Believers by Naoki Yamamoto

Groupie Joined: 03 Apr 2004 Posts: 118

If it were anyone other than "Chairman", I'd say he was making up that stupid story to get some. Wink

But he seems so deranged, he means it.

The dramatic re-enactment was hilarious. For a second, I wondered what manga I was reading. The cliche "kyaaaa!" had me laughing. Every manga/anime girl who is ever slapped, hit, falls over, whatever always screams "kyaaaa" in a little girly voice.

So, they're BUSTED. "Chairman" is so messed up, I wonder what sort of "punishment" he'll cook up. He looks so creepy and loony in that last panel. But hey, 2 against 1...

Posted: Sat Dec 04, 2004 8:59 pm

Just bumping this thread back up now that the series is finished (and many thanks to everyone who worked on making this available for us english-reading chumps).

Great series. Action-packed climax. A regular Tom Clancy-esque thriller. Seriously though, I loved the various elliptical explanations; the videogames and whatnot. Does Yamamoto usually end stuff like this? I recall Dance till Tomorrow being pretty straightforward but the one shots and this all seem winkingly openended.

Posted: Sat Dec 04, 2004 10:56 pm

Thanks for the kind words. Those kinds of comments make it actually feel like it was worth it to labor through the various ramblings that the characters made in this series. Though I have to admit, translating Chairman's bullshit justifications during the fellating was kind of enjoyable.

Dance Till Tomorrow was a fairly early Yamamoto work, and he hadn't developed his trademark style of surreal/abstract storytelling at that point. You have to wait until his mid-90s stuff to really see that in his work.

If anything, his style has become even more abstract after Believers, as can be evidenced in Anjuu No Chi, his recent one-shots and Hotta. I do kind of feel that he sometimes takes it too far as of late (although Hotta is very good if a little difficult to follow), and I think Believers had just the right amount.

I'm still a little miffed that his recent series in Ikki, Hakai, ended so abruptly and prematurely.

Posted: Sat Dec 04, 2004 11:52 pm

That was a good ending, I thought. Overall, a good series -- I had no idea how he was going to conclude things but I think he did a good job. I almost thought it was going to be a happy ending, but I got tricked.

Groupie Joined: 03 Apr 2004 Posts: 118

Yeah, I really like this series. I went out and bought all of Dance Till Tommorrow since I liked Beleivers so much, and loved that too.

The Beleivers ending I thought was well structured and I epsecially like the last page. It just seemed like the perfect note to end on. Really good dialogue.

Has anyone read Frederik Schodt's book Dreamland Japan? He has a chapter in it about the Aum cult and he talks about his quest to find a copy of their propaganda/manga for research purposes. The last chapter reminded me of that, with the cult's own official store and merchandise and T-shirt. (I haven't read anything else in detail about the Aum cult in Japan except for that book.)

Posted: Sun Dec 05, 2004 11:06 am

Yeah, I have Schodt's books sitting on my shelf at home. Yamamoto also talks a little about the Aum Shinryoku in an interview he did with Pulp magazine. If you check out the website you can actually read the interview online; you have to scroll through the thumbnails at the bottom of the page and the interview is in issue 6.04.

The dialogue was one of my favorite parts of the comic (though I can't imagine how it must have been to translate some of Chairman's run on monologues, or what it looked like originally), and there were a number of times while reading it that I got strange looks from my roomates for chuckling to myself. There are so many great ones that it's almost meaningless to pick just one, but my favorite sequence might be the bit around pages 21-24 in the first issue, where the characters display their ludicrous work ethic.

Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2004 1:07 am

EDIT: I should probably preface this post with a big SPOILER ALERT

Man, the last panel of Believers absolutely killed me when I first read it - in fact, the only reason I endured through Chairman’s numerous long-winded diatribes was so that I could translate just that one line - "to the other shore". I've said this many times before, but I can't think of any other manga series that ends as beautifully, eloquently and poignantly as this one. It was almost ethereal, especially when you consider the fate that awaits Operator in the real world (the death penalty is still practiced in Japan).

"Emotionally moving" isn't an adjective that's often associated with a Yamamoto work (the adjectives tend to run more along the lines of "disturbing" or "obscene"), but Believers did move me, emotionally. Because having seen the tribulations that the three characters went through, we as readers can't help but sympathize with them, their anti-social nature notwithstanding. We've seen them as human beings, with their weaknesses and their traumatic pasts, so it's very hard for us dismiss them simply as members of a dangerous cult. There's too much emotional investment on our part to do that. For me, the saddest moment (and my second favorite scene, just behind the ending) in Believers was when Operator recounted his experience of eating that pasta after returning from the island - and how it tasted like shit. I think it betrayed a longing on his part for the time when the pasta did taste delicious, and the cult did mean something to him. But of course, that's all gone now.

