MIKAMI MEDITATIONS PT. 5

 To cut to the chase, my answer to the question "why is heroic Reiko Mikami such a greedhead sadist" boils down to compensation for daddy issues. 

Given how little information artist Takashi Shiina offers about Mikami's developmental years, it's likely that he never meant to lay bare his character's soul. Though he wasn't unique in concocting a shonen heroine with both positive and negative traits, Shiina may not have wanted to kill his golden goose by dissecting its innards. But that doesn't mean he didn't contrive a working psychological concept of his heroine.  

Mikami's passion for the ghost sweeping profession is first highlighted in the arc "Message from Mother," in a flashback showing Little Reiko with her mother Michie. In present times, though, Adult Mikami believes that her mother has died some years back. Thus it's a considerable shock when Michie time-travels to Adult Mikami's era to ask Mikami and her team to guard over Mikami's younger self, Little Reiko. Then Michie disappears, and Mikami mentions that she was in middle school when Michie died. Mikami tries to contact her still living father Kimihiko Mikami, but he's out of the country, and the attempt only reveals to the reader the existence of some emotional rift between daughter and father. Then Mikami and her allies must confront a demon trying to kill Little Reiko for reasons that remain somewhat obscure by the story's end. In any case, Michie returns, so that mother and daughter vanquish the demon, after which Michie and Little Reiko return to their own time.

Shiina later follows up with an arc named "Someday, Somewhere." Though nothing much has been said about Mikami possessing the same time-travel power as her mother, both Mikami and Yokoshima experience premonitory dreams about Mikami's mother. Then a convenient "accident" propels both of them through time back to Japan's medieval era. During a battle with a demon, Yokoshima is killed, and a rage-filled Mikami attacks the demon. However, the fiend hits her with lightning, and this triggers her power, bumping her back a few minutes, so that she's able to save Yokoshima and defeat her enemy. They then return to the 20th century, and the story ends just before "The Man Who Can Summon a Storm." 

Having seen Yokoshima perish doesn't make Mikami any more generous to him, but in "Storm," she does soften when she encounters her childhood crush Saijou. Michie Mikami is still alive at this time, but though we don't know anything about ten-year-old Reiko's relationship with her still unseen father, a much later story will establish that Kimihiko's an absentee father. There's no way to prove that Shiina had fully planned out his intentions with Kimihiko, but on the hypothesis that he always had something sketched out, then Ten-Year-Old Reiko could be compensating for an inattentive father by crushing on an older, and not much less inappropriate, male figure. The conclusion of "Storm," however, suggests that Mikami has become totally invested in making money as self-validation, as opposed to Saijou's selfless altruism.  

I've stated that the earliest "internal chronology" mention of Mikami's fierce desire to make money appeared in an early story, where a middle-school-aged Mikami finds herself at odds with her sensei's desire to exorcise demons without making any profit. This early tale, "Love Needs Its Time," doesn't mention either of Mikami's parents, but it would be interesting to speculate that by this time Michie has passed (or rather, Mikami believes that she's dead). In such circumstances, even a middle-school-aged girl might have needed her father, and if he was still unavailable, that might have caused Mikami to believe that she was totally on her own as a ghost sweeper. Thus the desire to amass wealth becomes the lady exorcist's sole source of validation, which is why in "Storm" she goes catatonic from stress after trying to pursue Saijou's altruistic standards. 

Several episodes later, the arc "Death Zone" starts off with Mikami diverging from her usual habit of disparaging her junior assistant, by showing appreciation of his efforts with a salary increase. That it makes her uncomfortable to think about treating Yokoshima as a human being, rather than as a tool for her profit, is significant. Then another time-travel trip to medieval Japan ensues. Mikami and Yokoshima encounter their "reincarnation ancestors," respectively a demoness named Mephisto and a young exorcist of the medieval era. This is followed, after various interceding arcs, by the previously discussed "Mom's Here," which goes even further in demolishing Mikami's assurance that she won't ever succumb to Yokoshima's dubious charms. 

