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Usamaru Furuya is the mind behind works like Short Cuts, Picasso Hallucination (幻覚ピカソ, Genkaku Picaso), and The Music Marie Plays (Marieの奏でる音楽, Marie no Kanaderu Ongaku). My experience with the first two series were very similar: a friend in college introduced me to them and I enjoyed them very much.
Genkaku Picasso is about a high school boy who loves to draw and hates to socialize with his classmates. Therefore, they have nicknamed him "Picasso," which happens to be one character off from his real name. After a girl in his class, who was his only friend, dies in a freak accident, he is suddenly able to see her as a small angel who hides in his pocket. She tells him that he needs to work with her to help various classmates through hard situations by conquering the monsters in the strange worlds of their dreams. Each one of them has a different relationship with the real world than he had expected from them. He really hates to do this task despite his talents, wanting only to be left alone to draw in peace, but of course has no choice. Along the way, he accidentally makes more friends than just one dead girl.
(Picture found on Baka-Updates Manga)
Short Cuts is very different from Genkaku Picasso. Rather than several normal volumes of manga, it is a brief, two volume series of joke stories. It reads more like a Saturday morning newspaper cartoon sometimes than a manga. There are reoccurring characters and themes, ridiculous situations poking fun at society, and mixed genres. A favorite subject within Short Cuts are ko-gals, which is a term used to refer to girly, carefree high school girls who walk around gossiping, wearing their uniforms, talking on the phone, and generally coming off as vapid. One story features a robot that was built to act like a ko-gal in order to hide its secret missions, but the project is ended prematurely due to the robot's unbelievably annoying nature and constant complaining. One story follows a group of girls hiking through a mountain cave while maintaining superficial talk and gossip, even after one of them falls to her death, all for the sake of a training exercise to keep their ko-kal skills honed. The same ko-gal club are in another comic, in which the captain of the club criticizes the girls for talking about politics. In another story, a future society worships the ancient fashion and habits of the ko-gals, with old men dressing up in uniforms and building huge statues of the high school girls. Many stories in Short Cuts feature jokes about the dirty old men who love ko-gals to the point of worship. Other stories include a constantly horny kindergarten teacher, a robot built to be bullied in order to bring peace to the rest of society, poop jokes, and lots of other high school jokes. Furuya consistently displays an understanding of comedic pacing.
(Picture found on Baka-Updates Manga)
I discovered Marie no Kanaderu on my own while reading manga online. The name is difficult to translate due to the Japanese grammar involved, and I have heard it as "Marie's Played Music," "Singing Music of Marie," and "The Music of Marie." The last one is the title I chose to go with, although it is missing the word kanaderu (奏でる), which means "to play an instrument." Without Marie's name in the title, it would simply translate as "the music being played," but the fact that the music belongs to Marie is both important and hard to portray in English with these particular word choices. As for how I found this manga, I actually did not think I would read it at first. The cover is fairly bizarre, which is why I clicked on the first chapter in the first place, and then the art is very, very different from the usual manga art I would like to see. The characters are drawn with more or less realistic proportions and builds, and their clothes were really weird. I thought about finding something else to read, but I ended up going with it since there were only two volumes to blow through. At the end of it, I was floored, and I continue to be amazed by it every time I reread this manga.
Marie no Kanaderu Ongaku is split into two books: Above (上, ue) and Below (下, shita). The series is about a future world in which everyone lives in peace under a single religion worshiping the goddess Marie and her three wise men, although different cultures have different names for her and different worship rituals along with different cultures. In one country called Pirito lives a young man named Kai, who looks up to the sky to see the great music box of Marie floating above their heads, smiling down at them. He has amazing hearing and birthmarks in the shape of religious symbols on the palms of his hands. Kai makes his living by listening to the sounds of the world, finding precious metals echoing in the earth and broken gears clanking in the machines that power the world. These machines are the great passion of everyone in the village of Giru, and are their main product. In Giru, Kai lives alongside his best friend Pipi and the other young adults of the community. Every since he was orphaned and came to live permanently in Giru, Kai has been looked after by the whole village, especially by Pipi's family. Pipi is a pretty, popular girl who is the daughter of a great inventor, who gives her amazing, huge music box animals that she puts in the special garden she has built. She is secretly in love with Kai, and desperately wants him to notice, but has decided that rather than tell him she will wait until her 18th birthday. In this country, when a girl turns 18 she has the opportunity to choose a husband at her birthday celebration by presenting him with a symbolic painted egg, which is why Pipi is holding an egg on the cover of book Above.
