Angst In My Pangst

I am really beginning to enjoy Basilisk, and not just because of the grotesquery and the action sequences. The emphasis in the series is more on the unrequited love between Gennosuke and Oboro ( and between the previous generations of the Iga and Kouga clans ) much like a Japanese version of Romeo and Juliet. The story happens in the rains, and the animators render the sequences in a dreamy, watercolour-based palette that’s stunningly beautiful. I need to go back and rewatch Shinobi ( the live-action film based on the same book) after I am done with this. A lot of characters have been shuffled around, if I remember correctly.

After a very long time, I read a Jeffrey Archer book, a collection of fairly-recent short stories, Cat O’Nine Tails. I used to like love Archer when about ten years ago, his novels were The Real Thing, his stories just the perfect level of heartwarming content and hair-raising endings. We ( a rather naive bunch of Guwahatians) used to rate short stories based on whether they were Archerian enough. O. Henry definitely was, as was Maugham. Saki was, at times. Ruskin Bond would try. I did say naive, didn’t I? Cat O’Nine Tails…sigh, well, it tries so hard to be like Jeffrey Archer that it made me groan at times. Nearly all the time. Despite telegraphing its intentions from the first page – it’s basically a compilation of con stories that the writer picked up during his stint as prisoner FF 8282, and it goes without saying that all the cons he writes about end in a stint in jail – despite telegraphing its intentions, Archer pretends he is writing stories that might lead somewhere else or end in a way that you didn’t expect was coming, but guess what? They don’t. Meh. There’s only so much white collar crime I can take in one sitting.