What makes a book worth reading for you? I likely would have never picked up Sparks Like Stars except for one reason—My mom was reading it for her book group, and I have gotten into the habit of reading along, which gives us a regular topic to chat about when I call each week. Otherwise, I might have run away from the title—“Sparks Like Stars”? I don’t know, it simply strikes me as something gooshy, maybe preteen… and this book really isn’t that. Written by Nadia Hashimi, an Afghan-American doctor/novelist (dang, how does a doctor find the time to write novels?), Sparks Like Stars is the second book I’ve read as part of my book-club journey with my mother, with the first being The Pearl that Broke its Shell. Both books deal with Afghanistan history and young women navigating in and out of the country. This time, the focus is on a young Afghan girl caught in the middle of the Saur Revolution, manages to escape, and the crazy aftermath. The novel is often deeply moving and eye-opening for those unaware of recent Afghani history, though the plot is built on such radical implausibilities that the tale can come across as a bit eye-rolling.
Note that I will be discussing some spoilers here. I don’t want to spoil everything, but if you don’t want any spoilers at all, skip to the end.
The general set up is that Sitara Zamani, a ten-year-old Afghan girl living in Kabal, is living the high life (relatively speaking) with her father as the right-hand man to the president, Sardar Daoud. Everything goes south when a coup is staged, her family is murdered, and she barely escapes alive under the auspices of a guard she thinks killed her family. After a series of complicated misadventures and barely-evaded capture, Sitara manages to escape the country under a new assumed name: Aryana. After a harrowing side trip through the US foster system, she is adopted by a foreign diplomat, and grows up to become a cancer surgeon—and one day (here is the big spoiler, though it’s mentioned even on the Goodreads page) in walks the guard, Shair, that saved her life and may have murdered her family. He has also escaped to the US, and now he needs her help to save his life. But can he also uncover her past?
For me I enjoyed the first half of the book a lot more than the second. Sitara’s emotionally-wrought escape from death and her ensuing rebellion against her captor, then her growing relationship with an odd-couple mother-daughter pair (one is an actor, the other a diplomat) give a real emotional bite to the story, and create a delicious tension to the hairbrained escape schemes and encounters that play out. When Sitara/Aryana arrives in the USA and is pawned off into a foster home run by a tyrannical Christian mother and her pedophile husband, the story felt derailed a bit.
But then the narrative jumps to Sitara’s adult life, and I felt a lot of disconnect at first. I was more interested in following young Sitara’s adaptation to the new culture than older Sitara’s jaded maturity and broken love life. Then, when Shair appears through the wildest cosmic coincidence on her doorstep, I had a serious flashback to A Little Princess (which I also read earlier this year) because that book, too, relies on a massive serendipity to resolve its character conflicts. With Sparks Like Stars, though, this act of fate is just the first of several that stream from the godlike pen of author Hashimi, and which pull Sitara through a painful-yet-liberating journey back to the world of her childhood.
The celestial fates theme seems deliberate, even with Sitara standing as a skeptic/irreligious individual. She comes from a Muslim background, and there are hints that a greater power is working in the shadows or operating in the heavens—Shair definitely interprets the fated reunion in such a way. The story doesn’t exist without the touch of God so to speak, but it feels a bit faked rather than fated, especially as other bits fall into perfect place, or Shair speaks in deliberate riddles to string the plot out longer. The contrivances pricked my annoyance.
Still, if you can swallow the artificial elements of the tale, Sitara goes through a torturous character arc, and it’s worth it to troop along for the ride. Her relationship with her adopted mother is rewarding and warm, and traitorous Shair might be my favorite character (other than his Yoda-like obtuseness) due to his complexity and tragedy. Hashimi’s writing is at turns poetic, powerful, tense, and flat, with some few passages clonking in my ears as narrator (and Iranian-American actress) Mozhan Marno dramatically reads (I just think a few places needed another editing pass). Marno does a fine job with the reading, strengthening the narrative with due narrative heft. I was wondering as I was listening to the book whether the narrator could speak the languages of the Afghanistan, as there are several phrases in the book spoken in Afghani tongues—and while Marno speaks Farsi (the official language of Iran), it’s not clear to me she can also speak Afghani languages well. But… since I don’t know either way, it doesn’t affect my enjoyment much.
Basically, it’s a pretty good book. And it was nice to talk about it with my mom. That’s about all I got for now 😊
I asked Mayor Pilky to wait a week for my decision. She agreed on the condition that “King T-Rex” was willing to wait that long as well. To my surprise, he was.
“I’ve never lived in a garage before,” said the tyrannosaurus. “I don’t mind living under the stars for another week. But it’s kind of uncomfortable in this society if you don’t have a place to call home.”
I was glad he didn’t ask me why I wanted a week to think things over. Of course I wanted to think about where to put my vehicles if a big old lizard moved into my garage (the street or the driveway or the backyard were my big choices—if the latter, I would need to make sure I didn’t park them too close to that big boulder out back). But there were other issues I was thinking about, too.
Why did the tyrannosaurus want to live in my garage so much?
I performed some garage-reconnaissance over the next few days, and quickly found out that while my garage was pretty sizable, there were much bigger ones in town. And some of the bigger garages were not very far away from my own. Why didn’t the tyrannosaurus consider those garages? My garage didn’t have the biggest square footage inside. Nor did it have the biggest doors. Nor did it have the most windows, or the most comfortable flooring, or any other rubric I could think of that might affect the lizard’s decision to want to take over my stuff.
Now, many of the garages, like many of the buildings in town, were under repair. For whatever reason, a number of buildings in Final Pumpkin had fallen apart recently, some unexpectedly collapsing under their own weight, and so every building was being inspected and rebuilt or reinforced around town with new materials. Mine was not an exception in this regard. I had just had the place redone a few months prior.