"Zone" loosely sets up a later series of arcs, over 60 episodes in number, that pits Mikami against Ashtaroth, the "Big Bad" of her entire series. In the arc "Merciless War," Ashtaroth, a demon obsessed with destroying humanity, sends three emissaries to launch hostilities, demonesses whom he spawned, much the same way he earlier spawned Mephisto, Mikami's "reincarnation ancestor." In the arc "The Longest Day," Ashtaroth seeks to subvert Mikami's will by speaking to her as if she were his daughter, making him the first real Mikami "father figure" the readers have seen "on-panel." Little does Ashtaroth know that Mikami is already somewhat father-alienated, so she head-butts him. Unwittingly, Ashtaroth scores more of a point against Mikami in that one of his new "daughters," Luciola, falls in love with Yokoshima. Luciola becomes Mikami's first real rival for Yokoshima's affections, and this state of affairs will eventually lead to Luciola's extinction.

It's in one of these "endless arcs" that Mikami's time-traveling mother Michie returns, taking command of the operation to defeat Ashtaroth. Not till the end of the 60-something episodes does Mikami learn the truth: her mother actually did not die during Mikami's middle-school years but has remained in hiding ever since faking her death. Why? Frankly, I didn't follow the author's logic, but it does make one wonder if Mikami didn't get her manipulative streak from her mother.

Only in a very late sequence did the readers finally encounter Mikami's actual mortal father Kimihiko Mikami-- but in flashback for the most part. Mikami seeks out her trainer Father Karasu and he relates to her, and other members of the Mikami posse, the story of how Michie and Kimihiko met, fell in love and got married. In many ways Kimihiko is the opposite of Yokoshima. Kimihiko possesses a freakish level of super-telepathy, a talent he cannot control and which causes him to read people's minds and know all their secrets. In fact, after the spirited Michie proposes to him, Kimihiko tries to run away from her, but she tracks him down and compels him, with the intensity of her affection, to marry her. Nevertheless, Kimihiko remains aloof from his daughter throughout her childhood for fear of having a bad effect on her due to his telepathic influence. Ultimately, adult Mikami is able to transcend the disappointments of her childhood, by promising her father-- seen only from a distance-- to mend fences.

That's the last word of the series on fatherhood, both from Mikami's true father Kimihiko and from her "false father" Ashtaroth. Mikami's greediness doesn't play a big role in either of these scenarios, so my critical analysis remains only a weak correlation, since Shiina does not expressly connect Mikami's greed to her paternal issues. Further, by the technical end of the series-- not counting the "earthquake relief" story Shiina produced in 2003, which I'll address in my next essay-- Mikami is still expousing her gospel of profit. 

The story *appears* to commence in the far future, when Mikami, Yokoshima and Okinu have all died, leaving behind their spirits, or possibly just approximations of themselves, to haunt their old agency-building in year 2199. Two modern ghostbusters, a robot and a cyborg, intrude on the "ghosts" not to send them to paradise but to capture their spirits for profit-- but Mikami's superior GS skill defeats her enemies. 

Then Mikami and Yokoshima wake up in present times, having experienced the same futuristic dream. They and their colleague Okinu are then drawn into yet another of many battles with supernatural foes, and Mikami's last words are her motto, "Present profit comes first." The connotation I take from this is that even though Mikami sometimes looks gauche or foolish for wanting money so much, at base her desire for profit is an excuse, a motivation to drive herself to heights of excellence in ghost-sweeping. Her wish to emulate her mother may have engendered that ideal, but there's a reality of running a business that goes with that idealism, and the conclusion suggests that Mikami has reached a perfect balance between idealism and realism. To be sure, the final stories in the series don't provide closure for the 1991-99 series with regard to the Mikami-Yokoshima bond-- but the "really final" 2003 story does provide the best of all possible conclusions to GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI.                              

MIKAMI MEDITATIONS PT. 4

 In this essay-series I've written a fair amount about Ghost Sweeper Reiko Mikami, but very little about her male co-star Tadao Yokoshima, who's integral to the series' concept. He unlike Mikami does not have a consistent "literary psychology," but is composed of a congeries of humor and heroism tropes, fluctuating between one set of tropes to another however it suits author Takashi Shiina.

    The first two-part adventure clearly establishes Yokoshima as the butt of most of the series' jokes. He's a horndog teenager who works as an assistant to the gorgeous ghost sweeper, risking his life for little remuneration, just because he lusts after Mikami. In the earliest adventure Mikami appears more flirtatious than in later episodes, seeming to offer Yokoshima the possibility for a future hookup, just to keep the teen working for chump change. 

