Part of my revisit to the underanalyzed in Western anime discourse Super Dimension Fortress Macross (SDFM for brevity’s sake) series and the overall Macross franchise is a thorough examination of its ancillary material – manga adaptations, novelizations, side stories, light novels, audio dramas, etc. As is my typical practice, I will be treating this material critically and without the rose-tinted glasses of childhood nostalgia or fandom loyalty; it goes without question that I am not going to bother catering to the sensitivities of fans who may view the creative team as “infallible”. Of course, this also applies to the animated material and dialogues we see in the series, the theatrical adaptation (Macross: Do You Remember Love? or DYRL? for short), and the OVA Flash Back 2012 (FB2012 for short).

In this first installment of my Macross “pilgrimage”, I am reviewing the novel Misa Hayase: White Reminiscences [Hayase Misa: Shiroi Tsuioku 早瀬未沙 白い追憶], which Gubaba kindly and generously took the trouble to translate for the benefit of Western readers, whose access to it has always been limited. You can read Gubaba’s translation here (also archived here). As it has been out of print for a long time, it is only available on the secondary market, and has never had an official translation to English, French, or any other Western language.

To better serve the readers, I will be judging ancillary material like this on two criteria: their artistic value (in this case, literary) and their documentary value. It should be pretty obvious what I mean by “artistic value.” The documentary value, on the other hand, is how well the work at hand, be it a novel, a novelization, or an audio drama, works as a context source.

Penned by Hiroshi Ōnogi and planned by series creator Shōji Kawamori, the novel ostensibly tells the story of SDFM heroine Misa Hayase’s adolescence. White Reminiscences was published after the completion of the TV series. Therefore, its purpose is to provide context and blend in with the already existing story that was provided by SDFM, without introducing continuity conflicts. It begins in medias res with a “prologue” narrating two events set between SDFM episodes 24 and 27, and then it assumes the role of a prequel to the TV series, jumping back to a party held by Misa’s father, a high-ranking United Nations Navy officer named Takashi Hayase, when she’s twelve years old, and ending approximately five years later.

In actuality, White Reminiscences does not tell the full story of Misa’s adolescence. Instead, Ōnogi walks us through certain formative events that happen over the course of the aforementioned five-year period in her life. This period coincides with the escalation of the Unification Wars, a global series of armed conflicts that erupt after the crash of an alien starship that will become known as the SDF-1 Macross – the spaceship that gives its name to the entire franchise – and before the events of the TV series.

Misa meets a young cadet named Riber Fruhling and enters a platonic romance with him. This romance, combined with the rigid military household in which she grows up, triggers a cascade of events that have a significant impact on her life and personality. She enters the military at an alarmingly premature age and is forced to handle two painful losses without meaningful emotional support from family or peers. Scarred by grief, loneliness, and bullying, she strives to regain her agency and sense of achievement and self-worth by herself and on her own terms.

Normally, this would form a very strong skeleton for an extremely engaging and compelling novel. Sadly, this is not the case. Ōnogi wastes much of this potential by leaving unexplored and unexplained important aspects of Misa’s upbringing he merely hints at, but a careful reader would ask questions about. This is even more palpable at the end of the novel, which is very hastily written and condenses many important plot elements so much that the presentation of Misa’s emotional condition and mindset is unrealistic. This abrupt ending contrasts jarringly with the gratuitously verbose and fatiguingly contrived and florid prose he employs in the rest of the book. Additionally, the novel suffers from issues pertaining to conforming with in-universe chronology due to errors and ambiguous references, which are inexplicable, given Ōnogi’s direct involvement in the development of the TV series.

Worse still, he dictates, to the point of emotional micro-management, what the reader must think and feel about each scene. This is especially true of the most problematic ones, where he tries to manipulate the reader into normalizing actions and behaviors that any decent person would abhor. This manipulative and coercive writing is uncomfortably similar to Eugène Sue’s in Les Mystères de Paris. However, Ōnogi compares unfavorably even to Sue, as the latter at least knows what he is writing about. Readers familiar with military procedures and operations will immediately see that Ōnogi, at least at this stage of his career, has no actual knowledge of how militaries work and has made no actual effort to acquire this knowledge. This makes many of his explanations and narrations utterly implausible and irrational; therefore, they are easy to reject. These implausible narratives, combined with the coercive writing, sabotage any attempt of the novel to achieve the suspension of the reader’s disbelief.

So, I am in the unpleasant position of having to say that, as a literary work, White Reminiscences has so many stylistic and narrative flaws that its artistic value is extremely limited and does not make for a particularly enjoyable read. Still, for all its shortcomings, it is a crucial resource that helps a fan or scholar understand Misa Hayase’s psyche and why she is who she is. As for Ōnogi’s “instructions” w.r.t. how each scene should be read, I recommend that the reader ignore them and think and judge the characters and their actions and words for themselves. Regarding Gubaba’s translation now, on which I based this review, I must say I am quite impressed. Despite a few small issues which do not detract from his task of providing an accurate and reliable facsimile of the original work, he did a commendable job on par with many well-regarded official translations I have seen.

Literary Value: ★☆☆☆☆
Documentary Value: ★★★★☆