Anyway, meanwhile, within that week the big old lizard had become a huge celebrity. Hundreds, thousands of people were visiting Final Pumpkin City just to catch a glimpse of the dinosaur. Famous rock stars, actors, even the President of the United States came personally to talk with him. I guess it was a gesture of international relations, in a manner of speaking.
And “King T-Rex” was eating up all the attention. That winning smile was plastered across his face at all times now. He had even started giving out autographs, written in sometimes stuttering, uneven letters by gripping a fountain pen between his two fingers. Sometimes I saw him pinch the pen between his incisors. I understand that he broke the fountainpen he was using on several occasions, but his fans were just as delighted to have a blotch of ink as his often surprisingly legible autograph.
Which is all to say it took me a long time before I could talk with the lizard one-on-one again. I caught him by climbing one of his favorite munching trees (yes, he ate vegetation, believe it or not) and waiting for him to stick his head inside for a big bite. When he did so, even though there were crowds around his feet, I was able to talk with him in relative privacy… though I think I startled him, as he hit his head on a large limb.
“Oh, ow,” he said. “What are you doing in here?”
I was clinging to the trunk of the tree like a slightly overweight ape. I didn’t say that, though.
“I want to know why you are all hot to live in my garage specifically,” I said. “What’s the big deal? There are many other garages that are as good as mine, if not better.”
The tyrannosaurus picked at his teeth with a twig.
“Because it’s mine,” he said. “As I told you before.”
“But now you are a king,” I said. “You can choose any garage!”
“Excuse me,” said the old lizard, pulling his head out without taking one bite. “My public awaits.”
Immediately he started talking with someone I couldn’t see from where I was awkwardly hanging in the branches.
“Yes, what’s that?” he said. “Oh, you want me to sign your beer belly? Certainly.”
I frowned and climbed down as the tyrannosaur chattered on, slathering ink across some idiot’s hairy navel.
My habit is to go to see a new, usually Japanese movie every Wednesday because it’s the one night of the week in my city where I can watch for a relatively cheap price (probably around eight dollars instead of twelve). This time, because I saw the reviews were pretty good, I went to see “Rosuto Kea,” or, under it’s English title, Do Unto Others—a new film from Nikkatsu Studios. The title comes from the famous Bible verse in Matthew—“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
I really didn’t know what I was getting into with this movie. Note that I will be discussing some spoilers here, but if you are interested in taking a gander and don’t want the spoilers, jump to the bottom of the review.
The movie is about a particular worker named Shiba (played by Kenichi Matsuyama, probably most famous in the West for his role as super sleuth L in the Death Note films) who compassionately has devoted his life to helping the elderly as their ability to serve themselves ekes away. His coworkers look up to him, his clients adore him, he goes the extra mile every time someone on his radar needs help… and that includes a longstanding penchant for secretly murdering individuals who he deems are suffering too much, and also creating too terrible a burden on their caring families. Prosecuting Attorney Otomo (played by Masami Nagasawa, recently in Shin Ultraman) sniffs out his evil deeds, and soon discovers (as the poster shockingly points out—geez, spoilers!) Shiba killed 42 people. In the ensuing court case, though, she has to search her own heart as she considers how she has treated her own family, and Shiba’s actions seem more morally cloudy than originally suspected when his painful past comes to light.
Film critic Mark Schilling characterizes this film as making an argument for euthanasia, and I don’t fully agree. Shiba is depicted as a torn individual who has had his moral compass ripped apart by societal stresses and an economic impossibility, as well as his father asking him to help him die. Yet even as some of the families of his victims come forth in support of what Shiba has done, and even Otomo (who acts much more like a detective than a prosecutor in the film) partially comes around to his position, nevertheless there is an undercurrent pushing back against Shiba’s narrative. Of course Otomo tongue-lashes the eerily calm murderer to little outward effect, but tellingly in the court room after Otomo once again tries to justify himself, a member in the audience shrieks out, demanding he return the mother he had murdered and thus stolen away from her. A side story concerning two older lovebirds underscores the bare fact that every loving relationship means that we “cause trouble” for one another as part of what it means to love and be human. And Otomo, in a searing confession to Shiba, certainly does not come to agree with what he did—she instead finds blame in her own neglect of her father, and a stinging guilt in that her mother (a Christian) insisted in entering a nursing home when she reached dotage so that Otomo could pursue her independent adult life (I don’t think the movie gives an impression that Otomo dumped her mother into the system—it is explicitly pointed out that the decision was her mother’s, presumably coming from her Christian convictions related to that verse from the title).
I think what makes the movie interesting, and disturbing, is that it dares ask these questions, and it dares to present Shiba as more than just a crazed and vicious madman ala Satoshi Uematsu, a real-life care worker in Japan who stabbed 19 disabled individuals to death back in 2016. I am not sure that the movie wants to be fully realistic in this narrative—as with most movies, the emotions are exaggerated, the situations heightened and ridiculous, and the central question of how to care for the old and infirm (a lightning rod topic for aging Japan, where over a quarter of the population is over 65 years old) is presented in a stark and painful light that anyway worked for me as a gut-wrenching emotional trigger. The movie is filled with harsh scenes of geriatric individuals suffering from dementia causing messes, breaking into fights, living in squalor, and urinating on the floor. Comments from viewers who have written mostly positive reviews on sites like eiga.com praise the film for how it cuts home for them, citing their own experiences as caregivers for the elderly, and pointing to how uncomfortable the movie made them in considering their own position and their experiences in life. I saw comment after comment about how viewers felt “stabbed” by the movie, as if it had assaulted them with its narrative force, and I felt that uncomfortable heft as I sat bludgeoned in my seat as the film ended, too.