Kai has known for a long time that he is unusual—after all, he is the only one the animals and butterflies follow around—but in the summer of his 18th year he remembers details about something that happened to him as a child. He was swimming with Pipi and friends when he was sucked under the water and transported to the mystical forest of Marie, which she overlooked from the sky with chillingly human, even womanly, eyes. The three wise men appeared as robots that reached inside Kai's body and changed him somehow before returning him washed up on the beach. Afterward, his hearing was suddenly more powerful than anyone else's. He was gone for over a week and everyone was certain that he had died, except for Pipi. She refused to leave the beach or eat or drink anything, only kneeling and praying with her palms pointed out toward the ocean. When her little body was almost at its limit, Kai finally washed up on the rocks near shore, and the close friends became even closer. Pipi was clearly traumatized by Kai's disappearance and hardly lets him leave her sight anymore. Now, Kai and Pipi shop together, hang out together, and run errands together. Pipi always accompanies Kai on his journeys to find rare metals, sometimes getting messages from birds about where to find him and lead the villagers to him.
Kai talks about his recovered memories with the priest Guul, who lives in the caves beneath the Giru chapel where people come for quiet contemplation and his soft music. Guul listens carefully, pointing out that Kai may have been marked since birth for such a transformation by the birthmarks on his palms. He does not judge Kai for feeling that Marie's gaze made him feel as warm as that of a beautiful human woman would. Guul suggests that perhaps Kai's hearing is a gift that allows him to listen to Marie better than anyone else. He takes Kai down into the lower caverns, where there are destroyed tanks and weapons from a time past. There was war and killing. Then, Marie brought peace and maintains it with her lovely music. Has Kai become part of their goddess?
Some time goes by, and a girl in the village chooses a husband on her 18th birthday, which really gets Pipi excited and desperate for her plan to work. She has asked her father to build her something amazing as a proposal gift and show for Kai: the world's first successful flying machine. (In this world, machines only work up to a certain point; even when the theory is perfected, items like planes and automatons fail. So, Pipi may be asking her father for the impossible.) Despite liking Kai very much, however, Pipi parents do not feel that she should pursue her feelings for him, but there is no convincing her. Little does she know that Kai's devotion to the goddess Marie has grown into a physical attraction that disturbs him every time he looks up at her in the sky. Soon enough, Pipi drops by to visit Kai and sees him in his room masturbating while looking out his window towards the goddess. Pipi is horrified for many reasons, and becomes absolutely determined to fly, and once again her father tries to tell Pipi that there is something wrong with Kai, but she blacks out before he can say any more. Meanwhile, Kai goes back to Guul, disgusted by his own actions. Guul actually sees this as a deeper level of love for the goddess than other humans are capable of feeling.
On her 18th birthday, 9 brave suitors gather with gifts of art, dance, song, and machine to try and woo Pipi, and none of them are Kai. She ignores them all as her father and mother help her to push the flying machine onto the tracks that will help it launch. Dressed in feathers with her proposal egg around her neck and remembering a time as a child when she tried to jump out of a tree to impress Kai and failed on all fronts, Pipi is determined to fly higher than Marie and gain Kai's love. Simultaneous, one of their friends has built a robot that can speak and think, and all at once Pipi is flying and the robot is working. Just then, Kai looks up to see Marie looming over them, and a terrible sound pierces the air that no one else can seem to hear. The robot overloads and burns, the flying machine crashes, and Pipi's proposal egg is crushed.
In the second book, Pipi wakes up wrapped up in bandages, dreaming that Marie prevented her and Kai from being together as a happy couple. Kai is there beside her and insists that she not endanger herself anymore. Pipi agrees, and decides to try again to win Kai's love on her next birthday.
As the month's get colder, the whole of the village of Giru loads onto massive ships that will take them to a central island where people from all over the world will gather to share in the worship of Marie. Some people have different hand gestures used for blessings, others burn incense, some dance and play music, and others sleep. There are priests in shawls that walk around interpreting languages and acting as cultural bridges. Later that night, away from the hustle and bustle of the reunion, Kai goes to see Guul, who reveals his deepest sadness after Kai explains what he experienced on Pipi's birthday. Guul loves and worships Marie, but he wonders if she is what holds humanity back. Does she lovingly keep them in a cage, preventing them from flying high and hurting themselves? There was a time when technology, which is the heart and soul of Guul's home of Giru, was advanced and awesome. Now, it fails after a certain point. Telephones, robots, and other great creations must be shelved in a warehouse where they will be endlessly puzzled over.
