Monthly Archives: November 2024

Of Rakugo and Legacy

Posted by natechen on

One of the trends I hate the most in modern storytelling is the focus on the moment and the total disregard of the past. No longer do the facts of an existing story matter for high and mighty artists looking to do their own thing. This trend shows up everywhere nowadays. Amazon’s Rings of Power, Disney’s mangling of Star Wars (particularly the old Extended Universe), every Star Trek movie and series since the end of Enterprise – the list goes on and on. Old stories are cast aside to ‘make room’ for new stories, as if the old was some kind of barrier to achievement. There is an outright hostility to legacy in the major American studios these days.

There’s a lot you can say in response to that in the abstract, commenting on the way SoCal is childless, and thus views legacy as aberrant, or on the fetishization of rebellion that has defined the arts for the last hundred years or so. These kinds of observations are fine for what they are. But I am a storyteller and I tend to respond to these kinds of attitudes by reflecting on stories that see legacy not as some kind of obstacle or enemy to be overcome but as an asset or even the heart of the story.

Akane-banashi is a manga written by Yuki Suenaga and illustrated by Takamasa Moue that focuses on the art of rakugo. This is a traditional performing art that is somewhere between 200 and 250 years old that enjoyed it’s greatest influence in the early 1900s. It consists of a single person sitting in a formal pose and telling a story to the audience. Character, situation and action are all conveyed through use of pantomime, changes in voice and the use of a paper fan and piece of cloth as props. The performer is known as a rakugoka.

Shinta Arakawa is the stage name of Tehru Osami, a man studying to be a rakugoka. He has invested thirteen years of his life into mastering skills and studying under his master, Shiguma Arakawa, as a member of the prestigious Arakawa School of Rakugo. His family struggles to make ends meet, his daughter gets into fights at school when bullies call him a deadbeat and his wife’s family has never quite approved of him. Yet his daughter admires him, his wife supports him and his house is full of the magic of rakugo.

So Shinta continues to perform to small audiences, hoping to get promoted to the rank of shin’uchi, a rakugo headliner. Then he can get bigger gigs and a larger share of the profits. All he has to do is impress the leading performers in the Arakawa school at one big performance. In particular, he has to impress the school’s leader, Issho Arakawa.

Except he doesn’t. When Shinta and six other Arakawa prospects are given the opportunity to perform for Issho Arakawa and receive acknowledgment as shin’uchi the result is shocking. Issho expels all seven of them without explanation. While there’s nothing preventing them from starting over from scratch with another rakugo master in another school, Tehru does not have that luxury. His family is depending on him and he can’t keep them waiting any longer.

So Tehru Osami sets aside his stage name and gets a job selling concrete. He does well, draws an impressive salary and never tells a story again. His family eats better, his neighbors respect him more and his house… well, the magic of rakugo vanishes from it. And Akane – his daughter – is mortified.

A few months later she comes to Shiguma’s door and demands to learn the art of rakugo from him, so she can prove that the performances her father gave were not worthless. Taking up her father’s calling she sets out to prove her own mettle and redeem Shinta Arakawa’s name.

In and of itself, Akane’s struggle and goal is compelling.

However, the Osami family legacy is only the tip of the iceberg in Akane-banashi. Rakugo is a traditional art form, something that has much stronger connotations in Japan than in the US. It can only be passed down from a master to an apprentice. The very concept of legacy is built into the way it propagates. As Akane learns more and more about the art form she discovers that everyone who performs it carries at least as much emotional connection to rakugo as she does.

Ironically her biggest target, Issho Arakawa, is no exception to this. As the antagonist of Akane-banashi, Issho is a fascinating enigma. Rakugo is generally considered a form of comedy yet Issho is almost never shown smiling when he’s not performing. In fact, on first glance he’s a bit of a grump, always grumbling and complaining. Then we realize that’s an illusion. Issho is actually focused on his art form with a frightening, laserlike intensity that allows for no failure or contradiction.

