http://sf-fantasy-books.blogspot.com/2009/05/michael-moorcok-stealer-of-souls-free.html

Dirty, violent fantasy masterwork with great intro by Alan Moore free for a limited time.

and a Japan connection – Moorcock on Amano Yoshitaka -

http://www.nippon2007.us/GOH/Moorcock_tribute_to_amano.php

As for the «outcasts» angle— it seems to me to be a cross-genre thing, still going on strong; Japanese pop fiction always seem to romanticize the same kind of individualistic loners that would be shunned in real society (the Musashi novels, the typical shōnen hero, &c.), and those are often identified with the poor, the foreign (or alien), the inaka (Dragon Ball’s kid hero: «ore goku da»), and generally the Other. But when you try to talk seriously about outcasts, you end up like Kenzaburo Ōe.

PS: I know my previous posts got canned, but I had to chip this one in for whoever sees it and no, I dont have anything to do with the spambots on Meta no.

Yamada does, however, fit with engagement with one of those “other” Wests that I mentioned earlier as well as a sort of self-appointed ambassadorship to “blackness”. Really, however, it is the “West” of, say, American non-fiction of the 60s at its worst (think Norman Mailer writing about rippling ebony and primal rhythms). It is at once “black is beautiful” and condescending. However, I can’t think of a single reason to read Yamada other than to get angry at her.

Tales of the Otori struck me as being more “Eragon in Japan” – failing to break out of the typical fantasy mold, it found a niche by, as you said, going with a Japonisme brand.

Ninpocho – it is both fantasy and fantastic, however, I’m not sure that this is the right discussion in which to rework two pretty good critical concepts – a type of fantasy that creates a mythical world and a type that pretty much brings some fantastic elements into our one (or one much like it). Don’t want to go too far into anime here but I don’t think that it should be a surprise that Jubei Ninpocho director Kawajiri ended up making the Highlander anime – there are more similarities in style there than with LOTR.

Where did the Ninpocho style come from? I have not read much in the way of interviews with Yamada Futaro (and if someone has some examples of him talking about his influences, please share) but I don’t see a Tolkien influence or anything (he started publishing his ninja books in the late 1950s – before LOTR was translated into Japanese). Off the top of my head I’d say that he was influenced by older Japanese and Chinese fantasy literature like Hakkenden (he did a retelling of it) and Suikoden, the popularity of Yoshikawa Eiji, the boom in zangyaku mono that was going on at the time (especially in film, but it also saw the publication of Nanjo Norio’s stuff, which inspired the recent manga “Shiguri”), and the ghoulish aesthetic of Yokai art and the similar vibe of some Edogawa Ranpo stuff (he wrote mystery novels before ninja).

In any case, Yamada Futaro, like Shirato Sanpei (who makes Ninja into Burakumin), uses the Ninja POV to look at feudal society from the margins with the lives of commoners destroyed at the whim of horrible elites. The two sides are not “good and evil”, but rather “evil and pitiful victims of evil”. If there is a European influence here, it is probably the Marxist vogue among Japan’s cultured left in the 1950s – precisely the same trend that saw Nagisa Oshima make a ninja cartoon and Shimabara Rebellion film between his deconstruction of the student movement, Zainichi rights films, and teardowns of the state. All of this alternative stuff comes to together later – Miyazaki and Takahata go with Ainu as their alternative collectivist society in “Horus”, and in the 1980s, we get Ainu ninja lambasting the state in “Kamui no Ken”. This was the part of Japanese history that never got coopted as something for salarymen to study for negotiating hints.

Who would have thought that we would end up talking about Yamada Futaro and Yamada Emi in the same thread?

Returning to Leo’s point, off the top of my head, what if we think about a “greater high fantasy” which is about lenses overlaid on history rather than specific details like elves, barons, and wizards? For example, Tales of the Otori would fit very nicely into a Greater High Fantasy category. Superficially, it draws heavily on Japan and Japonisme (geography, proper nouns, politics, technology — even the magic is ninja magic), but if you leach out the local color and look at the skeleton alone, it’s a standard, mildly magical, farmboy-makes-good fantasy series, set in a heroic fictional world.

I don’t think I’ve read any Ninpocho, but if it was as influential as Leo says and it works along similar lines, you could view it as a Meiji-esque appropriation of the _tools_ of Eurocentric “high fantasy” for Japanese purposes, while leaving the _content_ well enough alone. Just like most of the Meiji authors wrote books along the lines of the foreign Serious Literature they’d read, but about Japanese people in Japan.

(The “must not include real people” thing might be fudgeable as a cultural conversion, given that for example the Japanese equivalent of Arthurian legends would be the tale of the Heike and so on — things that can be documented to have actually happened, if not quite so glamorously.)

Marxy’s suggestion goes well for other some high literature – Oe and Endo come to mind as people who carried on elements of the Natsume / Mori “dialogue” with the West (Endo with a form of moralizing ambassador behavior) – but of course circulating at the very same time were people like Abe Kobo and Kaiko Takeshi who were interested in offering something very different. There are people that you could say have done it lately as well like (the horrid) Yamada Emi.

We can’t, however, escape the fact that in the “golden age” of film, the “Westernized” Kurosawa (competing with John Ford, channeling Tolstoy) was not as popular or as critically acclaimed as Ozu or Imai Tadashii – two directors who didn’t seem to be in dialogue with the outside at all. Manga also quickly rejected the basic visual style and narrative tropes of American comics.

“fantasy is an interesting subgenre, but really, I wouldn’t say that Japan’s output was deferential to “the West””

Japanese sword and sorcery fantasy strikes me as having gone from D&D (Lodoss War, Crystania, Guinn Saga – am I missing anything pre 1985 or so?) to parody (Slayers, Orphen, Bastard) without having stopped at “literature”. There have been alternatives – I was very, very surprised to read that Miura Kentaro’s “Berserk” was not inspired by the British “Warhammer” thing – seems like an example of two ideas/world views being worked out in two different places at the same time (perhaps both as a rebellion against Tolkien – although I think that Miura’s was probably more of a second hand rebellion). And now “Moribito” and “Twelve Kingdoms” seem like really good alternatives although when it comes to escaping Tolkien’s Christianizing (perhaps backdoor, through the pastoral), Japanese have had an unfair advantage.

In any case, it is really exceptional that the major Japanese fantasies of the “Harry Potter” decade have been Asianized, politicized, S&S epics. Perhaps Japanese kids get enough schoolboys with powers in Jump and Sunday.