Something strange happens after everyone returns from the worship trip. Kai goes out and hears all sorts of conflict going on around him. Two boys fight over who should be with a certain young woman. A man suggests to his friend that they cheat to get more money. People watching the fights breaking out get excited and do nothing to stop them. The robot starts to work again, and Pipi takes off in the flying machine successfully, swooping through the air convinced that now Kai will see that she is better than Marie. Kai listens to all this until he can barely understand the confusion, then looks up to see that Marie has split open to reveal her gear-filled music box interior. Her music has stopped playing and she no longer looks at all human. Kai screams in horror, and the three wise men and their forest envelop the village, freezing everyone but Kai. They lead him down into the mechanical world of creation below, winding through vast expanses of what seems to be a machine. At one point they come out into an open place and Kai looks up to see that they are under the ocean. Then, after continuing on for a time, they walk along a walkway and Kai looks down to see clouds and realizes that they are inside Marie. The wise men take him to the heart of the music box, and show him the key to turn should he choose to keep the music playing. Kai feels used and betrayed, and decides to free humanity, not turning the key. Tears fall from Marie's eyes as her music box body falls apart and crashes into the ocean.
The world of humanity as we know it starts again.
Kai works as a miserable salaryman who comes home to his wife Pipi, who drinks too much to look after their child properly. He sees horrible things on the television about war and death, and tells Pipi that they are lucky not to live such awful lives.
Kai, Pipi, and their friends walk across a burning desert. They are all children and starving to the point that their bellies are swollen and their eyes have shrunk into their heads. Pipi suggests that they eat one of the dead bodies they have seen along the way, but Kai stops her.
Kai and Pipi are aged world leaders who have just declared war on each other.
Kai and his friends are soldiers in a foreign country where they have stumbled across Pipi, a helpless girl with dark skin. Cocky and arrogant, Kai announces that they should take advantage of her.
Kai was a soldier that was blown up by a bomb, and Pipi has won an award for photographic journalism for the photo of him and his mutilated comrades.
Kai snaps out of the vision to discover that he is still in the room with the music box with the three wise men watching him. He realizes that they are indeed wise and see why they let a human like him make this choice, and so turns the key to start the music again. The gears start turning, the mechanical animals move again, and the world below resumes. Kai finds himself flying above the world, huge and weightless. Beside him is Marie, a beautiful young woman with golden hair and a bare chest. Having dreamed of meeting her like this, Kai is very embarrassed and she teases him a little. She then shows him that the whole world is connected, that all the gears turn together. After giving Kai a quick peck on the cheek, Marie thanks him and returns him home, where Pipi's flying machine crashed again and the robot overloaded.
On a snowy day, Kai goes to Pipi's home and tells her that he has decided to leave Girul to become one of the priests who interprets languages and helps everyone find a way to worship Marie. Pipi is very upset, but walks him all the way to the docks so he can get on the boat. Cats and birds swarm around to follow them, and they hold hands as they walk. Kai gets on the boat, and Pipi says her farewell, then breaks down into shouting and crying as the boat pushes out to sea. Kai looks back sadly, thinking that if only he had not been chosen by Marie he would have stayed with Pipi. Then, Kai disintegrates and is blown away by the winter wind.
Years and years later, Pipi is an old woman in a wheelchair reading bits of blank paper thinking they are from Kai. Guul is also old and withered, but comes to visit Pipi and her aging father. The reader discovers that no one else was ever able to see Marie, the forest, or the wise men. Kai was the only one who could see the giant music box goddess Marie floating above their heads or hear the musical undertones floating through the air. We also find out that Kai never returned after being swept out to sea; only his decaying body ever made it back. However, Pipi always acted as though Kai was still alive. Butterflies hovered near her and the predictions about where to find metals and broken gears were always right, so everyone just got used to the idea that maybe Kai really was there and she could see him. And it turned out that Guul could hear him too. At the very end, we discover that the huge garden Pipi built around her parents' house is actually in the shape of Kai's face. Somehow, a part of her had known that Kai needed a body and she tried to make one for him, even though she was never consciously able to accept that Kai was dead, even as an old, old woman. Like Kai, her life seems to have come to a sad end of weak-mindedness, yet she is unaware of this fact. For her, life is dreaming of Kai and the music he might be hearing.
