Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface Manga Review
Finally, I’ve reached the (probable) end of my enormous Ghost in the Shell (GitS) retrospective article series, with this, my 36th article on the subject. I decided to end with original manga creator Masamune Shirow’s sequel manga, Man-Machine Interface, partly because it’s extremely challenging to talk about, mainly because the whole thing is so esoteric and hard to follow. I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to shed any light on what the hell Shirow’s trying to say in this incredibly pretty but pathologically inscrutable volume, but I’ll do my best.
I won’t lie, I come to the (probable) end of this GitS marathon with a feeling of release, that now I can move on to other things. I do love GitS so much (possibly even more so than before, since reading and watching so much of it lately), but you can have too much of a good thing. I’ve used all of this experience to write a massive GitS guide for Anime News Network, which will be published at some point in the future. I suspect Executive Editor Lynzee got a horrid sinking feeling in her stomach when she saw the submitted draft was 8000 words long, with fifty different pictures… I’ll post a link to that here on AniTAY, along with a proper index of GitS reviews, whenever it’s published.
As you’ll have read in my previous article about GitS 1.5: Human Error Processor (HEP), MMI went through several variations before it eventually came West via Dark Horse’s eleven-issue floppy comic release in 2003. I won’t repeat myself here, I do recommend you read the background in my HEP review. As I own all of DH’s 2003 release, that’s what my review here is based on, and it’s from where this review’s images originate. MMI has since been re-published in collected form in English by Kodansha, and I don’t know if those newer versions retain the alterations made by Shirow himself for the flipped left-to-right DH release, or if they’re now presented in original Japanese right-to-left orientation.
Shirow begins MMI with a short author’s foreword explaining that it occurs four years and five months following the conclusion of the first GitS volume, but it’s not a direct continuation of that story. At least it’s still set in the same continuity, unlike when he decided to randomly reboot Dominion, much to its detriment. We meet protagonist “Motoko” for the first time, who is most pointedly not the same as GitS 1’s Major Motoko Kusanagi. She looks different, seems to have minimal ties to Public Security Section 9, and the matter of her identity is integral to a major plot twist much later on. This version of Motoko goes by the surname “Aramaki” (as she did in her brief appearance in chapter 2 of HEP, though that version was clearly meant to have continuity with Major Kusanagi — it’s unclear what the link between this version of Motoko Aramaki is with the one in HEP, if there is one.)
During the 24-page first chapter, or prologue, Section 9’s Daisuke Aramaki and what looks like Borma (but who is referred to later as “Batou”) do cameo, but their input into the story is absolutely minimal. They have engaged the Japanese government’s “Channeling Agency” to investigate Motoko Aramaki’s movements. This is where we are introduced to a mysterious deuteragonist of sorts in Tamaki Tamai, a channeling agent. For the first time, Shirow adds elements of fantasy to GitS, not dissimilar to his earlier work on Orion. This integrates complex Buddhist and Shinto concepts to the world, which for a Westerner like me adds an additional layer of abstraction and difficulty in comprehension. Shirow already uses a lot of (often poorly-explained) jargon in his writing, so adding word soup like “Instability occurs every thousand years in the three trees of the Jizaiten Space Time Universe” is par for the course for him, I suppose. It’s not a great start to the sequel to Shirow’s biggest ever success…
A version of Motoko Aramaki who looks very reminiscent of Kusanagi floats on a boat in a horrendously badly-composited Pacific Ocean. Sometimes Shirow’s early CG use looks good, other times it just looks silly. Whenever he uses it to depict cyberspace or more conceptual scenes he uses it expertly. Anything realistic like buildings or landscapes look hopelessly dated to modern eyes. Motoko has a small army of almost pig-like AI digital assistants who perform lots of practical and security-based tasks for her. They banter a lot like tachikomas, but look ugly as hell, though they do all have funny individual names like “Hannibal”, “Lex”, “Musashi”, “Rocky”, “Conan”, and “Shiva”. I hate them. They’re also almost the only characters that Motoko converses with for entire very lengthy scenes of nothing but utterly impenetrable technobabble. There’s a general rule for writers when they construct dialogue: “read it out loud to yourself to make sure it doesn’t sound idiotic”, I doubt Shirow has ever done this. The characters in MMI don’t speak like human beings (maybe that’s the point), they speak like tech workbooks. That does not a scintilliating dialogue scene make.
