Some Stuff from the Latter Half of 2024

This half of the year has been busy, but I've still read quite a lot, so here's a series of shorter entries. Some of these were really great reads, so the brevity here isn't intended to be any indication of quality.

Uwa Youjo Tsuyoi by Hade na Kangofu:

A profoundly strange and fun manga with some wonderful character designs and weird worldbuilding. The premise is a squad of moe girls sent into an exclusion zone, using weaponised childhood trinkets to fight mutants (who are rendered in grotesque, crawling detail). Said mutants seem to have a penchant for collecting extremely vulgar loli doujinshi, which acts as a cryptonite-like substance to the main cast. It sounds a bit on the nose, and it is fundamentally and deliberately dumb, but it has a lot of soul and passion, and succeeds at being pure absurd entertainment with plenty of gags and brutal combat. It ends very abruptly after two volumes.

She Doesn't Know Why She Lives by Anu:

A slice of life story about a 25 year old girl disabled by depression. It's cute, and has some comfy quirky tropes of the menhera genre here and there, but otherwise it does a good job of portraying the protagonist's life as utterly pathetic and degrading, a constant stream of neuroticism, humiliation, exhaustion and occasional suicidal ideation. It's raw and not fun, which is how I personally prefer this type of story. The ending is refreshingly honest but nevertheless uplifting, so on the whole I was really satisified by this one.

Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka by Fukami Makoto/Tokiya Seigo:

I've been trying to explore the magical girl canon a bit more. This is firmly within the tragical girl subgenre - I bounced on to it after reading the Madoka manga since I was looking for similar works. Well, what can I say? It's an entertaining battle manga with a seriously cool (if uninteresting) protagonist and some fun supporting characters. It's gratuitously dark and frequently veers into unambiguously fetishistic depictions of moe torture, which gets pretty tiresome after a while. I enjoyed the dark magical realism-style worldbuilding and the action, but this didn't have much staying power for me and I dropped it about half-way through. Still, I wonder if Kurumi and Asuka get together? I may never know...

Memories of Emanon by Kaijo Shinji/Tsuruta Kenji:

An adapation of (what I'm told is) a classic sci-fi novel. I had no idea about the premise going in - I was (as with many other readers I expect) drawn in by the truly wonderful artwork, and stayed for the quiet and mysterious atmosphere as the (very short) story unfolds. Emanon herself is immediately enchanting - wherever she appears on the page she is pensive and mysterious, with a piercing gaze, but equally warm and soulful in her expression. The story itself has the elegance of a Philip K Dick short or something like that, a strange and explosive concept executed and communicated without hesitation or loss of momentum, but with a deeper empathy and sadness.

Prayer of the Singular by Tayama:

A wonderful short webmanga published on Twitter and translated by Penny Theater. It's also essentially an elegant science fiction short (although with a more lofty philosophical premise than anything traditionally sci-fi), contemplating the folly of omniscience, and what remains when knowledge fails you. All rendered in a distinctive, soft and very attractive style that reminds me a bit of fellow contemporary mangaka Mishima Yoshiharu (you'll see what I mean if you check it out).

Interspecies Reviewers by Amahara/Masha:

This was recommended to me by a friend, and I mostly checked it out on the basis of the artwork which is really fun and dynamic. Beyond that, I kind of expected a fairly one-note sex gag manga that would get tiresome or gratuitously vulgar pretty quick--

... as a side note here, when I say stuff like 'gratuitiously vulgar', I don't mean to imply some thick-skulled puritanical judgement, just that I do feel a certain level of brainrot if I'm reading something that is transparently trying to do nothing other than scratch some inelegant erotic itch over and over... so it's by no means a condemntation of stuff with explicit or implicit erotic themes/content, just that it's basically tedious reading something that is mindlessly and crudely erotic. Anyhow, back to the entry!

--but WOW is it so much more than that. All nine volumes of the manga have so much passion, creativity and warmth put into them. I would go so far as to say the series feels distinctly Pratchettesque, with an approach to worldbuilding that is attentive, detailed and imaginative, whilst never taking itself too seriously and firmly remembering that fantasy is a tool for subverting and poking fun at reality.

The monster and character designs throughout are characterful and charming, and the main cast - who are ostensibly a group of professional brothel-crawling sleazebags - are surprisingly likable and human, with largely positive attitudes towards sex, sexuality and women (although some extremely obvious caveats on that last one - at the end of the day it is a shonen manga about hot babes).