This movie is not a thriller per se. There is little action, and even the tense sequences are often overlaid with gentle music. It’s mawkish at times, oversimplified, and I think it’s disturbing how the movie positions Shiba in a positive light during choice sequences—but I think that dissonance is also deliberate. I like that the movie struggles with the moral quandary of its subject matter without landing on a resounding moral gong one way or the other. No one is calling for euthanasia laws at the end. Otomo is left questioning how she didn’t treat her family in a way she could be proud of, and there is a strong sense that Shiba is ravaged inside as he relives the moments that drove him to his first horrible murder. The cinematography cleverly plays the two actors against each other through reflections and their contrasting tears—each gripped in the hellish guilt of having taken part either directly or indirectly in the deaths of their respective fathers.
For me, Do Unto Others was a grinding endurance for my nerves. It asks important questions about the elderly in an outlandish way, but does so I think to shock audiences into contemplation, and the performances from leads Nagasawa and Matsumura anchor the movie, with strong supporting work by the rest of the cast–especially Akira Emoto (as Matsumura’s father). I am not entirely comfortable with where the movie went, but I want more movies to take me to places and urge me to engage with topics I don’t want to consider, and do so with a measure of craft. This movie did those things better than I expected (though I think 2019’s Talking to the Starry Sky deals with some similar issues more tactfully and with at least equal power). A thought-provoking and disturbing film, if flawed in execution—much like its villainous protagonist.
“The tyrannosaurus truly and sincerely wants to live in your garage.”
Mayor Pilky was sitting in my house, looking at me with pleading eyes. I crossed my arms and glared at her.
“I won’t force you, Walter,” said the mayor. “But the tyrannosaur has really taken a shine to you. And he is our king now, after all. You really should consider—”
“That old lizard is not a king,” I said.
“Well, he is more like a figurehead,” said Pilky. “Like the royalty in Japan or in England. He doesn’t have complete power over everyone in Final Pumpkin in the same way a king of old would have. But still, he is a king under the modern definition.”
“It’s ridiculous,” I said. “Why would I want a dinosaur living in my garage?”
Mayor Pilky uncrossed her legs and leaned forward placatingly.
“Please understand,” she said. “Any upgrades to the garage that might be installed for our new king’s comfort will be covered by the royal fund. You won’t have to pay a dime.”
“That lizard is a meat-eater!” I said. “He might eat me in my sleep!”
“So far King T-Rex has just been nibbling on the local trees. He doesn’t even have sharp teeth.”
“Yeah, what is up with that anyway?” I said. “Since when do tyrannosaurs not have sharp teeth?”
Pilky tried a smile on me. It didn’t work.
“I think King T-Rex’s winning smile was part of why the judge decided in his favor,” she said. “He really does have nice teeth.”
“I don’t see how his dental pulchritude has anything to do with…”
“We are prepared to pay you,” Pilky said then.
My ears perked up.
“Really?” I said.
“You would be King T-Rex’s official ambassador and caretaker,” Pilky said. “And for that role, you would be compensated generously.”
“Really?” I said again.
“I mean with money,” she said.
“Yes, I understand that,” I said. “But how much money are we talking here?”
Pilky named a number. The number had a lot of zeroes. I might not have been too crazy about the idea of having a giant flesh-eating monster living in my garage, but sometimes a big check makes all the difference when it comes to putting up with the blatantly absurd and potentially dangerous.
Today I was stressing myself looking over various creative writings I have done in the past and trying to find one that was perfect to share, and I finally came to the conclusion, nah. I am going to write up a review of a book I read recently, and leave it at that. This blog is kind of a conglomeration of my thoughts and readings and watchings of many stripes, and so today I want to share something of my language learning journey in a freeform review of this bilingual comic.
Part of learning any language involves lots of input–reading and listening. One of the most famous linguistic scholars on second language acquisition, Krashen, is well known for his writings on the importance of input, and increasingly I agree with him–in order to really understand and use a language, you need to input, input, input, input tons and tons of language. But it’s hard, especially at the beginning, because reading anything or listening to anything that was made for native speakers especially can be immediately overwhelming because there is just SO MUCH new and strange and confusing when you’re learning a language.
That’s why I really like bilingual comics. I like reading them even now, even after reading many manga straight in Japanese, and even after reading several novels in Japanese. The Shogakukan English Comics Doraemon bilingual series was one of the first Japanese-English bilingual works that I stumbled upon early in my Japanese language-learning life. Doraemon is a phenomenon in Japan, extremely popular–the kind of property wherein practically every schoolkid can doodle his face in their homework, and new episodes of his anime are ever on the air and new movies based on his comic adventures are released in theaters practically every year. The idea is basically that this dopey kid named Nobita is visited by Doraemon from the future (I think his future self sends him, but I am forgetting some of the details) at a crisis point (maybe Nobita forgot his homework or something). So Nobita regularly gets into some relatable and always idiotic snafu, Doraemon then produces some future technology that can magically fix Nobita’s problem, Nobita inevitably misuses the technology to Doraemon’s chagrin, and in the end usually things are messier or crazier than when they began. (Note that if you ever ask Japanese students to think of an invention they would like to see in the future, inevitably many of them will choose Doraemon inventions.) In reference to language learning, these comics use mostly easy Japanese in the first place, so reading them is not too hard–though it should be stressed that the Japanese text has been replaced with English in the word bubbles, and the Japanese is set in smaller text outside the panels of the comic. That means that all the kanji in the words have no glosses–no hiragana. Now, again, the vocabulary is usually low level, but if you are using these books to learn Japanese (they are actually made for Japanese learners of English), the reading can be a little frustrating if you don’t know the particular kanji.