And count me in as someone else who is a fan of Yamamoto's dialogue. Not just his dialogue really, but his unique flow in general. There's a certain rhythm to his comics (and rhythm is just as important to manga as story and art) that's very distinct and inimitable. He's completely mastered the use of silence and inaction, and inserts them in his manga to intentionally disrupt the flow, like half note rests in a music score. I guess other artists do this too, but Yamamoto does this so effortlessly that he's a cut above the rest. I think another artist who has mastered his own distinct rhythm/flow is Iou Kuroda, though his style is very different from Yamamoto's.

And yes, I've noticed how masturbatory this post is, seeing as how I'm hurling accolades at my own project here, but those of you who know me know that I'm full of self-love. But anyway, yeah, you guys can look forward to another project that I'll be doing with Gatsu. If anything, this one will be even more surreal...

Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2004 1:58 am

I would say that another artist who mastered this kind of emotional transfer is Taiyou Matsumoto - I'm totaly in love in No. 5 or Hanaotoko [tho i consider No. 5 being better] - not many manga could really move me and those 3 artist works definitely did. One more time thank for giving me such wonderful readings :]

Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2004 3:20 am

Wow, petr is actually thanking me (with sincerity, I hope).

*prepares for hell to freeze over*

Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2004 5:58 am

=.=

Street Musician Joined: 13 Oct 2002 Posts: 402

Have just finished reading Believers. Why it has taken me so long to get round to reading this; sex in manga usually turns me off.

The ending was so beautiful, soo lucky that I decided to give this series a go. I don't think i've ever seen any other manga ending so beautiful, to think that I almost missed it.

And having read the ending, I understand that it's not just the ending, the whole manga is beautiful.

Um, I can't really say much about this manga other than 'beautiful, beautiful', Summersoldier summed it up really well. Thanks for doing this

Street Musician Joined: 13 Oct 2002 Posts: 402

Well, I must have read that final chapter over and over at least 10 times since the post above. It's so beautiful.

I've found an english translated Naoki Yamamoto interview, he talks a bit about Believer's ending.
http://www.pulp-mag.com/archives/6.04/naokiyamamoto_02.shtml

Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2005 9:25 pm

alegria wrote:

I've found an english translated Naoki Yamamoto interview, he talks a bit about Believer's ending.
http://www.pulp-mag.com/archives/6.04/naokiyamamoto_02.shtml

That's a good interview. With the whole sex thing, I think even though his comics are filled with erotic images and stories about sex, it never really feels like he's doing it just to pander and I think he treats it pretty maturely. He also does stories that focus a lot on irrational behavior, which fits well with doing sexual themes. A lot of times when I read comics with a lot of sex I get annoyed if it seems like the writer is taking a really callow or adolescent "Woah" attitude. I was recently reading some early issues of Matt Wagner's Grendel and definitely got that from it.

I'm interested in buying some of his stuff in Japanese, and I'd like to hear from anyone who has read a lot Naoki Yamamoto's untranslated stuff. Any favorites or recomendations?

Street Musician Joined: 13 Oct 2002 Posts: 402

EDIT: spoilers.

Found a bit of information that you may find interesting.

Quote:

The "other shore" is in reference to the other shore of enlightenment as opposed to this shore being the world of Samsara (Life and Death).

Quote:

Higan in Sanskrit is "para" as in Prajna Paramita, where "para" means the other shore and "paramita" means to reach the other shore. Thus, "higan" means to reach the other shore or attain nirvana

Just thought you guys would be interested. And I always did think the scene of Ushiyama sitting in his prison cell, and with the glow around his head, seemed very Buddha-like.

Though regardless of any actual religious connection or significance, the way the manga concluded is impossibly beautiful in it's own right.

Fan Boy Joined: 05 Aug 2004 Posts: 11 Location: Ireland

ion_ford wrote:

I'm interested in buying some of his stuff in Japanese, and I'd like to hear from anyone who has read a lot Naoki Yamamoto's untranslated stuff. Any favorites or recomendations?

I can't claim to have read a lot of his stuff besides DTT and various scanlations but 'Arigatou' is pretty damn interesting and definitely worth checking out if you haven't already. I would really like to 'investigate' some of his earlier, purely wank-fodder manga that he did under an alias which I can't recall right now.