POSTSCRIPT
POSTSCRIPT
Here we have the second half of Pale Fallen Angel. When I think about how the story was published in four volumes in Japan, I’m somewhat stunned, but quite some time has passed since the printing of the first half, so time-wise it probably took about as long as the Japanese edition. And that’s about all I have to say about that.
D’s stage is the Frontier. If someone were to ask me exactly where that is, I’d be at a loss, but you can think of it as the entire Eurasian continent if you like. That’s why the descriptions of some places call to mind the forest regions of Europe, and then suddenly you have a location where the snow is piled thirty feet deep like you’d only find in Siberia.
But the image I have in my head of the Frontier comes from a scene in director F.W. Murnau’s 1922 classic Nosferatu the Vampire—the part where the realtor protagonist traverses the desolate plains of Transylvania. In the half century since 1958’s Horror of Dracula, I’ve seen Transylvania in scads of movies, but not one of them presented a tableau as stark, wild, and cold as that single scene. One reason for that might be because it was a black-and-white movie. The key difference between this variety of film that so admirably makes symbols of “darkness” and “light” and the color film that replicates the hues of our daily existence is that the former creates a strange land that is sharp and isolated.
When I traveled to Transylvania twice in the past, it didn’t give me the same sense of an otherworldly reality as Murnau’s film of eighty years earlier. For me, D travels constantly through a world of black-and-white film. Whether his exquisite features are glowing a pale blue in the moonlight, the skin of a beautiful woman is taking a rosy flush in the light of day, D’s blade is sending out bright blood, or a Noble’s manor is crafted of gold, D is still a resident of a world of darkness and light. A world where everything last creature that draws breath in the white world melts in a heartbeat into a world of darkness. Those who dwell there are shadows. D’s tale is told in beautiful silhouettes.
Pale Fallen Angel was penned as a tale of just such a world as well. I can only hope that you agree with me on that point, dear readers.
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Hideyuki Kikuchi
November 13, 2008
while watching Nosferatu the Vampire