The author is Shiriagari Kotobuki しりあがり寿, and the title is YajiKita in DEEP (弥次喜多in DEEP). It was serialized from 1997 to 2002; I read it in a 2005 book edition. It won prizes. I don't think it's been translated.
For the first half, I thought it was very amusing, even charming. For the second half, I alternated between feeling it was brilliant and finding it maddening. I think I ended on brilliant.
I think it can be mostly summed up by the convenient word hetauma. Google it. Good-bad, (un)skilled, pick your own rendering. The art style fits the label perfectly: on the surface it's artless, amateurish, school-desk graffiti level, but after you've read a couple of pages you realize nothing's accidental, nothing's drawn the way it is because of lack of control. And sure enough by the time you've reached the end you've encountered panels and passages of beautiful near-photo realism, nuanced effects of tone and line and shading, skilled pastiches of other artists' styles, and all manner of effective variations on the author's basic style. So it's obvious that the bad is an aesthetic choice, an embrace of amateurishness that opens the door to all kinds of experimentation. It unhooks the art from realism, so that anything's possible - including occasional realism.
Usually hetauma is used to describe the art style, but I would apply it to every dimension, every level, of this work. F'rexample, the adaptational aspect of it. As the title suggests, it's a riff on the old chestnut Shank's Mare, with two Edoites, Yaji and Kita, tramping down the old Tōkaidō to visit Ise. But it lowers your expectations immediately by having Our Heroes ignore a warning and take a right turn onto the new still-under-construction Super Dream Tōkaidō: we're given to expect that nothing is going to be like the original. And indeed there are precious few correspondences with the original, but it's not like the author is just using Kita and Yaji as an excuse for dreamlike happenings. He sticks closer to the frame than you might expect. He never totally abandons the early 19th-century setting, for example (despite all kinds of sly anachronism). And most of the surrealism is grounded in Edo-era fantasies, or at least jidaigeki renderings of them. The village full of religious fanatics at the end, for example, is clearly informed by an awareness of medieval ikkō-ikki. Indeed, the mystical symbolic significance Ise takes on from about halfway through the story is a kind of Godot-like existentialism that doesn't have to be, but really is, grounded in the source material.
Halfway through. Yes, it changes around then. For the first half it's (like the original) highly episodic. The moods of the various episodes range from nonsensically comic to quite horrific, and so the author has already succeeded in transcending the gag-a-page promise he seemed to be making at the beginning. But in the second half he goes somewhere completely different. The episodes all connect, and we start to get secondary characters, and then Kita and Yaji are transformed into a cross between Hindu myth-monsters and tokusatsu kaijū, and then they battle for a hundred pages straight, and then they drop out of the story entirely... It gets weird, dark, and super-violent, and the early episodes' flirtation with myth and religion reveals an obsession with the mechanics of messianic cults. And then we learn that maybe, just maybe, the whole second half was a dream, and/or an allegory of a boy's fears on entering puberty.
There's a whole documentary on it here, which I may someday have the patience to watch.
Showing posts with label manga. Show all posts
Showing posts with label manga. Show all posts
Saturday, January 17, 2015
Thursday, August 14, 2014
Tezuka Osamu: Message To Adolf
The last of my summer Tezuka reading, I think. Another one I read in English, because we had it around in English, because Mrs. Sgt. T taught it.
I'm trying to think deep thoughts about this stuff, trying to give it the intellectual attention it deserves, when really I know, deep down inside, that Tezuka isn't holding my interest. Message to Adolf was better than most, though. It's really his best argument to be taken seriously. If you only read one Tezuka, make it Atom; if you read two, this should be the second.
*
Mrs. Sgt. T likes to compare Tezuka to Steven Spielberg. The first time she said this I felt a light go on. It's a great comparison.
Both are artists who started out in fields that got no critical respect: they were purely popular art forms. Already there are problems with the comparison, because Tezuka's field as a whole (manga) got no respect when he started, while Spielberg's field as a whole (movies) already got a lot of respect; but he was working in the most popular end of that field, so I think the comparison holds up if you don't get too nitpicky about it.
And both proved to be extraordinarily gifted in those fields: innovative craftsmen, inspired storytellers, raising what they were doing as close to the level of art as it could get, within the constraints of a totally popular art form. Tezuka's influence on every genre of manga (and anime) is legendary, while Spielberg is usually said to have essentially invented the summer blockbuster action movie.
And then they wanted to be taken more seriously, so they started changing their art, making art for grown-ups. Tezuka started drawing things like Ayako, Buddha, and Adolf; Spielberg made The Color Purple, Schindler's List, Munich. And that's where the trouble began, because it's never been clear that either has all that much to say. They can bring tremendous craft (art in the sense of skilled work) to bear on their subjects, and through that they can make work of great emotional power, but the ideas behind that work are often simple and/or a bit confused. And so in spite of all their aspirations to be taken truly seriously, they'll always be remembered best for their lighthearted early work. (And, the missus notes, it's a coincidence but also maybe inevitable that in their bids for seriosity they both turned to WWII/Holocaust themes - loading the dice, really.)
They're both tremendous entertainers, maybe the best ever at that. And many of us have no problem calling that art. But they had this itch to please more demanding critics than I usually am, and they weren't as successful at that. Although, to be fair, I seem to be in a very small minority in thinking that about Tezuka.
*
Mrs. Sgt. T likes to compare Tezuka to Steven Spielberg. The first time she said this I felt a light go on. It's a great comparison.
Both are artists who started out in fields that got no critical respect: they were purely popular art forms. Already there are problems with the comparison, because Tezuka's field as a whole (manga) got no respect when he started, while Spielberg's field as a whole (movies) already got a lot of respect; but he was working in the most popular end of that field, so I think the comparison holds up if you don't get too nitpicky about it.
And both proved to be extraordinarily gifted in those fields: innovative craftsmen, inspired storytellers, raising what they were doing as close to the level of art as it could get, within the constraints of a totally popular art form. Tezuka's influence on every genre of manga (and anime) is legendary, while Spielberg is usually said to have essentially invented the summer blockbuster action movie.
