Leseprobe
ALEXANDER BESHER
THE MANGA MAN -
A NOVEL OF NEUROFUTURE
Apex-Verlag
Content
The Book
THE MANGA MAN
Note to the Reader About ‘Butoh,’ The Japanese ‘Dance of Darkness’
Prologue »the dead begin to dance«
Part One: »Once Upon a REM...«
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
The Book
I’m here to participate in the live study of an electromagnetically-induced earthquake. This one registered at a whopping 13.2 points on the Tesla Scale. That’s never happened before. An E-’Quake is the perfect super-weapon. Who would ever suspect it? It’s both invisible and untraceable. Oh, nature has been manipulated for reasons of state before. Take the ‘Great Gobi Sandstorm’ of 2032, for example. Hundreds of thousands of rebel Muslims were buried alive in China’s Far West Xinjiang Province. That was a beta-test for a certain type of military operation. But that event occurred almost thirty years ago when the science was still primitive. It was messy. Too messy. How do you explain all that real-time sand turning into mud?
The Manga Man – the new novel by Alexander Besher (born in China in 1951), author of the RIM trilogy (nominated for the 1994 Philip K. Dick Award; illustrated by German artist Christian Dörge.
THE MANGA MAN
»Everybody is a dancer.
A dancer is an angel who is corrupted
and stands apart from everyday life.
The dancer does not choose to dance
as one alternative in life, but is rather chosen.«
- Kasai, Butoh dancer
»Do not mistake the finger pointing at the moon
with the moon itself.«
- The Lankavatara Sutra
Note to the Reader About ‘Butoh,’
The Japanese ‘Dance of Darkness’
»I may not know Death, but Death knows me.«
- Tatsumi Hijikata, Founder of Butoh (1928-1986)
The post-Zen philosophy and aesthetic of Butoh (Bu-tō) was developed in Japan by the artist and dancer Tatsumi Hijikata in the wake of the atomic bomb that fell on Hiroshima in 1945. Its essence lies in the spiritual connection between body and mind, conscious and unconscious, man and nature. Butoh evokes a primal and mythological presence, conjuring a bridge between ancient times and the yet unwritten future. Since its creation, the »Dance of Darkness« has spread all over the world, »like a virus,«* manifesting myriad intercultural mutations. It is Apocalypse Reborn, a rehearsal for the Afterlife; and a meditation on the Age we live in.
* Akaji Maro,
founder of the Dai-rakuda-kan Butoh troupe
Third Millennium Manga Festival
Theater Miasma
Proudly presents
‘The Necro-Genesis of Terra’
from ‘The Chronicles of the Z-Zone’
Medium: Pineal Prints on REM Brainwaves
Psi-Gel No. 48. Catalogue No. 32,
‘The Hanging Butoh’ series
Artist’s signature/seal (‘Hanko’):
Illegible due to scalar seepage
from the Leopold Tear in Vector 10
of Dimension VIII
This historical epic has been authenticated
by the Ministry of Forensic Entertainment
as the work of the early 21st century bio-animé artist Jake Hill
(2034-2142)
Courtesy of
The Marquis T. Collection of Neuro-Media
Lucerne, The Swiss Pleiades
Access code required
to view this private collection.
Contact Luigi Mezzolini, Curator, 2512
Psi-Download Approved. Transmission begins...
Panel 1: Huge fires burning in the Imperial New Nippon city of Kobe on January 26, 2062. A flight of black crows streaking across a red-black sky. Greenish-blue balls of plasma erupt in spasmic bursts along the charred Meta-Grid that criss-crosses the liquefying metropolis.
Panel 2: A macabre ‘buffet’ in a luxury Kobe hotel ballroom, with skeletons performing ‘reverse liposuction’ on themselves, i.e. reattaching skin and fatty tissues to their bones in a desperate attempt to become human again.
Panel 3: Partially resurrected corpses are seen rising from their sitting positions on the floor, as some of them begin to crawl towards the exit.