Only one incident in the two-parter suggests that Yokoshima may be more than just a miserable lust-monkey. Both Mikami and Yokoshima are menaced by a deadly ghost, and Mikami is ready to go down fighting. Craven Yokoshima wants his last memory to be pleasurable, so he grabs Mikami's breasts. This action, for no explicit reason, allows the horny teen to release some magical/psychic power that amps up Mikami's abilities and exorcises the ghost. Despite the fact that Yokoshima's lustfulness saved their lives, Mikami beats the hell out of the teenager for taking liberties. To his credit, the threat of future beatings never permanently breaks Yokoshima's spirit. 

The matter of Yokoshima's lust-power finally becomes an ongoing story-element with the 20-part arc "For Whom the Bell Tolls." The dragon-goddess Shoryuki approaches the Mikami agency, fearing that a demonic power has compromised the testing-ground of the Ghost Sweeper Academy, and wanting Mikami to investigate. Shoryuki has already noticed that Yokoshima possesses an untapped spiritual power and suggests that it would be easy for the teenager to enter the Ghost Sweeper trials alongside other students. Though Mikami goes along with the plan, the lady exorcist has no faith in Yokoshima's potential and mocks him ruthlessly. However, when Shoryuki bestows a blessing on Yokoshima in the form of a kiss on the youth's forehead, Mikami is seen to be annoyed, even though she knows intellectually that the goddess isn't making any sort of romantic overture.

Yokoshima does pass his Ghost Sweeper tests, but there's little to indicate that he possesses the passion Mikami has for the profession. He oscillates between taking on heroic stature and devolving back into all-too-human cowardice, but I'd probably still deem him to belong to the persona-category of "hero," albeit of a very flawed nature. If anything, his "assistant ghost-sweeper" status binds him even more closely to Mikami's orbit, as she becomes "sensei" to his "student." And since he still screws up, this gives Mikami additional reasons to yell at him and beat him up. However, though Yokoshima does not intend to "stoop to conquer," the more Mikami works with the teen, the more she comes to want him around all the time, even though she consciously denies any such feelings.

Author Shiina also teased his readers with the possibility of a future Mikami-Yokoshima hookup in the time-travel arc "Stranger Than Paradise." Yokoshima meets a stranger who turns to be out the Yokoshima of ten years in the future, who reveals that by that time he and Mikami have become man and wife. More crucially, Future-Tadao has made the time-jaunt because in his time Future-Reiko is dying of an untended wound she took in the "present" era. Future-Tadao accompanies Yokoshima and the unwitting Mikami when they seek the demon who poisoned Future-Reiko. Future-Tadao hopes to use the monster's venom to concoct a counteragent to his wife's poison and take it back to his time to cure Future-Reiko.   

Naturally, this mission is successful as far as the reader knows, though Shiina throws in some plausible denials, having two characters state that Yokoshima and Mikami of this time may not be fully identical with their counterparts. When Mikami learns the nature of Future-Tadao, she uses magic so as to erase, from both Yokoshima's mind and her own, all knowledge of their rumored entanglement. 

Shiina never brings up the maybe-alternate future again. However, it's likely that many SWEEPER readers of the time shipped the two leads, and so the author gave them a "Tadreiko" to keep them happy. For good measure, Shiina does note that the two future-versions of the heroes remain on fractious terms, with Mikami dominating her husband while Yokoshima still hits on other women. In fact, in a scene paralleling a similar event in "The Man Who Can Summon a Storm," the ailing Future-Reiko experiences a surge of her will to live when she's told that her husband's been macking on the hospital nurses-- quite possibly because she anticipates punishing him again. 

Though Shiina devotes a couple of arcs to stories about Yokoshima's parents, neither of the teen's progenitors shape his personality the way Mikami is shaped by her parents-- which shaping I'll explore in another post. The dominant impression Shiina wants readers to reach is that Yokoshima remakes himself partly in response to Mikami's high expectations, and partly to his hormonal intensity. 

In two late stories, Shiina tells the story of the couple's first encounter. In the first, it's Mikami reflecting back on her low opinion of Yokoshima when they first met.