And then they wanted to be taken more seriously, so they started changing their art, making art for grown-ups. Tezuka started drawing things like Ayako, Buddha, and Adolf; Spielberg made The Color Purple, Schindler's List, Munich. And that's where the trouble began, because it's never been clear that either has all that much to say. They can bring tremendous craft (art in the sense of skilled work) to bear on their subjects, and through that they can make work of great emotional power, but the ideas behind that work are often simple and/or a bit confused. And so in spite of all their aspirations to be taken truly seriously, they'll always be remembered best for their lighthearted early work. (And, the missus notes, it's a coincidence but also maybe inevitable that in their bids for seriosity they both turned to WWII/Holocaust themes - loading the dice, really.)
They're both tremendous entertainers, maybe the best ever at that. And many of us have no problem calling that art. But they had this itch to please more demanding critics than I usually am, and they weren't as successful at that. Although, to be fair, I seem to be in a very small minority in thinking that about Tezuka.
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Tezuka Osamu: Princess Knight
So, more Tezuka. This too I read in English because it was around. Princess Knight (Ribon no kishi リボンの騎士) is one of the classics - and as hard as I am on Tezuka, I should note that I'm really glad that so much of his work is being published in translation. It's important that this stuff is made available, so fans and scholars can start to understand the history of manga, not just the contemporary stuff.
This is entertaining, but to a fault. It's one of those patented Tezuka frenetic plots, with a new twist on every page. That keeps it moving, but curiously it doesn't exactly keep it from getting static. Stasis is boring, and constant movement is just as static as constant stillness. The plot twists are exhausting. Sometimes the reader might wish to be a little less entertained. But that's Tezuka. I've come to expect this.
But chances are you don't read this today for pure entertainment. You read it for its tremendous influence on girls' comics in Japan. You read it for its still daring, still hard to completely process gender-bending. You read it for the deliriously girly art - it's like a constant sugar rush. There's so much that's important and interesting here on a conceptual level, in terms of influence and significance, that it's almost churlish to criticize it for not working better on the pure reading level. It's an essential manga. How can one ask for more?
The Takarazuka-style androgyny and critique of gender roles is the best-appreciated aspect of this work. Certainly the most important aspect of it. To that I'd add that it's also a great example of Japanese Occidentalism.
It's Occidentalist in the sense that it's appropriating its story materials entirely from the Western fairy-tale tradition. Mostly (and this is particularly obvious in the art) from Western fairy-tales as popularized by Walt Disney, of course. But it's not just a pastiche of Disney, because it goes places Disney would never go; not just the gender thing, but also Tezuka's decision to include both God and the Devil as characters. Right alongside Greco-Roman deities. Theologically it's a mess, and that's a perfect example of Occidentalism: to Tezuka, the Christian god and devil are on the same level as Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. They're colorful, exotic myths, and he uses them to colorize and exoticize his story, just like Western writers will appropriate Eastern religious imagery with little sense of the weight of meaning and association attached to it. Those of us who care about such things are sensitized - have tried to become sensitized, and rightly so - to Orientalism by Western artists. But there's an equivalent Occidentalism in Japan that doesn't get talked about quite as much. The power differential being so different both within and without Japan, it's not fair to say that Occidentalism is an equal and opposite thing to Orientalism, and they certainly don't cancel each other out. But Occidentalism is a definite thing. And Princess Knight is a perfect demonstration of it.
Which makes it kind of a strange read. Because for long stretches it's so Western looking and feeling that it's easy to forget that it's Japanese in origin. But then Satan will pop in with his curly mustache, and he'll turn out not to be a scenery-chewing villain but rather a Father Knows Best kind of paterfamilias, and you remember, oh yeah. This isn't Disney.
This is entertaining, but to a fault. It's one of those patented Tezuka frenetic plots, with a new twist on every page. That keeps it moving, but curiously it doesn't exactly keep it from getting static. Stasis is boring, and constant movement is just as static as constant stillness. The plot twists are exhausting. Sometimes the reader might wish to be a little less entertained. But that's Tezuka. I've come to expect this.
But chances are you don't read this today for pure entertainment. You read it for its tremendous influence on girls' comics in Japan. You read it for its still daring, still hard to completely process gender-bending. You read it for the deliriously girly art - it's like a constant sugar rush. There's so much that's important and interesting here on a conceptual level, in terms of influence and significance, that it's almost churlish to criticize it for not working better on the pure reading level. It's an essential manga. How can one ask for more?
The Takarazuka-style androgyny and critique of gender roles is the best-appreciated aspect of this work. Certainly the most important aspect of it. To that I'd add that it's also a great example of Japanese Occidentalism.
It's Occidentalist in the sense that it's appropriating its story materials entirely from the Western fairy-tale tradition. Mostly (and this is particularly obvious in the art) from Western fairy-tales as popularized by Walt Disney, of course. But it's not just a pastiche of Disney, because it goes places Disney would never go; not just the gender thing, but also Tezuka's decision to include both God and the Devil as characters. Right alongside Greco-Roman deities. Theologically it's a mess, and that's a perfect example of Occidentalism: to Tezuka, the Christian god and devil are on the same level as Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. They're colorful, exotic myths, and he uses them to colorize and exoticize his story, just like Western writers will appropriate Eastern religious imagery with little sense of the weight of meaning and association attached to it. Those of us who care about such things are sensitized - have tried to become sensitized, and rightly so - to Orientalism by Western artists. But there's an equivalent Occidentalism in Japan that doesn't get talked about quite as much. The power differential being so different both within and without Japan, it's not fair to say that Occidentalism is an equal and opposite thing to Orientalism, and they certainly don't cancel each other out. But Occidentalism is a definite thing. And Princess Knight is a perfect demonstration of it.
