Books: The Dirty Pair Strike Again

There is a plot, yes, but let’s face it — the plot itself is little more than a conveyance to get the Dirty Pair from one disaster to another, and as a way to provide them with chances to act like the zealous blockheads they are. One moment involves Kei in a darkened room discovering just how cute she is by feeling her own face, and I confess I laughed hard enough at this passage to cause the book to fly out of my hands.

So, the plot: The girls are wildly unthrilled when they get their new mission, since it has the flavor of a “go stick your head in the sand somewhere” assignment. It involves a mining planet named Chakra, where some miner got savagely bitten by some creature. Big flaming deal. Except for the fact that this happened in broad daylight with tons of witnesses, and no one saw a monster. Odd, indeed. Then an invisible beast of some kind attacks the Dirty Pair right at WWWA HQ, and the two of them end up trashing a good deal of the surrounding city trying to fight back. And then when they finally do get to Chakra, that’s when the real devastation begins.

Scarcely ten pages go by in the book without some kind of disaster happening, either one instigated by the Dirty Pair or one created in response to something they’ve done. Whatever this beast they’re tracking is, it has it in for them — and whoever else happens to be unlucky enough to be standing next to them at the time. A wrestling ring, a luxury boat, a three-star hotel room, the lobby of a mining company’s corporate headquarters … well, in the minds of the Dirty Pair, this is just how you get things done.

That’s a big part of where the character-oriented humor in the book comes from: the I-don’t-give-a-darn-this-is-my-job attitudes that Kei and Yuri manifest in every situation. The whole book’s told from Kei’s POV, and her running internal commentary on everything going on is a source of some of the biggest laughs in the whole book. She also ends up swooning badly for Jeff, the local sheriff on Chakra, and cheerfully allows her mission to be interrupted whenever he’s within view or earshot.

Kei’s the slightly more clueful of the two — probably a big part of the reason she’s our narrator — while Yuri is worse than a ditz; she’s a ditz with a ray gun. (A possible parallel: Mihoshi from Tenchi Muyo!, but with bombs as well as a sidearm. Scared yet?) There’s also a third, a pantherlike creature named Mugi who’s their perennial sidekick and occasional savior when the chips are way down, thanks to his small but useful collection of powers. And there’s a few other things the Dirty Pair can whip out when the pressure is really on, like a kind of joint clairvoyance that helps them pull urgently-needed clues out of the ether … and is probably one of the few reasons they still have a job, come to think of it.

The flippant, smarmy attitude — and to a degree, some of the themes in the book as well — reminded me of another SF comedy that I devoured as a budding fan. That was Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat series, about a Lupin-like thief in a far-flung future universe who pulls off one great scam after another until he’s roped into becoming one of the good guys. Likewise, I get the impression the only reason Kei and Yuri are on the side of the angels is because the pay is better and you sometimes get days off … although, as Kei and Yuri find out, sometimes that vacation time comes in a way you least expect. Or want.

Translation: It’s always a little tougher to judge the translation of a novel as opposed to a comic, because there are that many less clues about what might be missing or changed. Still, the translation by John Thomas is readable and reflects what I suspect is the original stripped-down, staccato writing style of the original.

The writing itself wins no awards for creative use of language (there’s nothing here like the vivid verbal images Hideyuki Kikuchi conjures up in the Vampire Hunter D books), but it gets the job done and, most importantly, gets big laughs when they’re needed. Thomas also keeps many of the original onomatopoeia, like Mugi’s “Gyaoo!”, which are some of the biggest signs that this is a translation — but they’re used sparingly and don’t really derail things.

This being a light novel, I should also make mention of the cover art, interstitial illustrations and watercolor-style frontispiece by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko. The inner illustrations add to the fun but the fold-out color picture has a potential spoiler — so you may want to save admiring that until after you read the book.

The Bottom Line: There’s a few guaranteed audiences for The Dirty Pair Strike Again — fans of the original DP series, those who enjoy light novels as a general rule, and people looking for a broad giggle. I’m sort of in all three categories: I’m happy to see more material like this in English no matter what its provenance; I loved the original shows; and yes, I’m a pushover for a good laugh. Let’s see if I can’t line up the other books in the series to look at as well.