Panel 4: This ‘skin’ and ‘fat’ and bodily ‘organs’-hearts, lungs, kidneys, intestines etc.-are displayed in chafing dishes that are neatly laid out on a buffet table. Instead of napkins and silverware, there are hospital gowns and other accessories within reach, such as combs and canes and IV’s containing unidentified bodily fluids. The living-dead help themselves.
Some of them come back for seconds.
Panel 5: A man who is dressed like a maitre ’d stands in the shadows of the ballroom observing the scene with a sardonic smile. He wears a black tuxedo with a barbed-wire cummerbund wrapped around his middle. A protective mesh of antimatter covers his entire body like a mosquito net.
Blue light sizzles from his lips as he speaks.
Text translation: Ha! Look at these fools! They think they’re alive, but they’re dead. Not to mention they’re inside out. As for me, I may look like one of the hotel staff, but I’m not. My name is Dr. Hajime Naoki. I checked in this afternoon on a special assignment for my superiors. My specialty is highly advanced microwave and gamma/cosmic-ray physics applications for use in the cold molding of steel at the Kobe Steel Laboratories. (Smiles) In reality, it’s a top-secret research facility for EM weapons technology which just happens to be located at the near-exact epicenter of the Great Kobe Earthquake of 2052. The one which is occurring right now. My employers? Their names shall remain secret. It’s in the contract.
Panel 6: The sinister Nipponese scientist steps past a corpse that begs him for a sip of life-giving photons that he carries in his hip-flask. Ignoring its pathetic grunts, Dr. Naoki fixes the monocle of a plasma-reader to his eye and looks upwards-up, up, up through the writhing funnel of light that swallows everyone and everything in its ever-expanding throat of exploding quarks.
Text translation: I’m here to participate in the live study of an electromagnetically-induced earthquake. This one registered at a whopping 13.2 points on the Tesla Scale. That’s never happened before. An E-’Quake is the perfect super-weapon. Who would ever suspect it? It’s both invisible and untraceable. Oh, nature has been manipulated for reasons of state before. Take the ‘Great Gobi Sandstorm’ of 2032, for example. Hundreds of thousands of rebel Muslims were buried alive in China’s Far West Xinjiang Province. That was a beta-test for a certain type of military operation. But that event occurred almost thirty years ago when the science was still primitive. It was messy. Too messy. How do you explain all that real-time sand turning into mud?
(Glances at data on plasma-reader) So far so good. Everything is going according to plan. Unnatural ‘natural cataclysms’ are the new frontier of meta-warfare. But this catastrophe will be different. It has unique properties. For one thing...
Panel 8: He kicks a grovelling zombie in the head. There is a sickening squish as the goulash of its brains splatters underfoot. The gray matter quickly reconstitutes itself, grows little millipede feet, and scurries across the floor to rejoin its fellow ghouls who are lollybuckling in a snakedance of despair.
Text translation: That should teach the unruly beast manners! Where was I? Oh yes, what’s so different about this ‘Quake? Ever since the twentieth century when Soviet scientists established that there was a definite cause and effect relationship between magnetic fields and biological functions, that thought-patterns can be influenced and restructured, we’ve made giant strides in the ‘Art of EM War.’ With our specially calibrated radio-frequency interference algorithms, we can reconfigure memories and realities on a collective and individual basis. Soon we will be able to deconstruct all of physical matter anywhere in the universe by reducing it down to its basic subatomic state.
Then we can regurgitate everything back again into brand-new forms of life! And rechannel these captured electromagnetic impulses into specially designed environments. These digital colonies and slave dimensions will serve our Imperial race and our sacred ancestors for all time-and beyond the known quadrants of time and space!
(Psi-cortex beeps) That must be headquarters. I better take this call. (Speaks into left nostril) Mission Control Leader Watanabe? No? The Lord of Project Fingermoon? No? Wrong number? That’s odd. Who else would know that I’m not here? (Stares with horror at the shrivelling cryomacrotome of his right hand, the carbonized puss of his bone-marrow fizzing) My God, what’s happening to my protective shield! I’m turning into a parabola! I’m spiking out!
