Chapter 1

Chapter 3
Epic Adventure
with a Sci-Fi Twist
Gankutsuou: The Count
of Monte Cristo
My solitude has ceased to be solitude.
I am surrounded by the goddesses of revenge.
The bitter fruits of betrayal must be plucked from the tree.
—Count of Monte Cristo, Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo
In its handling of the journey of a hugely popular nineteenth-century
novel to the TV screen, Mahiro Maeda’s series Gankutsuou: The Count of
Monte Cristo (2004–2005)—where “Gankutsuou” can translate as “King of
the Cavern”—promulgates the idea that in a satisfying adaptive process, the
source text and its offspring should illuminate each other. It accomplishes
this feat by showing persistently that a filmic adaptation can help us grasp a
book more comprehensively or from a greater number of alternate angles,
while the book, in turn, can help us assess more insightfully the adaptation’s
thematic and aesthetic import. Therefore, the two works benefit exponentially
from parallel exploration of their respective semiotic webs—a critical venture
that ultimately enhances not only our understanding of the two works as distinct
entities but also of a third party: the hypothetical third text, as it were,
brought into being by their dynamic interplay. If one considers, in addition,
the long list of adaptations spawned over the years by the original novel, it
also becomes possible—indeed pertinent—to address the intertextual dialogue
between the nineteenth-century narrative and the anime with a focus on its
potential impact on other previous adaptations. In other words, Gankutsuou
could be said to redefine not only its parent text per se but also our perspective
on other adaptations of that work that have preceded Maeda’s own transmu-
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