The process of adapting a novel for the screen fascinates me, if not as much as the writing process itself. On those rare and wonderful occasions where there’s no “…the book was better…” sensation, the people responsible for the adaptation are competent but also recognise what it is about the original that made it special.
Could I find a pic of Kirie on her own? Could I heck. This is much better though (click to see in its fully embiggened glory)
Reading the the opening chapter of Kara no Kyoukai after watching the movie, I can’t ignore the fact that it’s a very ‘early’ attempt on Nasu’s part to focus his creative energy and bring his inspiration together into a tangible, and readable, form. It has a rough-around-the-edges, first-draft feel to it, which is bad for casual readers but interesting to fans and those of us who like to dig beneath the surface to find out what makes the story, and the mind that wrote it, tick.
For some reason, being a devoted admirer of an artist’s work makes you more comfortable with criticising them. I think it’s because you get used to a high standard, so the smallest of flaws are more glaringly apparent. The execution of Overlooking View is a bit messy and disorganised, as though Nasu was playing around with the nonlinear narrative idea and finding his voice to tell the story. I find it hard to believe that subsequent chapters weren’t outlined when this one was serialised, but the fact remains that it’s not as polished or tightly focused.
This part of the novel highlights to me that Nasu did at least have a talent for combining concepts; I’d forgive you for saying he’s not the best of writers at this point of his career, but he’s an impressive ‘ideas man’, which is more of a help for adaptations than effortlessly-flowing prose.
Overlooking View is full of disparate concepts, bits of science and philosophy, thrown together in unusual ways. As an aside, it wasn’t until later that I discovered how much of an influence Natsuhiko Kyougoku was on him during the time that KnK was written but it’s evident here…even more so in the third chapter.
In being a huge fan of Kyougoku, Nasu unfortunately inherits some of the less desirable ‘Kyougoku-isms’, such as using terminology from very obscure areas of science and religion…although it’s impressive to see a writer put them side-by-side while creating his or her own mythology. Another Kyougoku-ism is that of wordy dialogue that forms the outline of a mystery-solving process.
It takes a bit of patience and concentration to follow the conversations between Touko, Shiki and Mikiya but it’s necessary to understand the weirdness of the apparent suicides: no note means no suicide, falling to one’s death in such an obvious and public fashion makes a statement and is therefore a suicide note of sorts, the unconnected nature of the victims being at odds with the recurring pattern in the nature of their deaths, and so on.
While Kyougoku’s most well-known writing is composed of murder-mystery and SF giving the mistaken impression of a supernatural tale, Nasu goes right into writing a supernatural story, inventing the required jargon and sets of rules with gleeful abandon. After getting used to the quirky and, as much as it pains me to say this, the relatively immature, prose the overall impression is that of disorientation.
I think this disorientation is largely intentional though. It’s told in media res so it’s not until you read subsequent chapters that you’re able to discern the context or which elements are important. Which does make appraisal of each individual chapter like I’m doing here really tough and possibly pointless…but fuck it. I love this story and wanted to write about it. Anyway.
It’s appropriate somehow, given the fact that the protagonist sees the world in a highly unusual way and has an equally interesting moral compass, that understanding this novel requires the reader to see the world from unusual perspectives. You have to take sections without fully knowing where they fit into the bigger picture, keep them there in your mind then make the connections between them later. For instance, I mulled over Nasu’s metaphorical analysis of the difference between floating and flying and how the concept applied to Kirie Fujyou’s situation before moving on to the idea that the area where the mysterious deaths are taking place has its own ‘flow’ of time. That was at least how I go about processing it, at any rate.
It’s easy to get caught up in the mechanics and jargon of the story but knowing what comes later helps me remember that what’s equally – if not more – important: the character-driven element. When the dust settles we’re left with an almost sympathetic antagonist and a dynamic between two of the protagonists that’s hard to pin down but is all the more fascinating. There’s very little to go on in terms of what sort of relationship Shiki and Mikiya actually share at this point, and their back-and-forth banter doesn’t really help either.
Somewhat connected to this: a detail that’s easy to forget when you’re as familiar with the story and its characters as many of us fans are is the fact that Nasu cleverly avoids specifying Shiki’s gender until the final paragraph before the epilogue, when Mikiya casually remarks, “you’re a girl, after all.” This is pretty hard to do in a visual medium with a well-known (female) seiyuu voicing a girl in a kimono but in the Japanese written language, in which gender-specific pronouns are less commonplace, it’s much easier to keep this hidden. It’s another example of the author playing with the reader’s expectations and also foreshadows the recurring issue that Shiki’s character has with her own identity.
It also strikes me as unusual for a tale of this type that it’s not a story with far-reaching consequences. The villain of this episode, if you can call her that, is not hellbent on world domination; rather, what’s at stake here is very small-scale and localised.
What I mean by this is, this story is a very personal one. It has more in common with Tsukihime than Fate in that the characters aren’t out to change the world; they’re on personal journeys that don’t have the entire planet hanging in the balance. Even when she faces the main villain of the piece (a moment I’ll get this blog out of hiatus in order to get to) Shiki is really trying to face her inner demons and ultimately save herself. I don’t know why, but the low-key nature of that plot point struck me as being particularly significant, and endears the novel even more to me.
Post title easter egg: it references a song by Soundgarden. Check out the lyrics!