Which makes it kind of a strange read. Because for long stretches it's so Western looking and feeling that it's easy to forget that it's Japanese in origin. But then Satan will pop in with his curly mustache, and he'll turn out not to be a scenery-chewing villain but rather a Father Knows Best kind of paterfamilias, and you remember, oh yeah. This isn't Disney.
Friday, July 11, 2014
Tezuka Osamu: Ayako
I've been reading some more Tezuka. I teach him, he's major, and I should read more of his stuff. I always feel that way, even though by this point I've probably read more by him than any other mangaka: I've read Phoenix, Buddha, Jungle taitei Leo, Dororo, Shin Takarajima, all complete, plus several volumes of Black Jack and Mighty Atom. That's enough to know more or less what I think of him, but of course there's always more, and since I teach him (in small doses), I should know it. So, more Tezuka.
Ayako 奇子 was serialized in 1972-1973, and was, like Dororo, part of Tezuka's response to the more mature, adult-oriented manga that had appeared over the course of the '60s. Even more than Dororo this one tries to escape the kiddie-comic ghetto that Tezuka had owned for so long. This one's even more ambitious: Dororo was working in established manga genres, while Ayako is a bid for comics-as-literature. I.e., no samurai, no spaceships, no monsters; a few gangsters, but mostly this is an attempt at realism. Multi-generational family drama, set against the historical backdrop of postwar Japan.
Dirty realism, or naturalism in the sense of dealing with humanity in a state of nature, unreconstructed, filthy and mean. He's telling the story of a wealthy rural family in northern Japan that's resisting postwar land reform, and all kinds of democratic reform, by becoming more and more insular and inbred. Literally. It's a family at war with itself - we get murder, incest, rape, all sorts of nasty stuff. All of this Tezuka ties to larger political things - not only the question of rural landownership, but also Occupation politics, spying, political corruption, and the Economic Miracle. Whew.
I kind of wanted to love it. I love the ambition. But I didn't feel like Tezuka's heart was in it. I know he loved the Russian novelists, and that this is supposed to have their grand scale, but the particulars of the story are largely drawn from contemporary Japanese film and/or fiction - Kurosawa's The Idiot and The Bad Sleep Well come to mind, along with Yokomizu Seishi's Inugami-ke no ichizoku. And the lurid details of the family's degradation feel tossed in just for cheap thrills. It all hangs together plot-wise, and Tezuka's smart enough that it's all nicely integrated in terms of subtext, but the nihilism feels unearned, adopted from early '70s underground manga because that's what the revolutionaries liked.
*
I read this in English. I almost never read manga in translation, because, well, I can read them in the original. But we happened to have this in English lying around, and I had a bout of insomnia, and I read it straight through in a day. Interesting experience. I read manga in Japanese, but not as fast as a native reader of Japanese can, which means that while I may be getting the same verbal experience, I'm not getting the same visual-verbal experience. That is, I'm not apprehending the visual-verbal synergy at the pace at which it's designed to be apprehended. That picture-and-text-at-a-glance thing that, really, comics as a medium is all about, I'm just a step too slow to really get when I'm reading in Japanese. So it was interesting to read Ayako in English. I kept wanting to check the original for language, of course, but meanwhile I felt like I was getting a more direct take on the comicsness of the thing than I sometimes do...
Ayako 奇子 was serialized in 1972-1973, and was, like Dororo, part of Tezuka's response to the more mature, adult-oriented manga that had appeared over the course of the '60s. Even more than Dororo this one tries to escape the kiddie-comic ghetto that Tezuka had owned for so long. This one's even more ambitious: Dororo was working in established manga genres, while Ayako is a bid for comics-as-literature. I.e., no samurai, no spaceships, no monsters; a few gangsters, but mostly this is an attempt at realism. Multi-generational family drama, set against the historical backdrop of postwar Japan.
Dirty realism, or naturalism in the sense of dealing with humanity in a state of nature, unreconstructed, filthy and mean. He's telling the story of a wealthy rural family in northern Japan that's resisting postwar land reform, and all kinds of democratic reform, by becoming more and more insular and inbred. Literally. It's a family at war with itself - we get murder, incest, rape, all sorts of nasty stuff. All of this Tezuka ties to larger political things - not only the question of rural landownership, but also Occupation politics, spying, political corruption, and the Economic Miracle. Whew.
I kind of wanted to love it. I love the ambition. But I didn't feel like Tezuka's heart was in it. I know he loved the Russian novelists, and that this is supposed to have their grand scale, but the particulars of the story are largely drawn from contemporary Japanese film and/or fiction - Kurosawa's The Idiot and The Bad Sleep Well come to mind, along with Yokomizu Seishi's Inugami-ke no ichizoku. And the lurid details of the family's degradation feel tossed in just for cheap thrills. It all hangs together plot-wise, and Tezuka's smart enough that it's all nicely integrated in terms of subtext, but the nihilism feels unearned, adopted from early '70s underground manga because that's what the revolutionaries liked.
*
I read this in English. I almost never read manga in translation, because, well, I can read them in the original. But we happened to have this in English lying around, and I had a bout of insomnia, and I read it straight through in a day. Interesting experience. I read manga in Japanese, but not as fast as a native reader of Japanese can, which means that while I may be getting the same verbal experience, I'm not getting the same visual-verbal experience. That is, I'm not apprehending the visual-verbal synergy at the pace at which it's designed to be apprehended. That picture-and-text-at-a-glance thing that, really, comics as a medium is all about, I'm just a step too slow to really get when I'm reading in Japanese. So it was interesting to read Ayako in English. I kept wanting to check the original for language, of course, but meanwhile I felt like I was getting a more direct take on the comicsness of the thing than I sometimes do...
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Anno Moyoco: Kantoku fuyukitodoki
Anno Moyoco 安野モヨコ initially serialized this between 2002 and 2004, and the book came out in 2005. Kantoku fuyukitodoki 監督不行届 - it's been translated as Insufficient Direction, which is a great handling of the title.
