Demon City Shinjuku The Complete Edition Novel eBook Hideyuki Kikuchi Jun Suemi
Download As PDF : Demon City Shinjuku The Complete Edition Novel eBook Hideyuki Kikuchi Jun Suemi 
In the first decade of the 21st century, a supernatural phenomenon called the Devil Quake leveled the city of Shinjuku in three seconds flat. Since then, wrapped in a phantasmal miasma, the accursed place has earned the abhorrent designation of “Demon City.” In the blink of an eye, it became a land ruled by the hair-raising and the bizarre.
The year is now 2030. A powerful warlock hiding out in Shinjuku attempts to assassinate the secretary general of the Earth Federation, bringing the planet to the brink of disaster. Wielding the fearsome and mysterious martial art of nenpo, high school student Kyoya Izayoi may be the only person capable of resisting the rising forces of evil.
The legendary series now springs back to life in this new omnibus edition!
Demon City Shinjuku The Complete Edition Novel eBook Hideyuki Kikuchi Jun Suemi
The first half of the book was very entertaining, fitting of an anime or manga. But the second story dragged and couldn't hold my attention. Still, as a fan of the anime, I was more than satisfied with the first half which was a bit different that what I had watched.Product details
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Demon City Shinjuku The Complete Edition Novel eBook Hideyuki Kikuchi Jun Suemi Reviews
The release of this English language translation of Hideyuki Kikuchi's debut novel DEMON CITY SHINJUKU means that every single book of his that has been animated is now available to English speaking fans. Honestly, I wouldn't have expected to live to see this happen when I first learned that some of my favorite anime titles were based on novels by the same writer. I was incredibly surprised and happy when VAMPIRE HUNTER D got translated and my amazement has only grown when it was followed by WICKED CITY, A WIND NAMED AMNESIA and now this. It's not like I'm completely satisfied just yet, not with at least seven WICKED CITY sequels as yet remaining untranslated, but it's still interesting to think back 15 years and to realize how far the international market for these titles has come since then.
What's important to know about this book is that it not only contains DEMON CITY SHINJUKU but also its first sequel, DEMON PALACE BABYLON (both books have also been adapted into manga form by Shinichi Hosoma and an English translation was published by ADV Manga in 2003/2004). You also get a total of three afterwords, the original ones from the books' seperate releases and the one written for the collected omnibus volume.
The writing style of DEMON CITY SHINJUKU and DEMON PALACE BABYLON is closer to WICKED CITY than to the VAMPIRE HUNTER D novels and makes for a brisk, fun read. As usual with books where one is already so familiar with the movie version, it's fascinating to note the little differences here and there. I'm not going to spoil the fun of discovering those for yourselves, though.
While I haven't read it yet I do look forward to doing so, because I'm already a big fan of this author. I'm currently collecting his Vampire Hunter D Series and managas and have read Invader Summer and his short D stories as well. This being his earliest book it will be an interesting read. This is the one that he is most known for other than D and I looooove D.
Let's get one thing straight even though "Demon City Shinjuku" is unequivocally Kikuchi's life's work rather than the just as unequivocally more popular Vampire Hunter D, the "Demon City Shinjuku" in question is the setting, not this novel and its bundled sequel.
It's for good reason that Kikuchi abandoned all the characters that show up in this work aside from the brilliant Dr. Mephisto since you can find their ilk in any volume of action oriented boys manga, but those same reasons have undoubtedly inspired him to include his unintentionally ironic vision of what at the time was near-future Shinjuku in something like 2/3 of his written works.
Unfortunately the lousy localization job that Digital Manga Publishing did on this book took it from the relatively mediocre (compared to Kikuchi's later works) to the outright abysmal, and their slapdash efforts with Yashakiden (see my lamentation of a review of the 5th and final volume of that series for more details) have quite possibly consigned the rest and best of Demon City Shinjuku to the other side of the Pacific for good.
