“Japan’s Anime Revolution is a greatly enjoyable, informative read, even on films you thought you knew back to front. Hey, Pokémon fans! Did you know Mewtwo’s Japanese voice actor, Masachika Ichimura, was picked for that role because he’d played the masked hero in the stage musical of The Phantom of the Opera?”

Over at Anime News Network, Andrew Osmond posts a long and gritty review of my book, Japan’s Anime Revolution.

“Fujisawa drifted into industrial journalism, working for a while as a reporter for that scandal-ridden gossip rag, the Japan Food Processing Newspaper. His area of specialty was ham and sausages, and even as editor-in-chief, he wrote a column called ‘Sweet & Spicy’, which frequently called out declining food safety standards.

“Widowed at 36, he moved back in with his ailing mother, and cared for her while trying to raise his daughter. Eight years later, he married his second wife, who took over the household chores and bought him vital time to write fiction. He began winning literary prizes in 1971, and in 1974 quit the turbid world of food processing newsletters to become a full-time novelist.

“‘When I reread my novels from that time,’ he wrote, ‘many of them are so dark that I feel a little pain. Love between men and women ends in separation, and stories end with the death of samurai. I couldn’t write happy endings.'”

Over at Media OCD, I commence my new column by relating samurai to sausages.

“Now the monks working for Kashinkoji are specifically described as Negoro monks, who were a real-life group operating out of the Negoro temple in Kii province, who were famously and obviously much more military than they were monk-y. They were legendarily accomplished not only with muskets, but with gunsmithing, and archery, and would be a major playing pieces in the samurai battles of the 1570s and 1580s.

“After their temple was destroyed in 1585, some of them ended up fighting for other clients, most notably forming some of the best musketeer platoons in the army of Tokugawa Ieyasu. And this film is set, as best as I can tell, somewhere in the late 1560s, shortly before the historical death of Matsunaga, so possibly the temple has yet to be destroyed.

“So the opponent here is a monk called Suijubo, the Fluid Spitting Monk, played by Gajiro Sato, who was a familiar face to mainstream Japanese audiences. He played another monk, although not one who vomited viscous gunge, in almost every installment of the Tora-san movies, for decades. He only missed one, due to a car accident, but he was still credited on the poster!

“That punch perm you see really marks him out as an unusual character in a period drama, but it was a part of his general look, and was a feature of many of his onscreen appearances throughout the 1960s and 1970s.”

From my commentary track to Arrow’s forthcoming UK/US release of Ninja Wars.

“…lives up to its title as a thoughtful discussion of how twenty select, enduring, and iconic anime transformed cinema worldwide… Jonathan Clements provides his unique insights into the evolution of an artistic medium. Thoroughly detailed yet accessible to all backgrounds, and replete with fascinating, little-known vignettes about historic anime and the people who created them, Japan’s Anime Revolution! is a ‘must-read’ for anime connoisseurs and highly recommended for both personal and public library theatre/cinema studies shelves.” — Midwest Book Review

Much to everybody’s surprise, including mine, I shall be appearing today on screen at the Odeon West End in London, introducing Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg. For connoisseurs of my introductory videos, I believe this to be the first recorded in my new office, so everyone can criticise a different section of my bookshelves.

The distributors at Anime Limited announced this yesterday, only to receive a welter of social media replies from fans demanding Bleach. This is why you can’t have nice things.

Angel’s Egg, presumably along with my face looming out of the screen, will also be appearing in a number of other locations in the weeks to come.

“His first novel, Paradise, is a ‘genetic’ romance, in which two star-crossed prehistoric lovers are separated by the Bering Strait, only for their distant descendants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be reunited by some strange attraction and hereditary memory. However, it was with Ring, a supernatural detective drama, that Suzuki first found true success. Combining an eerie sense of the time abyss of the Japanese countryside, in which modern comforts are written only lightly over centuries of tradition and secrets, with one of fiction’s most perfect basilisks, it posits a ‘haunted’ scrap of film that will strike its viewer dead unless it is shown to another, hence passing on the ‘curse’.”

From my entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction on the author Koji Suzuki, who died last Friday.