This book has 15 stories in its scant 170 pages, so you can tell that usually the tales take around ten pages or so to finish, providing bite-size chunks for swallowable learning times. These are “fantastic stories,” which generally means that the tales tend to be related to fairy tales and fantasy tropes–sometimes a riff on a Japanese fairy tale like Issun Boshi, sometimes Nobita might step into a Western fantasy like Cinderella. You might have fairies making appearances, or a story about Santa, or a tale around a sort of superhero. Some of the stories only seem tangentially related to fairy tales, and just have wild magic-like future tech… which almost all Doraemon stories tend to have. So, in the end, the book starts to feel arbitrary. It’s still fun, though, and Doraemon comics are almost universally episodic (though occasionally reference may be made to tech from a previous story); basically you can jump in and immediately enjoy the ridiculous misadventures without reading any of the other selections.
Part of the selling point for this book was apparently teaching fantasy-related vocabulary and expressions… and the stories don’t feature much sword-and-sorcery-type vocab. Thus the publisher added several pages in the end that function like a vocabulary list for fantasy–things like “devil” and “resurrect” and “legend” and “treasure,” plus an explanation of how the planets in the solar system are named after gods, and a page of terms that come from Greek myths in the end (like “Achilles Heel”). This section has the Japanese equivalents for the words and phrases, too, so it works as a Japanese-learning tool, too–albeit it’s probably better for higher-level learners.
Of course just reading the book one time probably won’t help so much with retaining the language you learn. I personally made a list of new or forgotten words that I came across in my Japanese-English dictionary app, Midori. It’s easy to make vocabulary lists for any books or movies or whatever in the app, and then you can scroll through them to check them again, or use the app to produce a set of flashcards based on the list you created. I don’t review the lists enough to deeply learn the language usually, but the act of making the lists is a step in the right direction. Basically, if you want to learn the language, reading is great, but it’s better if you try to interact with the language more afterwards–whether by revisiting the vocabulary, or using the words in conversation or in a journal entry, etc. Of course just reading the book one time probably won’t help so much with retaining the language you learn. I personally made a list of new or forgotten words that I came across in my Japanese-English dictionary app, Midori. It’s easy to make vocabulary lists for any books or movies or whatever in the app, and then you can scroll through them to check them again, or use the app to produce a set of flashcards based on the list you created. I don’t review the lists enough to deeply learn the language usually, but the act of making the lists is a step in the right direction. Basically, if you want to learn the language, reading is great, but it’s better if you try to interact with the language more afterwards–whether by revisiting the vocabulary, or using the words in conversation or in a journal entry, etc.
Looking at my list, I have things like “mimizuku” (horned owl), “kingyobachi” (goldfish bowl), “otamajyakushi” (tadpole, ladle), and “zehitomo” (by all means), among many others. I wrote a bunch from the final section of the book with the legendary terms, too–stuff like “meifu” (realm of the dead) and “meikyuu” (labyrinth).
For those who are interested in reading more, there are six books in this series, which tries to sort Doraemon tales under specific varieties–love stories, funny stories, touching stories, scary stories. I have read several of the other collections, and they are of a similar quality as this one. Again, reading books like these are great way to practice Japanese and just get started, so if you are looking for something along those lines, there are worse places to start! Why not give it a try? Just don’t give up, and keep getting more input to keep growing!
Bringing a tyrannosaurus to court is really difficult. I don’t know how long the judge (and whoever else is in charge of putting together a court proceeding) talked and planned, but it wasn’t long enough. Someone had paid a lot of money to make a large chair for the tyrannosaurus to sit in. The “dino-chair” did not survive one encounter with the tyrannosaur’s bottom. The tyrannosaur ended up mostly standing (he got antsy sometimes during the long court case, and his tail became a dangerous weapon as he twitched it around in boredom or agitation or whatever tyrannosaurs have for emotions).
The most amusing part for me was when the court tried to swear in the tyrannosaurus. To swear in a witness (in this case, a giant dinosaur), the witness is supposed to put one hand on a Holy Bible and one hand in the air. But it was really awkward to position the Bible so that the tyrannosaurus could put one of his claws on the book with his head jutting far out over the audience in the stands, and he looked really funny with his other hand sticking out at an awkward angle. Someone suggested that the dinosaur put his free hand over his heart instead, but then there was a debate about where a tyrannosaurus’ heart might be. I think everyone else in the room (including me) swore a lot more than the tyrannosaurus ever did.
“Honestly, I am not going to lie,” said the tyrannosaur after much foofaraw. “I think the truth is self-evident anyway.”
And the evidence was impressive. With some searching, the police were able to find over several dozen fossilized footprints that perfectly matched the tyrannosaur’s own foot (or feet) all around the city of Final Pumpkin (our city has a strange name related to agricultural scarcity and competition back in the day)—though there was some consternation about why many of those footprints had not been found before. The fact that some did not fit the rex’s feet caused concern that another dinosaur might be running rampant. Footprint experts came and talked about feet and described in detail the contours of the old lizard’s soles. I got so bored listening that I started watching the old lizard to see if he had any reaction to all the attention, but he didn’t seem very self-conscious. Even experiments on the cave in which the tyrannosaur had been sleeping, as well as his prehistoric pillow, came back with the same results: they (the dinosaur, the pillow, the cave) were really old.
So the tyrannosaur had been living in Final Pumpkin long before us humans had moved in. We just didn’t notice.
“And what’s more,” said the tyrannosaur, standing impressively in front of the lectern. “A tyrannosaurus is known as the king of the dinosaurs. It is just natural that I would also become the king of Final Pumpkin City.”