Anno is best known as an author of women's and or girls' comics, often with a really sexy flavor; this is a little different. It's about her first year or so of marriage, and it just so happens that she's married to Anno Hideaki, director of Evangelion, etc. etc. So this is a celebrity marriage memoir in manga form. The subtext is that since Hideaki is Lord God King of otaku, for Moyoco the first year of marriage was a crash course in otakudom; but the punch line is that she's constantly realizing how fundamentally otakkii she is herself, so it's not a big leap for her.
This manga works perfectly on every level. As a gag manga about newly-married life it's funny and
sad and wise in all the right places - it hits all its marks. As a meditation on otaku and their ways, from inside the citadel, it's thoughtful and perceptive (and it does its homework - it's accompanied by an exhaustive glossary of the titles and terms that come up in the comic). And as a piece of manga art it's brilliant.
That's what I enjoyed most about it, I think: the art. Particularly the way she's chosen to draw herself and her husband. In the manga she calls him kantoku-kun - Director-boy - and she draws him with a wickedly accurate but inexcapably affectionate caricature. It's recognizably him, with the wispy beard and the glasses and the Ultraman poses, so it has all the specificity needed to make an effective parody of an individual, but it's also abstracted enough to make him everyotaku, and in some ways everymiddleageddoofus. I.e., there's universality there. And it's funny: she's such an expert artist that even though he's drawn in a really cartoony way every gesture, every pose, every facial expression communicates. It's human.
Meanwhile she draws herself as a big baby in a onesie and a bib; she calls herself Rompers. This is the genius, the fascinating bit. There's a weird and wonderful disconnect between the two characters: he's cartoony, but as I say realistic enough to be recognizable as a middle-aged dude, while she's much more cartoony, and as a big baby who's nevertheless introduced as a 30-year-old professional comics artist, she's pure sign. There's no indication that the other characters see Rompers as a baby - no baby jokes at all. There's no way in which Rompers can be taken as a physical representation of the author, no attempt at self-portraiture here on an external level. And yet in nearly every frame we have the two of them side-by-side, interacting as a married couple. It's gleefully surreal. Here's Rompers trying on wedding dresses, here's Rompers having a beer, here's Rompers lying in bed with Director-boy.
It's surreal, and it's funny, but it's also tremendously effective. What it's doing is giving us, in the same visual field, an external view of her husband and an internal view of herself. We see her husband as she sees him, and we see her as she sees herself. It's first-person in a way that I've seldom seen in a comic - it's a wonderful device. And it's made possible, again, by Moyoco's tremendous drafting skill - even though Rompers is as cartoony as a Peanuts character in terms of line and level of detail, Moyoco achieves a tremendous nuance of expression with her, somehow conveying totally adult mannerisms, reactions, emotions.
Essential.
Anno is best known as an author of women's and or girls' comics, often with a really sexy flavor; this is a little different. It's about her first year or so of marriage, and it just so happens that she's married to Anno Hideaki, director of Evangelion, etc. etc. So this is a celebrity marriage memoir in manga form. The subtext is that since Hideaki is Lord God King of otaku, for Moyoco the first year of marriage was a crash course in otakudom; but the punch line is that she's constantly realizing how fundamentally otakkii she is herself, so it's not a big leap for her.
This manga works perfectly on every level. As a gag manga about newly-married life it's funny and
sad and wise in all the right places - it hits all its marks. As a meditation on otaku and their ways, from inside the citadel, it's thoughtful and perceptive (and it does its homework - it's accompanied by an exhaustive glossary of the titles and terms that come up in the comic). And as a piece of manga art it's brilliant.
That's what I enjoyed most about it, I think: the art. Particularly the way she's chosen to draw herself and her husband. In the manga she calls him kantoku-kun - Director-boy - and she draws him with a wickedly accurate but inexcapably affectionate caricature. It's recognizably him, with the wispy beard and the glasses and the Ultraman poses, so it has all the specificity needed to make an effective parody of an individual, but it's also abstracted enough to make him everyotaku, and in some ways everymiddleageddoofus. I.e., there's universality there. And it's funny: she's such an expert artist that even though he's drawn in a really cartoony way every gesture, every pose, every facial expression communicates. It's human.
Meanwhile she draws herself as a big baby in a onesie and a bib; she calls herself Rompers. This is the genius, the fascinating bit. There's a weird and wonderful disconnect between the two characters: he's cartoony, but as I say realistic enough to be recognizable as a middle-aged dude, while she's much more cartoony, and as a big baby who's nevertheless introduced as a 30-year-old professional comics artist, she's pure sign. There's no indication that the other characters see Rompers as a baby - no baby jokes at all. There's no way in which Rompers can be taken as a physical representation of the author, no attempt at self-portraiture here on an external level. And yet in nearly every frame we have the two of them side-by-side, interacting as a married couple. It's gleefully surreal. Here's Rompers trying on wedding dresses, here's Rompers having a beer, here's Rompers lying in bed with Director-boy.
It's surreal, and it's funny, but it's also tremendously effective. What it's doing is giving us, in the same visual field, an external view of her husband and an internal view of herself. We see her husband as she sees him, and we see her as she sees herself. It's first-person in a way that I've seldom seen in a comic - it's a wonderful device. And it's made possible, again, by Moyoco's tremendous drafting skill - even though Rompers is as cartoony as a Peanuts character in terms of line and level of detail, Moyoco achieves a tremendous nuance of expression with her, somehow conveying totally adult mannerisms, reactions, emotions.
Essential.
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Igarashi Daisuke: Kaiju no kodomo
Igarashi Daisuke 五十嵐大介, Kaijū no kodomo 海獣の子供 (Sea-creature children, although the official title of the translation is Children of the Sea, and I can see why). It was published in five volumes between 2007 and 2012. I read the first two when they first came out, and here are the notes I made for myself then:
Well, I guess I could wait to read more. I didn't get around to finishing it until now. Partly that was intentional - I have a bad memory for plots, so as much as I love serialized fiction I don't really enjoy reading it in real time, because I've always forgotten what's going on by the time a new installment appears. So when I get hooked on a current title I tend to put it aside until it finishes, or at least until enough volumes pile up to make it worth coming back to. That's what I did with this.
