The World is Mine

ザ・ワールド・イズ・マイン

• by Arai Hideki
• ran in Young Sunday

So a couple of weeks ago I reread this entire series with the goal of writing a review of it. I then decided it was absolutely impossible to do the thing justice and have been putting off actually writing it, but since I did go to the effort, I figure I really ought to push myself through and get something written.

Arai describes this as a morality textbook. A comprehensive look at violence in society and the way people react to it, it cross cuts between the stories of two terrorists and a giant bear, each rampaging across Japan. But it has a fractal sort of structure, and quite frequently spins away from these two threads to tell related stories - he might spend two hundred pages with a reporter tracking down the story of the bear, or sixty pages slowly, painfully describing the reaction of one of the terrorists' family.

Even looked at on a smaller level, there are few anonymous victims here; the first girl killed by the bear is presented in her own story, which the bear rudely interrupts. In fact, for the first few hundred pages, we get a much better sense of the victims than we do of the main characters; even knowing what came later, I found the opening frustrating. He just refuses to give you a handhold on the main thrust of the book; we're only seeing the main characters through the eyes of others. These little dramas are given all the hooks to make us interested you could want, only to have the main characters stomp in and enigmatically destroy them.

It only really finds its focus through a sustained action set piece - a horrific attack on a police station that carefully walks a delicate balance between entertainment and horror. Again, it's the mini dramas here that make it all work; a terrorist firing a machine gun down at the media assembled outside doesn't feel fun because we've been watching one of them trying to get a lunch which the guy who bought lunches forgot to get, and just as he's about to eat, a bullet drops through his skull.

In the wake of the police station devastation, the focus broadens, covering political and cultural movements. And the large scale sections of it are deliberately balanced by very focused stuff - the focus on the reporter, or the terrorists locked up in an apartment, committing unspeakable horrors on a very personal level.

And the ending is just insane.

I think there is a tendency for truly great works to be really hard to talk about. I mean, I just spent several paragraphs babbling about abstract structural nonsense without once getting near the book's core, or even given and suggestion of why exactly the book is so fascinating. I could equally babble about my emotional reactions to different sections of the book, or slap together some half baked theories about what it all means, but frankly, all of those approaches would have been absolutely as much a failure as this version was.

I feel a lot more comfortable liking I Love Irene, or Kiichi, or Sugar, all of which are much more focused, defined works, works I can grapple with an feel like I have a genuine handle on. Reading the interview with Arai included in the shinsetsu edition, I get the feeling he himself didn't have any kind of logical outline in mind, but wrote the thing purely on instinct; sometimes artists produce their greatest works when they don't know what they're doing. And now I'm descending into cliche, so let's call this a wrap.