At this point in the review I almost hate to pick up picking on Eugene Woodbury, the translator, from my review of Yashakiden volume 5 (which I wrote a couple hours ago), but even though his background gives me no reason to doubt his intimacy with either the Japanese or English languages, and at that rate the caliber of human being he must be, the projects he's worked on with DMP leave me questioning his ability to put his own ego as a writer aside to the degree required to pleasantly render Kikuchi into English.
I myself am not even enough of a linguist to accurately convey the quandaries that Kikuchi places his prospective translators into, but hopefully if I say it comes down to the difference between relaying what someone is saying and trying to explain WHY they might have said it in the first place you'll be able to comprehend the issues Kikuchi presents. Put another way, Kikuchi's dialogue is by no means his strength, but at the same time it's by far the most straight forward part of his works to translate (making the incoherent dialogue in DMP's English rendition of this work all the more mind boggling). On the other hand Kikuchi's prosaic narrative passages, his descriptions both of the engaging atmosphere his beguiling characters are ignoring the majesty of and the intense violence which functions as the engine that propels his works to greatness, are at once what define him as a writer and prove to be the stoutest obstacles to rendering his works in English. Of course the greatest irony of all this is that Kikuchi has far more western sensibilities than the average Japanese writer. I'm at a loss to compare him to a modern English writer (definitely not Stephen King, if anybody's the Japanese version of King it's probably Banana Yoshimoto), but even though I've been called crazy for making the comparison, Kikuchi always puts me in mind of Byron, only better.
I would say the opposite, that their strength is dialogue and their weakness is imagery, of just about any other Japanese writer that's found popularity in English. Haruki Murakami (who in the first place is probably the most American man to ever emerge from Japan's "student protests" scene) in particular essentially writes glorified monologues that work even more brilliantly in English than they do in Japanese DESPITE how hard Jay Rubin tries to inject himself into the translations (if you have money to burn grab his nearly unreadable translated collection of works by Akutagawa to see what I mean, I like Alfred Birnbaum's translation efforts just fine by the way, not least of which since back in the day he managed to make Pinball 1973 into something that's actually worth reading).
Having firmly gotten off the topic of the work I ostensibly set out to review, I'll conclude by saying that not unlike Haruki Murakami's debut work Hear the Wind Sing, the only people who this book can possibly entertain are die-hard Kikuchi fanatics who grew to appreciate him due through Vampire Hunter D since the contrast between the two projects is positively stunning, but the qualities that Kikuchi has since gone on to master still manage to shine through in spite of the low quality English localization.
Also check this out if, like another reviewer here on , you actually managed to enjoy its anime adaptation. Come to think of it, the stuff that Streamline Pictures did to the anime adaptations of Kikuchi's works in the late 80s and early 90s is not entirely unlike what DMP is doing to his novels (with the exception of the joint publication of the Vampire Hunter D series that Kevin Leahy's adoration and Darkhorse's firm hand have been able to deliver to us more or less intact) now.
Oh man. Seriously. I used to laugh every time I saw the word "gorgeous," and phrases like "D's sword limned an arc" and "paraffin white skin" re-used ad nauseum in all the volumes of Vampire Hunter D that Kevin Leahy has translated, but reading THIS THING actually succeeded in making me long for the idiosyncrasies of that particular translation project...
The main reason for the low rating is the laughable translation. "Dastardly deeds?" Come on now! Where was the editor when this this went to press? In Italian, the words for "translator" and "traitor" sound almost the same, and the translator of this book certainly betrayed the author! It reads like pulp fiction from the '30's. Still, if you approach it with the expectation that you will have a romp rather than a serious adventure, you will have fun.
this was good
I liked it. Very entertaining and fast paced.
Awesome!
The first half of the book was very entertaining, fitting of an anime or manga. But the second story dragged and couldn't hold my attention. Still, as a fan of the anime, I was more than satisfied with the first half which was a bit different that what I had watched.
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