Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis (2018)

Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis (2018)

Author: Yoshikazu Takeuchi | Translator: Nathan A. Collins | Page Count: 216

'I'm coming to meet you. I promise I'll come to you soon. I'll come to you, and I'll save you.'

Kirigoe Mima is a Japanese pop-idol. Three years in the business makes her a veteran, but her popularity, and therefore her career, is at something of an impasse. With so many hopeful idols (i.e. potential rivals) on the way up, Mima explores new avenues.

Her manager believes that moving away from her innocent image is the answer. He suggests that Mima explore paths that are more daring and seductive.

But not all members of the dedicated fan base that the pop-idol phenomenon attracts are accepting of their idols' life choices. For a small number of them, sometimes 'dedication' can cross a line and become 'obsession'. One fan in particular believes Mima ought to stay the same forever. He makes it his duty to ensure that she does just that; and if she refuses his selfless help, then it follows that it's his duty to punish her for her wicked betrayal, too.

Perhaps best known as being the text that Japanese filmmaker Satoshi Kon based his début feature film on, Yoshikazu Takeuchi’s Perfect Blue: CM novel is a thriller set in the pop-idol world, an entertainment industry that infamously preys upon purity and destroys integrity.

I suspect that most readers will approach the book with knowledge of the film, so I'll quickly mention what I think those folks will want to know: many of the things that vex Mima early in the anime also occur in the novel, but with slight differences. Where the two deviate the most is in the severity of the violence, and it might surprise people to learn that Kon's version of the same was toned down - in the book it's more vicious. But the similarities last for only so long; sometime around 80+ pages the novel runs out of ideas and spirals into repetitive mediocrity.

The writing (and/or the translation?), which isn't great to begin with, gets increasingly worse and by the time the book hits the final third, when it should be exploding its themes and tearing apart its characters' reasoning, it becomes excruciatingly trite and is an amateurish, joyless read.

To me, Takeuchi's novel is a woeful, undeveloped bore with little to offer a reader beyond its laboured shock value. I was hoping for something that at least attempted to give its characters as much depth as what Kon imbued his with. Kon understood that even characters who are meant to be shallow individuals ought to be well-fleshed out, but everyone in the book is one-dimensional and there's no indication beyond the opening chapter that the author had the ability, much less the inclination, to make his creations anything other than perfunctory and flat.

In short, the PB anime is a disturbing and sophisticated exploration of fame and identity, but it seems that the credit for that goes almost completely to Kon, not the original novel's author.

NOTE: Takeuchi's Japanese language novel was originally published in 1991. The 2018 date that I've used above is that of the English language version published by Seven Seas.