A later flashback, though, focuses more on the original concept. Even though Mikami gets irritated when Yokoshima molests her the moment he sees her, he's so eager to work with such a "gorgeous lady" that she realizes that she can save a lot of money on such an over-eager goof. Re: the comment about her finding Yokoshima "funny"-- Mikami never seems the least bit amused by either his blunders or his continued pursuit of her body. However, it's possible that she does get some sadistic entertainment whenever he lets her put him through some perilous endeavor. Further, Yokoshima alternates between wanting Mikami to raise his salary and seeking to make him give him sexual satisfaction. So Mikami repeatedly withholds both sex and money from the young fool, though as I noted above, she slowly warms to Yokoshima's pertinacity.   

Yokoshima has a few arcs that test his devotion to his sensei/mistress, to be sure. But it's Mikami's personality that undergoes the most significant changes in the series as a whole, as I'll show in the next essay in this series.  
            

MIKAMI MEDITATIONS PT. 3

 The other day I finished reading the last of Takashi Shiina's 1991-99 manga GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI. The series is very much like several serials by Rumiko Takahashi, whom Shiina considers a symbolic "sensei" (though he never apprenticed under her) -- by which I mean that MIKAMI is a combination of utterly wacky comedy antics and of moments of sentimental insight into the complexities of the human heart. Anything I will write about this shonen series must take into account how Shiina chose to sell his unique heroine to his readers.

When I wrote the first part of MIKAMI MEDITATIONS in early March, I was probably a little over half through the series. I raised the question as to whether the domineering Mikami would ever reveal a deeper "I-thou" relationship to her bumbling assistant Yokoshima, as opposed to just using him as a tool, an "I-it" relationship. I was fairly sure, though, that Shiina meant to tease the readers on the subject for most if not all of the series, much as Takahashi did with the relationship of Ataru to Lum in URUSEI YATSURA. He threw in lots of little moments-- Mikami being jealous whenever Yokoshima received attention from another attractive female, obviously-- but he could have brought the relationship to a close, as Takahashi did with another series that Shiina probably encountered, MAISON IKKOKU. I can now say without doubt that Shiina chose to emulate URUSEI rather than MAISON, but also that all Mikami's protests, in which she claims not to need or want Yokoshima as anything but a tool, prove empty. She's more or less the "Ataru" of the series, managing to confess without confessing, as occured in the final URUSEI manga-tale, BOY MEETS GIRL.

In the first MEDITATIONS, I also wondered if Shiina was building to some big revelation as to what psychological attitudes led Mikami to become so extraordinarily greedy. However, to the very end Shiina kept that set of cards to himself. He does, in the arc "Message from Mother," demonstrate that neither of Mikami's parents knows how this attitude came about, and an even later arc, "GS Mikami '78," provides evidence that greed was not a major feature of either Mikami's mother Michie in her youth, or of her father, whose backstory is for the first time expanded for the reader's delectation. She's like neither of them in that regard, but I don't think Shiina had no opinion on the matter. He just wanted to keep readers guessing, which I'll explore in another post.

Also, though I've not mentioned it here, I was hoping to get at least two mythcomics posts out of the MIKAMI series, since March is "Women's History Month," an event I sometimes like to celebrate-- though often not in a way any ultra-feminist would recognize. And to my immense pleasure, Shiina provided a second concrescent work in this serial-- though it required an earthquake to bring it forth.   

            

GOULD RUSH

 One of the earliest essays I wrote when I commenced this blog in 2007 was MYTHICITY, THREAT OR MENACE?, which partly concerned Eric Gould's 1981 MYTHICAL INTENTIONS IN MODERN LITERAURE. The book was not a major influence on my thinking, and I'm not even sure when I read it. In fact, at the time I wrote the 2007 essay, I didn't have a physical copy of INTENTIONS, and up to now, the only times I quoted Gould, it was from the few INTENTIONS passages in William G. Doty's MYTHOGRAPHY. However, thanks to a bargain purchase on Amazon, I now have a good copy of Gould's book.

