Type: Long-form critical essay (hybrid fictional–critical)

Status: Manuscript submitted; decision pending

Full manuscript available on request.

Abstract:

The essay traces a set of Nabokovian devices—unreliable narration, layered authorship, doubling, recursive structure, obsessive detail, linguistic and translational play, paratextual games, and child consciousness as an ethical nerve—and shows how each finds a counterpart in Urasawa’s
Monster and 20th Century Boys. At the same time, its hybrid fictional–critical narrative mirrors those techniques, letting a wandering narrator move through these ink-worlds so that the very act of reading the essay reenacts the unstable, layered authorship and fractured truth it describes.

Excerpt 1:

The Rabbit Nabokov card in your hand might not exist at all if not for one reckless act of indulgence: colliding two characters from Naoki Urasawa’s Monster.

That collision opened the door of the casino in 20th Century Boys. It’s where you found the card, and where it might reveal its rules. No one sees you. You move safely through the ink: pausing at tables, slipping behind mirrors, lingering for sparks of beauty hidden behind the scarred smiles and watchful eyes, or chasing after meaning they’d rather you never find.

The casino is a place that looks like it belongs to its own world, but you can sense all the different sceneries put into it; elements taken from American cinematic landscapes coexist in uneasy harmony with a Japanese casino ruled by the Chinese and Thai mafia, where a Russian game is played.

In this place, a man in a traditional Japanese kimono catches your attention. He hides a tantō in his sleeve—while everyone else, including the dealer, carries a gun. His poker face is almost flawless.

You know how that almost is crucial in worlds born under Urasawa’s pen.

He’s teaching Kanna—the girl with determination sparking in her huge eyes—the Rabbit Nabokov game, and reveals its creator: Aleksandr Nabokov.

It’s a hybrid of two Russian authors: Aleksandr Pushkin and Vladimir Nabokov. You wonder—why these two names combined?

Excerpt 2:

Aleksandr Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin shenanigans don’t end in 20th Century Boys. They don’t even begin here: you have to slow down and go through the mountains into Urasawa’s Bavaria.

You can tell it’s as rich as Nabokov’s landscapes—the difference lies in the form: drawings versus writing.

The town you’re visiting is called Ruhenheim. It’s both very fictional (there is no town called Ruhenheim in Germany) and very real (it looks and feels Bavarian, and it neighbors actual towns and places).

In Ruhenheim lives Konrad the jam maker. His jam comes from the same fruit that appears in Eugene Onegin: lingonberries.

Excerpt 3:

You feel as isolated and trapped as Richard did when you see the doppelranger. You can only shake your head in gleeful disbelief at the tonal clash; a wordplay as obvious shouldn’t work this well on your spine.

You glance at your hands—have they always looked this… inky? Maybe you’re committing the very sins Nabokov warned against: identifying with characters (juvenile!), hunting for the author inside the fiction (rubbish!).

But you don’t mind. The ink on your hands, the words torn to pieces—it’s entertaining, it’s enlightening, it’s enchanting, exactly the three ingredients from Nabokov’s recipe for a good storyteller.

You don’t mind looking at the author either—because what you see is a persona, or rather, a swarm of personas. A work is never just one mind, anyway; the supposed real Capital-M Mind behind this inky chaos will always remain an unanswered question.

Besides, how much can you trust answers from sources that spin absurd little stories about apes using charcoal, or about eighty-four-year-old soba apprentices their own chef refuses to see?