It’s not all boring-as-hell technobabble though, Shirow knows that a good pantyshot, or pert breasts, or shiny thighs, or tight buttocks can keep his readers engaged, so he makes sure to give us a detailed leer at Motoko’s camouflage-patterned knickers and lovingly-contoured perineum as she high-kicks a passing projectile. Get used to this — it’s going to happen so many more times in this volume that it becomes laughable. It’s the most highbrow ecchi manga in existence. (At least the actual hentai threesome rape scene was removed from post-2001 JP and EN editions by Shirow himself after the first edition/Solid Box JP release in 2000. I’ve seen the scans. Oh my goodness it’s nasty.)
Motoko meets up with a strange trio of cyberspace brokers and their… pet sphinx? I don’t know what the sphinx’s story is. She’s just kind of there, presumably to add visual spice. Looks like Motoko does work for these guys, and they provide her with hardware or software, such as the cool integrated bowgun in her upper arm. They ask Motoko to intervene in an uprising in a foreign country that’s turning nasty, and Motoko accesses the UN and US military databases for more info. This is where we learn of the existence of “decots”. A decot is a spare cybernetic body that Motoko can control remotely, and she has these stashed all over the world. Much of the story will find us following a variety of these decots, controlled by Motoko, mainly I think to give Shirow an excuse to draw a variety of beautiful women in varying states of undress. If you liked the OG version of Kusanagi, I’m sorry, but that character design barely appears in this sequel.
While also taking on mercenary work, Motoko is employed as chief of online security at the massive floating industrual complex Poseidon. Appleseed fans will recognise this as a powerful industrialised rival nation to that story’s main setting Olympus. Appleseed is set around ninety years after the events of GitS, it shares the same history of world wars three and four, so Shirow appears to be more closely tying his two biggest series together here into a single continuity. Appleseed ID states that Poseidon’s construction began in 2002 as floating artificial islands — by the time of Appleseed, it will be enormous, counting the entire Japanese island of Honshu within its territory. This earlier version of Poseidon in 2035 seems to be a major supplier of advanced tech to the rest of the world. Although Motoko has some authority, it seems she’s still limited by her superiors.
Chapter two — Circuit Weapon — is by far the shortest, at only 14 pages in length. Motoko pursues a pirate submarine beneath Poseidon’s floating city, hacking their navigator and generally causing destruction. The pirate captain keeps a couple of stolen android girls dressed in skimpy sailor suits, because of course he does. Motoko gains access to a mysterious file authored by the deceased Professor Rahampool that will turn out to be extremely important later… This marks the end of DH’s issue one.
Chapter three — Circuit Weapon — comprises fifty-six full-colour pages, and was initially released as issues two and three by Dark Horse. Motoko, in another decot body, investigates the bombing of a Poseidon/Meditech site on foreign soil, and finds something quite disturbing about the transgenic pigs raised there. The pigs are used to grow human organs for transplant, but someone has essentially “uplifted” the pigs’ brains, fitting them with e-brains and networking them, to the point they have almost human-level intelligence. That’s really quite disturbing. Also many of them have been slaughtered by a terrorist group called the Human Liberation Front in a recent bombing.
Motoko ends up cyberhacking her own employee, plant boss Labris, while battling two-dozen virus-infected cyborgs. Shirow’s action scenes are always incredibly dynamic, full of acrobatic brawling and deeply improbable limb positioning. If he can squeeze in as many panty-shots as humanly possible during an intense fight, you know he’ll do so. I can’t imagine how this looks to a casual reader unused to manga tropes and Shirow’s excesses in particular. Surely there must be legions of potential readers out there put off by the provocatively frequent female body objectification on constant display here.