Then it took the author an extraordinarily long time to come up with the last volume - 4 came out in 2009, and 5 not until 2012. And I can see why - he obviously had trouble with the ending. And in this case my plot-centric reading strategy kind of didn't pay off. The ending is a letdown. That is, it's hardly an ending at all. Things go along pretty well through Vol. 4 - we learn more about Ruka's mother (she's not a beach bum at all), and about Cusack, and a couple more interesting secondary characters are introduced. But Igarashi can't seem to figure out how to wrap it all up. He keeps adding new layers of subtext - the aquatic sea is the cosmic sea, science is recapitulating myth, death is rebirth, the microcosm is the macrocosm - until the only way he can end it is with page after page after page of wonder-filled, text-less illustrations of Ruka cavorting with sea creatures. And then it all resets - summer vacation ends and Ruka goes back to school.
So, yeah, I was right, but I forgot I was right. You read it for the art. Which is impeccable, all the way through. The long textless passages of Vol. 5 remind me of some of the flights of fancy in Tezuka's Phoenix for sheer wordless eloquence.
This is still in progress, but I’ve read as much as has been published, and I can’t wait for more.It’s about an adolescent girl names Ruka who lives in a fictionalized version of Enoshima/Kamakura, and two boys, Umi and Sora, who have been raised by dugongs and have mysterious powers in the ocean. Sounds hokey, very girly, but somehow it works. The writing is good—a mix of myth, science, science-fiction, environmentalism, and adolescent angst—but the art is superb, and carries it.Ruka’s father works at the aquarium, while she lives with her mother (parents divorced). Other characters include a foreigner named Jim Cusack who also works at the aquarium, and is Umi and Sora’s guardian, although he can’t really control them. Ruka is independent-minded but dreamy and moody. Her father is kind of bland, always working; her mother is clearly a beach bum who got pregnant too young. Jim is fascinating: tattooed all over with traditional designs from each island culture he’s lived with; speaks Japanese. And Umi and Sora are enigmas, constantly disappearing from the story, going off to speak with fish, etc. The plot is moving kind of slowly—something about fish vanishing, usually in a cloud of phosphorescence; Sora just disappeared at the end of Vol. 2, although we don’t know if it’s forever. There are vague hints of climate disturbances (an echo of global warming), and international research bodies with unknown agendas who want to examine the boys.But what you really read it for is the art. Igarashi has possibly the best draughtsmanship of any manga artist I’ve read, certainly recently. All his shapes—people, buildings, landscapes—feel really solid and real, like he really understands the principles of sketching. But they’re all rendered in this shaky, impressionistic style—if there’s a pen equivalent to watercolor, this is it. It gives the whole thing a dreamy, gauzy quality that perfectly fits the aquatic themes. And what really makes it work is that his tone, which could have been cloying, especially with this kind of art, is actually quite dry and reserved. Anyway, it’s a masterpiece of visual tone.
Well, I guess I could wait to read more. I didn't get around to finishing it until now. Partly that was intentional - I have a bad memory for plots, so as much as I love serialized fiction I don't really enjoy reading it in real time, because I've always forgotten what's going on by the time a new installment appears. So when I get hooked on a current title I tend to put it aside until it finishes, or at least until enough volumes pile up to make it worth coming back to. That's what I did with this.
Then it took the author an extraordinarily long time to come up with the last volume - 4 came out in 2009, and 5 not until 2012. And I can see why - he obviously had trouble with the ending. And in this case my plot-centric reading strategy kind of didn't pay off. The ending is a letdown. That is, it's hardly an ending at all. Things go along pretty well through Vol. 4 - we learn more about Ruka's mother (she's not a beach bum at all), and about Cusack, and a couple more interesting secondary characters are introduced. But Igarashi can't seem to figure out how to wrap it all up. He keeps adding new layers of subtext - the aquatic sea is the cosmic sea, science is recapitulating myth, death is rebirth, the microcosm is the macrocosm - until the only way he can end it is with page after page after page of wonder-filled, text-less illustrations of Ruka cavorting with sea creatures. And then it all resets - summer vacation ends and Ruka goes back to school.
So, yeah, I was right, but I forgot I was right. You read it for the art. Which is impeccable, all the way through. The long textless passages of Vol. 5 remind me of some of the flights of fancy in Tezuka's Phoenix for sheer wordless eloquence.
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Kono Fumiyo: Ballpen Kojiki
Bōrupen Kojiki ぼおるぺん古事記 (Ballpoint-pen Kojiki) (3 vols., 2012-2013) is the third thing I've read by Kōno Fumiyo こうの史代. I've read Yūnagi no machi sakura no kuni 夕凪の町 桜の国, which has since been translated, and one volume of Sansan roku さんさん録. To be honest I wasn't too impressed by the earlier works of hers, although I've had others argue to me, persuasively, that Yūnagi no machi is important and good. I find myself in somewhat the same position on this one.
Here's what it is. It's a manga adaptation of Kojiki, the Record of Ancient Matters, some of the oldest surviving writing in Japan and a repository of the archipelago's most ancient myths. Myths that form part of the foundation of modern Shinto, I should add: this book has religious as well as historical and literary significance. Kōno is aware of all of this in her manga adaptation; perhaps too aware.
Kōno is a good example of the contemporary phenomenon of literary manga. In the last couple of decades the manga phenomenon has spawned an ecosystem of criticism, awards, galleries, and other kinds of institutions devoted to encouraging and preserving serious manga, challenging manga, manga with artistic and literary ambition and merit. I see this as a Good Thing. It doesn't militate against popular, mass-oriented manga, but instead often celebrates it - we're seeing a kind of incipient high-low culture divide within manga, just as happened with film in the 20th century, but so far I don't see the high attacking the low or seeking to delegitimize it. So: no minusses. And the plusses are big: there's more of a place for ambitious, challenging manga than ever before. Kōno is someone who works this territory, and this work inhabits it nicely.
