snowperson

Ray Bradbury was the first sci-fi writer I loved, and up to today he is still among my favorite authors.

I was enraptured by The October Country. The Martian Chronicles goes without saying.

If I were to choose favorites, and the most provocative to me, among his many short stories with their splendid, beautiful, and fantastical solitude and solemnity, there would be “The Lake”, “Kaleidoscope”, “The Rocket Man”, “A Scent of Sarsaparilla”, “The Scythe”, “A Miracle of Rare Device”, “The Veldt”, “The Rocket”, “The Jar”, “The Small Assassin”, “The Wind”, “There Was an Old Woman”, “And So Died Riabouchinska” - I could go on forever. I also love “The Fog Horn”, and the thread between “Homecoming” and “The April Witch”.

But the ones that engrossed me most were “The Lake” and “The Rocket Man”.

(It was translated that way by Seiichi Yoshida in the Hayakawa* edition I read. Even now, rather than the more modern words in titles “The Spaceship Crewman” that Moto Hagio-san went with**, or “The Spaceman”, the rich, old fashioned image evoked by “The Rocket Man” feels more befitting to it.”

If I must call back on my embarrassment and confess, in middle and high school, I was diligently drawing and submitting manga, and I fearlessly even attempted to make some manga version of “The Lake” and “Rocket Man” in my total obsession. I aborted this fearsome undertaking on account of my inability to salvage my drawings, but I’m actually grateful for that setback. If I had carelessly become some sort of fumbling mangaka, I would’ve ended up, one way or another, persisting in my ambition to turn Bradbury’s beautiful and solitary world into manga - to the end that I surely would’ve been demoralized beyond recovery reading Hagio-san’s “Bradbury Masterpiece Theater”.

Moreover, Hagio-san’s choice of “I must make these into manga no matter what” stories even matched mine as far as “The Lake”, “Rocket Man”, and “The Fog Horn”. Thankfully I failed to become a mangaka. Because of that, instead of being shocked by Hagio-san’s choices, I could smirk, gloating to myself “Ah, Mo-sama loves the same works as me.”

Besides, Hagio-san being the one to adapt Bradbury into manga, and the one Hagio-san chose being none other than Bradbury, were undoubtedly good things. We are able to immerse ourselves in Bradybury’s world made into manga, with not my hopeless drawings, or anyone else’s drawings - but if someone had to do it, it could be none other than Hagio-san with her beautiful illustrations.

Hagio-san’s illustrations have a sort of gradated transparency; if I were to say, they project a kind of inanimate quietude. One might regard manga as something dynamic, but that quietude and serenity are the exact same that the lonely twilight world of Bradbury has, such that perhaps no one else could recreate the final sorrow of that summer in “The Lake”, or the translucent grief in “The Rocket Man”.

Come to think of it, my favorite chapters from The Poe Clan, “Glensmith’s Diary”, “Marybelle and the Silver Rose”, and “Holmes’ Hat”, among others, commune with Bradbury’s world - they are marked from the start by the loneliness of autumns and the clearness of dusks. Meaning, this collection of short stories can be called a homecoming for Mo-sama; that may have been the plan.

*Japanese sci-fi publisher