Finally, I took the witness stand to deliver my testimony as the first person to have met the rex, which gave my position an exaggerated sense of importance which I hadn’t really earned. Nevertheless, I was pretty upset by this point, and I would use any advantage I could get.
“Your honor, footprints don’t mean ownership,” I said. “I can walk through wet cement, but my shoe prints don’t mean I own the sidewalk. We have here an old lizard. But being old and a lizard doesn’t make someone royalty. That would be ridiculous.”
Some people were nodding in the audience. I pressed forward.
“Plus he can’t live in my garage,” I said. “I like my garage. I paid for my garage. A lot of money. This old lizard didn’t pay anything. He can live in his cave.”
I thought my arguments were really good. An hour later, the judge came back with the verdict.
“We don’t want to make the same mistakes our nation has made in the past,” said Judge Farrensquelcher, who was presiding. “This court recognizes the tyrannosaurus over there as the king of Final Pumpkin City.”
Originally submitted to a story contest on Reedsy Prompts, in response to the prompt “Write about someone who’s so obsessed with a goal that it leads to the destruction of their closest relationship.”
Leonard Field watched the blurry white dot high above, longing to pull himself out of the muck at the bottom of the swamp. He was halfway submerged beneath the mud, and the rest of his body too was darker now. He clenched his right hand around a chain that happened to be splayed out across the swamp bottom, the individual links digging into his fresh-rugged flesh.
“I can breathe out there,” he said. “Nothing is keeping me down here.”
He could speak underwater, and when he did, no rush of bubbles emitted from his mouth. He did not breathe air in the way he used to. Technically, he didn’t breathe at all. He didn’t need it anymore.
He felt fleshy tendrils around his shoulders gently press against his body; the armored tubes that pierced his chest expanded and contracted.
“We can breathe here for you,” said the voice on his back. “As long as we need to.”
Leonard allowed himself to sink an inch more into the mud, his eyes still staring upwards. The white blur shifted and twinkled, and the fear he felt that it might go away constricted his heart.
“I have to go up there,” he said. “I can’t stay here forever.”
The voice on his back hummed contemplatively, the vibrations providing his body a warm and gentle massage.
“We must agree together,” it said. “Wherever we go.”
Leonard did not reply. The mud covered his mouth. He pushed himself deeper into the dank sludge, brushing against the chain as he did so. He heard the click of metal links, the shifting of silt. He was beneath the floor of the swamp.
Restless. Waiting.
Leonard and the thing slipped across the bottom of the swamp, exploring. The voice on his back was moving its muscles as they went. Leonard could feel it probing, snapping up weeds and small fish, crunching up crustaceans.
They never rose far from the floor of the swamp, always staying close to the mud, where they could easily escape danger any moment. Though the mud floor seemed like nothing but slime and sludge from the surface, there was a home underneath of tunnels and chambers that could easily be accessed by easing through the filmy, gooey silt and ooze that was the floor and was the ceiling.
Leonard paddled languidly while pulling himself along with his hands, dislodging plants, chasing out small animals so the thing on his back could catch them and eat them.
“You should eat, too,” it said. “Your body can eat them now.”
Though Leonard looked down at the floor of the swamp, his mind was above. He remembered cooked foods. Steak. Hamburgers. Even skewers of fish roasted over a fire. A wriggling swamp worm was not food. It was a horror show.
“Are they still there?” he asked.
“We share much now,” the voice said. “When I eat, you take nutrients, but… If you don’t eat and use your own body, you become weaker. It’s bad for us both.”
“It’s bad for us if I don’t see her,” he said. “It makes me weak not to see her.”
“You want to mate,” it said. “It’s a good thing, to reproduce. But the timing isn’t right.”
“I want to live,” Leonard said, and he turned his body around so that his face was towards the sky.
The white blur was still there, not far away. Still shifting in the waves. Still calling to him. Despite being underwater, his mouth felt suddenly dry.
“Watch out!”
The voice spoke too late. Leonard’s head collided with a large rock. He curled up in a ball, clutching at the back of his skull. When he opened his eyes again, he saw strings of red rising around his line of sight.
“It’s not serious, I think,” said the voice. “I can look. I can lick it and make the wound clean.”
“No, no,” Leonard protested. “I’ll check it myself.”
He touched the wound, flinched.
“Oh, no one saved this one either,” said a voice.
Leonard felt his heart drop, and he began to uncurl himself to get a better look.
The rock he had hit his head on was in reality a piece of concrete, round, heavy, sunk in the mud. Above it was another chain, still mostly clean with only minor accretions of swamp muck in the links. The chain floated upwards towards the surface and attached at the end of the chain was a man, naked, and very much dead. But his body was still buoyant enough to keep the corpse from settling down to the ocean floor just yet. Leonard stared at dead body, the series of bubbles still stringing up faintly from the deathly dumb face.
“We can eat him,” said the voice. “He is still fresh, and the flesh will be good for you. Familiar flesh for your body.”
The man looked familiar. Leonard had not known the man well, but he had been a crewmember on the ship. John or Dell or something, it didn’t matter anymore.
Something was happening up there. Crewmembers were dying, and they were burying them in the swamp, where their bodies could become a part of the ecosystem again—a cold and scientific way to deal with the dead, but one he approved of. It was the right thing to do. But still, why were they dying?
Were his friends okay? And what about her?
“I have to see why these men are dying,” Leonard said. “I can’t stay down here forever.”
“That which floats on the surface is large and dangerous,” said the voice. “It swallows many lives. Even before you fell to this world, that which floats took many lives from below. This voice does not trust it.”