Shirow’s art during this chapter is particularly incredible, with stunning use of bright colour in the cyberspace scenes. His vision of a connected future is second-to-none, and the evolution of his colour art from GitS 1 is nothing short of astounding. None of this was in the original run of MMI in Young Magazine, which was almost entirely in black and white. No wonder it took almost a decade for Shirow to finish MMI to his satisfaction, and perhaps it’s unsurprising he burnt out from producing manga after this. It’s hard to pick out the best images here, because they’re all so beautiful — hence the reason this review is perhaps even more image-heavy than usual.
Chapter four— Flyby Orbit — is much longer, at 86 pages, though twenty-eight of these are the original untouched black and white pages as initially serialised. This chapter is split across issues four, five, and six. I wonder how Shirow decided what pages to colourise, and which ones to leave? In total there are 304 story and title pages over the eleven issues, 197 in colour, and 107 in black and white. I do get the feeling that perhaps Shirow would have been quite happy to spend another couple of years indulging his perfectionism and colourising the remaining monochromatic third, but perhaps his editors were pushing him to finally finish the damned thing? Maybe he’d still be re-editing today if he was fully indulged.
The black and white pages share much more in common with Shirow’s previous work. I really love his simple pen-and-ink art, and I feel quite sad that the hundred-or-so pages here seem to be the last of this kind of art he ever did. After MMI, Shirow gave up on manga due to the heavy workload and deadlines. In PIECES Gem 01, he talks about personal pressures outside of work, starting with the Kobe earthquake, some chronic health issues, and the need to care for his elderly, sick father. I’m grateful he managed to continue to produce art via his voluminous collection of art books, but I do pine for his simpler manga style, and the fact we’ll almost certainly never get a “proper” conclusion for Appleseed, or any more of those multiple Dominion: Conflict volumes he promised once upon a time.
This chapter introduces the mysterious Antares, a woman who always wears extremely concealing clothing (we don’t ever see her knickers, seems even Mr Shirow couldn’t find a way). Although she seems truly random here, she’ll turn out to be more important later. We also meet Motoko’s alter ego Chroma here, with a similar design to how she also appears in Stand Alone Complex as the Major’s online avatar. Chroma rides through the city on her motorbike, engaging with some weird-looking cyberhackers, and gets caught in a Matrix-like game world. (I say Matrix-like, but the initial publication of this story preceded said movie by at least two years.)
Chroma’s battle through a fantasy game world, pursued by random hacker weirdos is a fun little distraction, but I’m not completely clear how exactly it ties into the rest of the extremely difficult-to-follow meta-story. We get an eight-page full colour insert depicting a battle between Chroma and some terrifying-looking assassins, but I’ve no idea why they were attacking her. I wonder if the colour art in this section pre-dates some of Shirow’s other additions, because it seems far less flashy and much less busy — though I suppose this is the “real” world, rather than a digital cyberhacking environment.
Tamaki Tamai makes her return after being more or less ignored since the prologue. She manifests herself as a perpetual tormentor for Motoko, following her around everywhere, talking constantly. I like her — she’s spunky and acts as a great foil for Motoko, who’s visibly irritated that she can’t get rid of her. Their conversations are much more interesting than those between Motoko and her tiresome minions. Tamaki points Motoko in the direction of strange cult Stabat Mater and their creepy S&M cyber-dungeon that will appear next chapter…
Chapter five — Mold of Life — is the longest chapter, comprising one hundred pages total, and is split over issues seven to ten, with 49 B&W pages and 51 in colour. This chapter originally marked the end of MMI in its Young Magazine serialisation, and the colour pages were added for the Solid Box released in 2000. This chapter introduces the concept of Poseidon’s ultra-powerful Decatoncale supercomputer (which appears in SAC 2nd GIG — series antagonist Goda seems to be affiliated with Poseidon), plus the Aracnosat satellite communication/defence network (there’s a similar concept in both SAC seasons.)