I don't know if INTENTIONS justifies a large-scale explication. I expressed some disagreements with Gould in that early essay, and in the two or three others here where his name appears. My only strong influence from his work was his argument for the term "mythicity," meaning "the nature of the mythic," as Gould says in the introduction. From a Google search I don't get the sense that this term caught on with other literary critics, and it only gets mentioned in reference to INTENTIONS or to my own essays-- with one exception. A blog called Culturesmith devotes an essay both to Gould's term and to its earlier coinage by one Wilhelm Dupre in his 1975 book RELIGION IN PRIMITIVE CULTURES. It may be that Gould credited Dupre somewhere in INTENTIONS, but the latter's name is not in the index or the select bibliography.

Here's the only citation of Gould I made in the original essay:

The fact that classical and totemistic myths have to refer to some translinguistic fact-- to the Gods and Nature-- proves not that there are Gods, but that our talents for interpreting our place in the world may be distinctly limited by the nature of language.

This also appears in the intro to INTENTIONS, and my reaction to it now is the same as what I said in PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 3, where I was disputing what author Brian Attebery said against what he called "myth critics," including Joseph Campbell:

In my own essay I registered my disagreement with Gould on that point. Nevertheless, Attebery seems to have vaulted over the epistemological question, "what authority does religious 'belief' possess, even if it expresses the collective worldview of a given tribe, nation, or ethnicity?" I would be the last to validate the Doubting Thomas fallacy of the materialists, "If you can't dissect the risen body of Christ, that means no such body ever existed." But belief can be epistemologically valid insofar as its narratives reproduce epistemological patterns that are, in a sense, common to all human experience, not just to particular human groupings. For me at least, that transcendence of particular cultures trumps the "limits of language" that Eric Gould finds so disconcerting.

At base, Joseph Campbell shared this belief in such patterns, though he was, as I've said elsewhere, rather scattershot in his hermeneutics during his unquestionably distinguished career. But since Campbell and some of his fellow travelers are not validating myth based only upon whether the myth-narratives "authorize" a particular group's "belief," it's not surprising to me that Atteberry implicitly dismisses many comparativists that came into prominence in the 1960s, lumping together "Claude Levi-Strauss, Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye, and Mircea Eliade" as proponents of "myth criticism."

Though Gould's book had nothing to do with anything Atteberry wrote, or even the fantasy-genre with which Atteberry was concerned, as it happens Gould's introduction spells out his disagreement with Atteberry's focus upon purely historical manifestations of religious myth. Gould notes that "the issue for literary studies has long been the synchronic problem, that of trying  to explain what the mythic is..." The contrast between synchronic and diachronic approaches to linguistic analysis appears in this Wiki citation:

Synchrony and diachrony are two complementary viewpoints in linguistic analysis. A synchronic approach – from Ancient Greek: συν- ('together') + χρόνος ('time') – considers a language at a moment in time without taking its history into account. In contrast, a diachronic – from δια- ('through, across') + χρόνος ('time') – approach, as in historical linguistics, considers the development and evolution of a language through history.^[1]

Gould does not actually say in the intro that his is a diachronic approach-- of analyzing a subject across many different historical manifestations-- but that's the interpretation I take from his mention of the "synchronic problem." As noted above, I've found my own solution to all "synchronic problems," largely in the domain of epistemology-- though I have more recently averred that "epicosms," the domains of epistemological patterns, are inextricably interlaced with the domains of ontological declaration, or "ontocosms." I further in passing that I think Gould is far more preoccupied with ontology than with epistemology, though in a very different manner than Attebery, so I'm not sure how useful a re-read of INTENTIONS will be. 

MIKAMI MEDITATIONS PT. 2

 This post could have been a "near-myth" post, but as I get closer to finishing my reading of Takashi Shiina's GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI, I want to keep all the SWEEPER stuff in one bundle.

In the first part, I provided an overview of early installments of the 1992-99 manga series with respect to the imaginary psychology of the principal characters: ghost sweeper/exorcist Reiko Mikami, her lustful assistant Tadao Yokoshima, and her other assistant, mild-mannered female ghost Okinu (who reincarnates into a mortal body late in the series). In MEDITATIONS 1, I questioned whether or not there was a thymotic romance between Mikami and Yokoshima in the series as a whole. I strongly suspected Shiina had that intention, though, based on a page I reprinted from a 1993 sequence entitled "Dad's Here." In it, Yokoshima-- who's never received the slightest encouragement for his erotic approaches from Mikami-- welcomes his father Daishuu to Tokyo, though the older man is more than a little extreme in his behavior toward his son.

