i have always been fascinated by the prospect of dystopias, especially those with a particular emphasis on the potential for technological advancement the further we plunge our necks into a convergence that never comes, or at least isn't prescient enough to warrant a look back at certain bygone epochs. you know, works of such sophistry and wonder that you can't help but get lost in the possibilities that may come true many years down line. hell, you may live to see them play out before your very earthly visage. the feeling of knowing the unknown will incontrovertibly morph into what's in the now and consequently known, is one that parallels few others. Eden is a manga of that such ilk, with brand-spanking highlights of the technobabble of future civilizations manifesting themselves as narrative, it harbors no shortage of idealistic navel-gazing for pompous geeks such as myself. teeming with applications of cyberization and basic tenets of the proliferation of inorganic matter and life alike, it lacks nothing in terms of what may be explored in hard sci-fi -- or perhaps that seems so.
uncapping my verbatim reflective of Endless World, one takeaway i've periodically had with respect to the ostensible “what is lacking" happens to be what isn't retroactively shown in further depth. sure, many of the theories and machinations seem plausible at a glance, but that only really scratches the surface of what can be parsed within a web of congregating vignettes, each of which encloses a facet of post-modernity as a focal point of the uncollated tale's significance in the grand scheme of things. the reason i say "a" instead of "the" is simply that there's greater thematic depth to Eden than mere photon beam emitters that penetrate even kevlar-reinforced armaments. like, is that all? what is aptly annotated superseding this markedly shoddy attempt at textual digression is the following soliloquy i had when blazing through some of the more middling chapters smack dab bookending continually fracturing episodes starring a throng of relegated cannon fodder that also somehow take comparatively major precedence to the progression of the underlying subtext of neverending despotism:
"i hope more of the inner workings of this phenomenon is explained later on but for some out-of-touch reason, i keep getting the irreverent hunch that deluding myself into believing i'll get more coverage of that as i make ordinate progress across the manga's run is conceited and asking too much of the author."
Endo, if you knew this was going to become a bump on the road in the long run then why opt to make this so heavily mired in the fauxscientific. a fine example of balls-to-the-wall cyberpunk would be Shirow Masamune's Ghost in the Shell, wherein he goes into dizzyingly succinct depth about how he envisions a japan that's not grounded in present times and tries to convey the silliness of sudden drastic changes in modern society that would entail either mass skepticism or unanimous acceptance, each depending on the sign of the times to determine which is more amiable and attuned to the world as it is at any given fixture. Hiroki Endo's Eden does not do this at all. He tries to capture the dreary aesthetic of post-economic bubble japan circa the late 90s through a bevy of variegated stances, for one there’s the political framework of a slew of governing bodies that reeked of unbounded corruption and bore a tint of manipulative mannerisms that those in charge of running the country at the time never admitted to. similarly, the globalist faction Propatria does this albeit to much broader degrees. now, its discrepancy in relation to GITS' is as follows: GITS has every reason to wax philosophical while not needing to go ham on the technobabble throughout its runtime whereas Eden plays into the conceit that it may be obliged to do the same. this is where things begin to go awry. GITS has few unchanging rules to its structural components so working with those rules all while revelling in self-indulgence is fair, but in the case of Eden you’ve got so many different tenets that often act disproportionately to one another so they clash. a lot. hence creating an induced fear of imbalance, with contradictions and inconsistencies becoming increasingly prevalent as more and more of the world therein starts to unravel.
with that being said, the other thing i can ceremoniously praise Eden for is its handling of core thematic threads and messages that weave into the narrative at large. one such theme is the importance of familial bonds and the curious ways in which they ultimately transcend innately altruistic worldviews. now i know what may be suddenly crossing your mind? what does altruism have to do with family ties, especially in as majorly complex a narrative as Endless World? well, the first of my points has to do with the Ballards, the main provocateurs of each of the stories. Comprising 5 members, each replete with distinct backstories and moments of clarity, all of them are tied by the events that transpire around them, whether they be the perpetrators or unwilling participants in them, they inevitably seem to be latched firmly in place by the world over, never once being granted control over affairs regularly galvanized by them. yes, they serve as catalysts for the dozens upon dozens of botched operations and devious schemes devised by the higher-ups of Propatria or as stated, them.