Panel 9: A ripping sound as the seams of the protoplasmic mass that was once the city of Kobe splits apart. A huge boiling avalanche of light turns in on itself, and spews incandescent darkness into the reverberating tsunami of antimatter.
The picture splutters and fades. Blackness. Then a sign appears outside the city limits of this strange new world of the dead:
Welcome to The Z-Zone
Population: 0
[Curator’s Note: Panels 10-215 are missing from the Lichtenberg Memory Cube in which the images of this Chronicle have been stored for over a century. The fossilized fractals of the artist’s psycho-emotional discharge were recovered from a series of 60 gigahertz-deep REM burial mounds by excavators from the Ministry of Forensic Entertainment. What follows is a near exact projection of scenes from the original narrative.]
A strange procession of naked dancers appears on the warped stage of buckled photons and quarks. Their bodies are painted chalkwhite. Their heads are shaved. They wear thongs and move in slow, convulsive steps. Their eyes are rolled up to show their whites, their tongues are spewed out, and their faces are contorted beyond human recognition. As they move through the twisted landscape of the Z-Zone, they chant the monotonous dirge of their lost tribe: »Smoke, fire, water, stone, corpses, demons, ghosts, ash, light, darkness. Ancient we are in the free fall of night. This is our leader, Necroangel. Our navigator through the Fright...«
A naked fiery Asian femme steps forward, carrying a harpoon made of human ribs. She bows to an attentive audience of radioactive tombstones. Muffled applause greets her arrival.
»My name is Necroangel. And these are my brothers in ‘Butoh’-the Dance of Darkness, the Black Zen. May I present Hazeltot, and Vim, who goes by the name of ‘Vengeance is Mine,’ and Rune, and Brain-jin, and Calabash, and the rest of our troupe of Jigoku Hell Butohs. We are the survivors of the Mutant Light. The spawn of the Necro-Genesis of Terra.
But wait, there is one more whom you must meet...«
Necroangel waves her harpoon at the subatomic gristle of a preembryonic shadow. »The Hanging Butoh himself.«
A naked scrawny figure drops to the ground from a rope. He has been descending upside-down from the electrostatic hiss of the fiberoptic bungee which is the principal conveyance of his stagecraft. He lands upright on the soles of his feet, yellowish-blue sparks forming puddles around his ankles. He bows before Necroangel and her retinue. »At your service-and at the service of the Resistance.«
»Ah!« the Dancers of Darkness exclaim approvingly as they admire the warrior-like stance of this spectral being. His cheekbones glisten from the white-paste on his face. His tongue is crimson. »The predator of the private sector!«
The Hanging Butoh bows again. »How could we know that pain is the ritual that will transform the beauty of the deformed?«
Necroangel replies. »Indeed. That is the Way of Butoh. Now go! You have a long way to travel to reach the perpetrators of this crime. And to stop them before they breach the portal of death again.«
The Jigoku Hell Butohs hiss in wonder. »Ten years in man-made time!«
Necroangel smiles in grim bemusement. »What’s ten years when you’ve got all day?«
She turns to the Hanging Butoh. »You know what must be done?« The Hanging Butoh flicked the retractable blade on his index finger, and tightened his scowl. »Reverse the flow of the pseudo-stigmata. Kill the False God. Encourage the Virgin Death.«
Her eyes did not leave the slits of his obsidian optix. »You have my permission to leave.«
»Hai!« His body tensed, the cords of his neck tight as a bowstring.
Imprint
Publisher: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG
Text: Alexander Besher/Apex-Verlag. Published by arrangement with the author.
Images: Christian Dörge.
Cover: Christian Dörge/Apex-Graphixx.
Editing: Dr. Birgit Rehberg.
Layout: Apex-Verlag.
Publication Date: 02-08-2021
ISBN: 978-3-7487-7407-5
All Rights Reserved