I attended Crunchyroll Expo 2018 in San Jose earlier this month. It was my first anime convention in two years. I decided to go as part of my return to the industry (more on that in an upcoming post).
As anime cons go, the Expo is new—only in its second year—and it was small, but with a good schedule of events and guests.
I hadn’t intended to, but I found myself at the Dragon Ball Super big event on Sunday morning.
Ryo Horikawa, Vegeta’s seiyuu, hosted the showing of the final three episodes of the series. A rather sweet older man, Horikawa spoke in halting English to the nearly-full ballroom, expressing his pleasure at being at the convention, and then the episodes began.
I’d never watched any of the Dragon Ball series, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I didn’t expect a realization about the origins of my favorite kind of anime.
First, the episodes were great fun to watch. The climax of the Dragon Ball Super series has whole universes getting erased in a gladiator-type elimination scenario. The final three episodes begin with Vegeta being vanquished, leaving Goku to finish off the final villain, Jiren.
The fight scenes are amazingly over the top, with Goku and Jiren hurling each other into asteroids and planets exploding and everything else you can imagine.
At one point, Goku looks like he’s down for the count. But then his assembled family and friends cheer him on, and Goku remembers what he’s fighting for... that he’s not fighting alone, or just for himself, but for every...
... Wait a minute.
He’s not fighting just with his strength alone, but with the hopes and wishes of the entire village.
He’s fighting for his friends.
He wants to win the championship with his new school’s team, and show his former teammates that working together and not as selfish individual star players is the right thing to do.
I realized while watching Dragon Ball Super that shonen anime didn’t begin with Naruto, Bleach or Kuroko’s Basketball. It began with this guy.
I discovered anime in 2005, so maybe I can be excused for not understanding this before now. For not understanding that before Naruto and Sasuke, there was Goku and Vegeta. The origins of the whole meta shonen storyline, the hero’s journey from an egocentric reach for individual glory to appreciating others, from saving himself to saving the world—it began with Dragon Ball.
The origins of shonen stories may be obvious, but the originators of other Japanese cultural phenomena are less easily discernible. Take idols, for example.
Idols are a unique Japanese phenomenon. They sing and dance, but they’re so much more. Their striving to become famous is actually considered part of their appeal. They are actual and representational, in some weird way becoming more than the sum of their parts.
It’s rare that one reads a work of fiction that is entirely unlike anything one has read before. Most writers stay within a range of possibilities in their stories that is well-trod, recognizable—safe.
And then there’s Last and First Idol.
Winner of numerous awards in Japan, and published in English by J-Novel Club, Gengen Kusano’s Last and First Idol is a collection of three novellas about Japanese pop culture iconic figures: idols, gamers, and seiyuu.
The title story is about Mika Furutski, an aspiring idol who, despite working very hard at her craft, is only average at singing and dancing. She admires her fellow high school student Maori Niizono’s effortless excellence at these things and the two become best friends.
And then the end of the world happens.
But that doesn’t mean the story ends! It’s not the end of the story, not by a long shot.
It’s hard to convey how fascinating “Last and First Idol” is without spoiling it. Just when you think you know where the story is going, it takes another brutal and unexpected turn and you’re caught up in a new level of weird.
The same can be said for the second novella, “Evolution Girls.” Youko Sasajima is an everyday salarywoman in a safe boring job, when she downloads a game to her phone. A MMO game, Youko finds she’s good at it. Too good.
She’s an intelligent young woman and knows that game addiction is a thing, so she’s in no danger of getting addicted to this silly game. Right?
Before long she’s spending all her time playing the game, including at work, holding the phone in her lap so no one can see. She’s skilled, so she holds off on making in-app purchases, but the moment comes when she just has to power up, so she takes out her credit card and...
Soon she’s lost her job and stays home all day, playing the game. Bonus points are available every two and a half hours, so she sets her alarm and wakes up every two and half hours through the night so she can get the points.
Youko burns through most of her savings and begins existing in a zombie-like state where the game is her only reality. And one day, absorbed in the game, she walks out in front of a truck and gets killed.
Oh. You really thought the story would end there? This is where the true story begins.
Again, there’s no way to say any more without giving it away. But Kusano takes the overused “trapped inside a video game” trope, turns it inside out and basically reinvents it.
The final story, “Dark Seiyuu,” begins in the future. Seiyuu have evolved, along with the help of artificial intelligence, to the point where they can power space ships with their throat vibrations while singing. Genetically modified to sport special laryngeal sacs on their necks (while reading this story, I envisioned a giant turkey wattle), these souped-up seiyuu can manipulate sound, light and gravity.
Oh, and they also still voice act in the occasional anime here and there. ;-)
Akane Yomokura is a seiyuu and serial killer who murders other seiyuu to collect their laryngeal sacs. She’s “Dark Seiyuu”’s protagonist.
She begins hearing a voice in her head. She tries to ignore it, but it won’t go away. And then a hooded figure called the Dark Seiyuu releases a cryptic statement for the news media: “Seiyuu, listen to the voice.” This message presages a fateful event, one that changes the Earth forever and sends Akane Yomokura out into the galaxy in search of her nemesis - the Dark Seiyuu.
Remarkably, in Last and First Idol, not only the main characters, but all the villains and supporting characters are female. Male characters are almost non-existent. Without making a point of it, Kusano creates worlds where the agency of girls and women is assumed and unquestioned. They are neither fetishized nor sexualized, as female characters nearly always are to some extent, which is refreshing.
Author Gengen Kusano takes the idol, gamer and seiyuu concepts past all normal story limits, to the far edge of hard science fiction and beyond.
If you want to read a set of amazing stories you will never forget, pick up Last and First Idol.
Disclosure: I was J-Novel Club’s proofreader for Last and First Idol.
Amazon link: Last and First Idol
J-Novel Club link: Last and First Idol
