released 04 jan 03 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* Masamune Shirow's (MS) GHOST IN THE SHELL manga series takes place in a near-future Japan, where cyborgs and robots are common and humans are increasingly wired into the world cybernet. The story rotates around Major Motoko Kusanagi of the Japanese Ministry of Internal Security, Section 9, whose general charter is to keep tabs on what other Japanese government agencies are up to. (Section 9's charter actually seems somewhat flexible, and they are called on to perform various dirty-tricks operations when required.) Kusanagi is a very sophisticated cyborg with serious combat capabilities.
Kusanagi's boss, "Old Monkey Face" Aramaki, is a shrewd bureaucratic game-player who backs up his people while engaging in various sparring matches with them, and her team is a mixed crew, featuring her right-hand man, the old pro Batou, and the rookie, Togusa. The story takes the group through a series of semi-independent adventures, leaking up to a climax rotating around an artificial intelligence named the "Puppeteer".
Trying to describe a Masamune Shirow (MS) work in much more detail is difficult, since the stories are complicated, full of loose ends, and hard to follow. This is at the same time their strength and weakness. Instead of laying out a future society in a nice clean orderly way, he creates a disorderly future world and throws the reader into it, only giving hints every now and then to help show the way.
For someone who likes to be challenged, this can be a great deal of fun, and in a way the disorderly nature of the stories gives them a certain flavor of authenticity. After all, not much is nice or neat in the real world, either. Similarly, the fact that MS throws out an endless stream of ideas makes him lively reading, even if not all the ideas are complete or sometimes even make any sense after multiple readings. Even he has admitted: "Nobody ever understands my essays."
However, someone who's not that heavily wired into science fiction, impatient with a story line that takes the reader all over the landscape, and regards a litter of loose ends as annoying will probably throw GHOST IN THE SHELL across the room. This is the sort of writing that a reader will either find fascinating or totally hate.
I like it myself, though even I have to admit that some of his plot excursions, like the slapstick elements about the "Fuchikomas", tarantula-like mechanical armor / robots, seem a bit loopy. I used to wonder if I wasn't dealing with some Japanese cultural peculiarities, but I finally concluded that MS probably seems a bit eccentric to other Japanese, too.
As far as the artwork goes, it's very good and stylish, though not all that similar to conventional manga artwork. As with the writing, the artwork is idiosyncratic. I should warn that there is some fairly graphic violence and some sexual elements, though MS doesn't make a regular habit of them. In any case, this isn't a good book for kids, since most would have problems reading it.
Incidentally, Mamoru Oshii's anime movie version of GHOST IN THE SHELL does capture much of the flavor of the manga version, though the movie is substantially simplified. If you have seen the movie and liked it, you may well like the manga version, and it's developed far more than the movie. If you found the movie too hard to follow, then the manga version is probably not a good bet for you.
I give GHOST IN THE SHELL four stars for its cleverness and imagination. As far as its disorderliness goes, it seems to be so inherent in the way MS thinks that it's the necessary flip side of what makes him interesting. However, it also makes me hold out on that fifth star, just as a warning that some folks will find GHOST IN THE SHELL completely unreadable. Even they will admit, however, that it is certainly something different.
