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There're some Mamoru Oshii book lists on the Internet, but they don't have detailed explanations about the contents. My Mamoru Oshii book collection is far from complete, but I'd like to write some short summaries for each of those books.
I apologize in advance for grammatical errors and misinformation.
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title: 立喰師列伝
(Documentary of Showa Underground)
release: 02/26/2004
publisher: Kadokawa Shoten
[contents]
prologue
Beginning in the Illegal Market: Ginji the Tsukimi
The Sly Fox in Front of National Diet Building: Ogin the Kitsune-Croquette
The Nightmare of Tokyo Olympics: Inumaru the Whiner
The Yochinoya Attack: Gyugoro the Beef-Bowl
Struggle against Fast-Food: Tetsu the Hamburger
The Spectre of Disneyland: Tatsu the Frankfurter
Return from Asia: Sabu the Medium Spicy
[review]
This is an original novel from the Tachiguishi Retsuden series. It was serialized in a magazine called The Sneaker. Later, it was adapted into a "super live-animation" film. Oshii wrote the novel first because a film-adaptation project is more acceptable to producers than original stories. He was already preparing for the film when he wrote the novel.
I already wrote about Tachiguishi Retsuden in the review of "Thus Spoken Tachiguishi", so I don't have much to say about the novel. It is not so different from the film.
If you're good at reading Japanese, the novel version might be more recommendable than the film. Oshii put tons of technical terms and jargon into Tachiguishi Retsuden to create the traditional atmosphere. According to Thus Spoken Tachiguishi, Oshii rediscovered the beauty of the Japanese language by reading old writers' texts like Natsuhiko Yamamoto and Shin Hasegawa. He quoted their text a lot and tried to write beautiful Japanese in this series. And thus, the rhythm and nuance of the text are lost in translation. I once watched the subbed version of the film, but I found that the sub translator skipped most of the rhetorics and jargon. Those texts might be untranslatable but they're still very important elements of this series. The first half of Tachiguishi Retsuden is funny because Oshii uses so many meaningless rhetorics for mundane fast food.
In that kind of sense, Tachiguishi Retsuden is very Japanological, but it might have the highest language barrier among all Oshii's works.
