Tokyo Babylon

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My love of CLAMP spills out again. Tokyo Babylon is another beautiful tragedy that every CLAMP follower, and manga reader should try.

Story: Find yourself in Tokyo, the 90s, following Subaru, a young progeny onmyouji. Exorcist for all who don't know what that is. Sounds so ordinary, so very relative. You can't even begin to understand how absolutely tragic and emotional this manga is. Subaru's companions, Seishirou and twin sister Hokuto accompany him as he travels throughout Tokyo and what is ultimately the setting for X/1999. There's plenty of humor here, parallel with tragedy and drama.

If you're uncomfortable with shounen ai, you may not ... like this as well, although nothing outright is done. But there is always something alluded to it in Tokyo Babylon. Personally, I love CLAMP most for this fact alone. Their mantra, of someone's most precious person, no matter what gender, age or color has always been a redeeming quality. I support them alone for this factor in all of their work.

There isn't really much I can say without revealing spoilers for the manga and I can't ruin this beauty. The story will truly bring you in and you'll want to know just why Seishirou is always there for Subaru and you'll want to see more of Hokuto's deliciously charming fashion. This is certainly a twist of a story and you'll never guess it. Enthralling and completely CLAMPesque.

Art: It's a CLAMP classic and I love their older works. The artwork of their older ones is so beautiful and so rich in texture, I always feel like I'm watching it move. There's a sensual feeling to the older works of CLAMP and this one definitely has it. Especially when you see Hokuto's outfits that she makes for her and Subaru. It's highly detailed and dark, which adds to the effect of the dark tones to the story. It's so elegant that it amplifies that tragic atmosphere to the story, making it all so much more impacting.

Character: I love Subaru and Hokuto. Hell, I even loved Seishirou despite certain things. There's certain character development that happens, that is significant to the story and what happens after the story that makes it all so...tragic. God how many times have I used that word in this review? Subaru is the absolute representation of purity and good. Watching how he changes throughout the manga is wonderful (which means you must then read X/1999-you really must. I've written a review for that as well so check it out), and Hokuto is the sweetest sister ever. She's fiercely protective of Subaru and I loved that about her. And Seishirou is like an enigma. Their interactions throughout the story are what make it all and how everything comes together in the end makes it all so much more...
Just read it guys.

Enjoyment: If you can't see it now, you're blind. I love Tokyo Babylon. I fell in love with it in volume 1. Something about self-sacrificing Subaru just made me want to love him. I think, as humans, we can identify with tragedy because we all experience it in one way or another. And this is what makes us connect to what we read or watch. I can feel these characters and I can connect with the story and I love that I am pulled into this story not of my own volition. There wasn't one second where I thought, "Nah, I'm just going to put this book down and go wash dishes or something." This book gripped me by the heart and squeezed me for every tear that I had.

“Love is just a blood-match, to see who can endure lash, after lash…” – St Vincent


Though the title "Tokyo Babylon" evokes a contrast between the urban sprawl of 1980s cityscape and the ancient city of desolation, perhaps Sodom and Gomorrah would be a better allegory for the cold and corrupt city that lends itself to the scenery of Tokyo Babylon.

The city’s influence on our main character, Subaru Sumeragi, is undeniable. Thirteenth in the long line of onmyouji (spell-casters, mediums, or exorcists), he is employed as a kind of spiritual psychiatrist to relieve Tokyo’s residents, past and present, of their emotional baggage. Despite his obvious power ... he has a passive, neurasthenic personality, as soft as wax and as wavering as candlelight. Ultimately a kind and selfless sixteen-year-old boy, the pressure and grime of city life slowly weighs down on his soul.

Not that Subaru’s life is one of introversion and agony – at least not at first. His twin sister Hotoru ensures that. Aggressively cheerful, her personality likely an unconscious front put on to support Subaru’s weaknesses. Her idiosyncrasies are a source of humour and warmth throughout, especially her endevours to push her brother together with their mutual friend Seishiro Sakurazuka. “I wanted you to have something you would love so much, that you wouldn’t care what others thought. Something you wouldn’t change your mind about. It didn’t matter what it was. I just wanted you to have something like that,” she explains to her brother. Seishiro, despite his surname having distinctly sinister connotations with death, is a mild-mannered and chirpy vet who couldn’t possibly be anything more than he first seems.

