A Kitschy but Visually Stylish Take on Vampires

(Please bear with me as I take a very short break from translation and mull other interesting thoughts about vampires. :-) )

Here's another cult Vampire movie I've been wanting to see, which would be quite different from Moto Hagio's interpretation of vampires, but interesting in its own way. It is The Hunger, a 1983 movie starring the glam David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. Just imagining the production values, the classical/ gloomy, gothic Bauhaus/Iggy Pop soundtrack and the eye candy factor makes it sound watchable, though I suspect the vampire theme is handled in a rather campy and over-the-top way. But that would precisely make it fun, wouldn't it?

Anyhow, here is a partial plot summary from Wikipedia:

Catherine Deneuve's character, Miriam Blaylock, is a beautiful and modern vampire who chooses human lovers and promises them eternal life. As the film begins, her current companion is John (Bowie), a man she married in 18th century France. They live together in an elegant New York townhouse.

Yet as John learns, humans can never become true vampires. Miriam herself is truly ageless, with flashbacks indicating that she has been alive since at least the time of Ancient Egypt. Her human lovers, however, only experienced prolonged youth for a century or two. Then they begin to age rapidly, eventually deteriorating into withered, corpse-like figures. The true horror of this situation is that these vampire/human hybrids age but cannot die. Miriam and John both hope that Dr. Sarah Richards (Sarandon) will be able to help restore his health.

When John visits Sarah's clinic, she dismisses his claims of rapid aging as delusional. She leaves him to sit in the waiting room, where he ages decades in just a few hours. Sarah is appalled when she sees what has happened to John, but it is too late to help him. The now-ancient man returns home and begs Miriam to kill him. She tells him that she cannot, and tenderly places him in a coffin in the attic alongside her other former lovers.

Sarah, guilty over her failure to treat John, comes looking for him at home. Miriam decides to take Sarah as her new companion. She seduces the doctor and, while they are having sex, cuts herself and has Sarah drink her blood.

Sarah returns home to her boyfriend Tom (Cliff DeYoung), not realizing what Miriam has done to her. She begins to feel increasingly distracted, and experiences a hunger that cannot be sated even with raw steak. Sarah returns to Miriam's house and demands an explanation.

Miriam attempts to initiate Sarah in the necessities of life as a vampire, but Sarah is repulsed by the thought of subsisting on human blood. Still reeling from the effects of her vampiric transformation, Sarah allows Miriam to put her to bed in a guestroom. When Tom comes looking for Sarah, Miriam sends him up to find her. Sarah, crazed with hunger, attacks Tom and drinks his blood.

Once she has finished feeding, Sarah goes downstairs to find Miriam. Miriam is pleased that Sarah seems to have finally come around. Yet Sarah, overcome with grief at murdering Tom, has decided that she will not continue on be a vampire. She cuts her own throat. She cannot die, but the loss of blood apparently renders her comatose.

(I won't give away the ending. :-) ) And though I would get to enjoy seeing a very gorgeous David Bowie for at least part of the movie, I suppose at a certain point he would start looking gruesome, though Sarandon and Deneuve, at least, would stay hot and stunning till the end.

It sounds kind of silly, but again, there are some basic commonalities with other vampire stories: the time-traveling, the immortality and (nearly) eternal youth, the need for blood, the self-disgust in becoming a vampire and losing one's humanity.

Maybe sometime soon I will rent out some DVDs and have a vampire film festival to see how differently the vampire mythos is played out at different times in the recent modern culture.

Movie "Summer Vacation 1999"

I was looking up "Moto Hagio" in YouTube and came across this video. Inspired by "Tooma no Shinzou" by Moto Hagio, the story takes plance in an all-boys boarding schoool (their characters are played by young actresses). Now, I have no idea what this movie is about, but when I saw this clip, I felt a bit "hazukashii" (embarrassed). It is not really part of my culture that women play male roles. But this is part of the culture in Japan, and especially for Shojo Manga, because of the Takarazuka Revue - an all-female musical theater company they have a huge female fan base.

Osamu Tezuka grew up in Takarazuka City and went to see Takarazuka Revues when he was little. So when he started drawing Shojo Manga, he was said to have been inspired by his childhood memory of the revues to do "Princess Knight." So the Takarazuka Revue and Shojo Manga have a strong connection at the root.

So it may not be very strange for this movie to cast actresses in boys' roles, but it looks silly to me. In fact, "Tooma no Shinzou" was dramatized by an all-male theater company Studio Life (that's also popular with women). Personally, I would be more interested in that.

Japan has no shortage of "bishonen" or pretty boys, so why bother with an all-girls cast? If someone is planning to dramatize or cinematize "Poe no Ichizoku", please consider using real boys.

So I have two questions.

1. I have never seen "Poe no Ichizoku" dramatized or cinematized (my husband heard a radio drama when he was young, but he said it was not good). Is "Tooma no Shinzou" more popular in Japan than Poe?
2. If we could produce Poe movie, who would you cast (Japanese or westerner, but real men)? David Bowie could have done it when he was younger, but I am not very familiar with who is available today.
   

Give me your comments!

Why Hagio writes about boys

I found an interesting interview with Moto Hagio where she discussed how she ended up writing shojo manga, yet her characters and settings were almost completely male-dominated.

Shojo manga up until that time (and, arguably, this is currently true) focused on girls' friendships, rivalries, interests in boys and so forth. Feelings, relationships and an internal life are very important. Obviously, they were aimed at an audience of girls and women.

Shonen manga for boys featured male protagonists in a very masculine world, with a lot of action and adventure.