Leonard was quiet for a time.
“I came from there,” he said. “They are waiting for me.”
“Are they?” asked the voice, monotone.
Leonard continued to pull himself along the bottom of the swampland, and a slow prickling annoyance arose and seemed to prance upon his temples. Of course they were waiting for him.
Of course she was waiting for him.
Several days later he caught sight of her. When the voice on his back was asleep, Leonard crept out onto a small island far from the ship. It was barely an island so much as a swath of thick mud and reeds that could only just bear his weight, and his limbs were deep in the muck.
Though he was far from the ship, he knew a way to peer long distances with clarity, as if looking through a pair of binoculars. It was a trick the voice had taught him after they had become one. Leonard’s body had changed in some ways after the voice had fused with his back. His hair had thinned, and webs had grown between fingers and toes. The voice had shown him that he could touch fingers to thumb in a certain way, and then, after running his hand through the water, pick up bubbles that, if he shifted his fingers just right, would form into makeshift lenses in his hand—lenses through which he could peer and see farther away.
Of course, peering through a bubble caused some distortion and warping of the image, and if there were impurities in the bubble—refuse from the swamp water—they could disrupt his vision. It took him several tries that morning on the mud island, hiding behind the reeds, before he could get the bubbles shaped just right in his hands, and clean and clear enough to look through.
She was walking on the deck. Long, dark hair framed her perfect, moon-shaped face, now distorted through the filmy water She was wearing a white one-piece swimming suit that hugged her curves, delineating her body. His mouth watered as he stared at her breasts, her hips. Even through the bubbles in his hand, she was gorgeous.
He remembered the first time he had been close to her, smelling a warm scent of jasmine. When they had held hands, the flesh of her fingers so soft in his rough laborer’s hands, the way she would kiss him fiercely on the lips, how they would…
On the ship, she raised her hand to her mouth, a small red dot winked on, then she flicked something into the water below. A cigarette—no doubt one of the new “safe” ones with none of the dangers and a healthy hit of vitamin C, but still… littering here? That was against regulations. He would have to chastise her lightly when he…
The thing with the voice on his back seemed to hum, a feeling like a light vibration playing against his spine. It was waking up. It wouldn’t want him on the surface of the water. It definitely wouldn’t want him spying like this. He didn’t want a fight over what his body did or where his body went.
He clenched his teeth and backed away into the water, letting the colorful and translucent water cress close over his head.
The voice didn’t say anything about the island visit until they were in the tunnels later that day.
The tunnels stretched in every direction underneath the swamp. They were not just the living quarters that Leonard and the thing on his back called home, but other scampering creatures lived there, too. Leonard was always careful stepping through the tunnels because he didn’t know when one of the clawed, sinuous lyre worms would ping like a struck note and lunge out of the puddles to latch on to his heel.
“It is good to walk carefully above too,” the voice said.
“I was careful,” Leonard replied. “I wasn’t even walking. I was low. I got down into the water when you started waking up.”
He had hoped the voice hadn’t noticed that he had been out. It often slept so deeply, but this time… He clenched his fists, and the webbing between his fingers crinkling uncomfortably.
“Better to stay in the tunnels,” said the voice. “You can’t find anything of value on the mud banks.”
“She is my girlfriend!” snapped Leonard. “She cares about me, and you’re keeping me from her! What do you expect me to do, wait underwater until my balls fall off?”
The thing on his back seemed to tense against his shoulders, and it let out a thin stream of warm water that ran down the small of his back. He used to think the creature was urinating on him, but apparently it thought it was calming him down with a “gift” of warm and comforting liquid stored and heated in its body.
It didn’t comfort him. The anger burned hotter.
“If we leave this swamp, we can find other options,” said the voice.
Leonard felt his eyes flash, and he nearly choked with rage.
“I am a human being! And I want to love a human being!”
The thing on his back seemed to consider this. Leonard waited, expecting another warm trickle of not-urine to snake its way down his thighs. It didn’t come.
“Are you sure who she is?” the thing said.
“I’m in love with her,” Leonard said, feeling an overwhelming longing. “I want her.”
The thing hummed and held him, crouching in the dark in the tunnel.
“I will catch a twinkling eel tonight,” said the voice. “It has a pleasing poison inside, it will make you feel good.”
No, thought Leonard. Nothing would make him feel good enough as long as he was under the swamp, stuck in these tunnels, away from his real life, away from everything that he was supposed to be.
The twinkling eel—a long and sinuous blue creature with dozens of sparkling appendages that snap and writhe as it swims—was delicious in its way. Leonard did not eat it, of course. However, even still, after the thing on his back consumed it, Leonard felt the effects of the toxins in the eel’s body entering his own bloodstream.
They filled him, fingertip to fingertip, toes to scalp, with a sense of kinetic energy and a rush of euphoria. Like jagged waves of energy, he felt his nerves jangle and swim across his skin. It felt as if the allure of the toxin reached into his farthest depths, into his deepest desires.
And he saw her. Salinda Powers. Her flashing smile, her curving waist, her flowing hair. Every word like steam from her lips, beckoning him. Every movement lithe and smooth and seductive, like the most delectable dream.
The voice was silenced on his back. Whatever effects the toxins may have had on Leonard, their force must have been multiplied several times over on the thing as it was the one who consumed the eel directly.
Thinking that the voice could not resist any longer, Leonard stumbled through the tunnels, treading over lyre worms and clicker crabs, and pushed out of the muddy bottom of the swamp, out into the water, and up, up, the excitement inside him building, eyes wide, staring at the blur of white above as it grew larger and larger.
