The past is never behind you. It is the building holding you up every day. You can feel the choices under your feet. When you’re determined and confident, your footing is solid, and you can stand proud and easy. When you’re regretful, your footing is loose, and you feel like it’s going to collapse and take you with it. You can’t change the past, and, thus, you can’t replace parts of the building. You can only build more of it and hope to reinforce the weaker parts. When a chance comes along to do that, to reverse a decision that haunts you, what do you do?
Purple Haze Feedback is a light novel written by Kadano Kouhei and illustrated by Hirohiko Araki that has now been translated into English by Buddy Waters. It functions as a sequel to Part 5: Golden Wind and stars Panacotta Fugo, the character most known for being written out of the story for being too strong. Fugo is called into service by Passione now lead by Giorno Giovanna, and also powerful enough to shut down events tantamount to the Super Bowl for meetings, and told by his Number 3 Guido Mista that he must seek out and kill a member of a remnant of Diavolo’s old Passione before that faction can flood the streets of Italy with the drugs they worked to get rid of. He is accompanied by GioGio’s bodyguard Sheila “E” Capezzuto and leader of the intelligence division Cannolo Murolo on his journey to answer a single question: “Why am earning my way back into Passione and not already standing at the side of it’s boss?” A single question that is the key to everything that makes Fugo who he is and what inside himself created his destructive alter ego.
When I heard about Feedback, I thought it was going to be very straightforward. “Fugo beats up the drug trade” sounds like a fun romp through JoJo’s to me. Give them some crazy stands to get some good fights, and we’re good to go. And it turns out that I was totally right. Purple Haze Feedback does have a very straightforward plot that doesn’t stray too far from that concept. There are little complications here and there that strive to make the most of the JoJo’s and Italian settings. There are parts that almost read like a tour guide to Italy, but always used in service of the scene and is only awkward for a moment. For instance, Team Fugo has to travel to Sicily at one point in pursuit of their target, and the narrative takes a moment to tell us about the Sicilian history of Nazis and WWII. You might be able to see where I’m going with Nazis and JoJo’s, but if you can guess the ultimate payoff for it, you’re reading ahead.
No, Feedback is a character driven narrative, and that’s what makes it shine. The story is largely focused on Fugo’s character arc, but each character around him is written to strengthen that arc while still feeling like full characters themselves, even the old Part 5 characters. Fugo’s meetings with Giorno and Mista go a long way in fleshing the two of them out. Mista gets some fun lines like, “I only survived because I’m a super lucky mega-nice guy born under a blessed star, but you didn’t have that to fall back on,” and his fear of four is driven to such an insane degree that he won’t even touch two because it’s half of four. Giorno appears only briefly, and sometimes the story does sometimes dote a little hard on him, but his ability to unlock the potential in others and make others want to support him is shown far more effectively than it was in most of Part 5.
And that’s just those two. A fair portion of the story is flashbacks to Fugo interacting with Bruno’s gang, including that fateful scene outside the chapel, and his perspective and inner monologue help give Narancia, Abbachio, and especially Bruno development as well. The new characters are done well too, mostly through effectively tying their personalities and personal histories to their stands, as Part 5 did, while keeping them interesting powers in fights. Angelica Attanasio’s Night Bird Flying, named for the B side of “Dolly Dagger” by Jimi Hendrix, allows her to make targeted people experience a bad acid trip on the spot as a reflection of her desire to force the pain of her crippling drug addiction onto others while using that to grasp even the smallest moment of the human warmth through understanding she so desperately lacks. Massimo Volpe’s Manic Depression, named for the Jimi Hendrix song, allows him to either make super drugs out of salt or to get so high he turns into Ron Perlman because his family crushed his life before he could do anything about it causing him to have no dreams or belief in the future. The stand designs are fantastic, and I don’t just mean the descriptions. Araki did good on the stand design, too.
That’s Volpe’s Manic Depression, and it’s legitimately the most unsettling stand design in the whole series while also managing to be a good reflection of it’s user. As a zombie newborn, it’s future is dead, exactly as the user sees it. And then the fights are still nice. Transition to mostly text didn’t stop the fights from being plan based and nicely visceral, so no worries about that.
I only have two real gripes with Feedback. One is that the fanservice can feel a bit arbitrary. In particular, there’s a cameo from a character that feels like the author just wanted to have that cameo and came up with a way to justify it afterwords. It’s used to make a point effectively, surprisingly, but it’s still jarring at first. The other is that the language can get a bit flowery, so there’s descriptions that make you pause and laugh at the prose. The one that stands out the most is towards the end when Fugo’s inner monologue describes Volpe with, “With him, all paths lead to blackness in the depths of a bottomless
crevasse carved in the side of a glacier!” It’s honestly hilarious how overwrought that is, like the author, for a second, thought he may have lost you on that Volpe is a bad dude.
They’re small complaints, though. As a JoJo fan, Purple Haze Feedback is definitely an enjoyable read. I barreled through all 173 pages in one sitting without having to think about it, and that’s the highest praise I can offer. Buddy Waters did a good job with the translation, a spelling error or two aside. The language sounds natural, the Italian locals are identified effectively to make sure the names correspond to the right places, and it reads well. You can download the torrent for the English book here. Please enjoy it.
(Thanks to Frolic-Chronis Tumblr for posting the news and the torrent link)
One Pixel Jump 