So with "Poe", "Tooma no Shinzou" and so forth, which clearly take place in settings where boys predominate, how could these works be classified as "shojo manga"? Or maybe I should be asking another question entirely: why would a female manga-ka want to write about boys, but in a nontraditional context?

It's also interesting to consider the pop culture that was thriving at the time. Musicians like David Bowie, T-Rex and David Essex had launched "glam rock," which celebrated the androgynous looks of both males and females. Album covers and fashion magazines showed women donning pinstriped suits, and men wearing feather boas, sparkly jumpsuits and outrageous platform shoes. Experimenting in unorthodox same-sex relationships was de rigeur within the rock-and-roll world. Like many young people at that time all over the world, the women from the Year 24 Group were into glam rock—you can see an influence in the way Hagio draws her young male characters so prettily, so fey and slender with their elegant attire, doe eyes and shaggy, tousled hair.

I wonder if Hagio Moto had a clear idea of who would comprise her audience for works such as "Tooma no Shinzo." (Although primarily she wrote to satisfy herself, it would be interesting to consider whether she had a clear idea of a target readership outside of herself.) But it does beg the question of who, ultimately, is more likely to be attracted to her subject matter. At first glance it would appear that Hagio offers something for everyone. Yet at the same time, it's just as easy to imagine girls being turned off by uber-masculine plotlines or settings, or—more likely—boys and men (and girls too) reacting squeamishly to the highly suggestive (if not flagrant!) depictions of boy-boy love. So it's a mixed bag, but at least at the time, there may have been more of an open mind regarding her subject matter.

In the end, what's important is that Hagio found her readers and maintained artistic integrity in writing freely on these delicate subjects. But who could have guessed the connection between the spaceships and boarding schools!

Here is the excerpt (full translation here):

Moving to Tokyo

With my publisher located in Tokyo and all, I ultimately wanted to move to Tokyo as soon as possible, but my parents wouldn't let me go. Around that time, I was asked to work as an assistant and that led to meeting Keiko Takemiya, a cartoonist. She had already moved from Tokushima to Tokyo. So when I mentioned how I also wanted to move to Tokyo but was prevented by my parent's opposition, she proposed to live together. An acquaintance found us a house—it was more like a tenement house with three adjoining units. And finally I was able to move to Tokyo. It was around October of the year I became 20 years old.

The house was in Oizumi Gakuen. We lived there together for two years. During this time I was very fortunate to get acquainted with many people, such as Ryoko Yamagishi, Mineko Yamada, and Nanae Sasaya (now Nanaeko). Now that I had many manga friends, I was so happy to talk about manga from morning to evening. I could also draw pictures without worrying about my parent's disapproving eyes.

Road to "Tooma no Shinzou"

One of the friends I made during the Oizumi Gakuen era was an avaricious book junkie, and she recommended a lot of books, like "Demian" by Hermann Hesse. As for Hesse, I had read "Beneath the Wheel" but its dark ending kept me away from other titles of his. But "Demian" was so good that I ended up reading all his stuff after all.

That person really liked the world of shonen-ai [Note 1]. She recommended those, too, even what one might call "porn", but I didn't like any of those. I would say "What's so great about this?" when I returned the book after reading it. In the meantime, Takemiya-san was also reading those stuff alongside me but it was she who got hooked. Later, Takemiya-san invited me to a movie. It was released as "This Special Friendship" (Japanese Title: "Kanashimi no Tenshi" ) back then, but it is now available as video called "Kishukusha".

[Note 1] I believe she was talking about Norie Masuyama.

The hero is a thirteen year old boy, and the story is about the upperclassman who loves him. It was such a beautiful movie—romance developing in a school. But at the end the hero commits suicide due to misunderstanding that he was betrayed. I didn't like such an unreasonable story without salvation and felt really sorry for the hero—it was too much to let him die like this…thinking he was betrayed. Then, I thought of drawing a story in which the hero dies but he gets something out of it in the end. That's how I got the original idea for "Tooma no Shinzou". When it came to that movie, perhaps I had some critical judgment.

Closed Space to Boys' World

I like closed space. That's why I depicted stories with such settings as dramas set within spaceships, or stories about the people who moved to another planet—no wonder I wouldn't be popular with readers. This is how closed space turned into a boys' world:

First of all, "Tooma no Shinzou" was a private work I began in objection to "This Special Friendship" and I had no prospect for publication. Back then I had many pieces like that just for fun. Since I was doing them for fun, I didn't get to finish them of course. But in "Tooma no Shinzou", the characters came to life pretty well as I drew. So I couldn't possibly publish this story, but I wanted to try a short story based on the same settings, and I published "The November Gymnasium".

Since the intended publication was a girls' magazine, I thought perhaps it was not good idea to have a male protagonist, and I developed two plots, with all-girls' and all-boys' versions. Then in the all-girls' version the relationship got wet and sticky [Note 2] for some reason. I was wondering why the all-boys' version did better, and then I realized this:

After you get to a certain age, the male-female gender roles in society have been internalized in your psyche, and you cannot be free from them. Especially so for my generation. But when I draw all-boys' stories, I am not bound by those constraints. It came as a big surprise to me as I drew. That's what interested me in drawing a boys' world.

[Note 2] Original text reads "女の子版の方は、どうも関係がネチネチしてしまう"—"ネチネチ" is a very difficult word to translate. What Hagio meant is that girls tend to have different dynamics and dimensions in same-gender relationships that she perceived boys don't have, such as different sensitivities, means of establishing hierarchies and managing relationships, a perceived style of 'clique-ishness' and so forth. In Japanese, such elements are described in water-related terminology. Thus I used the terms "wet" and "sticky" because they imply complicated, difficult, unclear relationships, in contrast to the cut-and-dried relationships within a boys' world.