The Poetical Vision Of Hirohiko Araki
There are so many romantic notions about writers that you could spend the rest of your days listening them out. The quirky yet still highly attractive thiry something-ish woman who just can’t seem to catch a break. Until she meets a lonely yet also highly attractive and successful man who manages to learn the art of love through the graces of our heroine. This act frees the lovely woman from her writer’s block and allows her to write her dream novel. The words flowing like water bursting from a dam.
The male equivalent involves the lovable but eccentric weirdo (the good type of weird.) He is redeemable through the graces of a conveniently placed older mentor and the woman of his dreams. Thus his weirdness is transmuted into genius for his best selling novel.
The most outlandish of writer’s fiction is the Captain Ahab archetype. The lone wolf sigma male writer that is unwilling or unable to back down. His book will be published the way he envisions it or over his dead body. They are content to die as beggars rather than compromise the integrity of their work.
Even stranger then the Ahab archetype is that you can find real life examples of it. Charles Bukowski was content to waste away drinking beers in his apartment until an editor knocked at his door and started pulling out his poems—which he stashed all over his ram shackled apartment. He had been storing what would become his most famous works in dusty old filing cabinets. Fernando Pessoa wrote his magnum opus “The Book Of Disquiet” in his notebook and told not a single soul until his editor discover it years after his death.
When I learn about the lifestyle of one of these authors, my heart beings to race. What is it that drove them? What made them so unwilling to compromise? And is it possible to make money as an artist without compromising what made you want to be an artist in the first place?
With this question in my mind, Hirohiko Araki walked into my life. Mr. Araki’s magnum opus is the Japanese magna series “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. The series has been running for over thirty-four years and has been easily accessible to Western audiences through animation and Netlix.
The show focuses on the most unlucky family in the world, the JoJo family. Each season has a different member of a different timeline facing off against an unspeakable horror. Along the eight season run the members of the JoJo family had to contend against a deliciously evil wannabe aristocratic vampire, buff Mayan stone men, the same vampire resurrected due to the bodysnatching of the first JoJo and now with the ability to stop time, a serial killer who can warp time and plant bombs in your eyes, and finally a drug dealing mafioso who erases time whenever someone comes close to figuring out his identity.
The series calls itself bizarre but what it really is—is batshit insane. I watch the series in awe not because I am a fan of anime, or enthralled by the plot or animation but at amazement at what Araki can get away with. The second season features a German officer hilariously named Rudolf von Stroheim who is not the enemy but an ally. He blows himself up the save the protagonist but the German army doesn’t allow death to get you off the hook. They bring him back together as a cyborg with a machine-gun implanted in his chest. Peak ridiculousness is when he fires over six-hundred rounds of ammunition from his chest-gun all while claiming that “German science is the best in the world!”
The main protagonist of that season, Joseph Joestar, is a half-British, half-American who’s special ability is to run away from the battle. Joseph claims that this is not because he is a coward but because he needs time to devise a trick or a deception. The character is the personification of the fool archetype as he can only win a battle through his wit and we watch his back be constantly placed against the wall—only for him to come out on top through some random and barely conceivable solutions often at a cost of his own pride.
The battles of the series is another example of how out there the show is. The first JoJo’s are built like brick shithouses that pummel their enemies with a golden chi-like energy called Hamon. The later JoJo’s become scrawnier and scrawnier as they learn to fight with an avatar manifestation of the their souls called stands. The power of these stands range from godlike (re-write reality) to situationally useful (a battalion of toy-soldiers equipped with miniature rifles, helicopters, and tanks) to comedic (a stand that only activates after winning a game of rock, paper, scissors.)
And through the hurricane of craziness stands Araki at the center. For over thirty-four years he has worked on the same piece of art. Always evolving, always unfolding, and always willing to take the series in whatever direction his bizarre mind can conjure. Censorship is not a concept that exists in this mans brain. The JoJo’s where British royalty, American immigrants, half-Japanese and traveling the world like Jules Verne, then fully Japanese and attending a small town high-school and on and on until the last chapter I read had the main JoJo as a paraplegic horse jokey racing across the United States to find pieces of Jesus’s corpse. No piece of art has survived so many shifts.
I am jealous of Araki, I stand in awe. He achieved every artist’s dream when he set the fifth season in Italy. The first thing you learn about Araki is that he is an Italophile. Every season leading up to this one had something to do with Italy. The characters of the show often posed in the classical positions of great statues such as “David” or the “Apollo Belvedere” Italians kept on finding their way to the JoJo family such as the warrior-monks of the Zeppeli family or the Italian chief Toni Trussardi. They would often speak in a portmanteau of English and Italian taking special care to elucidate Italian cuisines, culture, and customs.
It is every artist’s dream to make money while focusing on the topics that interest him. The behind the scenes for the Italy season feature Araki with wide smiles at all the locations he got to visit while “researching.” He even includes decades of personal pictures from his numerous visits to the peninsula. The JoJo’s may be on a fictional adventure but they are very much a park of Araki’s real life adventure—which is continuing till this day. They say you should do what you love and that man Araki is constantly doing that…and constantly reinventing what that love is.