"Journey to the West" aka "Monkey" is a hugely important literary work from China, dated to about 1690. The most important character in it is the monkey prince Sun WuKong.

To the Japanese the story is known as Saiyuki and Sun WuKong is known as "Son Goku". The character by that name in Dragonball is loosely based on the original character, which is why in the first series Goku has a flying cloud and fights with a staff. Sun WuKong did all those things.

DB isn't the only entertainment in Japan based on that story; it shows up all the time. There's a reference to it in Macademi Wasshoi, for example. And "Karma Saiyuki", which my copy of will be delivered tomorrow, is 40 minutes of hentai based on it, where all the main characters are reimagined as gorgeous chicks. Much though I'm a fan of DBZ, I have to say that the Goku-equivalent character in Karma Saiyuki is a lot better looking.

Even so, I fully expect it to be a trainwreck. I don't buy hentai titles very often, and I don't think I've ever been glad I bought one. I tend to watch a couple of minutes, then scan through the rest just once, and then stash it on the shelf and never look at it again.

But I'm going to really try to watch this one, and we'll see how far I get. I'm going to try really hard to watch the entire thing, so that I can write a review of it, because there's no review of it on AnimeOnDVD, which usually reviews everything.

If this is really a scene from the show: I'll give it 4 stars. (The one in the front with brown hair is Goku, except she's probably not called that.)

(I posted a bunch of other NSFW pictures from the Japanese web site for the series in this post from January.)

Information available on this series is extremely light. ANN doesn't even have a cast list. I wonder if it's got any big names?

ADV is no help. ADV's site doesn't list it, and if "Happy Carrot" has a web site I sure can't find it.

UPDATE: Doing some googling, I found an excellent high-resolution image of the cover art:

Frankly, though it makes the girls look good, there's no graphical indication at all of the mythological aspect of the story (such as it probably is). From that image, it could just as easily be about high school girls in modern Japan. I would have much preferred this one:

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:57 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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