Daishuu, though still married to Yokoshima's mother, remains the sort of smooth heartbreaker Yokoshima would like to be. Then by a sequence of events, Daishuu goes on a date with Mikami, which ties Yokoshima up in knots. He dreams that the ten-years-older Mikami has married Daishuu and becomes his mother.

 

  For her part, Mikami never shows even a slight interest in Daishuu, not least because he's married, though Daishuu almost certainly wants to seduce the ghost sweeper to become a mistress. "Dad's Home" ends with a meaningless comic brawl between father and son.

  While "Dad's Home" had no direct impact on the series' direction, clearly Shiina had it in mind when, about two years from the series' conclusion, he created a bookend-story called "Mom's Home." Yokoshima's mother Yuriko visits him, declaring that she intends to divorce her husband and have Yokoshima live with her. Yuriko even acts just as rashly as her husband did on his earlier visit.

      

Upon meeting Mikami and Okinu, Yuriko describes her reasons for wanting to divorce Daishuu for cheating (though he will turn out to be innocent of this particular charge). She also makes Mikami very uncomfortable when she describes how she Yuriko married Daishuu after having been forced to beat him up several times for inappropriate behavior.

 

However, Yuriko has another similarity to Mikami: she's a high-roller businesswoman, and she plans to leave Japan with her son. Privately she tells Yokoshima that if either Mikami or Okinu will speak up to keep the young man in Japan, she'll let him stay-- though Yokoshima can't simply ask the women to intercede. So just as Yuriko plans to fly out, Yokoshima uses a magical device to impersonate Mikami-- only to get exposed when the real Mikami shows up.  

   
 

Yuriko, however, is less concerned with her son's mendacity than with Mikami overstepping her bounds, punishing her former employee, when it's obviously the mother's right to punish the errant child (which she does, even while talking to Mikami). Only one thing can save Yokoshima: a full confession of Mikami's feelings for him.

 

  Well, that and one other thing-- the timely arrival of Daishuu, who brings proof that he didn't cheat on Yuriko. Immediately Yuriko drops the whole matter and leaves with her husband. Mikami's confession of her feelings is rendered incomplete, allowing things to go back to the status quo. And for good measure, it's suggested that Yuriko may have manipulated things to make sure her boy got hooked up with a proper mate-- a mate just like the girl who married dear old Dad.  

THE READING RHEUM: THE SINGING CITADEL (1970)

 

I'm not sure how much further I'll delve into Michael Moorcock's Elric saga, since I often find the results uneven. I may just finish up with SLEEPING SORCERESS and then conclude with STORMBRINGER, the collection of stories in which Moorcock killed off his hero-- thus engendering dozens of prequels and interstitial tales. After that, maybe I'll explore his other two serials of the 1960-70s, Corum and Dorian Hawkmoon.

SINGING CITADEL was a Berkely paperback edition of four stories Moorcock had previously published in British magazines, only one of which is an Elric story, while two others were brought into the "Elric universe." Instead of reviewing them in order of collection, I'll go with the order of publication.

TO RESCUE TANELORN (G)-- This story, published in 1962 (the year after Elric's debut), is tangentially connected with the albino hero, thanks to a brief mention of Elric's rumored adventures. I don't know if Moorcock contemplated bringing this story's hero, Rackhir the Red Archer, into the Elric-verse that early, since the two character would not meet until 1972's ELRIC OF MELNIBONE. In any case, "Tanelorn" is easily the best story in the collection. Rackhir is a "warrior-priest" who served the same Lords of Chaos seen in the Elric tales. However, he and many similar warriors became weary of fighting their Lords' pointless battles, and so retired to a vaguely mystical city, Tanelorn. A Chaos Lord takes offense at these defections and summons an army of mindless beggars to destroy the city. Rackhir consults an aged magician to learn to reach a group of entities, the Grey Lords, for help, and the two of them venture into several alternate dimensions in search of Tanelorn's salvation. The conclusion seems rushed, but "Tanelorn" serves to put forth one of the author's best sketches of his nihilistic universe.