When Akane finds an opportunity to confront Issho in person and ask why her father was expelled from the Arakawa school we gain our first major insight into his character. He deflects the question by telling Akane he is in mourning. Rakugo is dying, you see. In the modern age, with the Internet and smart phones affording the average person a constant bombardment of entertainment, there’s little hunger for the simple yet profound entertainment rakugo provides. Only the most captivating rakugoka have any hope of retaining an audience in that environment. In short, Issho feels he must carry the legacy of rakugo itself on his shoulders.

As time goes on we find that Shiguma, the man who taught both Tehru and Akane the art of rakugo, also bears a legacy from his master. One he hoped to pass on, first to Tehru and then to Akane. And it is a legacy he and Issho fought over, for it turns out the two of them both learned their art from the same man.

As time goes on and the story of Akane-banashi builds on itself the legacies of each character and the legacy of rakugo itself join together like the pieces of a mosaic. We go from a story about a single character, trying to master a craft and right a wrong, to a vast web spanning generations, all tied together by a passion for performance. Here the old is no impediment to expression. It is the very foundation of it. Even Issho Arakawa, for all his dour moods and callous behavior, presents hard but realistic lessons that the up and coming talent must eventually grapple with.

It is this web of generational legacy that makes this simple story about traditional comedy tick. It transforms a tale about finding a career from a straight forward, if beautifully illustrated, coming of age story to a deep, rich and compelling emotional journey. It makes rakugo more interesting than blockbuster movies with multimillion dollar budgets. And it is why, if you have any interest in the performing arts or legacies, you should absolutely make the time to read Akane-banashi.

A Slow Thaw

Posted by natechen on

I admit that the Cameron Winter mysteries fill me with an odd sense of delight.

To explain that I feel I have to backpedal a bit to when I first read Andrew Klavan’s The Great Good Thing, a memoir of how he came to love writing, literature and eventually Christ. For a person who is fond of all three of those things, Klavan’s memoirs were fascinating reading. However after reading The Great Good Thing and listening to a few of his podcasts I thought I would try one of his novels out and bought a book titled Werewolf Cop.

Perhaps I should add a disclaimer.

In his nonfiction prose and his podcasting Klavan is witty, wry and humorous, beginning most of his shows with a two or three minute satire segment and inviting his audience to laugh with him through the fall of the Republic. I was aware that Klavan’s fiction was focused on gritty tales of crime. However I think I can be forgiven if my expectations for a book titled Werewolf Cop were slightly colored by how Klavan speaks when addressing his audience directly.

Klavan’s stories are fascinated with the darkest parts of human nature. They are also wrapped up in the question of how we, as people, must fight back against that darkness. However, in order to properly ask that question he first has to take us deep into the worst parts of our nature to confront who we really are when all the lies we tell us about how nice and kind we are get stripped away. We must know the enemy before we can fight it.

On my first reading of Werewolf Cop I was surprised by how dark the novel was, how little the surface level ridiculousness of the title bled through into the narrative and how closely tied to the existing culture the overall plot was. It wasn’t a bad book, in concept, but it lacked something in the execution. The protagonist was an interesting character but his ability to grapple with the evil of his situation seemed almost… off kilter. The darkness of the situation felt like it should have had a much bigger impact on him, on his family and on his life than we really got from the story. The impact of such a thing felt like it should have extended much further.

All this brings me back to Cameron Winter.

By structuring the series as a slow unfolding of Cameron’s past in conjunction with a series of very depraved crimes Winter must unravel in the present Klavan accomplishes two things. He allows Cameron to grapple with the present from a position of semi-detachment. At the same time he justifies Cameron’s distant attitude by telling us about Cameron’s past and the many deep marks it has already left on him. Klavan weaves the past and present together with great expertise. Stories play out over two time periods with the events in each period expounding upon those in the other.

In my review of the previous book in the series, The House of Love and Death, I mentioned that I thought Cam was at a turning point. After reading A Woman Underground I feel both vindicated and surprised. It is, indeed, a turning point in Cameron’s life but not quite the one that I was expecting. At the end of Love and Death Cameron was on the cusp of forming a healthy relationship with a woman for the first time in a long time. However at the opening of A Woman Underground we learn he hasn’t contacted Gwendolyn Lord, the woman in question, for over five months. He isn’t quite ready to take that step yet.