He felt the power inside, felt invincible, felt a lust he could not contain. His webbed hands grasped the chain leading off the side of the ship. The cold metal sent a shock of pleasure through him, almost as if he was caressing her arm. Hand over hand he climbed, his breathing ragged, the thing on his back like a dead weight.
He clawed his way onto the ship, gasping, eyes on fire, teeth bared in desire, and pushed himself to his feet.
“Salinda,” he croaked.
He saw her, pointing at him. He tried to smile.
And the men came. They had sticks of electricity. He could not look at them, but only at Salinda, even as the electricity called out his voice and sent his screams spearing into the sky.
When Leonard awoke, something was missing, and something else was there. In his state of mind, it took him some time to figure out which was which, despite the gaping psychological absence. He tried to feel his face, but found that he was bound, and when he tried to turn his head, he discovered himself encased in wires and tubes at every quarter.
Clacking footsteps rang out, and when Leonard looked up, he saw Salinda. As she came more clearly into view, he saw she was wearing a long white coat over a professional gray top and ironed raven-black pants. Her mouth was open in excitement, and he tried to speak, but heard a strange rasping sound instead.
“Shhh,” Salinda said. “You’ve gone through a lot. Your throat sustained a lot of damage I’m afraid.”
She sounded gentle, and Leonard wanted to lean into the comfort of her voice, but he saw in her eyes a jet professionalism mixed with a frightening excitement that pulled at the corners of her mouth and gave a taut character to the skin around her eyes.
“Salinda,” he managed, hearing his voice finally in that awful rasping.
“You remember me,” she said, and allowed her face to be pulled into a savage smile. “I thought you might.”
Leonard imagined those days before, in the spaceship, holding Salinda close, his hand upon her cheek, her hand upon his side. Feeling his hands now as he clawed at the bedsheets, he only found rough scales, the webs between his digits stiffer now, even more uncomfortable.
“I love you,” he said.
The savage smile softened a bit, and she pressed her lips together in a sympathetic grin.
“That might have been the difference,” she said. “That might have been what finally brought one of you back.”
He stared at her, desperately, willing the restraints to go away, aching to reach out for her.
“You deserve an explanation,” she said, taking notes from the monitors connected to his flesh. “We wanted the parasite. But the parasites are smart. Smart, but, I don’t know, good-hearted? Some of the other scientists are already calling them the Samaritan suckers. They suck onto you, you know—and they are suckers for someone who is dying underwater.”
Leonard almost choked.
“Some people did die,” Salinda said. “The suckers don’t always rescue everyone. They bond with land-dwellers so that they, too, can become ambulatory on land. But they also seem to want to save people, and prefer to bond with sentient lifeforms. We don’t really know why yet, but we are trying to figure it out.”
Leonard thought back to the many times it had warned him, how it tried to help him.
“Turns out we got real lucky,” she said, patting Leonard on the upper arm. “Not only did one of the suckers go for the bait finally, it just happened to be a bait that I had had a fling with. At the time I never dreamed that dalliance would matter. Just a nice pastime, you know, and you weren’t so ugly, and I knew you wouldn’t stay around forever. We just tied you to a rock, like we deal with corpses anyway. We thought the chains would hold you, and then we would have the sucker, too, captured as it tried to bond with you. But it managed to get you loose.”
Leonard felt fireworks in his mind, broken shards of darkness and light.
“Where is he?” he hissed.
“Oh,” said Salinda, frowning a little. “Unfortunately the sucker didn’t survive. Thought it would be hardier than that. But we can still learn a lot from its remains. We are dissecting it now.”
The smile appeared again on Salinda’s face, the same kind of taut excitement returning, pulling open her cheeks so that they revealed teeth that nearly snarled, flashing in the harsh light. She put her hand on his, her flesh soft, her fingers hooking around his scales.
Sometimes love and care, when applied to the wrong part of a film, can feel like sloppiness, or a lack of craft. Shazam: Fury of the Gods has gotten a nasty trouncing by the critics and has bombed out badly at the box office, with many finding the movie shallow and unfulfilling, all spectacle with little of the heart from the first film. While I think such complaints may be merited from a particular point of view (especially in reference to some weak baddies and convoluted MacGuffin chasing), I am not sure as a whole the movie lacks the tender loving care that some critics attest, and I can’t help but wonder if in a few years audiences might rediscover this film as a minor hidden gem.
The story follows the daughters of Atlas arriving to steal that broken Shazam scepter from the first film. When Billy broke the scepter, he opened up congress between worlds, and the daughters of Atlas (Kalypso and Hespera) crossed over on a mission of vengeance. See, the powers of Shazam actually are stolen from six “gods”—his name is actually an acronym of those gods. Shazam is supposed to have the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury—where the families of these other gods are is never mentioned. Shazam and his Captain Marvel family have become dysfunctional in their mission to protect Fawcett City, causing a lot of damage and goofing off while saving lives, a problem that has gotten to the point that they have received mocking nicknames. Kalypso and Hespera create a massive energy dome around the city, trapping everyone inside, and begin the hunt for Shazam and co—as well as searching for a mysterious seed that they want to grow a tree (though I personally got a little confused about why they wanted the apple, and how they were going to get back Atlas’ powers, and what exactly they were going for). As the story progresses, Billy Batson/Shazam must deal with his insecurities about his future, the splintering of his team, and his past failures as the deadly goddesses attack the city and unleash an army of monsters to create a transformed world.
