#teito monogatari

In many ways a lot of their storytelling is best described as "derivative" but I don't really like using that word because it has such a negative connotation. I think CLAMP's genius is actually their ability to iterate on the themes and ideas and character types and other inspirations that they derive from, especially in their ability to translate those elements to a visual/aesthetic format and to add themes of queerness into those stories or highlight the already present elements of queerness.

Like Tokyo Babylon is inspired by Teito Monogatari (and also Peacock King but that in of itself is a subject for a whole other post). And it's not just limited to the quick one-off comedic reference to Yasunori Katō that we see in the beginning of the manga. The title itself is a reference to the first manga adaptation of the Teito Monogatari. And that title choice for the adaptation was itself probably a combination of a deliberate reference to the Book of Revelation which was culturally relevant in Japan at the time for reasons I'll explain in a little bit, as well as the fact that the author of Teito Monogatari based Katō in part on Aleister Crowley. But Teito Monogatari and Tokyo Babylon are fundamentally stories about the exact same subject matter, that is the City of Tokyo itself.

X aka X/1999 is pretty self evidently a loose adaptation of the Digital Devil Story novels, the ones that would go on to be adapted loosely into the Megami Tensei video games. An apocalyptic battle for the fate of the entire world fought in Tokyo between two ideologically opposed groups of super powered beings, one of which is literally called The 7 Angels. There is a magic sword associated with the death of a female loved one, there are references to a whole bunch of religious and occult concepts from both the east and west, and one of the key locations for the plot is an elite private high school. X and DDS/ Megaten are both quintessential examples of media born from the Japanese Occult Boom. Bad Japanese translations of the prophecies of Nostradamus in the '70s would inspire the Boom, and then would become mixed with the social and economic chaos that was the Japanese asset price bubble and other late stage capitalist nonsense like the financial collapse in the '90s is why you have in both Tokyo Babylon (and by extension the manga adaptation of Teito Monogatari) and X this weird obsession for the Book of Revelation in a ostensibly non-Christian cultural zeitgeist. Tokyo was both "Babylon" as in Rome or any sort of other hypothetical city / civilization that represented decadence and degeneration, and it was Tel Megiddo in the sense that it was the place where the end of days and the battle heralding the Apocalypse would commence.

Photos from the Tokyo Grand Guignol stage play Galatia Teito Monogatari, based loosely on the Teito Monogatari serial of epic dark sci fi occult horror books. Despite sharing its basis with a greatly influential series which spawned several films (the first Teito Monogatari adaption even featuring special effects designed by H.R. Giger) and a set of animated horror films, Galatia remains the most obscure of the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s productions. Very sparse information of its contents exist online. On one specific page I found a month back, a (very poorly translated) English synopsis describes the play as being a story about a machine that destroys a major city in Japan. It’s unclear if the machine they’re referring to is in reference to a humanoid robot or a more generalized weapon. It’s said that in the play, Kyusaku Shimada appears as a mad scientist who creates the oxygen destroyer from Godzilla (1954). In a description of the ending, the finale depicts a scenario where the character Yasunori Katō (a demon that manifests itself as an imperial army First Lieutenant) welcomes one of the characters to what he refers to as the “new imperial city”. He reveals to the character a supernatural landscape where various children’s toys and dolls across the stage come to life and move around on their own, all to the sounds of marching drums and claps of thunder. All images were digitized by yours truly, with the sources being volume 28 of Yaso magazine and the Suehiro Maruo-focused magazine Only You, which features a digest version of Galatia’s screenplay. Of course, with the screenplay (or at least a condensed version of it) in my possession, I plan to translate it to English some way or another down the line. This adaption would help start off Shimada’s professional acting career, with Shimada having his first major cinematic role as Yasunori Katō in the film Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis. As mentioned though, Shimada doesn’t act as Katō in the Tokyo Grand Guignol version. That role was instead designated to Yaguruma Kennosuke, who would later appear as Raizou in the original performances of Lychee Hikari Club.

I didn't have a previous familiarity with this character, but I did some digging and her name is written 洪鳳. Agi seems to be the same character, or the same character concept (Katō's maidservant), but renamed and possibly also reimagined in other ways in some adaptations.

Here is a Japanese-language Yahoo forum with someone asking a rather technical plot question about her.