After finishing Marie no Kanaderu Ongaku for the first time, I had to go back and flip through it again just to get a handle on whether or not Kai really was invisible to most people. If you are paying attention, you do start to notice that people speak about Kai rather than to him, usually focusing on Pipi since she is the voice of Kai. People are not really able to answer when Pipi asks if they have seen where Kai went, and people often deduce that Kai is around by saying things like, "That's Kai over there with you, isn't it, Pipi?" His home is also pretty barren. You never see him eating or anything like that.
Personally, I find Pipi's character to be fairly annoying, but at the same time she is necessary. She has always been pretty and popular, and even a bit spoiled by her parents. She grew up in a big house on the hill, and does pretty much whatever she wants and get almost anything she asks for. Pipi had a record number of suitors at her birthday, and is always surrounded by friends. At times she can be quite whiny, cocky, flashy, and immature. She even speaks about herself in the third person as though she knows she is as good as royalty. In the glimpses of a world without Marie's music, we see that Pipi often seems weaker in mind than others, falling to alcoholism or thoughts of cannibalism before her peers. This suggests that in an imperfect world Pipi's worse qualities would perhaps be her most obvious. On the other hand, Pipi is attractive, talented, outgoing, persistent to a fault, and does not care at all what people think of her (unless, of course, that person is Kai). Whether or not Pipi is someone I would have the energy to be around, all these qualities all make her highly visible, the complete opposite of Kai. Her devotion to him is greater than her devotion to the goddess, which has been true since they were children, and is probably why she may have been chosen by Marie as well, in a way. After all, Pipi can talk to birds and see Kai. Pipi might feel hostile towards Marie, since the goddess is her rival in love more or less, yet some kind of door has been held open for Pipi so that she can provide Kai with a life. I would say Pipi's personality is the only way for Kai to exist as he did, with a job and a home. No one else has the strange set of qualities that Pipi has that allow her to convey his messages to others. Who else could say they see a dead child walking around and not be labeled a freak? Her invulnerable sense of self worth is contagious, and everyone in the village gets swept up by whatever ideas she has. Additionally, whether or not Kai existed, Pipi always led everyone to real finds of precious metals. In fact, his prowess is so widely accepted that his name is famous in other towns and villages, who are fascinated by the idea of a spirit boy.
As to why Guul the priest can hear Kai too, his ability seems based around his holiness, or perhaps his devotion in spite of what he has come to realize. He knows many things about what the world once was, and sees how the world functions now. Although he feels jealous of Kai's ability to feel devotion to the point of love for Marie, making her far more real to him than to the rest of the world, Guul sees that what Marie may be doing is keeping humanity in a cage without letting technology, and therefore people, advance. As a citizen of the machine-loving village of Giru in the mechanics' country of Pirito, Guul is saddened by the thought that the robot will never work, that the planes will never again fly the way they did when humanity was allowed to be violent and cruel. Kai's presence seems to remind Guul that he both worships and doubts Marie. This strange balance of devotion and sin is probably the reason he can see Kai. Pipi is similar. She worships the goddess yet shouts blasphemies at the sky. Of course, Pipi's focus is on Kai and Guul's focus is on Marie, but there is a feeling to doubt towards Marie that seems to make them capable of seeing the world for what it really is, and therefore Kai. He is almost literally the key to the strange, semi-artificial utopia they live in, the one who decides if the cage of dreams is better than true, dangerous flight on the whole.
I have two possible interpretations of Marie no Kanaderu Ongaku.
