最後にして最初のアイドル

by Gengen Kusano, 草野 原々 (著), TNSK (イラスト)

“バイバイ、地球――ここでアイドル活動できて楽しかったよ。"

第4回ハヤカワSFコンテスト特別賞
第48回星雲賞(日本短編部門)
第27回暗黒星雲賞(ゲスト部門)
第16回センス・オブ・ジェンダー賞(未来にはばたけアイドル賞)

SFコンテスト史上初の特別賞&「神狩り」以来42年ぶりにデビュー作で星雲賞を受賞し、SF史に伝説を刻んだ実存主義的ワイドスクリーン百合バロックプロレタリアートアイドルハードSFの表題作をはじめ、ガチャが得意なフレンズたちが宇宙創世の真理へ驀進する「エヴォリューションがーるず」、異能の声優たちが銀河を大暴れする書き下ろし声優スペースオペラ「暗黒声優」の3篇を収録する、驚天動地の草野原々1st作品集!
解説:「げんげん♥SF道」前島賢

Genres: Light Novel, Science Fiction, Japanese Literature, Short Stories, Yuri, LGBT, Horror

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 24, 2018

Reviews

[Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

[dwmonkey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't let the cover fool you—this is brilliant hard SF. I really hope this book finds an audience beyond the Japan crowd, too. It's such a wild experience to read these works.

[The Final Song ❀ · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I glanced at the cover the first time I thought that was some isekai story or something like that, when I read the title I keep thinking that it was a reference to Last and First Men, and learning later that the titular story was initially a Love Live Fanfic just made me even more curious.

The author himself describe it a "Existential widescreen Yuri baroque proletariat hard sci-fi idol story" and this time I have to agree with it even if at first sight it looks like a string of meaningless words. For me it was like Alfred Bester mixed with Anime tropes and actual bits of science popping to explain things, the Yuri was kind of soft for my taste but even that was on there.

It was generally pretty fun to read, the three stories share some similar themes the only one that really let me down was the "Dark Seiyuu".

Maybe I would write later a more detailed synopsis of each one.

Maybe

[Genma496 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Last and First Idol > Dark Seiyuu > Evolution Girls

The title story is definitely the star of the show here. It's such an absurd fever dream that somehow paints a picture of both the terror and allure of idols in a much more striking way than any conventional story could. Hard Sci-Fi isn't really something I care about much, so that aspect is what drew me in the most.

Dark Seiyuu also has some of those elements, but in general, I found it a lot less focused and concise. And after the previous two stories, the shocking content didn't land quite as strongly. It was pretty funny though.

Evolution Girls is my least favorite of them. It was entertaining to read, but it's really the one most strongly focused on just being hard sci-fi as opposed to saying something meaningful about gacha games.

Also GOD DAMN IT, cant believe it was actually Love Live fanfiction the whole time. First Umisawa, then this, why are the things that impress me the most always fucked up fanfictions of cute girl stuff?!

[LG (A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of three stories. I'll cover each one separately.

"Last and First Idol"

This is the story of Mika Furutsuki, a girl who loved idols ever since she was six months old and only idols could calm her crying. Her dream of becoming an idol herself eventually leads her to attend a high school known for having produced one of the top new idols. At that school, she eventually catches the attention of Maori Niizono, a girl who doesn't care much about becoming an idol herself but who, for some reason, is determined to help Mika achieve her dreams.

Unfortunately, Mika's best efforts aren't enough. Her talent agency goes bankrupt, and both her sister and Maori Niizono confront her in the aftermath. Although Maori continues to be determined to help her, this only makes Mika feel worse. Feeling as though she's lost everything worth living for, Mika kills herself. This, as is turns out, is just the beginning of her story.

I had no idea what I was getting into with this story. Even when I thought I'd found my footing ("ok, so this is a screwed up post-apocalyptic twisted yuri/idol adventure"), the story shifted and became larger and larger scale, until it encompassed the creation of the universe and the origins of consciousness.

