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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: ゾンビ日記２ 死の舞踏(ダンス・マカブル)
(ZOMBIE DIARY 2: Dance Macabre)
release: 08/28/2015
publisher: Kadokawa Haruki Corporation
[contents]
Zombie Diary 2
[review]
This is a sequel to Zombie Diary. The protagonist is changed to a woman. The MC of the first volume had a sniper rifle, but this female protagonist uses a hand-gun. She tells that the previous MC taught shooting skills to her, but he's not with her anymore for some reason.
The basic structure is the same as the first volume. The protagonist shoots dead people as funeral rites and thinks about various topics. It is Oshii's sociological/ philosophical essay again.
However, the female protagonist's theme is different from the first protagonist's theme.
The first topic is excrement. As some Oshii fans already know, Oshii has indirectly shown excrement in his films. Excrement is linked to food, which is another important theme of Oshii's works. It is also very important for the "death" theme. Human beings' negative feelings toward them are very similar to corpses' cases. It culturally differentiates human beings from animals. Toilet is probably the most basic element of human culture. Some people might find a psychoanalytic theme in them.
After touching upon excrement, corpse, and food, the protagonist talks about clothing and makeup. It is a very fresh theme to Oshii fans. Since the protagonist is a woman, Oshii put a different process in the funeral rite. She chooses clothes and cosmetics every time before the rites.
That theme is linked to some traditional themes like dance and religion, but it also shows Oshii's change in his late phase. Oshii himself often says that he got interested in women recently. (Before that, women were ununderstandable entities. We should remember that Oshii often says he can't understand Lum at all.)
The most important part of this novel is the ending. The protagonist owns one dog, and that dog brings an unexpected conclusion to the story. It also indirectly explains the reason why Oshii needed to put a dog into Seraphim and Garm Wars. Now, we should remember that this series thematizes zombie/death. Then, we can easily guess what kind of theme he tried to convey by the combination of a woman and a dog. It also explains why Oshii emphasized that "child zombie" doesn't exist in this world.
spoiler
In the conclusion, the dog becomes pregnant. Dogs’ natural reproduction was an important theme in Garm Wars too. That theme was repeated in The Sky Crawlers as well. Technologies, modernity, capitalism, and human intelligence alienate us from authenticity. We’re becoming closer to the corpse or dolls. Oshii once thematized those things in his films, but the theme was inverted in his later phase.
“A dog became pregnant” and “The protagonist is a woman.” Such simple settings are important in that kind of context.
We can't become dogs. Men, including Oshii himself, don't become women (physically). Oshii learns karate, and his sister dances. In the binary structure of sex and species, Oshii's theme got into the next phase.