Then, for the first time in the series, Klavan allows a character from Cameron’s past to enter his life in the present of their own volition. Charlotte, the girl who is the source of half of Cameron’s neurosis, makes a brief and fleeting effort to contact him and throws everything in his life out of whack. The result is a slow rolling disaster that forces Cameron to finally face and resolve a small part of the misfortune that has twisted him into such knots for most of his life.

As usual, Klavan ties his plots of hard-hearted and selfish men and women with threads of modern day events. This is done more to create a backdrop for the story than for any political commentary, which I appreciate. Fans of recurring characters like the Recruiter or Stan-Stan will not be disappointed either. However the most controversial element of this story will probably be Charlotte herself.

By exhuming, staking and burying a ghost of his past Cameron has made a definitive step forward in his character arc, fundamentally changing the dynamic between himself and the rest of the cast he works with. Charlotte, who’s shadow defined most of the character work in the first four books of the series, is going to be much less of an element going forward. Some readers, particularly those enamored of the predictable formula of television, may dislike that. I am optimistic that it signals we are going to go even deeper into the element that made the series appeal to me in the first place: Cameron’s past and how it shapes his present.

There is also a meta commentary in this story on the nature of story itself, something most authors can’t help but slip into their work at some point or another. Both Cameron and Margaret, his therapist, comment on the hand of a storyteller at work in Cam’s life. It’s the first hint of faith we see from the stubbornly agnostic protagonist and a bit of a tongue in cheek fun from Klavan himself. More than that, there is an interesting subplot early in the story that hinges on an author. The use of fiction to push an agenda and reframe a story is an interesting twist. Normally this would be the plot element where an author makes their apologia for playing god but Klavan chooses to refrain from this particular cliché. Instead, that kind of editorializing author is left to a rather ignoble fate.

As an author myself I can agree with that message but as a reader it did feel a little intrusive. Fortunately this is not enough of a major plot thread to create a negative impact on an otherwise excellent story. While others may come away with a different opinion I implore you not to let doubts about such a storyline keep you from enjoying a well told tale. As usual, I look forward to reviewing Klavan’s next work, whether it be fiction or nonfiction. Hopefully it will come soon.

Speaking of books, I am proud to announce the release of my first book! It compiles eight stories of high adventure in a West that never was. Follow Roy Harper as he makes a living as a magic wielding mercenary, making the West a better one bounty at a time. Get it here:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DNP7DC82

AI – Two Reasons for Optimism

Posted by natechen on

There’s been a lot of hand wringing around the potential innovation and potential hazards of a thing called “AI.” There have been many debates about ethics and implications. The technology could force a significant shift in the way we look at intellectual work and intellectual property and I regret to inform you that any attempt to prevent it’s development will inevitably be worse for humanity than allowing it. (Don’t believe me? Look into why Roman technology stagnated.)

What I don’t want to do today is contribute to that debate. I am more interested in some things I’ve seen in AI that are actually signs for optimism about the way we will react to the technology. This is not to disregard the shortcomings and hazards AI may pose. But I am a creator first and foremost. We survive by making things that emphasize the good and beneficial aspects of our tools rather than by constantly dwelling on all the shortcomings. Hazards are things to be avoided and drawbacks things to be compensated for. The real question is what will we get if we avoid and compensate our way to a successful AI creative environment?

Well, the first thing is we will get a much more verbal society. Ever since Apple Computers introduced the first graphical user interface (technically inspired by Xerox, I believe, but still usually credited to Apple) electronics have been moving us towards a visual culture. Look at any smartphone screen and you can see the upshot of this. Lots of pictures, very few words. However the things we call AI are large language models (LLMs) developing algorithmic prediction based on a neural networking framework – a bunch of fancy terms meaning they read the Internet and form an idea of how the words connect to each other. That means in order to get an output from the LLM you must input words. You cannot press buttons with pictures on them. You cannot draw something.

You. Must. Use. Words.

