Akira: Part 2 THEMES OF AKIRA/NEO-TOKYO IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE/GETTING READY FOR VOL 1.

Themes of Akira

Kaneda and Tetsuo

Akira covers many different themes over its long story. What I find the most fascinating is that the themes get more serious as you go along; much like adolescence and adulthood. Kaneda and his biker buddies just want to race around Neo-Tokyo, pop some pills, and occasionally get laid. Nothing too out of the ordinary there. But the moment Tetsuo's bike crashes into a strange boy with 26 tattooed on his hand, their lives become increasingly more complicated, and their problems only get worse from there. One thing that you have to pay attention to when reading Akira is growth. What does each character grow into, and how is it different from what they were when the novel started?

While trying not to spoil too much, each main character in the book goes through some event where they must confront something that is bigger than them. In order to accomplish this task, they are asked to go above and beyond their physical limitations in order to succeed. Kaneda, Tetsuo, Kei, Lady Miyako, and even Akira himself all face something that is more powerful than they ever imagined, and how they react to these situations frame the story and what happens inside of it.

Imagery is incredible in the comic. People who have a love for artwork should definitely read it just for the eye candy.

The second main theme you would have to consider is power, and what it does to people who wield it. One main quote you can get from the motion picture is the one where the Espers are using Kei to talk to Kaneda, where they mention what would happen if an insect was able to gain the intelligence of a human, and what that would mean. Akira, Takashi, Kiyoko, Masaru, and Tetsuo are all given these amazing powers, and they all treat them differently. Each person seems to accept their place in what their powers truly mean, and while Tetsuo uses his abilities for fear and control, the others seem to try their best to distance themselves from what they have. We'll get into why that is later on down the road.

Speaking of control, this is the third and final main theme that you should consider when reading Akira. This is often an overlooked theme in the novel, but make no mistake, the entire book deals with control and what people will do to obtain it and what they will do to hang onto it. Control can be seen in almost every panel of the comic. Kaneda controls his gang of friends at the beginning, but Tetsuo wants to branch out and carve his own piece of history. The Colonel wants to control the Espers and the power they possess, but they just want to be able to control their own lives. The terrorists want control of their government, and the government is trying to control the terrorists in order to do their bidding behind closed doors. See what I mean? The later chapters deal with control even more thoroughly, but again, I don't want to spoil too much of what is going to happen down the road. 

The power of Akira

Neo-Tokyo is About to EXPLODE

Neo-Tokyo is the setting of this piece, and like I said in the previous post, it's one of the most vivid cities you will ever see in a comic book. Japan in the 80s was seen as the technological leaders in the world market, and their gadgets and cars soon poured into the States at an alarming rate. Nintendo, Sony, and Honda all made a huge chunk of their money off North American sales, and with so much Japanese hardware laying around, it was easy to picture this country as a place where the future met the present. Akira is built off this premise, but with one catch, this Japan is built from the ashes of an attack that decimated Tokyo. Without warning, and explosion rocks the entire city, leveling most of it, and causing WWIII in the process. Foreign countries see this as an attack and use the tension of the Cold War to finally engage in the battle that never was. 30 some years after the bomb went off, Neo-Tokyo now stands, still thriving even after the attack, much like Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Street gangs seem to have overtaken the city, and lawlessness is everywhere. The schools are run down, and most of the kids grow up in homes for neglected children. All the while, there is still a slick sheen to the entire city, and it's neon still fills the skyline at night. While the kids race around on their state of the art bikes, they still don't seem to be able to get ahead in life all that much. While the ceiling is incredibly high, the road to get there seems almost impossible for our protagonists, at least at the beginning of the novel. 

While Neo-Tokyo does get leveled and changed around in the film, it's nowhere near the level that it went through in the manga. Neo-Tokyo turns from the post-WWIII beacon of hope to something out of Mad Max about halfway through the book, and it's important to notice that the entire city is always the focus of the conversation in the latter part of the piece. 

Neo-Tokyo is as essential to the novel as Akira himself. Without it, the story wouldn't be as impactful, because you have to consider the entire history of Japan when looking at Neo-Tokyo. Considering that Japan had already gone through a horrible nuclear attack, something like the damage done at the beginning of the book makes you think back to those pictures and videos they show you in high school of the dropping of the bomb. It's crazy to think that a power like that would be unleashed onto people and they would be able to survive, but Japan did, and flourished. Much like that, the residents of Neo-Tokyo witness an ungodly power rain down on them, and they have to learn how to survive afterward.

Power does strange things to people.

GETTING READY FOR VOL 1.

If you are interested in reading Akira yourself, a copy can be easily attained. Local libraries are great for reading manga these days, and if they don't have it, you can always try an interlibrary loan. That's of course if you want to read the book for free. If you would like to own a copy of it yourself, you can find it on Amazon. It's not badly priced, and if you space out buying the volumes, you can actually save some money when buying. There are places you can easily read it digitally online, but I wouldn't suggest it on your first reading. The artwork is bar none, and some of that will be lost if you are trying to read it on your phone screen or a computer.