My one, fairly glaring criticism is the astounding absence of any female perspective towards sex throughout all nine volumes (apart from one or two isolated instances). There are great female characters, don't get me wrong, but their perspectives on sex are expressed solely in relation to the male characters in the story.

This is so weird! The goal is wide open here to have some recurring sex-positive female characters who pursue a similar lifestyle to the main cast, and share their compatible/conflicting views on sexual preferences/partners. Let me put it another way - the core premise of the whole series is exploring the different way sex manifests across a colourful variety of fantasy cultures and races. We have dwarven perspectives, dragon perspectives, mermaid perspectives -- but no female perspectives? A friend pointed out that Crim - the anatomically male and female angel - is probably supposed to fill this role, and it's a good point, but on the whole I don't think the writing of that character really satisfies this. I don't know - it's a mystery!

Still, it's a fantastic read.

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou by Ashinano Hitoshi

It's such a monumental, all-encompassing masterpiece that it feels completely futile to write about it. I've only lived with this manga a few months, but sitting down to write about it feels like if someone had said "hey, review that summer where you met the person you'd spend the rest of your life with". What am I supposed to do here? That's not to say my experience of YKK (abbreviated) is that personal and ineffable, but more that the success of the manga is in its ability to settle on your skin and permeate through you with the same rich, unspoken, sensory quality that defines those precious warm memories that no one other than you will ever be able to access or fully understand.

Others have written about the manga at length saying stuff I don't need to repeat - it's exemplary status as "good-boring", its subtly genre-defining and radical vision of a future lost to climate change, of a world where it is kindness (not hatred) that stands the test of time, where (thanks Leonard Cohen) all living things are ultimately leaning out for love and will lean that way forever.

Just go read it and you'll get what I mean.

I will write down a few of my more direct thoughts about the manga though, since those are easier to talk about. Well, the manga is ultimately about the end of civilization. It makes this clear from page 1, with the wonderfully phrased introduction: "The once festive world has gradually wound down. Allow me to take you through these latter, languid days; the so-called Age of Evening Calm. Let us sit on the warm concrete before Night falls." The cruelty (non-pejorative) of the manga is how it tricks you into forgetting this, because most of the series is full of community and life.

Alpha for her part lives a quiet, isolated life, but occasionally intersecting with her life are a cast of characters fully embracing their lives, loving eachother, building things, expanding their horizons and looking towards the future. But these things are - as we are all aware - ephemeral, and fleeting before the inevitable advance of time and entropy. The manga honours its opening commitment, and as the series advances, the passage of time documented by the manga begins to rapidly increase. The first few volumes are blissful, each season and year passing at its own languid pace. By the final volumes, years pass in a flash, characters return a few chapters later having suddenly grown up, moved on, whole sagas of their lives coming and going without the reader's notice. This is the manga at its most bittersweet. Just like how it can be in life, you don't really realise that it's happened until it's too late, and that the world and characters you had grown to love are now gone, that there's less of the manga ahead than there is behind, and that those characters won't be coming back. Pulling this off so successfully and elegantly is such a triumph.

Vitally, it's also in these latter volumes that you understand Alpha's perspective most clearly. Like the reader, for the most part her experience is a blissful and simple one detached from the passage of time in YKK's world, only to occasionally wake up and realise whilst she was napping or watching the clouds another piece of the world she loves has slipped helplessly through her fingers.

In this sense, YKK feels like it is very deliberately - and with total compassion - trying to teach the reader a certain kind of acceptance of change, loss and the passage of time. Of course, this is hard, and you shouldn't except any kind of special enlightenment from reading the manga. YKK doesn't expect any from you either. All YKK wants you to understand is that loss and change are above all natural. That simultaneously feeling deep love and deep sadness for the world is okay. That things will be okay, and that ultimately - despite all the trouble that has clouded our lives and human history as a whole - the world that receives us and the world that we leave behind is one of deep mystery, timeless beauty, and infinite peace.

MASTERPIECE.

Kodama Maria Bungaku Shuusei by Mishima Yoshiharu

I found this author through their more recent work on Gengaku Shijuu Soudan (mentioned below). Oh my GOD is it good. It's like Miss Bernard Said (that manga is really good too, I think I've never written about it) and Shimeji Simulation collided and this manga was born from the ashes. It's nominally about literature, but it's not really about books - its grand thesis is framing the world itself as a work of literature. There are wonderful metaphysical musings born from that (not least of all maybe a fun queer reading as I discussed the other day with a friend), but it never comes off as pretentious or too caught up in its own project. Part of this is because at it's core, it's a cute high school romance story. But also the author does such a wonderful job of communicating their ideas in a concise and engaging style, kind of like a thought experiment.

