A Vampire Tale Like No Other

Everything begins with “Demon City.” It now goes without saying that Hideyuki Kikuchi’s roots as an author trace back to his debut novel, Demon City Shinjuku. Also well known is the frightening thrill he got from simply seeing a poster for the movie Dracula in his formative years.

Thus it stands to reason that his second authorial effort, Vampire Hunter D, should revolve around vampires.

The long-awaited Yashakiden came seven years after his debut and took him back to where he started. Demon City became the foundation and the driving force behind this epic tribute to the vampire genre.

Published in thirty-seven magazine installments over four years and compiled into eight volumes, the sheer scale of the project is impressive enough. All the more so considering that everything Hideyuki Kikuchi has done since his debut—or ever since he was first entranced by the picture of fear and dread molded into human form and clothed in a black cape—permeates these pages.

As such, Yashakiden does not simply represent the culmination of Kikuchi’s work as an author, but the epitome of the fantasy horror genre in Japan and beyond its borders.

Yashakiden is the story of the all-out war between the citizens of Shinjuku and a vicious vampire gang.

Ever since Bram Stoker’s Dracula, humans have been fighting these heliophobic vampires. Novels, movies or manga, this interspecies conflict has pretty much been the rule. Though the scale alone—setting an entire city against a gang of the undead—is not what sets Yashakiden apart in this instance.

Robert R. McCammon’s They Thirst takes place in a Los Angeles that has become an island and the domain of a vampire king. In two of the last Hammer films, Dracula A.D. 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula, Dracula plots the conquest of the world.

Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and the manga Teen Town ZF by Kazuo Koike and Hitoshi Hirano create worlds where the vampires have already taken control. Ryo Hanmura’s Arteries of Stone and Kiyoshi Kasai’s Vampire War posit vampires guiding the currents of history from the shadows.

Rather, what sets Yashakiden apart is the nature of the conflict. In the aforementioned cases, no matter how far-flung the setting, the element common to the genre is that of humans fighting vampires. The human must resort to collective action and armaments against the stronger vampires.

In Yashakiden, to be sure, the people of Shinjuku raise arms against Princess’s gang. But this is Demon City, where the “people” aren’t all ordinary humans. The genie Setsura Aki and the Demon Physician Doctor Mephisto, to start with. Along with the witch Galeen Nuvenberg, the doll girl, an ectoplasmic raven, and a supernatural Special Forces unit.

Not to mention the clan of the unequaled Toyama vampires. And all manner of fantastic and grotesque creatures waiting in the wings.

Yashakiden is more than monster duels or mutants in a civil war against each other. Getting away from the human-versus-vampires formula also frees the conflict from the conventional two-dimensionality of good and evil, right and wrong, heaven and hell, light and dark.

Driving the point home, Kikuchi drives a stake through the Manichaean simplicity of Demon City versus the vampires by creating divisions within their own ranks and creating a love-hate relationship between Shinjuku and the “outside world.” Allies turn on each other. Enemies make pacts. And break them.

The Machiavellian schemes multiply. Distinguishing friend from foe becomes well-nigh impossible. A tried-and-true ally like vampire clan leader Yakou becomes Princess’s servant. Mephisto himself has turned bodily into a vampire, leaving Setsura to face the deadly struggle by himself.

With genie against monster and monster against other monsters, this is a heroic supernatural battle with scarcely a true human among its combatants! And so the traditional conceit of vampire-versus-human has been completely cast aside, with the leading men and ladies all vampires or non-humans.

The allies are as strange as the enemies, and even words like “enemy” and “ally” are hard to pin down. These are the kinds of roles made for a world haunted by vampires.

Kikuchi seems to imbue all of his characters with multiple facets. As with Setsura’s dual personalities, “D” as well was born into the no man’s land between two worlds, endowed with qualities binding him to both, yet doomed to be accepted by neither.

Vampires can likewise be said to be citizens of those ambiguous borderlands. Less immortal than being cursed with immortality. Living with the memories of a mortal life that they can never return to, mortals being now only the source of their sustenance. Wandering forever through the twilight world.

Princess and her gang have lost their homeland and practically everything that makes them human, including death. These creatures of the night are sealed within an endless twilight, stealing through the world aboard their ship, seeking a place of sanctuary. If anyplace in the world would ever take them in, it must be Demon City Shinjuku.

Vampires did not appear in Shinjuku because the city was already corrupt and evil. Rather, built on the boundary between the real and the surreal, Shinjuku calls out to those expelled by the outside world. To these eternal “borderlanders,” there can be no place else for them but smack dab in this border city.

There alone they could put their wandering pasts behind them. There alone they could embrace the faint hope of calling the place their own. Except that only through slaughter and violence could they convince themselves such a destiny was assured.

Not even Shinjuku could reject them. The moment it tried, Shinjuku would cease to be Demon City. However it might try to kill them afterwards, it would first invite them into its house without reproach. That is what made the city what it was. Every freedom was condoned. The freedom to live. The freedom to die. The freedom to fight and destroy.

To live in Shinjuku was to fight every day to stay alive, to be bound by nothing but the individual conscience. Anything—animal, vegetable or mineral—willing to fight to the bitter end could fan the flames of its own life. Only when that thing ceased to struggle did it lose its rightful raison d’etre.

In this dog-eat-dog world, only the logic of exclusion is forbidden. No matter how strange, it is allowed to live and let live. Two thousand of its citizens once proclaimed that, “No matter what manner of life form, here it has the right to live to the best of its ability.”

Even the mayor, described by some as an “absent-minded bank guard,” wouldn’t be cowed by a contingent of the Special Forces, fearlessly declaring:

All who choose to live here are accorded all the rights due them as citizens of this ward. As long as they choose to live here, we will do what we can to protect them. No matter how noble your cause, no matter how much power you flaunt, as long as it’s coming from the outside world it goes into the circular file. This is Demon City Shinjuku. What may make sense elsewhere won’t pass muster here.

That which defies the existing order Shinjuku takes in, all the illogic that the inexorable march of modern society has striven to stamp out. And so the anarchy blossoms.

Except that the more order that modern society tries to impose upon reality, the more often disorder erupts cataclysmically in strange and distorted ways. By contrast, the steady diet of grotesque death that constitutes daily life in Demon City means that, as the mayor puts it, “Nobody comes to this city with hopes for a rosy future blossoming in his chest. And nobody leaves suffused with newly-found happiness.”

So from whence comes this boundless sense of freedom and vibrant sense of life? Confronting the conventions of both fiction and reality, Kikuchi poses the problem to us: the absolute safety whose absoluteness must at some point corrupt absolutely versus the omnipresent danger of a bewitching and liberating disorder.

What do we lose in our inevitable bargaining for safety and security? What do we lose in order to maintain the status quo? There is no firm answer to such hypotheticals. But as long as Demon City exists, Hideyuki Kikuchi will continue to lob such rhetorical explosives in our direction.

In 1997, fifteen years after Hideyuki Kikuchi’s debut, John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (in which Carpenter turned Manhattan into a Demon City-like penal colony) came to Japan. That year as well, the magical city of the century, Hong Kong (previously transformed by Kikuchi into Wicked City) was returned to China. And that year, Kikuchi began writing about the Devil Quake that gave birth to Demon City Shinjuku.

Yoshiharu Sasagawa (while watching The Great Yokai War)