There aren't many books I would suggest before reading Akira, but if you are looking at the novel as a whole, it's always a good idea to look towards the things that help inspire the manga, as well as pieces that it may have impacted after it's publication. Star Wars, Ghost in the Shell, and Strange Things are movies and TV shows that seem to have a similar tone and atmosphere to a lot of what you see in Akira, particularly people being able to do extraordinary feats. Another movie that people point to is Chronicle, although this would be more along the lines of the film, and not so much the book.

When looking for comics that have the same feel as Akira, you may have some difficulty. The book far exceeded what expectations people had of it when it came out in the early 80s, and with it encompassing so many genres, it can be hard to pin it down to one style to look for. One manga that always comes to mind when I think of Akira is Fist of the North Star. The story is vaguely similar to the latter part of Akira, and it was written and published around the same time, so I think those are some reasons why.

Sometimes, dialogue isn't needed, especially if you can convey what you want with ingenuity. 

Nothing is really going to prepare you for Akira the manga. Even the film, as massive and complicated as it is, is nowhere near as immersive as the novel alone. But one shouldn't feel intimidated when getting ready to undertake Akira. It's honestly a fast read, even with the size, mostly because it's an engaging story, and you can probably polish off a couple of volumes a day if you are in the zone. 

NEXT: AKIRA PART 3: AKIRA VOL 1. TETSUO/CONTROL, AND WHO IS REALLY CONTROLLING WHO/COME WITH ME NOW, AND ACCEPT WHAT YOU ARE/KANEDA AND TETSUO

Hubert Selby Jr.

Most people have never heard of Hubert Selby Jr., and the fact that I have had to tell so many people about one author has always made me incredibly sad. Selby, known by his close friends as Cubby, is one writer who completely changed the landscape of fiction over 50 years ago, but his work is seldom taught in any curriculum; college, high school, or otherwise. When I do come across someone who also likes his work, it seems the same trends will hold true of what we both appreciate, and that is Cubby's honesty. The books always feel like real people, and they seem to take chunks out of your life while reading it.

I mentioned earlier how I had ditched school to read all of the Last Exit to Brooklyn. I'm not the only one who was transfixed by this story. In the introduction to Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky stated he read the book the week he was supposed to be studying for finals, and he ended up failing them because he wanted to finish the book. That's the passion that Selby fans have towards his work. His writing speaks to you in a rare fashion that can't be ignored, whether you enjoy it or not.

Hubert Selby Jr. was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York during the great depression, and his hard upbringing shone through in his writing. He wrote about survivors, and how hard it is exactly for one to survive when you aren't supposed to. I think this was because the deck was always stacked against Cubby. At 15, he faked his age to enlist in the Merchant Marines, and while at sea he contracted tuberculosis. He ended up losing a half of a lung, and was sent home and told to die. Determined not to have a wasted life, Selby started writing to pursue a career. He spent the rest of his life dedicated to that craft, and in the end, he published seven novels and three spoken word albums.

Selby's life story by itself is amazing. What the man produced on paper sticks out even more. While he only had a limited education due to leaving for service at such a young age, Selby still was able to piece together enough knowledge to get his prose written out. If he didn't know the word, it was spelled out phonetically. Due to not wanting to waste time while typing, he would use / marks to indicate apostrophes rather than spend the time to hit the shift key. Although it turns off most readers who write off Selby, it also shows people through a different lens. Cubby let the action carry the book and did not concern himself with the technicalities.

Selby, like many authors, unfortunately, lived the majority of his life in poverty. While in the hospital for his TB, he also developed a morphine dependency that followed him for years. Selby was able to kick the habit, even going so far as to refuse it on his deathbed, but he was able to revisit the theme of addiction with Requiem, which goes to show how much guts one would have to face a topic that hits so close to home, and not fall back into addiction.

I'm not sure why a heroin addict from New York was able to grab my attention with such force at a young age. I stopped questioning my tastes a long time ago, and Selby is one of those that I have come to accept as a deep love and appreciation for what he has done in my life. But there have been many people who I have given his books that hated it. I can see that side of the coin as well. It's hard to look at life when it seems so raw and meaningless. The majority of people who I know that read does so to escape, not think about more depressing shit, and Selby is the anti-feel good author. I don't suggest reading his work unless you like books like Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, or American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.

Hubert Selby Jr. isn't remembered by the masses. He has never written a New York Times Bestseller, and he isn't brought up too often when discussing American writers. But his writing is still amazing, and so emotional that it should be at the very least peaked at. He is such a polarizing figure in American literature, and his work has shaped the way I have looked at literature for the rest of my life.

Why Write?

I couldn't pin down one reason why I have chosen to write. I used to spend a lot of my free time as a kid reading books in my room, so I suppose going there would be a good start. I would write a lot back then, but nothing ever too serious. I didn't expect really anybody to see what I had written, so it wasn't very polished. In fact, I didn't even think that my writing was very good until teachers in school would tell me they had liked it. This didn't really get me too excited. I figured teachers were paid to say shit like that. What was the point in believing it?

