(Originally posted 13 January 2015 at trenchkamen.livejournal.com)

The book starts out strong with a grandiose and poetic description of the creation of the planet, and then starts to fall flat toward the middle-end. I had to force myself to keep reading. But it picks back up again toward the end-end with some rather profound reveals and it made me meditate on the functionality of religion, for a while. There is a skillful use of a repeated phrase and the author has a deft hand with visual descriptions, many of which, oddly enough, seem to follow laws of anime aesthetics/physics. This may be my weeb bias, though, especially given that animation in the 1960’s was quite technically different than it is today.

My Western Judeo-Christian background means I am far more familiar with the story of Jesus than the details of the Buddhist cosmology, so I understood the unspoken implication behind several stated, unelaborated facts in context in Jesus’s portion of the story. That being said, I was disappointed with it.  The version of the Passion presented here is far more boring than the original version. So much of the original grandiose drama has been sucked out of it—no Last Supper, no betrayal, no ‘give us Barabbas’ etc—and Jesus became a relatively boring character, not particularly bright or insightful, just manipulated by outside forces. He would have been far more intriguing without this watered-down backstory.

I do admit there is an adolescent part of me that thinks the idea of Jesus and Buddha fighting it out in the far, far future is pretty kick-ass.

In short, an intriguing project with grand scope, but the actual stories behind the main characters fall flat. There is some fascinating philosophy. Enjoyable if you like classic sci-fi, and it is indeed a classic in the Japanese canon, heavily influenced by contemporaneously-published books (1960s). That being said you must remember the time in which this was published, and the market, and that the whole ancient aliens seeding mankind’s knowledge thing wasn’t nearly as played at that point. What is still fresh about the book is the twist behind the seeding of the knowledge, revealed close to the end. There is a lot of technobabble, and I admit I don’t know what is pure babble and what is congruent with what was known about high-energy physics at the time. Ultimately though this is a mythology, in the trappings of hard sci-fi, so the gritty details of the science aren’t what really matter. And I can’t get enough of the message that you can’t wait for a promised savior; you have to take things into your own hands and save yourself. Otherwise that promise will keep you paralyzed and complacent. Makes you wonder about the motivation of those who made that promise.

And I must compliment the masterful English translation.