Anime Spotlight: The Twelve Kingdoms
Hello, everyone, you’re tuning in to the another edition of Anime Spotlight where we put the spotlight on shows that you may not have heard of, or shine the light a little brighter on shows that you’re already familiar with. Today, we’ll be taking a look at a series that some consider a classic, but many people haven’t heard of, The Twelve Kingdoms.
Since there’s a good chance that many of you haven’t heard of this series before, and don’t know what it’s about, allow me to provide you with a quick synopsis:
Nakajima Youko is your average, and somewhat timid, high school student. One day, a strange man named Keiki appears before her, and proceeds to swear his allegiance to her. Before she could properly register what was happening, demon-like creatures attack Youko and her friends, and, while trying to escape, they are pulled into a different world. A world unlike what she has ever known. Separated from Keiki, Youko and her friends must do whatever they can if they wish to survive in this new world.
While there’s a whole lot more to the series than that, I’d rather not spoil anything — and I’d recommend checking the series out for yourself if you’re at all interested. Anyway, now that that’s finished, let’s rewind back to where this all began…
The Twelve Kingdoms was adapted from a series of light novels written by Fuyumi Ono. She attended Kyoto University and was a part of the university’s mystery story club — a club for readers and writers of the mystery genre. She made her publishing debut in 1988, and her story, Sleepless on Birthday Eve, was published by Kodansha and featured in their X-Bunko teen heart series.
Before she began writing The Twelve Kingdoms, Fuyumi Ono wrote The Demonic Child in 1991. It’s a horror novel about a boy who had been, “spirited away,” and then returned without any memories of what had happened to him. Fuyumi Ono used several elements from The Demonic Child when she was writing The Twelve Kingdoms.
Fuyumi Ono graduated from college with a degree in Buddhist studies, which could explain why The Twelve Kingdoms has been so influenced by Chinese mythology, but had to drop out of graduate school because of financial issues. Feeling lost, and not quite sure what she wanted to do, she decided to try writing for a living when an editor, who had read her previous works, suggested it to her.
Yoko Nakajima, the main character of The Twelve Kingdoms anime series and one of the main characters in the light novels, was inspired by the letters Fuyumi Ono received from young readers. She said that, “Many of my readers end up writing to me and they often share their personal problems. I was never able to write back to them, so instead, I wrote Sea of Shadow. As for the events that befall Yoko, I feel that all people end up experiencing, to a greater or lesser extent, the kinds of mental and emotional trauma that Yoko does as they grow and establish themselves in the world. I’ve experienced the same things in the past, and I was able to overcome them somehow. There’s no set answer, but I just hope to arouse the feeling that you, too, have been like that some time.”
In order to keep track of everything that was going one when she was writing, she kept a timeline of events and a dictionary of all of the terminology that is used in The Twelve Kingdoms.
The first volume of the The Twelve Kingdoms light novel series, The Shadow of the Moon, The Sea of the Shadow, was published by Kodansha on June 20, 1992, and volume two was published on July 9, 1992. There are eight novels in the series and the last one, The Birds of Hisho, is a collection of shorts stories that was published in 2013 by Shinchosha. Many fans of the series had given up on it ever being concluded. But, on December 28, 2015, Fuyumi Ono stated on twitter that she’s working on a new novel and that she’s planning on releasing it in 2016. Shinchosha has reported that the novel’s manuscript was over 1000 pages long.
The Anime
The series was brought to the small screen by Studio Pierrot, and was directed by Tsuneo Kobayashi, and aired between April 9, 2002 and August 30, 2003 with a total of 45 episodes. The series was released in English by Anime Works a.k.a. Media Blasters. The anime only covers events from the first four novels, and is primarily focused on Yoko as the protagonist.
The anime was originally supposed to run for 68 episodes instead of 45. In 2004, John Sirabella, a representative from Media Blasters, stated that the reason for the anime being cut short was because the character designer was having health problems. Another possible reason is because the story was moving away from Yoko, who, as stated earlier, is the main character in the anime, but one of a few main characters in the novels. The theory is that the producers felt that they would lose their audience if Yoko wasn’t the main character — since they had run out of source material to pull her stories from. And another possible reason is that, at the time of the anime’s conclusion, they had caught up with the light novels, and ran out of source material to work with.
The Twelve Kingdoms has also been adapted into two video games: Juuni Kokuki: Guren no Shirobe Koujin no Michi and Juuni Kokuki: Kakukakutaru Oudou Kouryoku no Uka.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Kingdoms
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2005-07-17
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interview/2007-03-18/fuyumi-ono-author-of-the-twelve-kingdoms