It wasn't until I hit high school that I saw a different way of writing, and it was a writing that struck a cord emotionally. The first experience I had was reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. I remember reading it, and thinking that not really a lot was happening; it was just two guys wandering through the desert while on drugs, but I recall feeling like I had to keep reading to see what was going to happen. I had never felt like this, and it was really addicting.

It continued on. In English class, I came across a story by Kurt Vonnegut, Harrison Bergeron, and it made me start having these strange thoughts... What if I tried doing something like this? It wasn't boring or pretentious like a lot of stuff they made you read in high school, it was something that finally spoke to me. I am not saying that the stuff I was reading was bad, it just had never made me feel or think on this crazy level before. I remember looking up the story in my textbook many times before the semester was over, just to try to recapture that crazy flutter that filled my chest when I had finished the story the first time. I was chasing the dragon, but this high was a literary, and not a narcotic one.

Senior year of high school was when shit really hit the fan. I discovered Hubert Selby Jr. After I had read that, it completely changed the entire landscape of reading and writing for me. I discovered him like most people discovered Selby in the 2000s, by watching Requiem for a Dream. I remember after watching it, reading the back cover of the DVD box, and thinking, "Jesus Christ, how was THIS a book?" I couldn't believe it. I couldn't ever picture anything like that on a written page. I had to find out more, so I jumped on my laptop and Googled everything I could about the movie, as well as the author, Hubert Selby Jr. I saw that he had written a book before Requiem, The Last Exit to Brooklyn, so I decided to pick that up and give it a whirl.

I had to wait until I got paid, which was about a week away, but I remember counting the days until I would be able to buy it. I even did a couple of dry runs, going over to the Barnes and Noble that was across from the Baggins sandwich shop that I worked at, looking over the shelves until I knew the placement of the book by heart. I could probably walk into that store blindfolded, and still be able to find that damn Selby book, and the closer I got to pay day, I felt my frenzy growing larger. As soon as my shift let out I shot over to the bookstore across the street. As soon as I purchased it and was out the door, I started thumbing through the pages, looking over the paragraphs in glances. It looked so different, unlike any book I had ever been given in school. The punctuation seemed all messed up, and some words weren't even spelled correctly, they had just been phonetically spelled out. It seemed so wrong compared to what I had always been shown and told about writing. I spent the next three days doing nothing but smoking pot and reading that book, but at the end of it, I can honestly say that I never looked at literary works the same way ever again.

After reading Brooklyn, I felt like I couldn't read the same books I had been reading. Once I had a peak into this kind of reading, I felt like I had to find all of the books I could that made me feel like Selby did. It turned into this strange quest to find these particular books that had certain criteria that were impossible to pin down. When I would tell some people how much I loved reading, I remember getting empty looks back. People don't really like to read anymore. They did in the 50s, maybe even all the way up through the 80s and the early 90s, but now when you ask someone what they read, they may give you a website or a Twitter feed that they follow.

But even with the disinterest, I still felt trapped. Books were my passion.

It wasn't long after reading all of this stuff that I started trying writing on my own. I had written a lot when I was a kid, but to be honest, I didn't think it was all that serious. It would mostly be a way to pass the time. But now, I felt like writing became an obsession.

For a while, I felt that a lot of the stuff I wrote was whatever I was reading regurgitated back onto the page. I feel a lot of young writers go through this because you are just latching onto whatever idea may come to mind. A lot of what writing is sometimes is just stacking ideas on top of each other, and seeing what fits. Worst case scenario, you don't have shit, but you still have the ideas that you can build upon later on if need be. Writing is trying to be resourceful. You try to make things work because you have a good idea, but you may not be experienced/skilled enough to pull it off yet. The important thing is that you work through this phase.

Why spend so much time working through this phase? I honestly couldn't tell you. A lot of times I felt it was because I had some strange standard when it came to my writing. I didn't want people to read what I wrote and think that I was bad, or that I was out there faking it. Some of the worst writing was the stuff you read where you knew the person didn't know shit, but they felt like they knew enough to pass it off in their work. Nothing is more insulting to a reader than this. But for myself, I just like it. I love writing things out, and reading things over and over again, and try to see how I can make the words fit better, or have the sentences flow smoother. It's an amazing thrill that I can't really find anywhere else.

It's reasons like that I started this blog and writing to publish. I don't feel the need to do it for fame or for getting rich. That's probably the most unrealistic goal that a writer can have. You may as well just spend all your money on scratchers and start going to town. I want to write because it feels natural, and I love doing it.

I feel some people were put on this earth to do certain things. I hope you all find the things that you were meant to do. It's an amazing feeling, pursuing what you love. Being true to oneself is very important, and highly undervalued in society. Once you find something that you love that much, don't let anything get in the way. Work through it, figure it out or make sacrifices somewhere else because you don't want to find yourself doing things you HAVE to do because you didn't do things differently.