The titular Maria Kodama is a wonderful character, and again the skill of the author in reconciling the outlandish with the everyday is evident here. That is to say, she is a completely alien, almost divine entity, and yet this veneer frequently slips to reveal moments of homespun and endearing humanity. She therefore occupies the role both of the enigmatic 'other' but also the human soul of the story - you want to learn from her, but you also want to be her. That's not to downplay the role of the actual protagonist - the unassuming Feuda - who has a really surreal and amusing trait that's the manga's main twist and revealed about a third of the way through. But his inclusion is really at the whim of Maria, and so you get the feeling that she's really the one writing the narrative and pulling the strings here.

It's worth mentioning that the manga itself isn't complete, nor is it fully translated. The scanlator (shout out to Grey Area again!) works in volumes, and the author has massively slowed down the speed of new chapters whilst they work on Gengaku Shijuu Soudan. But that's okay, it's a slow burn anyway.

Some Stuff I Liked and Disliked From 2024 So Far

I haven't updated this much in 2024 so far, partly because of work, but also partly because I've been dipping into a few things, or because the stuff I've been engaging with hasn't quite warranted a full independent entry. So here goes some shorter notes on a selection of things I've been checking out.

Norwegian Wood:

I didn't enjoy it. I liked the pensive, yearning, zeitgeisty (yes, zeitgeisty... despite being from like 40 years ago) romance story, and the early parts of the novel have a few evocative vignettes and scenes that I found memorable. But outside of that... uuugh... the overwhelming impression was a vulgar and gratuitous expression of male sexuality. You can hardly go a single chapter without the protagonist getting sucked off from one of the novel's small selection of female characters (the manic pixie dream girl or menhera-chan, take your pick!) who exist to satisfy the protagonist's sexual desires whilst asking for basically nothing in return. It's so one-sided, so unexamined, rendered in erotic detail but with no reflection or acknowledgement from any of the novel's characters. The icing (no pun intended) on the cake is the book ending with the protagonist essentially raping a character who has been sort of an older sister/mother character. But they say "oh don't worry, it's fine!", so phew, no problem there. Then the book ends. What are we doing here exactly? Contrast this to a contemporary novel like Normal People, which is oozing with sex, but makes sex firmly a mutual experience and firmly part of the book's narrative and the texture of the relationship between the characters. It's night/day. I don't know, I know Murakami wrote this quite a while ago, and maybe it has to be evaluated in the light of a conservative 1980s Japan. But if so, man it hasn't aged well...

Subahibi / Wonderful Everyday:

A friend recommended me this last year, and I've only just got around to finishing part 3. It has a wonderful classic VN vibe and is very charming in its own way that's slightly difficult to place. I do think part 1 does perhaps go a little far in almost 1:1 lifting its most memorable sequence (the ending) from Night on the Milky Way Train. Although, having written that, that's a bit unfair - the sequence on the fairground ride was also very evocative. And, of course, the famous piano-playing scene... yeah I guess I actually liked part 1 the most maybe! Part 2 was a bit convoluted and less memorable to me. Part 3 was harder to get through, since it's obviously pretty graphic and upsetting, but that's not a criticism. I'm not sure if I'll read any more - apologies if I offend anyone who really likes this series, but I just get the feeling it's really not quite as clever as it thinks it is. What you get is a wonderful vibe, accompanied by a pile of literary references and vague dialogue posing as plot... I'm sorry, I just don't buy it. I fully accept that maybe I would get it if I read more, but I feel like it hasn't done enough to sell me on reading further. Maybe I'll come back to it though.

Destroy It All And Love Me in Hell!:

A solid toxic yuri story with a Fight Club-esque focus on transcendent violence and self-destruction. It's very compelling. This one kind of reminded me of Wearing School Uniforms at the Age of Nineteen (pretty sure that was it) in its tone and vibe. Looking forward to the next volume when it's eventually translated.