Which means that she's essentially free to be difficult with this manga, and difficult it is. Primarily (although not only) in terms of the language. She keeps the original language intact, as much as possible. This is a huge thing.
The language/writing system employed in Kojiki is famously difficult, but also tantalizing, since it holds out the promise of preserving the Japanese language at its earliest recordable stage. Kojiki and a few other key contemporary documents have for this reason been fetishized for centuries for their language as much as, in in some ways more than, for the stories. At its most extreme this has shaded over into a worship of the language as a form of kotodama - word spirit or sacred word, an idea that the language of the text itself is truth, is magic, is power, above and beyond its capacity to convey information. Of course this is not a totally strange concept to anybody familiar with other holy books in the world...
When I say she keeps the original language intact, what I mean is that she more or less sort of faithfully reproduces it as the narration and dialogue of her manga. What she adds is the illustrations, but her illustrations are essentially just acting out the mostly-unchanged original text. Now, anybody who's looked at the Kojiki in the original will notice that the text she presents is not completely unchanged - she changes the notoriously enigmatic original orthography into something that much more closely resembles modern Japanese. But the grammar she leaves more or less intact, and since Kojiki Japanese is at least as distant from modern Japanese as Beowulf English is from modern English, that presents huge potential problems for her readers. She adds extensive footnotes to help the reader, but it's still not easy. And I'm a premodernist - I have no idea how much patience your average manga reader will have with this.
So it's difficult in that sense: it's just plain hard to read the language in it. Luckily the illustrations are fabulous, really fantastic, and for the most part she has employed the visual language of comics well enough that you can almost follow the story without understanding the language. But still, the total package is one that makes the reader work. She could have jettisoned the original language and just retold the stories in a pure-manga format, with modern Japanese dialogue, and made it totally accessible to the modern reader, but she doesn't do that. That would have allowed the reader to forget the source; in her version, the reader is constantly brought into close contact with the source.
In some ways that's exciting (to me as a premodernist). But to be honest it's also a bit worrying. In places it does feel that she's privileging the original language so much, and so reverently, as to invest in it a little of that old-time kotodama religion. This is most glaringly apparent in how she handles the names of the gods. Now, there are a lot of gods in Kojiki. There are whole chapters that are nothing but catalogs of gods - gods who appear once and never again, all of whom have extremely long tongue-twisting names that moderns inevitably have problems remembering and distinguishing. Most of the time these long names can be broken down into meaningful elements - i.e., there's some debate as to whether these are names or titles, or whether at this point names can even be distinguished from titles. And there's great scholarly debate on this.
What this means for her is that there are excuses if she wants them for sidestepping some of the linguistic difficulty with this text. She could have used an abbreviated form of each god's name, treating the rest as a title to be rendered in more easily understood language, once and then dropped. But instead, for each god she uses the full, incomprehensible (mostly) name/title each time. She knows this is hard on her reader - she puts a square around each god's name each time it comes up to make sure the reader can separate a god's name from the rest of the sentence - but she does it anyway. That's (a). And (b) she includes all the catalogues of gods - all those gods who pop up once and never again. It's like the begats in the Old Testament. There's no reason to include this stuff - except that it's Holy Writ, right?
This is what I mean when I say that it feels like she's being reverent to the original language in a way that goes beyond historical fidelity and shades into religion. And given the way some of these myths were used by 20th century imperialists and nationalists, and given the current revival of the right wing in Japan, this gives me serious pause. I see nothing in this manga to make PM Abe, or the Yasukuni crowd, the least bit uncomfortable, and that's worrisome.
Which is a shame, because it's a smart manga, and a beautiful one, and an experimental one. It's all drawn with ballpoint pens, for example - none of the tones or CG shortcuts or different kinds of pens for different kinds of textures that most manga artists consider essential to their toolkit. She's doing it all with ballpoint pens. And there's a really interesting parallel she makes between her tools and the myths - because of course one of the early stories is about the heavenly spear dripping liquid into the primordial sea, and this makes land. The symbolic connection between the ball of ooze on the end of the spear and the ink-covered ball on the end of her pen is made quite early, and it's really a beautiful connection between form and content. But there, too, it's not hard to feel a kind of religious impulse at work - maybe the decision to use only ballpoint pens proceeded from the perception of this parallel. Given the long history in Japan of sutra-copying as a form of religious offering, it's possible to see the self-imposed strictures Kōno assumes in creating this manga as a kind of spiritual discipline...
Here's what it is. It's a manga adaptation of Kojiki, the Record of Ancient Matters, some of the oldest surviving writing in Japan and a repository of the archipelago's most ancient myths. Myths that form part of the foundation of modern Shinto, I should add: this book has religious as well as historical and literary significance. Kōno is aware of all of this in her manga adaptation; perhaps too aware.
Kōno is a good example of the contemporary phenomenon of literary manga. In the last couple of decades the manga phenomenon has spawned an ecosystem of criticism, awards, galleries, and other kinds of institutions devoted to encouraging and preserving serious manga, challenging manga, manga with artistic and literary ambition and merit. I see this as a Good Thing. It doesn't militate against popular, mass-oriented manga, but instead often celebrates it - we're seeing a kind of incipient high-low culture divide within manga, just as happened with film in the 20th century, but so far I don't see the high attacking the low or seeking to delegitimize it. So: no minusses. And the plusses are big: there's more of a place for ambitious, challenging manga than ever before. Kōno is someone who works this territory, and this work inhabits it nicely.
Which means that she's essentially free to be difficult with this manga, and difficult it is. Primarily (although not only) in terms of the language. She keeps the original language intact, as much as possible. This is a huge thing.