Obviously if there’s an unbelievably powerful supercomputer, Motoko’s going to want a piece of that action, especially as she’s made it her business to go smack down a random S&M techno-cult. I do like this chapter because although Motoko is an employee of this enormous megacorporation, she’s still highly individualistic, and doesn’t let her boss saying “ no” to her request to access the Decatoncale cramp her style. She hacks security, sets up a decoy, remote-controls a body hidden inside one of her meat-mechs, climbs through tiny service ducts, unleashes viruses and knockout gas, all to get her own way. Her boss is right to be suspicious of her, but he can’t do a damned thing to stop her. She’s absolutely terrifying.
Motoko engages in cyberwarfare with chief Stabat Mater cyberdominatrix Millennium for… reasons. Look, by this point in the story I really had no idea what was going on or why, and this was on my fifth read-through. I think Stabat Mater also uses a similarly powerful Decatoncale supercomputer, but I don’t think it’s confirmed, and for some reason they’re in control of Poseidon’s missing president… I don’t really know what significance this has to anything. The super-detailed hacking scenes still look very cool, even in monochrome, but the story really starts to go off the rails at this part, with almost infinitely-dense technobabble dialogue that makes only partial sense even after I’ve read and re-read it. Lots of stuff seems to be happening in the cyber-world, but I’m damned if I can parse what any of if really means.
So, anyway… we start to get some kind of answers to who Motoko actually is, once she finds herself conversing with that Antares person and her friend Spica in cyberspace. I’ve no idea why they turn up now, nor what they’re really up to, but it seems they may have had something to do with the human-brained pigs a while back. Thought probably not the bombings. They call her “Motoko 11”, which suggests she’s not the original Motoko, but one of the offspring of Kusanagi and the Puppeteer from after their merger. That likely makes this Motoko a few years old at most, though she already seems to have fused with several other intelligences, so she may have access to many years of lived experience due to that.
While the artwork here approaches the realms of the transcendent, and the dialogue presumably aspires to the same, a poor lowly Earth-dweller like me can’t hope to understand what these pages upon pages upon pages of gobbledegook are supposed to mean. Whatever plot there was melted away ages ago, leaving this… incoherent blob of text and colour. Shirow seems to be saying something about fusion of consciousnesses, and evolution, and machine intelligence, and there’s even something totally random about silicon-based intelligent organic life, but there’s no context for any of it. Everything’s abstracted so far above the level of basic storytelling it’s like none of it actually matters. Much like with Kinoko Nasu and Fate’s super-complex rules and esoterica, this is like a conceptual game of Calvinball. Shirow spews some clever-sounding shit and the reader has little choice but to go along with it.
Everything seems like it’s building to something, it’s all very climactic and grand, but I can’t even hope to give a plot summary of this chapter because there is no plot. There are no characters here, either. Just pretty faces spouting gibberish. You know, there’s a reason that despite so many different animated adaptations of GitS existing, that no-one has ever dared to adapt MMI. It’s because of this stuff. No-one except Shirow understands it. It’s not entertaining. It’s not illuminating. It looks beautiful, but it’s emotionally and conceptually empty. It tells us nothing about the human condition or experience. It tells us nothing about posthumanism or whatever philosophy Shirow is trying to endorse. It’s a complete failure of communication except for the base aesthetics.
I can imagine readers of the original serialisation were left at the end of this chapter asking “what was that?”, as it really resolves nothing. Motoko’s time with the Decatoncale is brought to a sharp close, not before she strikes a “deal” with who I think is probably meant to be the original Kusanagi/Puppeteer hybrid, but of course Shirow doesn’t actually tell us this. It seems they’re going to build a new lifeform together. Or something. Whether that’s meant to be new bodies for them to inhabit, or something else, is left frustratingly unsaid. Motoko’s remote body escapes before security can apprehend her, and that’s kind of the end of that. Motoko tells her boss she’s taking a holiday in space, and… it ends. Thankfully, this version has an all-new epilogue written for the “full” MMI version, first published in Japan in 2001. Surely that will clear everything up…?