Starting in a generic monster-of-the-week format, Tokyo Babylon gradually reveals more and more of the characters’ backstories and the tangled web woven between fate and free will.

This is something of a hallmark of CLAMP: the notion of “inevitability”, though it may not be as evident in this as in their other work. Tokyo Babylon could be thought of as the encapsulation of their various themes and tropes: the occult, good and evil, self-sacrifice, sexuality. While some may view this as nothing but talentless repetition or ego masturbation, despite being somewhat cliche due to the context of CLAMP’s subsequent fame, Tokyo Babylon is what I consider the pinnacle of CLAMP’s craft.

Stylistically, the art in Tokyo Babylon gradually improves throughout the seven volumes. Subaru is drawn effeminately and with an elegance that belies his innocence. CLAMP in true form take great pains exploring extremely detailed fashion and distinctive character designs, replete with standard 90s CLAMP anatomical proportions. This is particularly prominent in Subaru’s dress-sense, with his trade-mark gloves and meticulously rendered coats with buttons, zips, lapels, pleats et al. Whether this is truly the style of a sixteen-year-old boy is up for debate, but it is certainly stunning to look at, especially on the full-colour covers and the small posters inside the front cover of each volume.

While Tokyo Babylon may seem like fluff, even in the earlier stories its use of Shinto ideology to present didactic inquests into social issues is scathing. Subaru’s power leads him to help many people, from the murderous to the lonely, and very few sections of society escape without commentary.

It’s this pull of inevitable reality where Tokyo Babylon’s true intentions start to unfurl.

In a dream, a man tells the child Subaru, “Did you know? They say buried underneath every cherry tree is a corpse. [...] The reason the cherry blossoms bloom so beautifully every year is because of the corpse buried underneath.”

Just as the true form of beauty is seen to be one of ugliness, everything we know about the characters is perceived a different shade in the light of truth.

As we saw through the relentless critique of society, so we see more starkly the juxtapositions of obligations and choices, industrialisation and sorcery love and death, and ultimately the selfishness inherent in selflessness.

We see how the catalyst of despair that ultimately manifests as malevolence in the last volume began as an undercurrent that has rippled in every page, panel and brushstroke since the very beginning. Perhaps it is this that gives Tokyo Babylon its unusual allure, palpable tension and lurking melancholy that has endured the 23 years since Tokyo Babylon’s first printing.

RRP: £9.99
Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: Tokyopop (15 July 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1591828716
ISBN-13: 978-1591828716

Originally posted on my blog http://marusamarento.wordpress.com/

Tokyo Babylon is mainly a collection of few stories about an exorcist protagonist and encounters he has during his works - both regular jobs and random confrontations.

Now, right from the start I felt like I was missing some chunk of the story, like I accidentally started reading the wrong volume and skipping the introduction. The characters aren't exactly properly introduced and thanks to their status as twins might even be easily confused for each other for first few chapters (though this might also be fault of the very low quality scanlations which are pretty much your only choice for this manga as the official ... release is out of print). The character of the main protagonist is pretty much just "being a good boy". I'm hoping for some development in the sequel, but for now he's not exactly the most interesting protagonist. The other two of the trio of main characters aren't really important to the plot except for the finale, so they too aren't exactly expanded upon.

For the stories itself - most of them feel like an attempt to portray some serious topic to make tha work deep, but they don't offer any unique take or any more deep analysis of the problem. It's like Tokyo Babylon gives up on making it more interesting and always decides that "yep, that's enough, that will do, this suffices to entertain a reader", which to be fair might work if this is one of the first fictions that takes on those themes that you've read. The last part of the manga breaks from the linked anthology format and follows more straightforward storyline. While it's nice that there is some twist in the narrative, one of them is a leap in logic like straight out of bad yaoi. Tokyo Babylon truly does not forget its shounen ai roots and dishes out a questionable narrative as it tries to push two characters to have to interact with each other as in a relationship.

About the art, I won't hide that I'm not a fan of CLAMP art and this manga sadly isn't an exceptions. It's still more readable than the usual 90's shoujo manga and I have to admit that the art indeed improves through the volumes, but it's still not for me. If you're a CLAMP fan I'm sure you'll enjoy it anyway though.

Overall, most of this manga is forgettable both story-wise and character-wise so I would suggest it only to those that are already fans of the authors. If you want to pick this up to try to get more into the intertwined world of CLAMP works and to understand the links between the works, just don't expect anything great and you probably won't be disappointed.