The first is this this: everyone who is chosen the way Kai was will see Marie and her wise men a different way. Kai is the orphaned son of a mechanic who died in a landslide in a nearby mining village. Pipi's father is a famous inventor and she has grown up around music box animals and creations. Their friend who built the robot is passionate about doing the impossible. Almost everyone in the village of Giru and the country of Pirito is somehow involved in the art of technology, and people travel from all over the world to train and work there for this reason. Basically, every character we see has a certain grease monkey view of the world. We know that people from other countries exist, that they have their own worldviews, but none of them every feature into the story beyond trying to speak with our characters in another language. So, the gear and cog themed world of Marie and her wise men does not strike the reader as strange or out of place. Even Marie generally looks like a robot. However, I noticed that not everything looks like the inside of a mechanism; the forest that follows Marie across the surface of the world has a distinctly organic quality to it, even if it looks more like a cluster of clay sculptures than a forest of trees. This suggests to me that Marie and her wise men appear before chosen people in a way that is comfortable for them. On top of that, every time we see Marie or the wise men, it is well established that we are seeing them through Kai's eyes, through his personal experience. No one else is there with him in these moments. For a long time we assume that everyone sees what Kai sees, which is Marie floating in the sky, but although Marie seems to circle the globe every other character looks up to a clear sky when they are on their own. Pipi even shouts at a clear, open sky when she decides to voice her challenge to Marie. At the end of the story, Kai sees the gears of the world and is rewarded for his difficulties as the chosen one with a visit to the stars with Marie. He sees Marie as a cheeky human girl, not all the different from Pipi in many ways, and flies about on mechanical wings that burst from his back. The solar system is a giant mobile and everything is connected by pulleys. Before Kai is returned to reality, Marie gives him a flirtatious little kiss as a thank you, which seems like the sort of thing a girl like Pipi might do were she and Kai dating rather than a powerful goddess. It is a stark contrast from her usually benevolent, maternal, and sometimes wrathful face that we have seen throughout the story. All of this seems to point to Kai's perception rather than a truth. When Kai dies, he turns to dust rather than crumble apart into a mass of gears the way we saw Marie do earlier in the story. Like the forest, this dust seems organic, unlike the mechanical wings that came out of Kai's back at one point. Kai's physical attraction to Marie may have been one of the changes made to his body way back when the wise men kept him in the forest as a child for over a week, but the way his love manifests itself is a vision of a girl a lot like Pipi, who he acknowledges should have been the love of his life had he been normal. The fact that Marie looks like Pipi and acts like her makes the whole thing feel like an almost ridiculous dream. As he disintegrates at the end, Kai sees that he is no longer able to see Marie, that he has truly been returned to humanity, although he has no body and no purpose to keep him tethered to the world any longer. Finally, Guul explains at the end of the story that Kai's descriptions of Marie and the wise men fit in with the lore in the holy books. The way to Marie is down through the ocean and the earth, and the forest and her wise men follow her journey across the sky. Yet again, there is something in Kai's world from when he was a child that can explain why he might perceive Marie the way he did. A country is mentioned that lives amongst enormous trees and primarily exports fruit. Perhaps someone from there would see Marie as some sort of carved wooden music box.
The second: humanity lives in an artificial world that is a dissected and reassembled version of earth rebuilt on the ruins of the old. Buried beneath villages like Pirito are artifacts from the old world of war, and legends say that Marie struck all that down in order to bring peace from the ashes. People have already rediscovered how to build telephones, planes, and automatons, so it is hard to say how long it has been since the old world existed, but it is safe to say based on Guul's descriptions that people had reached an almost godlike mastery of technology. Cities were massive, flight was easy, and space travel may even have been perfected. So, is it possible that the people of the future decided that they had gone too far? That human nature is both endlessly curious and violent at the same time? I cannot say whether a small group or humanity as a whole made this decision, but it seems to me that someone decided to build Marie, her wise men, her forest, and the world around them. Is this a small, separate world from our earth? Is this an experimental group of human beings living on this tiny planet overseen by Marie? When Kai is brought up high to see what the world looks like from a far, it looks more like a diorama or the inside of an observatory than a real universe. Going back to my perception theory, this may be due to the fact that Kai sees everything having to do with Marie as being mechanical and clock-like. However, I would say that the two theories can work in tandem. Marie may have been built with a future technology we could scarcely imagine, especially if she and the wise men manage to pull off mind bending tricks like climbing to Marie by going down through the ocean, or blowing up Kai's view of the world so that he feels as big and omniscient as Marie herself. Are the people of this world normal sized or miniature? Are they kept in a separate universe? Are they living on an enclosed planet away from earth? Was a shell built around the planet to shield this new and improved earth from alien intrusion? Whatever the case, someone decided that humanity was too destructive on its own, both towards itself and the environment, and took matters into their own hands. My impression is that humanity itself chose cut back its own growth, which is why a human must always make the decision to rewind the music box and leave the world alone. The wise men are the messenger and Marie is the enforcer. I have yet to decide what the forest might be. Perhaps it is a glimpse of the odd, ceramic technology of the far future.
The art alone is reason to read The Music Marie Plays. I have included only the covers because deciding which images did the work justice would take too long. Yes, the people are drawn in a somewhat unorthodox way, but I think it works for the story. It makes the weird fashions and backgrounds less jarring to look at in there strangeness. The attention to detail is amazing. I love examining everything from the culture of Kai and Pipi's hometown to the complex world of the goddess. It is so short that I encourage readers to take a look at it for themselves.