So, uh… This sixth and final 24-page full-colour chapter, or epilogue, comprises issue eleven of DH’s initial release. It probably counts as Shirow’s final ever manga work (that I’m aware of). There’s a random conversation between Tamaki and a version of Motoko who looks a lot like the Kusanagi from the first volume. I don’t know if it’s her, though. There’s a single panel of some kind of very moist-looking lesbian tentacle orgy thing that there’s no way I can reproduce here on Medium, but there’s also a reference to the “real” body Motoko lost as a child, so maybe this is the original Motoko?
Tamaki and this Motoko float off into cyberspace and witness a strange macro meta-scape similar to that seen in the original GitS when Kusanagi fuses with the Puppet Master. It looks like huge scoops of vanilla ice cream jammed together in space. Shirow starts ramming in references to Shinto, and other religious traditions, such as Yatagarasu the “sacred crow”, and Amanojaku the “contrarian demon”, but these references are lost on me. (The only Amano Jaku I know was the protagonist of Urotsukidoji, but the less said about that the better.) Once again, Daisuke Aramaki and Batou very briefly appear as little but bookends. The whole epilogue adds almost nothing. It doesn’t even seem to feature the Motoko we’ve been following the entire story.
Man-Machine Interface is a grand example of authorial hubris. Shirow gets so wrapped up in his own fantastic world, incredible ideas, and amazing imagery that he completely forgets to make a coherent or entertaining story with recognisable characters with empathetic drives or goals. In the end it’s a borderline pornographic thesis on post-human existence that both plumbs the depths of base human instincts, while attempting to elevate humanity to godlike status. As far as the frequent nudity and sexualisation goes, it’s weirdly sexless. Almost all of Shirow’s female characters are synthetic versions of the same person, with bodies that are merely replicas of the biological human form. He draws them the way he does to merely titillate, there’s nothing deeper about them. There’s an offputting artifice to them and their improbably bizarre idealisation of women’s anatomy. If Shirow’s regressive depiction of women puts you off as a reader, I completely understand, and unfortunately there’s not an awful lot here to recommend outside of the gorgeously-rendered art.
I loved the original GitS because of its characters and interesting stories, the same goes for the early volumes of Appleseed and Dominion. Unfortunately with Shirow’s later works, he gets so caught up on the details and minutiae of his worlds that his stories and characters get left behind. It shouldn’t take a person five readthroughs of a manga to get even a vague idea of what’s meant to be happening. The fact I still don’t have a clue what the hell Shirow’s trying to say with MMI isn’t my fault as a reader. That flaw sits with the author alone. What is the point of artistic fiction like this if it fails to move its reader? If it fails to tell a story? If it fails to illuminate its characters’ thoughts and feelings? I don’t know, and perhaps Shirow himself can’t answer, and therefore has retreated to the world of digital art books and shiny greased objectified females.
Despite its positive aesthetic qualities, MMI is my absolute least favourite of all Shirow’s manga (and I’ve read everything of his available in English). I’m glad to be finally finished with it now. I doubt I’ll ever return to reading this again, as I feel I’ve extracted everything of value from it. I think it’s time for me to give Ghost in the Shell a rest, so next time I write I expect it will be about something completely different. Thanks so much for reading!
Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface
Author: Masamune Shirow
JP publisher: Kodansha
JP publication:
US publisher: Dark Horse
US publication: 5th January 2005 (flipped left-to-right)
US publisher: Kodansha USA
US publication: 7th March 2017 (unflipped)
Pages: 307 (Dark Horse), 320 (Kodansha US)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978–1593072049 (Dark Horse), 978–1632364234 (Kodansha USA)