THE GREATER CONQUEROR (F)-- Published in 1963, "Conqueror" takes place in the historical domain of Alexander the Great, shortly after he made his foray into India. However, in Moorcock's version, Alexander's reign is the center of a struggle between the opposed powers of Good and Evil, represented respectively by the Persian deities Ormuzd and Ahriman (who may be a big influence on the athor's conceptions of Law and Chaos), Alexander's mother Olympias, a worshipper of Ahriman, consecrated her son's body and soul to Evil, and in some vague way Alexander's path of conquest is supposed to aid Ahriman's mastery of the world. The possessed Alexander is not the story's eminent hero: rather, a skeptical mercenary, Simon of Byzantium, is drafted by the powers of Good to take out the Macedonian monarch. Simon is quickly converted to the reality of the Good-Evil struggle by his encounter with real demons, and yet the conflict proves underwhelming, even up to a final sword duel between the hero and the possessed ruler. The characters are all flatly conceived and "Conqueror" feels like a concept that might've been interesting in a full novel, something along the lines of the Haggard-Lang fantasy THE WORLD'S DESIRE.

MASTER OF CHAOS (P)-- According to this vital Moorcock site, this story was composed in 1964, shortly after Moorcock published the 1963-64 Elric tales that became the fix-up novel STORMBRINGER, the one in which Elric dies. The hero is a valiant knight, Earl Aubec, who seeks to extend the dominion of his queen/lover, only to find that he's encroached upon the terrain of Chaos, and he never returns. The aforementioned site includes the information that Moorcock considered doing a series of stories with Aubec, but when the proposed series didn't pan out, Moorcock may have channeled some of these ideas into another character. Aubec is name-checked in ELRIC OF MELNIBONE in that the hero acquires the knight's fabled sword. Most if not all Moorcock contains strong elements of irony, but "Chaos" comes closest to being purely ironic in tone.

THE SINGING CITADEL (F)-- This short tale appears to be the first of the "prequel stories," as well as being written to clarify events in "The Stealer of Souls," (reviewed here) an Elric tale published in 1962. In "Citadel," Queen Yishana hires Elric and his Melnibonean magic-mastery to investigate a mysterious citadel into which Yishana's knights have disappeared. However, Yishana sweetens the pot by sleeping with the hero, and this pisses off her former lover, the court wizard Theleb Ka'arna. Thus Elric has to deal with sorcerous assaults from both the wizard and the master of the citadel, a minor Chaos-Lord named Balo. The tale is just okay, with the best part coming at the end. Yishana tells Elric not to bother seeking vengeance on Ka'arna, that he should just remain in her domain as her consort. But Elric is hot to pursue the wizard, and it's evident that the hero's accumulated guilt and regrets make it impossible for him to "settle down," arguably contributing to his doom.

In my crossover-system, "Tanelorn" is a null-crossover for having name-checked Elric.                    

MYTHCOMICS: "THE MAN WHO CAN SUMMON A STORM" (GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI, 1995)

 As I write this, I've not yet finished reading the entire GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI manga online, but paused at Volume 2 (1996), three years from the feature's conclusion. In MIKAMI MEDITATIONS I opined that mangaka Takashi Shiina intended to provide an epistemologically grounded psychology for his starring character Reiko Mikami, as to why she was both a peerless hero and a money-hungry businesswoman who exploited at least one employee. However, Shiina chose to dispense elements of that psychology in dribs and drabs. Shiina's biggest "drab" so far, 1995's "Storm," does not provide a total psychology for his heroine, but I'm seeing a strong pattern suggestive of Adler's compensation theory. So I'm writing this essay without reading all of the available volumes of SWEEPER, as something of a test of my method, before finishing the series and seeing what else the artist has in store.

"Storm" doesn't concern any sort of real tempest, and so far as I can tell, it's a metaphor for psychological upheaval. The story starts out largely with the status quo, although after roughly four years of acting the fool, Yokoshima has upgraded his skills, enough to function as an assistant ghost sweeper. But his ability to charm the skirt off Mikami remains non-existent.

Then Mikami learns that there's a competing GS outfit nearby, one subsidized by the Japanese government. She seeks them out, only to find that she knows the head of the agency-- and Yokoshima sees an unusual sight, that of Mikami acting "girly."