The language/writing system employed in Kojiki is famously difficult, but also tantalizing, since it holds out the promise of preserving the Japanese language at its earliest recordable stage. Kojiki and a few other key contemporary documents have for this reason been fetishized for centuries for their language as much as, in in some ways more than, for the stories. At its most extreme this has shaded over into a worship of the language as a form of kotodama - word spirit or sacred word, an idea that the language of the text itself is truth, is magic, is power, above and beyond its capacity to convey information. Of course this is not a totally strange concept to anybody familiar with other holy books in the world...
When I say she keeps the original language intact, what I mean is that she more or less sort of faithfully reproduces it as the narration and dialogue of her manga. What she adds is the illustrations, but her illustrations are essentially just acting out the mostly-unchanged original text. Now, anybody who's looked at the Kojiki in the original will notice that the text she presents is not completely unchanged - she changes the notoriously enigmatic original orthography into something that much more closely resembles modern Japanese. But the grammar she leaves more or less intact, and since Kojiki Japanese is at least as distant from modern Japanese as Beowulf English is from modern English, that presents huge potential problems for her readers. She adds extensive footnotes to help the reader, but it's still not easy. And I'm a premodernist - I have no idea how much patience your average manga reader will have with this.
So it's difficult in that sense: it's just plain hard to read the language in it. Luckily the illustrations are fabulous, really fantastic, and for the most part she has employed the visual language of comics well enough that you can almost follow the story without understanding the language. But still, the total package is one that makes the reader work. She could have jettisoned the original language and just retold the stories in a pure-manga format, with modern Japanese dialogue, and made it totally accessible to the modern reader, but she doesn't do that. That would have allowed the reader to forget the source; in her version, the reader is constantly brought into close contact with the source.
In some ways that's exciting (to me as a premodernist). But to be honest it's also a bit worrying. In places it does feel that she's privileging the original language so much, and so reverently, as to invest in it a little of that old-time kotodama religion. This is most glaringly apparent in how she handles the names of the gods. Now, there are a lot of gods in Kojiki. There are whole chapters that are nothing but catalogs of gods - gods who appear once and never again, all of whom have extremely long tongue-twisting names that moderns inevitably have problems remembering and distinguishing. Most of the time these long names can be broken down into meaningful elements - i.e., there's some debate as to whether these are names or titles, or whether at this point names can even be distinguished from titles. And there's great scholarly debate on this.
What this means for her is that there are excuses if she wants them for sidestepping some of the linguistic difficulty with this text. She could have used an abbreviated form of each god's name, treating the rest as a title to be rendered in more easily understood language, once and then dropped. But instead, for each god she uses the full, incomprehensible (mostly) name/title each time. She knows this is hard on her reader - she puts a square around each god's name each time it comes up to make sure the reader can separate a god's name from the rest of the sentence - but she does it anyway. That's (a). And (b) she includes all the catalogues of gods - all those gods who pop up once and never again. It's like the begats in the Old Testament. There's no reason to include this stuff - except that it's Holy Writ, right?
This is what I mean when I say that it feels like she's being reverent to the original language in a way that goes beyond historical fidelity and shades into religion. And given the way some of these myths were used by 20th century imperialists and nationalists, and given the current revival of the right wing in Japan, this gives me serious pause. I see nothing in this manga to make PM Abe, or the Yasukuni crowd, the least bit uncomfortable, and that's worrisome.
Which is a shame, because it's a smart manga, and a beautiful one, and an experimental one. It's all drawn with ballpoint pens, for example - none of the tones or CG shortcuts or different kinds of pens for different kinds of textures that most manga artists consider essential to their toolkit. She's doing it all with ballpoint pens. And there's a really interesting parallel she makes between her tools and the myths - because of course one of the early stories is about the heavenly spear dripping liquid into the primordial sea, and this makes land. The symbolic connection between the ball of ooze on the end of the spear and the ink-covered ball on the end of her pen is made quite early, and it's really a beautiful connection between form and content. But there, too, it's not hard to feel a kind of religious impulse at work - maybe the decision to use only ballpoint pens proceeded from the perception of this parallel. Given the long history in Japan of sutra-copying as a form of religious offering, it's possible to see the self-imposed strictures Kōno assumes in creating this manga as a kind of spiritual discipline...
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Yamamoto Naoki: Ashita mata denwa suru yo
Here's your literary, artistic, interesting, worthwhile erotica in manga form. Right here. It's a collection of short stories by Yamamoto Naoki 山本直樹 called Ashita mata denwa suru yo 明日また電話するよ (I'll call you again tomorrow); came out in 2008, but the stories were originally published between 1995 and 2002, in various venues.
I'm new to Yamamoto, but I always see his stuff in the cool corners of the manga floors of the biggest bookstores - that corner by the elevator in the basement of the Ikebukuro Junkudo - I bought this purely on a flyer. Sometimes you get lucky.
It's fine stuff. It's sexy, sure, but also by turns creepy, nostalgic, funny, wistful, hard-boiled, satirical, socially engaged, and even innocent. There's always two or three things going on alongside the wet stuff; usually something to make the wet stuff even wetter, and something else to make it bone dry.
The writing's great, and the art rises to the occasion, too. He's more daring, or is allowed to be freer, than most artists who draw this kind of stuff for mass-market publications in Japan, but what makes his wet stuff work is, of course, not just their cunning lubricity, but his sensitive and sure touch with everything else in the visual plane. His framing, his composition, his line and shade, are all masterful; and he experiments. There's one story in here told entirely in long-focus and wide-frame, same angle, panel after panel, like a movie camera set up and turned on and left; it's not a trick he came up with (I've seen it in Tezuka, for example), but neither is it a common one, and he uses it well.
It's adult in every sense of the word.
I'm new to Yamamoto, but I always see his stuff in the cool corners of the manga floors of the biggest bookstores - that corner by the elevator in the basement of the Ikebukuro Junkudo - I bought this purely on a flyer. Sometimes you get lucky.
