Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan is a Japanese TV mini-series with nice production values currently available via Amazon Prime. I was a bit puzzled by this because I stumbled upon it backwards, so to speak. I watched the feature-length spinoff Rohan at the Louvre and was intrigued. Then I jumped to the beginning of the series (there are three short seasons), to find out what the hell was going on with this weird bloke.
The background is by no means simple. Kishibe is a fictional manga artist, or mangaka, created by the real and highly regarded mangaka Hirohiko Araki. Araki's series Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is a vast and hugely popular manga series in which Kishibe features. The live-action series sees Kishibe, played by Issey Takahashi, encounter a series of supernatural threats. It's not quite horror or fantasy but straddles the grey area between them to considerable effect.
Kishibe has a superpower - he can literally read you like a book and rewrite you as well. This saves his butt in several adventures, but there is a clear expectation that he can't rely on this power - known as 'Heaven's Door' - all the time. The bizarre threats he faces are weird enough to entertain and sometimes are truly disturbing. This being Japan, you can never quite know what's going to happen because Hollywood horror rules don't apply. At one point, for instance, Kishibe is replaced by an evil entity because he enters a sacred tree and looks into a mirror. And some episodes are stranger than that.
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| No idea why he dresses like this. Sometimes it's worse. |
This is enjoyable viewing, not too demanding but quirky enough to keep you entertained. The plots involve ideas culled from Japanese folklore in some cases, though I'm not well-versed enough to be sure if all the tales have their roots in tradition. The first episode concerns an elite community - 'Millionaire Village' - where you can only gain entry by demonstrating perfect good manners. Mistakes in etiquette lead to terrible punishments. However, Kishibe bucks the system by defining good manners in a way that predates and transcends any code of behaviour.
Any downsides? Well, it must be said that Rohan Kishibe is a bit of a twerp. He supports my hypothesis that when a male writer creates a writer as a character, the result is invariably a dickhead of some kind. It's worth noting that women don't do this, but men seem to manage it every time. Kishibe is so absurdly pretentious that he becomes endearing, embodying every cliche about the writer who 'lives for his art'. At one point he acquires a dog. That's about the sum total of his emotional life. His long-suffering editor, Izumi (Marie Iitoyo), by contrast, is irrepressibly perky.
So, that's my first spooky TV recommendation, with a spooky movie tacked on. Rohan at the Louvre coincided with an exhibition of Araki's work at the famous museum. (This gives you some idea of the global clout of manga.) The story concerns the blackest painting ever made, which - me being me - led me to start quoting the series Ripping Yarns. "Eee, that painting's really black our mam! Even the white bits are black!" Some aspects of British culture are stranger than anything you'll find in manga.
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| More tea, Shinto vicar? |
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