Nantonaku, Crystal: its lineage, descendants, and standing in Japan
01What this origin is
Nantonaku, Crystal (Somehow, Crystal) is a 1980 debut novel by the Japanese writer Yasuo Tanaka, which followed a fashion-model college student through her brand-saturated everyday life in Tokyo. Its defining device was its 442 footnotes annotating the real brands, shops, music, and trends the narrative name-drops, turning the consumer culture of its moment into the substance of the work itself. That annotated style is the origin of capturing an era by drowning the reader in its proper nouns, the lineage that the Neo-Showa dictionary mechanic descends from directly.
02Sources
03Buried gems that carry this root
ふりかけ☆スペイシー (no official English title) Buried gem
A high-tempo Neo-Showa nonsense-gag novel told in cel-shaded illustration and animation, in the sound-novel form of a visual novel, made by the Japanese solo doujin creator Yonton Tomachin (developer and publisher both). Across seven episodes, roughly one anime cours, the cat-eared protagonist Saatan and a cast of crazed schoolgirls run riot through hell, outer space, the inside of a child's body, and other surreal worlds. Its core device is the Neo-Showa Dictionary, which annotates some 700 proper nouns to bury you in 1980s Japanese culture, packed with homage and parody of 80s anime, games, films, music, and celebrities, plus over thirty original BGM tracks and divination and wordplay mini-games. Very Positive in Japan at 246 reviews and 96 percent, but the West has barely reached it: the reviews are dominated by 189 in Japanese against only 5 in English. There is no English version (the store supports Japanese and Simplified Chinese only), and an 80s Japanese proper-noun parody is brutally hard to translate, so the language is the wall.