Gengaku Shijuu Soudan:

The English title for this is 'Pedantic Quartet' at the moment which seems a bit off. I love this scanlator's work though- Grey Area, go check them out, they have excellent taste and basically everything they TL is really special. This is no exception, I love this one so far, it's dripping with strangeness and flair and has quite a contemporary feel to it in its commentary on science and society. It's hard to say exactly what it's about, but a core theme is the dissolution of disciplines and rationalism and positivism and stuff like that, and a return to the deep strangeness of early intellectual traditions, where art and science and mythology all bled together into a single discipline. I love it!

Bocchi the Rock!:

I thought I'd check out the manga since the anime was so popular. I liked it, but I don't know... it reminds me of a manga I read a while ago called 365 Days to the Wedding (I think?) that was about two very introverted office workers that sincerely love being alone, but are forced into a sham marriage to avoid being sent to work in their company's Siberian office. It's a great concept and refreshingly original - what does love look like between two people who really just want to be alone? But the manga never really engages with this question - quickly it pivots to follow a cliched trajectory where the protagonists realise how miserable it is being alone, and how much they long for conventional romance, both of them become quirkier and more extroverted amongst a cast of eccentric tropey friends... yada yada you get it. It was cute, but it was disappointing that it never really tried to break the mold and present an honest account of what an authentically happy introverted/independent person might look like. I felt similar about Bocchi. It starts off selling you on the idea that it'll be an honest (if satirical) portrayal of social anxiety and loneliness, that subverts and avoids the typical band manga tropes. But then it quickly becomes just another generic band manga! Bocchi - at best - is a loose satire of someone with social anxiety, there doesn't feel like any attempt to really go further than that. I'm prepared to be wrong here - do I need to give it more of a chance?

Voynich Hotel by Douman Seiman

Or Dowman Sayman or whatever. I've been meaning to check out their work for a long time and I was finally put onto this one by a friend. I totally devoured it in like three or four days so I evidently really liked it. I'm planning to totally re-read it soon with more of a critical eye, because it does a couple things that are really interesting and impressive. Firstly, each chapter is relatively concise at around 8 pages, but WOW does it not feel that way, the pacing is so tight and well structured that a chapter never feels rushed or prematurely ended, or short on plot. Secondly, for something that feels very plot-driven, it has almost no plot at all, with the story eventually concluding with... nothing really happening at all of any consequence other than a few deaths. This reminded me a little of Mozocry's approach to storytelling, which similarly seems to harness this weird sorcery or whatever wherein a manga that should be boring or unsatisfying -on paper- ends up feeling so full of life -in practice-. Thirdly, what makes this even more impressive, is that this is pulled off with an absurdly large cast of characters that seems to grow every two or three chapters, all of whom feel unique and well-characterised, all with their particular pocket storylines (although, again, some of these -on paper- do not really constitute storylines) that get explored and wrapped up.

Basically it's really impressive. It also has that wonderful kind of pre-2010s nostalgia, full of bright sun-soaked hedonism and counterculture, joyously violent and dark, and with a sense of humour that I think has aged surprisingly well.

Some End of 2023 Notes

I read a lot of different manga this year, and a few books. I finished the books (mostly - still filtered by Ininfite Jest for now ;_;) but didn't finish all of the manga. Still, I think that's fine, and I'll probably pick some of them up again later - Rojica to Rakkasei, Goodnight Pun Pun (I read a lot, but it's long), Love After World Domination, Dropkick Jashin-san and the original Ghost in the Shell manga are notable ones I'll probably get back to. 365 Days to the Wedding, A Rare Marriage, Shy and Dandadan are series I probably won't go back to, all of them very good in their own right but I didn't feel like they really had staying power.

This year marked the end of two series I have loved for a while - Shimeji Simulation by Tsukumizu and Dungeon Meshi by Ryoko Kui. I'll probably write a retrospective about both sometime this year. Dungeon Meshi in particular was the series that made me start drawing, and that choice led me to where I am today (probably the happiest and most awake I've felt in my life), so it has a very special place in my heart. Beyond that it really is just a technical masterpiece from head to toe with so much love and original flair pumped into it by its deeply charming and clever creator.

I feel like I've probably forgotten one or two completed or dropped manga from this year (stream of consciousness edit: yes, I have, I also binged through the whole of Nichijou this year which was amazing). This year I think I'll make a more deliberate effort to catalogue things.