It got a bit too weird and large-scale for me, although I appreciated that I had literally no idea where any of it was going to go. Also, the way idol rules, goals, and career development were bent and twisted to fit the post-apocalyptic situation was darkly (horrifyingly?) amusing. Without spoiling too much, the cover art would have been a little more accurate if the idol, who assume is supposed to be Mika, were spattered in blood and gore.

"Evolution Girls"

Youko Sasajima is a twenty-something young woman who gets sucked into a free-to-play game called Evo Gals, in which ancient extinct species depicted as cute girls battle against each other. Unfortunately, although the game is technically free, the only way to truly progress and make it onto the leader boards is to use the gacha system to get better girls, clothing with better or more appropriate stats, and more. Before she realizes it, Youko is spending everything she has on the game. She's barely eating, and she hasn't gone to work in a week. During a trip to a convenience store for some food, Youko is inevitably hit by a truck...and reborn as an amoeba into something very much like the world of Evo Gals.

This was my favorite story in the book - it reminded me, somewhat, of Okina Baba's So I'm a Spider, So What? Maybe I'm just starved for "reborn into a nonhuman body" isekai. Anyway, Youko's new life becomes a constant quest for points, which can most easily be earned by killing and eating other Girls (which gets pretty horrifying when you think about it), and new gacha.

Of the three stories, this one was probably the least weird and experimental, at least until the last couple chapters, when it, like the others, ballooned to encompass all of time and space. I got to the point where I wished Kusano would stop doing that.

"Dark Seiyuu"

In the world of this story, seiyuu are no longer just voice actors - they are people with mutations and genetic alterations that have given them laryngeal sacs with incredible power. In the story's present, seiyuu are kept under tight control and used to power spaceships. Akane is secretly determined to become the ultimate seiyuu, break free of the constraints put on her people, and change the world. When confronted with the limits of her abilities, Akane overcomes them by killing other seiyuu and transplanting their laryngeal sacs onto her own body. The one laryngeal sac that Akane wants most belongs to a terrorist known as Dark Seiyuu.

Did Randall Munroe's What If? books ever cover what would happen if Earth's gravity suddenly disappeared? Anyway, so does this story, but this apocalyptic event is only of minor interest to Akane, who will do absolutely whatever it takes to find and defeat the Dark Seiyuu. Including murder (of course), cannibalism, the enslavement of a space whale, and probably other stuff I'm forgetting.

This story was utterly bonkers and, to me, seemed like the most comedic one in this anthology, despite the complete destruction of Earth. Kusano also embraced the yuri elements a little more...although I very much expected Akane to eventually turn her girlfriend, Sachii, into an emergency food source at some point.

The collection ends with a chapter written by Satoshi Maejima, a light novel/sci-fi journalist. From the sounds of things, although Kusano received an award for the first story in this collection, the judges where extremely divided about it, some of them utterly hating the work. Honestly, I was kind of put off myself when I heard more of the details. "Last and First Idol" was originally written (and submitted to the contest as) a Love Live anime fanfic. That said, from what little I know of Love Live, Kusano's story was an extremely...unique take.

Overall, this was an interesting and unusual collection. That said, Gengen Kusano seemed somewhat fixated on endings that were as large scale as possible. I could deal with it in these stories, but it would have been utterly exhausting in a longer work.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

[Mercedez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Indescribably weird, incredibly queer, and well worth reading in a day, especially if you've got the time. Plus, there's some very strong Perfect Blue vibes that haunt you too the very delicious end.

Kudos to the translator: Andrew Cunningham is an absolute gem, and a translator that I always know will handle media with care. While the writing and sorry fully belong to Gengen Kusano, Cunningham shines as a wordsmith, choosing the exact turn off phrase to keep you reading until the very end.

I'm glad that I finally decided to read this collection: I feel like I've gotten cake and pie AND ice cream all at once. I'm not sure when I'll re-read this, but I know in the future, I definitely will.