Enoa comes off at first as this idealistic child commanding this sense of anti-nihilism as he grabs whatever opportunity that dangles in front of his face by the hand. a naive opportunist, he appears readily adamant about jettisoning the paradisiacal eden that both he and his future wife Hana are stranded on. Later on, as he redebuts as a jaded revolutionary assuming responsibilities in the form of orchestrating a large scale coup’d’etat against Propatria that takes ages to reach some semblance of a conclusion, he wavers and grouchily catapults back and forth between sabotaging Propatria from within and caring for his family before settling on a definitive calling card. and thus winding up choosing his family over downing the megaestablishment douches. how very admirable. it sugarcoats the thin facade of fickle relationships and immortalizes it as something that transcends even time. who you are in the present, what forms of treachery and deceit you dare commit out in the open, how much you value everyone else more than you do your birth parents because of how much insurmountable grief they might have caused you for not having been there in your most vulnerable hours, it all doesn’t matter. family comes first and should any bad omen come their way, you must act expeditiously to endeavor and deflect whatever that imminent danger is.
kicking back the dilemma of parenthood for a bit, Eden also spares no mercy on the part of the reader as it constantly inundates them with fleeting passages of fornication. in this context specifically, prostitution. Enoa’s son, Elijah, is a disenfranchised youth. he yearns for a place to belong since losing both his younger sister and mother to a remotely spearheaded division of Propatrian lackeys imparted a toll all too hard for him to cope with. so he wanders the incan mountain range aimlessly, happening upon barren cities every so often, reminding us, the audience, that this is a war-torn future full of callous decisions and hasty science-y shenanigans condoned by glory-seeking scientists that teeter on the very brink of collapse and failure every time they experiment on a newly discovered strain of virulent microbes. that is, until he crosses paths with the mercenary group Nomad and is blackmailed into doing their bidding lest he barrels off in the opposite direction when they’re not monitoring his every misstep. fast forward some odd four years later, Elijah is now a proficient contract killer worthy of the mantle "Lecherous MacGyver”. he is serendipitously tasked with investigating a lead discovered after some of the Nomads discover a trail of blood within an Australian bioelectronics firm that indirectly stems from Propatrian soil, and so he, along with a ragtag crew of misanthropic and disgraced law enforcers plus an incubated a.i. that takes corporeal form, sets out to find what it is that they have decidedly chosen to associate themselves with. and now, for the reason as to why all of this is lost on me: the sex interspersed throughout. yes, you heard me right. there are way too many sex scenes accompanying a majority of the events i have described above, and sometimes you may even spot some instances of recreational drug use, though not for meditative purposes, mind you. the people in this manga all happen to be debaucherous animals who crave carnal pleasures and Sabbath-like epiphanies where they rather waste their lives living from one moment to the next without care for anything that does not inherently concern them. selfish, and above all, blind to the crushing realisations and expectations present only within reality. what they are and who they were before are not two inextricably linked concepts as far as they’re concerned.
i do not reserve the right to riff on about the art as gushing about manga aesthetics from a strictly technical point of view does not fall within my area of expertise, i'm afraid. although, i will comment on the general "feel" of the style Endo fosters throughout. it is predominantly consistent, and while it does dip at points, it stays very much in line of the scope of ambition and range of prose and constructs that it postulates. smooth as silk at times, and rough as sandpaper as well as soulless at others, it is truly commendable that Endo managed to work up this much of an appetite for consistency of delivery over the 10 or so years he spent writing and illustrating this wondrous piece of dystopian sci-fi.
additional notes: does anyone else feel that the exact genre that Eden is supposedly classified under should be be up in the air rather than be defined as plain cyberpunk? this does not read like how conventional cyberpunk would. rather, i infer that it jumbles up and decompartmentalizes subgenres across all basic gists native to storytelling and bastardizes and pokes fun at them individually, and one at a time. for closure, volumes 9 and 10 read like something out of a flick centered around a geopolitical turf war between unruly occupying forces and those who seek to bleach their lands of the aforementioned scourge, so to speak, with a backdrop incumbent on a non-specific locale, much akin to how a game of cat and mouse would unfold but only with no intentionally divulged number of sides to the unending pursuit. conversely there's nonsense like volume 14, where the better half of it is spent on a bunch of random field agents pursuing a duo of schoolgirls, one of which is a trained assassin unafraid to exercise lethal force on her foes. the thing with its tone is that it's almost school comedy-esque, with many of the shenanigans happening over the course of it being reminiscent of tacky self-aware comedies with school as the main focus a la Cromartie High School. yeah, it's kooky, i know.
