RahXephon (novel) Vol.#01

By: Sakura Eries
Review Date: Thursday, March 30, 2006
Release Date: Sunday, July 10, 2005



Creative Talent
Writer/Artist:Hiroshi Ohnogi
Translated by:Rhys Moses
Adapted by:

What They Say


The Review
Packaging:
One of the main things that attracted me to the RahXephon anime was its beautiful artwork- vibrant colors, clean lines, gorgeous backdrops, and yummy character designs. As such, I was disappointed with the cover art. They keep the anime logo, which is displayed along the top in blue. The cover art features Ayato and Reika. For those familiar with the anime, she's in her trademark yellow dress in her famous "facing away" pose, but instead of posing on a sea cliff, she's standing on what looks like debris. Ayato faces front in a white jacket and pants- he rather looks as if he's trying to emulate a Miami Vice character. Overall, the cover art has a rough feel to it- as if someone has just taken a preliminary pencil sketch, slapped some color to it, and put it on the cover. Also, the colors don't harmonize the way they do in the anime art, and the background is bland and non-descript. They don't even bother with a back cover design; it's plain blue with a lackluster story synopsis in boring font.

The paper quality is pretty good for a paperback- it's heavier weight than I expected. Extras consist of three pages of character profiles that look like they were lifted from a RahXephon anime art book.

Artwork:
Art in this novel consists of a grand total of 7 black and white drawings. They consist of a 2-page spread illustration of an Earth Federation fighter jet; three sketches of Reika and Ayato, Ayato and Haruka, and Ayato and Megumi; two drawings of RahXephon; and one battle scene drawing. The battle drawing is rather poor; you wouldn't be able to tell what was going on unless you were reading the story. The RahXephon drawings are also rather rough. They look like watercolor or pencil and charcoal affairs (hard to tell in black and white). The character sketches reflect the styles used the manga but look more like conceptual drawings than finished illustrations. The only drawing that looks "finished" is the 2-page spread.


Text/Translation:
The translation for this volume is appalling, and I don't use that term lightly. I'm surprised they let it print with such a poor editing job. The entire book is rife with grammatical errors, ranging from misspellings to inconsistent verb tense to punctuation mistakes. On page 220, there's a leftover editorial note that is glaringly out of place in the text.


Grammar aside, the translation comes off as quite stilted. It reads like the first draft of a Japanese to English translation by someone with an extremely poor grasp of colloquial English. Honorifics are left in the text but are not explained, and there is one scene in particular where an understanding of Japanese honorifics is crucial to why a character reacts the way he does. There are a number of acronyms (especially in the battle chapters), but only a couple are explained, and I found the rest just plain confusing.

The only reason I didn't straight out give this translation an "F" is because, if you try hard enough, you can figure out what is going on in this story. However, reading a novel shouldn't require this much effort.

Content:
The year is 2015 and all mankind has been obliterated, except for Tokyo. Three years earlier, the War of the Invasion took place, abruptly destroying most of the world's population and rendering the air poisonous. Tokyo survived the invasion, however, and its citizens somehow manage to continue their lives beneath the hemisphere barrier that protects it from the rest of the world.
Ayato Kamina is a teenage citizen of Tokyo, who lives with his widowed mother, a high level researcher. Ayato leads a rather ordinary life (or as ordinary as you can get under such circumstances) -- he attends high school, paints as a hobby, and is preparing for college exams. The only things not quite so ordinary in his life are his encounters with Reika Mishima, a distinctly mysterious classmate.

Then shortly after his 17th birthday, Ayato's world changes. Tokyo is attacked by outsiders. In the chaos, Ayato is taken captive by one of the invaders, a beautiful woman named Haruka Shitow, who promises to reveal the truth about the world to him if he goes with her. Her attempt to get away is thwarted by Tokyo's defense force, and they crash land in a mysterious sanctuary where they find a gigantic egg and Reika Mishima. The egg hatches to reveal a white robot, RahXephon, and it takes Ayato on as its pilot. After a dramatic confrontation where Ayato destroys a Dolem (one of Tokyo's high-tech defense weapons) and sees his mother bleeding blue blood from a cut on her face, Ayato blacks out and awakens to find himself in an abandoned town just outside the Tokyo barrier with Haruka and RahXephon.

In the days that pass while waiting for a rescue team to pick them up, Haruka explains to Ayato that Tokyo is not the only survivor of the war. In reality, it is the only area captured by the invaders, the Mu, who proceeded to cut it off from the rest of the world. The supposed defense barrier makes communication with the rest of the Earth almost impossible. Also, time moves six times slower in Tokyo, and the current year is actually 2027. When Ayato asks about his mother's blue blood, Haruka explains that Mulians cannot exist in this world alone; they need to assimilate with a human host. Once that symbiosis is complete, the host's blood turns blue.

While Ayato warms up to Haruka in the days they are stranded, things change once they make it back to civilization. They are taken to a military ship where Ayato's treated coldly and with suspicion, despite the fact that his blood is still red. He ends up being locked in a high security hold, and a transport arrives to take RahXephon away to a research facility. However, a Dolem appears and attacks. In the midst of the battle, Reika mysteriously appears in Ayato's cell and Ayato is again somehow transported into RahXephon. Ayato is then faced with the choice of fighting the Dolem, which in essence is fighting against his home Tokyo or allowing it to destroy the humans who have obviously opened his eyes to the truth but whom he feels no connection to.

Comments
Unlike the RahXephon manga, which had little to do with anime storyline, the RahXephon novelization is a retelling of the anime story with greater detail into backgrounds, lives, and thoughts of the characters involved. It's told from the first person point of view with Ayato as the primary speaker, but there are a total of ten other speakers in this volume.

I initially had high hopes for this book. I loved the anime for two main reasons: spectacular artwork (yes, I think Ayato is a hottie, and Koopiskeva's Euphoria is my favorite anime music video) and beautiful music. The storyline, however, I didn't quite get. Watching the series felt like trying to piece a puzzle together, but the picture left by the last episode was full of holes and missing half its pieces. I started reading, hoping that I would get insight into these gaps.
I was sorely disappointed. The potential for a compelling story is there, but the translation is so plain awful that the amount of work you put into trying to figure out what's going on detracts from enjoying the story.

I would not recommend reading this as a stand-alone. To have any hope of figuring out what's going on, you really do have to watch the anime (reading the manga won't really help). I also recommend against anime newbies trying to make heads or tails of this book- it's set in Japan and the writer assumes you have a basic understanding of honorifics and Japanese culture. In fact, the only ones that I would think would want to invest in this volume are fans of the anime interested in getting every single detail possible out of the RahXephon fandom and fans wanting every little bit of artwork, no matter how obscure, related to the anime.

The book is rated 13+ for strong language and some complicated pilot jargon during the invasion chapter. However, I think I'd be hard pressed to find a child patient enough to read it in its entirety given the poor translation.