[trashman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. I didn’t think I was embarking on a philosophical rollercoaster full of grotesque descriptions of cannibalism and free will and space fish. I didn’t understand what I did by opening this book. I have opened the floodgates and they cannot be closed.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book deserves an award for sheer audacity. Three separate hard sci-fi stories with grim body horror, the nature of the universe, and a splash of yuri. It’s normal for the first 3% of the book and then goes absolutely insane - I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like it.

[Adelaide · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew it was weird , but I wasn't prepared

[Efreak · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is great, all three stories are extremely odd blends of SF. Afterword is quite accurate:

An adorable story about cute girls singing, dancing, following their dreams, working hard... An idol anime like that was fused with a hard sci-fi story about unnatural human evolution. This is what Gengen Kusano has done, and the readers gleefully yelling, “Why would you combine THOSE!?” are really birds of a feather. Most likely, his creation lies at the end of the road lined by the bad otaku’s dread missives. But Gengen Kusano’s ‘bad’ is beyond the pale. Where your ordinary bad otaku would limit their dreck to 140 characters, allowing it to amount to little more than a joke, a harmless prank, this dastardly villain actually followed through.

And of course the obligatory mention of the future. I think this is possibly the first time I've ever agreed with with one of these (actually being interested in what comes out next, rather than just wanting more if the same):

Where will Gengen Kusano take us in the future? For all he’s written about the grotesque evolutions of mankind, I can’t help but see him as undergoing an evolution of his own. According to that interview with SF Magazine, he’s planning a novel that would combine Jainism and Singularity, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this young talent, through that work, evolves beyond anything I can imagine.

Some quotes from the individual stories (these shouldn't ruin any enjoyment of the book as a whole):

“What’ll we do once we run out of food?” Sachii was using the bones to make a sort of caveman house. It was her way of killing time.

“I’ll just have to eat you.”

“So I’m just so cute you want to eat me up?”

The Great Seiyuu Age—there was a period in time that earned itself that name. Seiyuu became the stars of the day, the hopes of humanity—all envied their laryngeal sacs
...
The history of seiyuu was a long one. One theory placed the origins 500,000 years ago, as early as the birth of homo sapiens. That being said, seiyuu of the past were natural...did not have laryngeal sacs displayed outside

First, all national systems were converted to mobile games. Medical insurance and pension payouts were redistributed via gacha pulls. The constitution’s protections for human rights were interpreted to mean a minimum guaranteed number of gacha pulls. A healthy life with the acceptable minimal cultural value was considered one in which you could login to a mobile game daily.

There was only one group of humans engaged in any sort of organized activity. These women called themselves the Vigilantes. They were die-hard anti-technologists and traditionalists. Vowing to take back the Akihabara of yore, they all wore T-shirts featuring moe characters of a bygone age. These were their traditional iconography.

[Roxanne Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Still a bit rough around the edge, but this author definitely has good potential. It reminds me of the older light novels, when stories were shorter and more imaginative. The translation is also quite good, especially to keep with this fast pacing and SF stuff.

[Scott Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

A real page turner, yet each story was strangely unsatisfying.
Can't decide if I like it or not, got to ponder on it some more.

[Katy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating ideas in these three stories! But often a bit too grotesque/body-horror for my tastes.

[Sol · Rating 3 out of 5]

She might be a gory pile of body parts, but it was still her, and she was still cute.

"Last and First Idol" - Mix Love Live! fanfiction, Last and First Men, the tiniest dash of Blindsight, and you get something exceedingly, exceedingly strange. I think there may even be some Attack on Titan in there. And a half dozen other influences from the animanga sphere. From the feeling of this being a glimpse of a story too expansive to be put to page, to the grotesque body horror, to the tongue in cheek conclusion about the destiny of ME, THE READER, this story is all over the place. In a good way. When the author is having this much fun, it can only be as contagious as the adulation of idols. It does, however, lose something having had its serial numbers filed off. I didn't watch Love Live!, but I know that having Nico's brain transplanted into a mass of floating organs would have been far funnier than the forgettable Mika.

