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A love-letter to Japanese kaiju, or the giant monsters we all know and love, from Godzilla all the way on down to Varan and everything in between. In a slightly-alternate present, Japan has a special government division, the MMD, to deal with giant-monster attacks of all varieties. Like any government agency their work is underfunded, thankless, and tiring; their sole reward for sparing Tokyo from destruction yet again is often nothing more than a hostile round of press coverage and their next paycheck.

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[Volume 1 and Volume 2 of this series are also reviewed here.]

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Back before No Longer Human had even its first volume released in English, I went and copped all three volumes of the original untranslated Japanese edition. I read the first two of them back-to-back on one train ride back home, and I read the third a month or two later, while sitting in Bryant Park on a cool autumn afternoon (an incongruous setting for enjoying such a punishing piece of work). In short, I knew what I was getting myself into when Vertical, Inc.’s English translation arrived, but that didn’t make the experience any less emotionally shattering.

It says something that I can finish the story, find flaws with it that bothered me on a conceptual or dramatic level, and yet still see the whole as being unassailable. I’ve since found that’s the only sort of perfect you’re likely to get in this world: one where you can see something’s flaws all the more clearly because you love the whole, and in the end you forgive the whole those flaws because the entire package is worth the effort.

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The end. And it’s a fitting end to a manga series that’s always stood poised on the knife-edge between sweet fairy-tale simplicity and the tougher sensibilities of stories for mature audiences. Black Jack might well have been Osamu Tezuka’s finest work by dint of how it combines the accessibility of works for younger readers (Astro Boy, Unico) and the sophistication and ambition of his experimental productions (Phoenix). Now’s the time to go back to the beginning, if you haven’t already, and experience the whole of this saga of a black-market medical man from start to finish.

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If one were to travel into the universe of GTO: 14 Days in Shonan and look up Badass on Wikipedia, I would find the article deficient if a picture of Eikichi Onizuka didn’t appear as the illustration of choice on that page.

GTO stands for Great Teacher Onizuka, and the adventures of Onizuka and his stupefying excursions into rock-ribbed machismo have been chronicled in both a manga and its subsequent anime adaptation. Both were translated into English, but are now sadly out of print. Enter Vertical, Inc., who have been looking to broaden their manga offerings. Rather than reissue all of GTO, which would have been problematic at best, they elected instead to bring English-speaking audiences this previously-untranslated follow-up series. It’s a gamble, but not a reckless one, and the presence of previous GTO stories doesn’t create a major barrier for newcomers.

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“This book argues,” writes Richard Gombrich in the preface to What the Buddha Thought, “that the Buddha was one of the most brilliant and original thinkers of all time.” His aim is to place the Buddha in the same canon as Aristotle or Descartes, rather than Jesus or Mohammed — a philosopher and thinker, not simply a religious figurehead.

This is an ambitious undertaking, and I am happy to report that What the Buddha Thought is not a case of hubris or mislaid ambition. It is one of a number of works that I am tempted to call “revisionist-Buddhist,” works that attempt to wipe away the encrustations of time or the dirt of history from Buddhism and make them not only relevant to the current age but allow us to see more of Buddhism than would be possibly by simply reiterating previous work. Brad Warner and Dzogchen Ponlop have both produced work in this vein for lay audiences, and now I am exploring works of a more scholarly nature that attempt to do the same things.

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There’s been any amount of talk lately about how comics, science fiction and fantasy, movies, and all the rest of pop culture constitute a new mythology for the age. I go back and forth about this one myself, because one of the things a mythology seems to imply is the presence of some larger belief system about what is being mythologized. Maybe it’s a matter of terminology: would a fairy tale for the modern age imply that much less baggage than a new mythology?

It isn’t as if I think fairy tales sit further down the ladder from full-blown mythos — more like they occupy different seats on the same general bus. One thing I can say about Osamu Tezuka is that he seems to have been comfortable in any of those seats, as well as comfortable driving the whole bus. He created works that were not only mythology for the new age (Phoenix) but which dealt with real-world myth figures (Buddha) — and on top of that created a whole slew of manga which we could comfortably call fairy tales without feeling like either his work or the term itself was being demeaned.

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This survey of the intellectual history of Buddhism in the West was not written as a full-blown exegesis, but rather as an attempt to trace the prevalence of a single, common thread of thought: why Buddhism was regarded by many prominent 19th-century intellectuals (and earlier than that as well) as a “cult of nothingness” or a religion whose highest affirmation was nihilism.

The first thing Roger-Pol Droit assumes of his readers is that they understand the general history and conceits of Buddhism. His main audience is not laypersons, although an educated person without a scholarly background can make sense of the book without undue effort and derive quite a bit from it. He speaks most directly to people who have a scholarly understanding of Buddhism — and, most importantly, those who already understand without laborious explanation how Buddhism explicitly rejects nihilism and encourages positive action in the real world. For that reason, there is no general introduction to Buddhism in the book, but rather a direct plunging into the fray.

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Basil Pascali is a spy for the Ottoman Empire, which as of 1908 is well into the terminal phase of its decline. Nevertheless, on the tiny Greek island where he has taken up residency, he has been writing and filing his reports for nigh-on twenty years and being paid just as dutifully for them. The money doesn’t buy as much anymore, and his pleas for a raise have gone unheard, but he knows nothing else other than this life. Companionship is a luxury he can’t afford (in any sense), and trust is for other people.

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Brad Warner’s first book Hardcore Zen was an attempt to bring Zen Buddhism to the very people who might never have bothered with it, but at the same time might benefit most from it. I liked the book because it attempted to undo the decades of pop-cultural manhandling that Buddhism has suffered, often at the hands of its own well-meaning proponents. It was not designed to tie in with the feel-good New Age leftovers that, in Warner’s view, make up too much of the writing on Buddhism.

Sit Down and Shut Up is in some ways even more radical, since it tackles as its subject matter one of the more esoteric, impenetrable, monolithic and challenging texts in all of Buddhism: Dogen’s Shobogenzo, an eight-hundred-plus-year-old text that has appeared in various translations (Warner’s master Gudo Nishijima produced one himself) and attracted only the most, well, hardcore of readers. It is the Being and Time, or maybe the Being and Nothingness of Buddhism: a text more famous for its influence and the shadow it casts than for it having been actually read.

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Ain't it fun when you're always on the run
Ain't it fun when your friends despise what you become
— The Dead Boys, “Ain’t It Fun”

In the second volume of No Longer Human there is a moment when Yozo, the self-destructive and conflicted main character who has spent his whole life keeping the rest of the human race at bay, dismisses the idea that he’s a good person. He’s fooled everyone around him into thinking that, because it’s all he knows how to do. “You are a good person,” says the little girl he’s talking to. “Everyone says so.” She is the daughter of the woman Yozo has shacked up with, used for sex and milked for money, and even she chooses to look the other way.

A story about someone so despicable should not be so absorbing. But that was one of the paradoxes of the original 1949 Osamu Dazai novel: it was about someone we ought to hate, who engages in things we find revolting, but all the same we cannot look away because he exposes himself so completely. The face he presents to the world is not the face he presents to the reader, and out of that dichotomy comes all the energy and fire of this story. The same has happened here in Usamaru Furuya’s adaptation, with the split between the Yozo we know and the Yozo the world sees widening all the more precipitously.