This is very different from the way using electronics have been going for the last twenty to thirty years. Nothing has dealt more damage to the modern person’s verbal skills than how little they are needed to use modern tools. Don’t get me wrong, the visual communication employed in modern user interfaces is quite impressive. Given the international market for much of these products its also very practical. However it has also reduced the interest in and power of verbal communication in almost every aspect of society. An AI built on an LLM pushes the pendulum back in the other direction by forcing prospective users to interact with it verbally. For the writer and the storyteller that is a positive development.

Of course, AI requires a very idiosyncratic kind of verbal communication right now and that’s less than ideal but I will take what I can get.

That brings me to the next thing about AI that gives me cause for optimism and that is the need for framing. If you have used some kind of online form in the last five years or so you may have been asked to find all of the stop lights or buses in a picture before you can submit it. The primary purpose of this exercise is to prevent automated programs from flooding the form with submissions. The bots that fill out these forms cannot understand the pictures so they fail this simple test.

The secondary purpose of this exercise is to create AI that can understand the pictures.

One of the things no AI can do is frame an object. When the AI program looks at that picture all it sees is a bunch of pixels arranged in a grid. It has no way to tie specific groups of those pixels to a concept like a bus or a stoplight because buses and stoplights are arbitrary concepts invented by humans. The AI has to be taught the concept to understand it. The idea must be “framed” for the AI by human beings who already grasp it.

Human beings have a remarkable ability to learn new concepts and apply them to the world around them based on their pattern recognition skills. It is this ability to “frame” issues that gives rise to creativity, language and communication. Even if an AI can be taught the very broad, basic aspects of something like the law or medicine it still will not grasp the intricacies of a given situation in its specifics. Working out these intricacies and communicating them back to an AI is going to be a necessary skill going forward. This, in turn, will demand people develop situational awareness and communication skills, things which technology has so far driven people away from, rather than towards.

This emphasis will, once again, push people to develop verbal skills which our society has largely allowed to atrophy over the last thirty years or so. In this environment there will be plenty of opportunities for people with a strong command of language to thrive. Better yet, it may change cultural tastes. Visual art is all well and good, don’t get me wrong. I love to draw as much as I love to write. However there hasn’t been as much taste for verbal craftsmanship as there has for visual craftsmanship in my lifetime and if the rise of LLM AI pushes our culture towards verbal excellence again I think it would be a nice development.

I am not saying these things are guaranteed. Nor am I in any way implying that AI will not cause our culture considerable difficulties as it grows towards its full potential. The printing press and the Internet did those things as well. However I do see some reasons to embrace this shift in technology not just for its ability to boost dreary things like efficiency and productivity but also for its ability to push our culture towards aspects that have long been ignored by most people – the communication of ideas through verbal excellence. It is by no means guaranteed but one can hope.

The Empire of Southern California

Posted by natechen on

Most artists are obsessed with their craft, thinking about it constantly and drawing strange connections between disparate points of data to arrive at new conclusions. I am no exception to this rule. A long term study of the art of storytelling has led me to an interesting conclusion – there is more to the strange distortions that have felt through American culture than just a loss of skill or a growth of a particular ideology.

In some ways this was not a huge revelation to me. While there are real signs that ideology has taken over vast swaths of the people who produce most of America’s modern stories, that cannot explain things on its own. Sure, overpowering ideology creates blinders that get in the way of storytelling. It hampers the development of key storytelling skills and distorts the sense of truth and beauty that all the best art relies on.

Ideology is a very limited thing. In and of itself it creates a framework for viewing the world and if that framework is detached from what makes a good story that’s an issue. But if the ideology has good grounding in truth then steeping in that ideology can actually be beneficial. Ideologically driven stories can also succeed if they are tempered by other contributions from people with less ideological commitment, or at least equally significant commitment to artistic merit. So long as the ideology has a grasp on the true and beautiful there is hope for good art to come from it. So I have always found the ideology excuse for modernity’s bad art insufficient to explain the situation. That’s not to say the ideology driving much of modernity’s stories is good, I don’t think it is, I just don’t feel that alone explains the issue. That leaves lack of skill as a possible reason for bad stories.

