Yukikaze Soars, 80s Appreciation Week Continues
Some time ago, Haikasoru’s Yukikaze came out in its English-language glory. Picking up a book all about aerial dogfighters shooting random alien menace was probably not the most natural thing for me to do–I’m a far cry from a military otaku–but it felt like the right thing to do.
Now that I’ve finished the book, it struck me that this is a must-read if you want to plot out the dots on the cultural landscape of “modern visual culture” of Japan. In other words, Yukikaze is probably landmark stuff, and it is self-evident. I’d rank it along with books like Boogiepop and other notable cultural oddities that influenced a generation of fans and creators.
I mean, the war on pants now makes sense. I’m not going to say “you can’t criticize Strike Witches without reading Yukikaze” but it certainly makes things a lot more interesting once you’ve begin the analysis from that perspective. Because, after all, Strike Witches anime (no clue about the other stuff) practically is the thematic adaptation of Yukikaze.
A housekeeping note, I’ll italicize the name of the book, Yukikaze, when I refer to the book. When I am not referring to the book (ie., the plane, the anime, etc) I will not italicize.
Anyways, a few more impressions:
I get the feeling that the prose in Yukikaze, as a matter of translation, flowed better than the previous Haikasoru books I read. For the record that’s everything out here at the time of Yukikaze’s release except Brave Story, The Book of Heroes, and Battle Royale. (A side note on that–already preordered Ibis, Slums and Loups-Garous~) Props to the translation/editing team. There’s a review on Amazon that points to the flaws to the translation, but it doesn’t look like a huge deal.
More seriously, though, the question is what does that mean in regards to Yukikaze the anime? I don’t have a copy of it (never watched the whole thing anyways), so I can’t pull it out for reference, but from what I remember much of that was nowhere as awesome as the stories in the book. I know they were pushing hard on the rogue AI element, but that felt really cliche. The story in the book painted a somewhat different picture, where neither Yukikaze (the plane) nor her pilots and owners worried about Yukikaze becoming sentient. They didn’t care that they have an intelligent plane; they worried about how it fare against the JAM. They worried about surviving their missions. Yukikaze doesn’t “turn evil” per se, but yeah, sure, she can, in Asimov style, prioritize her survival over her pilot’s survival. What really shined in Yukikaze’s execution was they never really blown it out of proportion beyond Yukikaze’s singular purpose–a war machine against the JAM.
I also don’t remember much about Booker in the anime, but he is a big part of what makes the novel interesting. Safe to say I’m sure there are a lot of stuff left out of the anime adaptation from the book, and that could be part of the problem. In other words, yes, I didn’t really enjoy the Yukikaze anime, nor the cute animorphic one-shot spin-off. I guess I didn’t buy into that whole franchise at the time. Maybe I’m willing to try again?
The Haikasoru presentation gave us a few extra pieces at the end of the book. The author’s notes indicated that this particular version is his 2002 rewrite which followed the sequel to his original 1984 Yukikaze, called Good Luck, Yukikaze, that came out in 1999. The rewrite supposedly remained true to the original, but with some touch-ups to make the transition better to the sequel. There also exists a 2009 sequel, the third in the series, called Unbroken Arrow. Naturally, I wonder what the changes were… and yeah, please bring those over too, will you?
There are two essays in addition to all that stuff appended to the book. The essays juiced the story and theme analysis out pretty well, as both essays are straight analytical pieces about Yukikaze. They are good starting points if you want to follow up… but to me they did the opposite and made me generally apathetic to thinking more about Yukikaze. I mean, much of what I could say is said there already. And said better. If this post turns out mostly about framing Yukikaze and not much about the content, blame it on those essays.
A week or two ago there was this rant on Haikasoru’s website about World SF, and uh, I’m not sure if I have a response to it. It probably makes little sense to look at Yukikaze like how I treat a typical pulpy page turner SF from some American or British author. Even if in context, and I experience both functionally within the same context–on a long train ride home–my expectations are different. What I read matches what I expect. The mechanism that adjusts my expectations accordingly is probably what’s missing in this dialog… and it is probably why this post is turning out to be my way to address this question indirectly by giving you my framework to approach Yukikaze.
The last thing I want to mention is that the last story in the book (Yukikaze is actually a series of short stories about a consistent set of characters in their JAM-fighting life) talked about the next generation fighter that will inherit Yukikaze’s … combat paradigm, lack of a better term. It’s not just the AI and its learned experience, but also its design doctrine, tactical specifications, and hardware performance. What bugged me about it was that it talked about Yukikaze’s supercomputer being a bottleneck in Yukikaze’s incremental upgrade inside its Super Sylph frame.
Today, we know that Moore’s Law reigns supreme. What passes as a supercomputer 10 years ago is probably today’s university-lab home-brew cluster computing rig, and what passes as a supercomputer 20 years ago probably pushes as many flops as my desktop. In other words, it’s a major flaw that Yukikaze doesn’t take the rate of computing advances into account. It’s much more likely that Yukikaze gets a CPU upgrade that shrinks the power requirement, weight and size of its main computer by 50% in half of the time it takes to get an engine upgrade with max throughput of 160% increase. There is no Moore’s Law to avionics, thanks to the fact that dogfights in the book don’t happen in vacuum. This “design flaw” is particularly egregious since Yukikaze invokes the rogue AI schtik. To fix this, he might have to rewrite the entire last chapter…
So much for trying to say that I really enjoyed the read. Maybe I should just say “this is probably the best Haikasoru book out there, you owe it to yourself to read it!”
I’m glad to hear that this is actually good – I watched about one episode of the anime version, and it was seriously one of the most incredibly dull things I’ve ever sat through. Didn’t stop me from buying the book anyway, but I’m presently thumbing through the latest Twelve Kingdoms…
I have a small hill of backlog thanks to my UC Gundam catchup, but I expect to tackle the latest 12K book soon.
Honestly the only good part of the Yukikaze anime was the aircraft designs themselves. The Super Sylph is just awesome. Other than that it was a textbook example of Gonzo’s remarkable ability somehow leech the life out of their productions and churn out soulless trash.
I actually never knew it was adapted from a novel. Might pick it up. Not surprised that you mention Strike Witches in this context though, given the Mave-chan spinoff.
No, man, you have no idea how Yukikaze relates to Strike Witches. It’s amazing. Mave-chan’s got nothing on it. Actually I should go rewatch Mave-chan, since it tackles the existential part of Yukikaze more up front, if I recall correctly.
In some ways I think Yukikaze is actually just like Ghost in the Shell SAC. It doesn’t deal with sociology so much as GITS but there are some thematic and philosophical similarities.
I never knew how much different the novel is from the anime. I’ll try getting my hands on the former if I ever see it here!