Much digital ink and video noise has already been shared about any number of failings in Shazam 2, which is already a massive failure at the box office, and is receiving widespread derision from the fans who bothered to attend. Much of the derision stems from shallow and seemingly thoughtless character work and poorly constructed worldbuilding, as well as an overall step down in heart and storytelling from the first film (bizarrely, the easter egg from the last movie has very little payoff here, and despite Shazam’s archnemesis receiving a movie just three months ago in theaters, Black Adam is never mentioned in the entire movie). Some of the complaints (which are understandable) include wafer-thin and predictable villains with cliched bad-guy lines; an even more childish and downright stupid characterization for Shazam despite Billy Batson’s more mature stature; and for me anyway confusing powers irregularly used and badly executed in the film. It’s been a while since I sat through the original Shazam, and so my memory is cloudy with a chance of forgetfulness, but methinks the humor in Shazam 2 feels a bit degraded, with many gags not quite landing.
A big part of these issues probably comes down to how Billy Batson’s utter absence for 98% or more of the movie. Seriously, the actor maybe trips onto stage in two scenes, briefly—and I thought they were decent scenes! This is the MAIN CHARACTER of the film, the protagonist, and he barely even appears. Now I know what you’re thinking—Shazam is the main character, Shazam is Billy Batson, how can you say that the main character of the movie doesn’t appear in the film? And yeah, okay, I hear you, and you make a good point… but Shazam here, he is barely Batson at all.
As mentioned previously, Shazam is uber immature in this movie. With his big expressions and idiotic shallow thoughts, I kept thinking this guy, he supposed to be like five years old. This is a weird choice, because Batson is seventeen in this movie—coming up on eighteen, worried about “graduating out” and losing his foster family. He is practically an adult. And I think you can take Batson hiding inside Shazam as our hero worried about facing the truth of his situation. Maybe his immature behavior also is meant as a way to shield himself from maturity, that he acts like a doofus because he doesn’t want to cross that threshold into adult life. You can read it that way, but I am not sure the film intends such a reading. After all, Batson/Shazam seems to want to be a good leader. He seems to want to create solid plans and turn around the Captain Marvel team so that everyone can work together well and they can overcome their negative reputation. And we never see Batson hint that he wants to be a dopey kid. When Batson appears on the screen, he immediately seems ten times more mature than Shazam. This despite the fact that Shazam is supposed to possess the wisdom of Solomon—a problem in the script that is lampshaded in the dialogue! But folks, mentioning the problem doesn’t make it go away! (Lampshading is an ongoing issue in the movie, and continues with a 6,000-year-old goddess falling in love with and dating a minor—a major plot point, and its creepiness is pointedly remarked upon… and ignored.)
So why is Shazam so incredibly stupid in this movie? Again, this comes down to a weak script. In the end, Shazam has to put his life on the line in a dramatic way, but I am not convinced that he was ever unwilling to do such heroic deeds in the face of danger. He isn’t shown to be a coward, it isn’t part of his apparent character arc that he was unable to be brave at the beginning and only capable of sacrifice by the end. Unless we are to interpret his fear of losing his family (including his fellow super fam members) as a lack of bravery? There is a line towards the end that seems to indicate that his acts of daring do qualify him for being a genuine god—but that never seemed like his goal, either.
This sort of vague character motivation plagues other aspects of the story, too. Hespera and Kalypso are both very bland as villains, despite the talents of their respective actors, and even their goal can feel unfocused. They seem upset that Shazam possesses the power of Atlas (his strength), and so they try to zap the power away from our hero with the staff—but then they seem more concerned about this fruit that Shazam has in his chamber of secrets for some reason. How Shazam got the fruit isn’t clear—it may have been mentioned, but the delivery felt muddled to me. It’s not entirely clear what good the fruit will do Hespera and Kalypso once they get it, though there are some gestures at the idea the fruit will restore the villains’ world somehow. So did the wizard who gave Batson his powers steal the fruit and destroy Hespera and Kalypso’s magical dwelling for some reason? If so, why? We don’t know. It feels very arbitrary.
However, if you can embrace the arbitrariness as a standard classic superhero story element, you can still find a lot to enjoy in this movie. The cockeyed storytelling and half-wit motivations feel like golden-age comic book poppycock, which has its dream-like charm. Yes, the inner workings of the story are a maze of contradictions, the world-building is a mystical colander, and the character motivations are a mess, and the character arcs are poorly constructed—but there is still a true sense of head-down, all-in fun that the movie delivers. Over and over throughout the film I was noticing clever touches and background details, set dressing, and cute lines that helped forecast plot developments. The movie has a cheerful devil-may-care attitude that carries the movie, injecting it with a freewheeling charm that pulled me along with the ricocheting narrative and allowed me the space to overlook some of its narrative weak points. For example, I totally dig Freddy Freeman’s wacky t-shirt design.
Plus we get a host of monsters and excellent effects. The army of creatures springs right out of folklore and legend and betrays an affection for classic monster films, especially with the design of a certain Cyclops that is an obvious tribute to Ray Harryhausen and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. The main dragon, too, is more than just your usual reptilian dinosaur with wings—its called Ladon (Radon in Japanese, which is also the name of a famous pterosaur kaiju from Toho’s Godzilla franchise), and its made from a tree. It’s a plant beasty, so its bark is as bad as its bite because its bite has bark… you know what I mean.
There… is a lot to be annoyed about in Shazam: Fury of the Gods. I had to restrain myself from complaining about some bits (a bizarre homing magic blast, for example, or an excruciatingly long scene where Ladon menaces two main characters without actually killing them for absolutely no reason than plot armor). Still, I walked out of the theater grinning because it’s the kind of movie that screams freedom of silliness, that gives permission just to laugh and have a good time, that resists the gloomy storytelling that occasionally pervades action cinema, and that embraces a bright and optimistic color palette in a time when because of health and a world that seems constantly on the edge of collapse, I need some cheer, man. Shazam 2 gave me some of that happy juice. I’m just thankful for that.