The Stapledon inspiration is obvious, and Kusano acknowledges it. The references start right at the title, riffing on Last and First Men. The style of narration, where the majority of the story is told as if in summary or as a high-level history, rarely descending to the level of individual moments, is straight from his work, as is the expanding and multiversal scale of the plot. Even more particular are the 17 "generations" of Mika Nico's self-directed evolution, changing massively in response to environmental conditions, followed by a final superlative generation that outshines all before. This generation isn't the 18th in-story, but is given a number in the 10s of billions to create scale. The retroactive causality of idol fandom extending to past and future universes is straight out of Star Maker, and the transmission of the narrative into our world via the author is again pulled from LaFM. However, ultimately the inspiration feels glib. The core of Stapledon is yearning for something better, and a universal sympathy with suffering, limited beings. Even those that cause suffering are suffering themselves. The Cosmic Spirit experiences everyone's suffering in perfect sympathy. While the prologue exhorts us to sympathize with Nico in order to truly understand the work, she demonstrates no sympathy in kind to anything else. While the story's conclusion could be said to be positive, the Last Idol is not Star Maker's Cosmic Spirit.

Whether the story is making any serious of commentary on idols, or is just making jokes via juxtaposition, is beyond me.

Some months having passed, I kept telling myself I would read the other two stories, and have not. Maybe someday. From what little I read, all three involve body horror, deadpan third person science exposition, transcendental twists, and otaku cultural staples. "Evolution Girls" seems like a riff on gacha games crossed with the Kemono Friends phenomenon, with some Baxterian fragmenting early universe backstory, while "Dark Seiyuu" is some space opera about voice actors forming a super-powered subspecies.

[EJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of three novellas is a balls-to-the-wall gonzo sci-fi extravaganza featuring non-stop body horror and some truly unhinged girls, topped with a heaping helping of mostly-affectionate satire of the various industries that feed modern otaku culture. (If you're not deeply into Japanese pop culture, this book is probably incomprehensible.) This isn't a lukewarm three stars; this is me constantly teetering on the line between being delighted by it and finding it all A Bit Too Much.

The author calls it "hard sci-fi", but I think this is stretching the definition a little bit; there's certainly some real research into scientific phenomena backing up many of the elements, but there's also plenty of silly stuff tossed in without explanation, such as space whales and a universe that operates on gacha mechanics.

My favorite story was the middle one, Evo Girls, which goes from a stock isekai setup (complete with our good friend Truck-kun) to a long middle section reminiscent of the game Spore to a denouement in which the heroine realizes her destiny is to save humanity by destroying gacha gaming forever. I found it to be simultaneously the sharpest satire and the story whose characters seemed the most like real people, and these aspects made the story's disparate and frequently ridiculous elements into a thematically coherent whole. The other stories didn't come together as successfully for me, although they had their moments.

And yes, the first story is very transparently a NicoMaki fanfic. But I don't think most Love Live fans are clamoring to see their faves as mutant cannibals going on murder-dates in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, so if you were interested in reading just for them, be warned. (If you don't want to expand the spoiler, just see above re: body horror and unhinged girls.)

Either you will love this, or you will hate it, or you will alternately love and hate it. But one way or another, it's a memorable experience.

[Yoshinobu Yamakawa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book tells the story of the unexpected death of a girl who aspires to become an idol, and the surprising transformation that follows. The girl is revived as a monster by her best friend, a medical student, and changes and evolves her body to adapt to sudden changes in the global environment. Eventually, she expands her activities into space.

The highlight of this book is the perfect blend of sci-fi elements and human drama. Against the backdrop of large-scale events such as the upheaval of the global environment and the expansion of space, the book carefully depicts the growth of the protagonist's inner life and changes in his relationships with those around him. This makes it a magnificent story but also a work that resonates with the reader.