It is harder to pinpoint what exactly could cause an artistic community’s skill to slip away and thus harder to tell whether or not it has happened at all. Many once great creators like Ridley Scott or James Cameron have produced films that fall far short of their best efforts. Is that because they have aged, as we all must? Or is some other factor at work? It’s hard too tell in an objective, testable way. The creation of art is not a scientific process, nor are the intricacies of creating it as measured and precise as science demands. I have only my intuition and a handful of data points to work from.

However over the last few months I’ve started to wonder if there might be a third explanation I’ve overlooked. What if modern storytellers are just too insular?

Indulge me in a brief digression. One of the greatest English language authors to ever live was a Regency era British woman named Jane Austen. All six of her novels were about the lives of minor, upper class British women juggling their social standing, family obligation and personal ambitions. They are wonderful studies of character and human nature. Like all art they grasp very true ideas and present them to the audience in fascinating ways. They also come from a very specific historical and cultural context.

If a Jane Austen novel were presented to the people of the British Raj or West Indies who lived at the time they were published there is a good chance they would not find it engaging or entertaining. While the basic character archetypes of, say, Pride and Prejudice are universal to the human experience the situations those characters find themselves in are very specific. That very specificity would make the entertainment provided by the narrative harder to receive for those unfamiliar with British life. Even those living in a theoretically British culture. There is just no point of cultural connection between the far flung cultures of the Empire and the culture of Jane Austen.

The purpose of this rather lengthy analogy is to undergird my theory on why so much of modern storytelling (and art in general) fails to resonate with so many people. Most modern stories, particularly in America, are seen through the filter of a small group of people in Southern California. Yes, publishing houses are mostly headquartered in New York but few Americans read stories anymore so, for the purpose of a broad discussion, publishers are sadly irrelevant. The rest of America’s modern storytellers are in Hollywood and the gaming industry. Even if these industries are not headquartered in SoCal the people who write for them come out of schools thought and schools of education that are exclusively focused on the Hollywood frame of mind.

The reason SoCal is important here is that it has a very unusual culture compared to the rest of America. It is demographically diverse, urban, childless, full of people who have spent a large chunk of their lives in “higher education” and share an extremely permissive attitude to sex. This culture is foreign to the rest of the nation. Perhaps more foreign to the majority of other Americans than British Regency culture would have been to the Indian and Caribbean cultures they ruled over.

The people of SoCal create stories steeped in their own, insular values and seem shocked when the rest of the world find these stories inaccessible to them. They are much like the oft depicted, out of touch British visitor to some far flung Imperial holding who doesn’t understand why everyone looks different, speaks oddly and eats with their hands. I have come to this conclusion lately specifically based on events around the gaming industry. For the sake of being thorough, some examples:

The game Black Myth: Wukong was criticized for lacking “representation” for black and Latino characters even though the game is based on Chinese myth. This demonstrates that the resident of Imperial SoCal cannot conceive of any culture being represented that doesn’t have the ethnic make up of the world right outside their widow. The point of the game was to represent ancient China, not modern California, so the American storytellers were scandalized.

The game Dragon Age: The Veilguard features an entire storyline about a character’s pronouns. This is a bit of linguistic drudgery born of too much useless college education, the kind of thing so detached from reality only the ultra wealthy in the entertainment and tech sectors really pay attention to it. The audience found it tedious and stupid yet Imperial SoCal cannot understand why no one cares about it.

The game Dustborn features entire mechanics built around shaming and verbally abusing other people to defeat them in “combat” using the social standards of South California’s Empire. The results range from sad to unbearably cringe inducing. The game flopped horribly. Yet the creators insist the basic system is both interesting and narratively insightful.

Audiences do not connect with the stories or critiques above. They are based in a context we do not take part of and don’t really want to understand. Modern storytellers don’t seem to understand that because they are so deeply embedded in their own insular culture. Does it explain why they struggle to create anything that resonates with the rest of the world? It could.

How is the problem to be solved? That’s harder to say. But with the problem diagnosed we are one step closer to that goal. Til next time, friends.