Saijou, head of the "Occult G-Men," lived with Mikami's family when she was just a child, because Saijou was training in GS skills with Mikami's mother. It's soon clear to Yokoshima that although Mikami calls Saijou "brother," her attitude toward him is hardly fraternal. Yokoshima immediately assumes that Saijou hopes to conquer Mikami's heart, especially since Saijou is taller, more handsome, and a stronger GS fighter than Yokoshima. However, it's soon disclosed that Saijou really doesn't see Mikami romantically, and his main purpose for seeking her out is to recruit her for his agency. And Mikami accepts, even though government pay is nothing like the money she makes as a private agent.

      

A flashback established that Saijou was the first crush of ten-year-old Mikami, and that she even confessed her feelings to him, though he didn't for an instant take her seriously. To be sure, Mikami only joins Saijou's agency on a probationary basis, and she expects Yokoshima and Okinu to keep running her private business, making big money for her. The young man, knowing Mikami better than Saijou does, enlists some of Mikami's colleagues to make the GS business more profitable than ever. However, when Mikami visits her agency, she's clearly depressed to see it functioning well without her.

Mikami overcompensates by trying to throw herself into her g-men work, but Saijou has seen the way she acts with Yokoshima. He gives Mikami a minor assignment to get her out of the way while Saijou has words with Yokoshima. The younger guy still believes that Saijou is a romantic rival despite the latter's denials, but Saijou still has only fraternal feelings for Mikami, and so he tests Yokoshima in battle. Yokoshima knows he's physically outclassed, so he not only flees battle, he humiliates Saijou with a variation on the old "order 100 pizzas for your enemy" trick.

   

However, Saijou accidentally pushes Mikami over the brink by giving her a mundane assignment--lecturing to schoolchildren-- that he'd easily perform with his altruistic mentality, but which is like poison to the high-spirited exorcist. Saijou, Yokoshima and Mikami's other friends find her in a hospital, not responding to anyone. She mechanically repeats the word "money," but doesn't respond when Okinu holds a pile of cash in front of her nose. She also doesn't respond when her first crush speaks to her. Then Yokoshima declares that her coma-like status means that he can take advantage of her, and Mikami immediately snaps back to normal and elbow-slams him. Saijou realizes that even though he only wanted to work with Mikami for non-romantic reasons, she's more suited to non-altruistic pursuits, so he fires her and returns her to Yokoshima. However, Saijou gets the last laugh by duplicating Yokoshima's "100 pizzas" trick, which has the added effect of putting the hapless schmuck back in the crosshairs of Mikami's wrath.

 So in "Storm," Shiina isn't quite ready to tell his readers exactly what makes Mikami coo-coo for currency. He does show that ten-year-old Mikami crushes so hard on "brother" Saijou that she acts just like a self-sacrificing female, willing to do anything to please her man. Yet when she tries to do it in her mature years, the effort almost destroys her, even though she can face down ghosts and demons without blinking. Further, whatever gave Mikami "gold fever" apparently happened between her pre-teen and teenaged years, going by the story I summarized in MIKAMI MEDITATIONS. "Storm" suggests to me that after ten-year-old Mikami was left behind by her crush when he sought altruistic pursuits, she overcompensated by pursuing a parallel course of heroic action, but only when she was well-paid. So she both followed Saijou's example and deviated from it.

And yet, if money was really all Mikami desired, she would have been pulled out of her coma by the presence of greenbacks. Instead, what awakens the sleeping beauty is not love's first kiss, but the (probably feigned) threat of rapine. Experienced readers are not likely to believe that Yokoshima would ever really rape a woman, in this story or in any other. He's a reader-proxy for very minor acts of molestation-- groping boobs, stealing kisses-- and in this story, he seems to realize, if only instinctually, that Mikami gets "fired up" when he molests her. In part, it stokes her ego to know that she can always kick his ass, while still feeding her sense of self-worth with his constant appreciation of her looks-- both pleasures she could never get from noble Saijou. Where Shiina will take his heroine from here, I don't yet know. But even if he goes in a different direction from "Storm," I expect I'll find his psychological twists just as engrossing. 

ADDENDUM: It belatedly struck me that although the title implies that the new character may be the "man" of the title, it seems to be Yokoshima who actually brings forth the full storm of Mikami's emotions, as opposed to causing her to repress them. That's assuming there's no special Japanese cultural meaning to the phrase, of course.