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Rating: If you want to access, perhaps for the first time, the universe of Shintaro Kago, you need to be prepared, and above all, warnings are necessary.
Kago is among the most extreme and peculiar manga artists (mangaka) in activity. Considered among the masters of ero-guro, or fashionable paranoia, an avant-garde artistic subgenre that, originating in the 1930s, combined elements of eroticism, nonsense, pure grotesque, and a taste for the absurd of all kinds. Kago infuses all this into his mangas, which result in underground works that break the mold and are taken to extremes.
Disgusting, delirious, unpleasant; incorrect, obscene, pornographic, surreal. In one word: genius. This is Shine! The Co-Prosperity Sphere of Greater East Asia, probably his most extreme work of all. And it contains within it everything that satire should be.
The context: the Co-Prosperity Sphere of Greater East Asia was a project, little known by most today in the West, of Japan's imperial expansion during the early 1940s when World War II was already underway, to be clear.
Kago takes this pretext to stage his personal uchronia and vision on the theme. Which involves, therefore, general reflections on the entire ideological framework underlying it as well as on Japanese society of the era. Steeped in nationalism and often fanatical patriotism.
Rarely was Japanese patriotism disintegrated to this extent, perhaps never. Certainly not in this manner, so caustic and fierce, desecrating. Shintori Kago's satire annihilates the very idea of the patriotic spirit, mocking the military and, above all, the officials of that great imperial power that (at least in aspirations) Japan was before the defeat. And in this sense, it also leads to reflection on how mortifying, as a reflection and consequence, that defeat was for a people accustomed to seeing themselves as the center of an Empire, with ambitions of supremacy and for whom values like honor and patriotism were above everything else. Even at the expense of rationality. After all, certain values take on the form of faith, which is always irrational and blind.
In these times of enormous militaristic, warlike rhetoric and false patriotism, I believe a work like Shine! is more precious and timely than ever. But it does not lack memorable jabs against the phobia of both communism and liberalism. A satire that would therefore appear transversal, because in truth, it aims at the only great target of Japan itself. Imperial and imperialist Japan.
Beyond this, Kago also targets another cyclical and fundamental problem of Japanese society: the relationship with women and with sex. And an intrinsic aspect in this regard is the paradoxical censorship: in Japan, in fact, there is still a censorship in the representation of sexuality and genital organs. By law, they cannot be explicitly depicted, and those who know a bit of Japanese cinema, even the most extreme (like a Visitor Q by Takashi Miike), know that there is always, even in that case, a form of graphic censorship.
Japanese society is one that still lives with taboos, and Kago's work is pushed towards the destruction of many of these taboos. His works often feature cannibalism, torture, rape, coprophagia. Coprophagia, in particular, permeates all of Shine! in an always rather disturbing way but aims precisely to destabilize and horrify in relation to the misogynistic and militaristic culture of the Land of the Rising Sun. A coprophagia that is as explicitly allegorical as ever.
In Shine!, genetic, military, and sexual experiments go hand in hand and represent the dark side of a society full of eternal contradictions, impulses, complexes, and perversions. Balancing between a morbid attachment to traditions and a desire for freedom and modernism. The structure is episodic: several small episodes of madness and aberrations, connected by context and the above-mentioned themes. A hybrid, therefore, between the horizontal structure of the novel and the vertical structure of storytelling, to which Kago is very fond.
Kago, who among his influences has masters like Katsuhiro Otomo and Masamune Shirow, the silent cinema of Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, the bodily humor of the Monty Python school, and, in general, that of black comedy, can also recall the theorizing about carnal mutations of Cronenberg. Which, on the other hand, together with the aforementioned Otomo and Lynch was the greatest source of inspiration for works like Tetsuo by Shin'ya Tsukamoto.
Shine! is an over-the-top manga, not always easy to enjoy, certainly not comfortable or reassuring, but undoubtedly a unique experience that extreme lovers must try.
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