The Plague by Albert Camus

The most striking thing about The Plague is that it simultaneously manages to be an overwhelmingly philosophical book whilst not being philosophical at all. What I mean is that the book presents a clear and complete statement (in my opinion anyway) of Camus' ideas on the absurd, whilst never actually talking about them once within the text. Everything is contained within the narrative and the characters, both of which are deeply compelling and wonderfully written. The Plague, like any existentialist literature, grapples with the question of how we should act given our situation of existing in an obtuse and apparently meaningless (insofar as a meaning cannot be identified using reason) universe. The book situates this question in the context of Dr. Rieux, who is effectively the protagonist, a physician trying to control a plague epideminic in a town under quaratine. Faced with the impossibility of doing anything to control the spread of the plague or alleviate a substantive amount of suffering, Rieux grapples with why he nevertheless feels so compelled to help people. This is explored from various perspectives represented by different characters.

Camus' answer to this question is that there is no answer - or at least, no answer that reason can give you. Rieux embraces a kind of dark nobility in the knowledge that it is impossible to both 'understand' and 'act' at the same time. There is no reason why one should try to stop human suffering, there is no reason why one should live for anyone other than oneself, and yet we are compelled to do it anyway. I don't think this is as arbitrary as it sounds - whilst I'm pretty sure Camus was an atheist, I think there is inevitably a deep kind of spirituality to this choice. I'm not saying that spirituality is God, but what I mean is that this choice to accept the absurd and follow the compulsion to help others independently of reason is essentially identical to faith. Rieux admits does not know why suffering is wrong, or why helping others is the correct choice of action. He admits he cannot judge anyone who decides instead to flee or act selfishly, and he even aids those people to the extent that he can. But Rieux nevertheless cannot in good faith accept any other conclusion than continuing to resist suffering. Rieux 'inhabits' the wrongness of suffering. For him, it's self-evidence transcends truth.

The book is for that reason hugely optimistic about the human condition. The absurd is the territory of human goodness. Every character in the book (bar one) ultimately arrives at this conclusion through one way or another, whether they are a priest, a revolutionary, or a lovesick journalist. Each finds a sort of sublime peace and grace in the absurd community of collective human suffering, and collective human compassion, even if it means (in some cases) their wretched and futile deaths. A tangent, but this kind of reminded me of the empathy box from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the whole Mercerism thing in that book. I guess that probably suggests Dick's reading of the existentialists although I don't know for sure. Unsurprisingly, there are strong echoes of Kierkegaard here as well - in Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith is basically just an ordinary person, and similarly in The Plague Rieux describes his great struggle (and the great struggle everyone faces) as simply to live as an ordinary man, harming no one, helping where he can, having few doubts and few wishes.

There are some truly incredible passages in the book, some horrifying, some razor-sharp and analytical, and some deeply moving, so I'd really recommend reading it to get all of that ontop of these broader philosophical conclusions.

Made in Abyss by Akihito Tsukushi

[NOTE: I reflect on this diary entry in more detail in my ACTUAL DIARY (see the navigation bar) entry from March 11th 2024. It might be worth reading that before/after if you're interested, or if you really like Made in Abyss / fanservicey otaku media.]

I'm really late to the game on this one. It's part of the 'dark moe' canon I guess, so it was inevitable I'd get around to it sooner or later. To get the glaring negatives out of the way first, I guess I had avoided it due to its - to say the least - pretty notorious reputation. The guro content I get, and it compliments the manga's interest in body horror (and the horror of embodiment), but the inclusion of softcore ero loli/shota stuff is frustrating and it's hard to see how it could be considered anything other than bad faith fetishistic pandering. I have nothing but patience for giving authors the benefit of the doubt, but whenever the manga gives you pause to think "oh, you know, maybe there's more that meets the eye with this", it quickly closes the door by shoehorning in some totally unambiguous fanservice. I would love to have some super progressive outsider opinion on this, but I just don't. This manga is so good in every other aspect that it deserves better from its creator.

Because it IS really good. It's dripping with that ineffable masterpiece quality, to the extent that it would feel reductive to talk about it in any other way. It is crammed full of originality, beauty, wonderful attention to detail, and deeply charming and infectious characters that deliver on classic tropes whilst continually subverting expectations here and there. Its core thesis revolves around a fascination with transcendent self-destruction, and the allure of falling haphazard into the intimate inviting darkness of humanity's shared suffering. I'm sort of going to like that concept straight out of the box, but its success is making an otherwise strange and challenging idea deeply compelling and accessible to an (evidently) broad audience. It never compromises in its commitment to confronting this central thesis, and after 66 chapters (the current length of the ongoing series) it still has new things to say despite some occasional meandering.

