Review
MM9
2006
translated by Nathan Collins
Haikasoru
Review by Peter Young in Big Sky #1 (2013).
What if the world had a Richter-like scale for monster attacks? And where better to show how the whole thing works than in Japan? Given that this is such a brilliant idea, when teamed up with this book’s self-serving ending it was probably inevitable that a TV series would result from this fix-up of episodic short stories about the Monsterological Measures Department, doing battle to contain outbreaks of kaiju activity across Japan. As a science fiction writer, Yamamoto’s first priority had to be that of getting around the law of conservation of mass to account for the extraordinary size of some monsters and their unlikely ability to support themselves/breathe fire/stomp buildings with apparent ease, and Yamamoto has given his monsters a clever yet almost whimsical explanation that conveniently excuses them from the laws of physics of our universe. Yamamoto’s speculation in this aspect of the novel is engaging but not always rigourous, and when evaluated by his characters the explanations are often too easily accepted by the MMD without a great deal of debate because, well, there’s a monster to defeat now and it answers the problem of how to tackle the kaiju somehow. I admit to approaching MM9 from the wrong direction at first, expecting a more tongue-in-cheek and self-knowing escapade than the straightforward episodic adventure we were given, but after realising how I should be reading it this novel was good fun, and Yamamoto’s mythical monsters are always neat inventions. I’m now awaiting a dubbed/subtitled DVD release of the TV series with bated breath.