This novel made me think about the expansion of human potential and the meaning of continuing to pursue one's dreams. Even after his death, the protagonist does not give up on his dream of becoming an idol, but rather changes the shape of that dream and sublimates it into something bigger. It taught me the importance of maintaining hope even under difficult circumstances.

The story of this book is unpredictable, and I couldn't take my eyes off the events that unfolded one after another. For example, the shock of the protagonist seeing his new self in the mirror for the first time and the gradual awakening of his new abilities are particularly impressive.

In conclusion, this book goes beyond a simple science fiction novel to make you think about human nature and the future. The story begins with the dream of an idol and expands into the infinite possibilities of the universe, and will stay with you long after you finish reading it.

[Benji · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard sci-fi Japanese short story collection. Every story has a satirical pop culture bend (idol culture, mobile games, voice actors) and then uses physics and evolutionary biology to create splatterpunk body horror. The prose is never very good but first two stories were very creative campy, gory fun. Unfortunately the last one was straight up bad, everything hinged on the concept of gravity manipulation and it just wasn’t as compelling or fun as the preceding stories (with the exception of a really cool apocalypse scene). The first two stories felt like queerplatonic relationships and the MC of the last story came off to me as aromantic but all three stories are intended by the author to be yuri/GL.

CWs: suicide, gore, natural disasters, blood/vomit/diarrhea, body horror, cannibalism, murder and graphic violence, child death, cancer, eugenics, genocide

[Melos Han-Tani · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some really inventive plots - the obsessed idol Yuri of story 1 and the bizarre gacha hell of story 2 - but I found the hard sf to feel almost textbooky or distracting from those elements, to the point I wasn't that into the story any more. So many people die violently that each subsequent description of death felt more perfunctory than the last. There's some loose philosophizing about the nature of idols and gacha addiction but I feel they would be more at place in an essay than woven into an already confusing scifi singularity escalation.

[Terrible Book Club · Rating 3 out of 5]

For this week's Patron's Choice episode, we read Last and First Idol by Gengen Kusano for our anonymous patron. We have not been this baffled since Episode 50's The Eclipse of Darkness: Unveiling the Unseen World, which was also an anonymous recommendation. We now live in fear of the next anonymous recommendation we receive. Still, we thank you, unknown patron!

[Jenn Odd · Rating 2 out of 5]

** Really Trying Too Hard and Was Dull As a Result **

The mile-a-minute pacing suddenly breaking at conversations, to then move into dense 専門用語 gave me whiplash. I didn't care about the characters at all because I didn't know them at all. The SF felt like a joke as it switched from hard-core science to a first-grad conducting brain surgery because she read it in a book. It made any basis in real science feel fake.

The few lines characters said made them out to be annoying clingy 中二, and in stories that were trying to be hard-core SF, was really off-putting. Which is a shame because I loved これは学園ラブコメです。but partially because the cheesy characters worked well as a play on troupes. (But maybe that's just how the author writes characters?)

I wonder if the English translation is better than the original Japanese as so many people seemed to like it.

[kuro · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't think it's a bad book by any means. If anything, it's composed of three brilliantly written stories with themes never thought of before. That said, I couldn't say I fully enjoyed it as it turns out hard sci-fi just isn't my thing, so it was hard for me to go through. However, if you're a nerd who's a big fan of getting a bunch of sci-fi terms and lores dumped on you, then this book just might be for you.

[Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible set of three stories in an unlikely combo of genres (Idol and Hard Sci-Fi). Loved the detail in each of the stories.

[Katja · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was so weird. Super bizarre. But kind of intriguing too.

[Brent Millis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird, wild, pushes those boundaries of speculative fiction that I like. Biopunk themes.

[Isapropanol · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,75
When I first flipped through this book, I wondered why there weren't any illustrations. Upon reading it I quickly realized that it was probably for the best.

[Libby · Rating 5 out of 5]

The wildest ride I've ever been on. The fact that this started as a Love Live fanfic makes absolutely perfect sense.

[S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last and first idol take the genre to its logical conclusion.