on her own terms, to comfort the boy, before slipping away again.

It’s very difficult for me to imagine a book like this being created by an American; the relationship to nature, and the trust in passivity, just don’t seem like things that would come easily out of a Judeo-Christian culture. At the same time, the post-apocalyptic landscape and the android are clearly borrowed mirrored in lots of Western sources (Bladerunner springs to mind, for example). Again, it’s the familiarity and alienation together which make the work pleasurable and fascinating.
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In his review, Bill argues that YKK seems nostalgic and reactionary; using a utopian apocalypse to avoid the actual intricacies of living with nature. I think that’s a fair cop…though, on the other hand, I’m not sure that “reactionary” is always and everywhere a bad thing. Humanism —the mythologizing and aggrandizing of humanity — is part and parcel of progressivism. The mythologizing of a transcendence which isn’t human tends to be linked to more traditional, often reactionary ideologies; Christianity or, in this case, Buddhism (and perhaps a traditional pantheism?) YKK is certainly somewhat cloying in its conservative serenity — enough so that I’m not sure I’ll ever read the whole thing. Still, that serenity also has an appealing ruthlessness. Humans won’t fix anything, and the planet isn’t going to care. Not practical advice, exactly, but not a preposterous prediction either, as these things go.

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As I was writing, it occurred to me that the themes I’m discussing here (especially the implicit comfort in human disempowerment) are somewhat similar to the themes I discussed in my review of another backward-looking future, C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy. If you’re so inclined, you can read that essay here