Books: Vampire Hunter D: Mysterious Journey to the North Sea, Part Two (Hideyuki Kikuchi)

To backtrack a bit: In the first half of the story, D made his way to Florence in the company of Su-In, an inhabitant of the village following up on the mysterious death of her sister. It had something to do with a peculiar little bead that the girl had in her possession — something a cadre of murderous assassins is more than willing to kill everyone in their way for, and when they collide with D they give him a harder time than anyone he’s yet encountered in this series. I think this is the first time in the series so far we have seen D not only put at a disadvantage but also dangerously wounded. It’s good to see the stakes raised that much further: if we know D can survive anything thrown at him, he’s not as interesting. Seeing him survive real danger? That’s interesting.

Most of the second part is like a chess game between D and the assassins after him, Su-In, and the bead. Each assassin’s peculiar power is mapped and explored exhaustively, and D has to find ways to either confront them head-on or simply let each of them checkmate the other, as it were. As with the previous books, Kikuchi pairs D up with at least one fairly independent female character — Su-In, here — but by the climax she’s essentially been turned into a pawn to be shuttlecocked around, and is no longer as interesting as a person as, say, Lina from Raiser of Gales (the second D book). She does, however, have one side adventure involving D’s severed left hand that climaxes in a way that sounds like the punchline to a dirty joke.

And then there comes someone who seems to be Meinster himself, after centuries on ice, but who has the memories and behavior of one other person who seems strangely familiar to Su-in. His past and hers are, of course, heavily intertwined, but somehow the answer we get isn’t nearly as interesting as the aura of mystery used to build up to it. It adds up to quite a bit of plot to burn through and towards the end it does get a little belabored — I kept feeling like the entire second half of the book was running through roughly the same couple of scenarios over and over again. Still, Kikuchi does try some things with the story that he hasn’t done before, such as exploring what happens to people with conflicting loyalties who become embraced by the lure of the vampire curse.

What remains most interesting about the series is the way Kikuchi has absorbed and made use of a whole universe of idioms that are explicitly not Japanese — the Hammer Studios horror films, the Universal Pictures continuum of films (so grotesquely trashed in Universal’s own Van Helsing, what irony), and TV shows like Dark Shadows. In fact, in his afterword to this volume, he evinces a bit of distaste for his own country’s anime productions — sentiment I’ve heard echoed by a fair number of other writers from Japan, whether “literary” or “popular” — but he was satisfied by how his own work was adapted, and mentions that a possible animated adaptation of North Sea might also be on the slate at some point. Even if that production’s tied up in logistical red tape at the moment, we won’t have to wait long for more D: the next book, The Rose Princess, is due out this November.