Terumina by Kashmir

Terumina, by the prolific but elusive mangaka Kashmir. It's difficult to categorize and stands out as one of the more unique and wholly authentic manga I've read. It documents the travels of a cute diminutive catgirl as she takes famous railway journeys around Tokyo. In this aspect the manga has a documentary approach, sharing information about the lines and referencing facts and histories relating to the trains and the areas they pass through. I think this on it's own would actually kind of work as a concept. But Terumina goes leagues further than this, as each chapter rapidly devolves into nauseating, grostesque fever dreams, the railway journeys becoming a safari through dizzyingly complex landscapes melting and twisting into surreal and psychedelic scenes of decay, transmutation and esoteric symbolism. The protagonist remains, for the most part, blissfully disinterested, giving the reader an anchor of sanity in the unrestrained insanity of her world - this is a device in storytelling that I always seem to be drawn to in manga and it works really well here. It would be possible to launch into some literary exploration of what Kashmir is trying to communicate here by putting something so bland and mundane as a railway journey through the psychedelic meat-grinder, but there's nothing I can say that would really do it justice so you should just go read it. Each chapter is short and self-contained, with the next one beginning as if nothing weird had ever happened. It's a tragedy that barely any of it has been translated, with the last chapter updated a few years ago.

Discommunication by Riichi Ueshiba

An unusual manga from the early 90s. It's about a high school girl and her romantic fascination with an enigmatic boy in her class, who lives alone in a derelict building and practices weird esoteric magic. The story follows a comfortable, honest slice-of-life type rhythm, but occasionally deviates into sprawling psychedelic dream sequences dripping with complex visions of eastern mystic imagery. These are really beautiful. The juxtaposition of these two opposing sides to the pacing of the manga gives it a distinct character that works really well. It's worth mentioning that for a female schoolgirl character written by a male author in the 90s, the protagonist stands out as feeling very organic and well-rounded - she's tough, principled, has clear boundaries, but also does all the things an ordinary schoolgirl would do, and expects to be respected and treated as a woman. Although, the premise is all about her inexplicable infatuation with a mysterious but otherwise disinterested boy, so take it with a pinch of salt. I really wanted to read more but unfortunately most of it hasn't been translated as far as I can tell.

Spectral Wizard by The Imitation Crystal

I re-read this recently for maybe the third time. It's the longest and probably the most well-known work of enigmatic indie mangaka The Imitation Crystal AKA Mozou Crystal AKA Mozocry. A gloomy and meandering slice-of-life story about an outlawed wizard deeply at odds with herself. As with all of Mozocry's works, I find myself always wanting it to go a little harder, to be a bit more direct and definite in its message and plot, but at the same time I feel the lack of these qualities is exactly what makes their work so unique, and what gives it just a characteristic quality. Mozocry is a master of carrying a manga with a -vibe-. There's no story hook here, it's a vibe hook. It's enough to just experience their characters doing their thing, wandering around their vague and inconclusive monochrome worlds.

I'll probably write about this more elsewhere - actually I did touch on it in my review of their manga Game Club (see blog :]) - but I think this is probably also a deliberate creative decision from Mozocry. Spectral Wizard (and pretty much all of Mozocry's work) indulges in conflicts and ennui and unease that isn't meant to be resolved - it's perennial and vague, not reduced to a collection of straightforward plot elements waiting to be tied up. This makes Spectral Wizard kind of frustrating, but in a way that feels honest, and it works in spite of it.

Various Short Stories by Kenji Miyazawa

That's not the title or anything, it was just a book of short stories by Kenji Miyazawa so I called it that. I read a few - Night on the Milky Way Train, The Nighthawk Star, Indra's Net, Magnolia. They're difficult to write about because it's the experience of reading them that is most striking and memorable, rather than the themes they explore or the stories they tell. The -visual- potency and beauty of the worlds he describes is hard to overstate.

Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exup�ry

It's an autobiographical memoir. He was one of the pioneer pilots flying mail across the Sahara, back when being a pilot like that was more akin to being an astronaut. It's a haunting memoir about the transcendence found in utter desolation. He struggled through much of his life with depression and ennui, chasing these fleeting moments of perfect absolution he felt out in the desert. Profoundly humanistic in its conclusions and beautifully written, and it really does manage to do it without coming off as pretentious or preachy - which is not what you'd expect given it's a prose-heavy memoir by a brooding and romantic French author in the 1930s. You get the sense he is writing out of an honest need to communicate this transformative and massively compelling personal experience.