It's fine stuff. It's sexy, sure, but also by turns creepy, nostalgic, funny, wistful, hard-boiled, satirical, socially engaged, and even innocent. There's always two or three things going on alongside the wet stuff; usually something to make the wet stuff even wetter, and something else to make it bone dry.
The writing's great, and the art rises to the occasion, too. He's more daring, or is allowed to be freer, than most artists who draw this kind of stuff for mass-market publications in Japan, but what makes his wet stuff work is, of course, not just their cunning lubricity, but his sensitive and sure touch with everything else in the visual plane. His framing, his composition, his line and shade, are all masterful; and he experiments. There's one story in here told entirely in long-focus and wide-frame, same angle, panel after panel, like a movie camera set up and turned on and left; it's not a trick he came up with (I've seen it in Tezuka, for example), but neither is it a common one, and he uses it well.
It's adult in every sense of the word.
Monday, July 1, 2013
Shigisawa Kaya, Virtual Red
Virtual Red (Vācharu Reddo ヴァーチャル・レッド) by Shigisawa Kaya シギサワカヤ. Published as a book in 2012 in 2 volumes, of which I've only read the first; the episodes in it were mostly published in dōjinshi between 2004 and 2006. I picked this up because I was looking for something different in manga, and the cover looked interesting. (The red tint is a translucent red cover - take it off and the picture underneath is mostly white - nice effect.) Erotic, sure, but maybe more, maybe interesting.
It wasn't, unfortunately. I've never read this author. I don't know quite what to make of it. The story is mildly intriguing: an overworked, underconfident young male software engineer is directed by a coworker to the house of a woman "who'll sleep with anyone." He sleeps with her once, basically moves in with her, and most of the rest of the book (what I read, anyway) takes place in the house. But rather than focusing on their sexual escapades, as seems to be the promise at first, the focus is on the guy's confusion and anxiety - is she real? Why does she like and accept him? Where is her husband? Is he taking advantage of her (duh)?
That description makes it sound more interesting than it actually is. I'm just not sure what this is trying to do. The woman is way too underdeveloped to be an effective deconstruction of a male fantasy - but after the initial sex scene their relationship is too tame to work as a straight rendition of a male fantasy, either. Visually and narratively she's presented as a hundred percent sex kitten, with no apparent interiority, suggesting it's not really aimed at women readers, but there's so little payoff that it's hard to imagine it's aimed at male readers either. If the narrative was a little less foggy (it's rather hard to follow, because we're constantly trying to follow both an impressionistically-rendered external narrative and a very inarticulate internal monologue in the guy's head) it might be challenging on a number of levels, but it's not, so it's not. It seems to be aiming at literary erotica, but it's not really effective as either. I'm not going to bother with the second volume.
Mrs. Sgt. T., who's far more manga-literate than I, says this is a perfect example of one possible early etymology of yaoi. That is, this isn't dealing in homoerotica, but it is totally lacking in plot tension, punch lines, and meaning.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Matsumoto Taiyō: GOGO Monster (2000)
It has the air of a major project: a nearly 500-page deluxe hardback, written for book publication (i.e., not serialized in a comix mag first). Therefore: no episode divisions, only five large chapter subdivisions; no story recaps, no concessions at all to capturing and keeping an audience. This is manga as novel, developing characters/story/themes over a long narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Which makes it, possibly, weird that Matsumoto elected to make it much less coherent on a narrative level, then Tekkon. And, first of all, they beg comparison: like the earlier one, this manga concerns two misfit boys, best friends, borderline psychos in a psychotic world. The older boy is visionary to the point of being unhinged, while the younger boy is touching in his innocence and vulnerability. In fact, I ended up reading this book as a rewrite of Tekkon - same basic story (down to the unexpected, improbable happy ending). Meaning the differences end up being more interesting than anything else.
And those differences come down to one move in the direction of greater realism, and one move in the direction of greater surrealism. The realism comes in the art and the setting: gone is the krazy topsy-turvy world of Tekkon. Instead we get a setting that's confined to an elementary school, rendered with amazing impressionistic realism. I just made that up, but what I mean by it is that his line is shaky, at times deformed, at all times expressive, but beneath it is concealed an almost photorealistic sense of perspective, space, volume, and texture. It's an amazing combination.
The realism also comes in the fact that, for most of the book, it's clear that the conflicts, the mysterious monsters and otherworlds of the story, are all in the head of the older boy, and maybe his perhaps-real, perhaps-doppelganger buddy (not the younger boy, but a secondary companion who emerges halfway through: this happens in Tekkon, too, of course). That is, the line between external reality and internal surreality is much more firmly maintained here than in the earlier book.
But the narrative technique itself - the way characters interact, the way the story moves forward - is very surrealistic. It's here that you can feel how much Matsumoto was liberated by not writing for a magazine: he's able to get as abstract in his storytelling as he wants, and that's pretty abstract. It's actually pretty difficult to follow what's going on in places, especially when we venture into the older boy's internal surreality; much harder than in Tekkon to assign symbolic referents to the talking bunnies and leering water droplets that we see here.
The tension between these two moves is what makes this both a slightly maddening book and a deeply impressive one. For those long stretches where you just surrender to the art, to the moody visuality of the thing, it becomes one of the best representations of childhood in all of manga - of the mindset of the misfit, the outcast, in the artificial world of the school, where kids have no sense whatsoever of normalcy, so whatever they see or think they see is real.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Asakura Sekaiichi: Jigoku no Saramichan
(If anybody noticed the silence, sorry for it: it's been the month from hell in Tanukiville. Illness, travel, work. Lots of life-weather, and I've been under all of it.)
I spent five hours on a plane today, and most of it I spent reading Jigoku no Saramichan 地獄のサラミちゃん ("Sarami, the Princess of Hell," in the official English title; I'd really rather translate the title as "Salami from Hell," but that would be unwarranted...) by Asakura Sekaiichi 朝倉世界一. A girls' comic from 1998 to 2002; collected, it comes to one thick bunkobon volume.
I read it not for its own sake but because it was the intertext, the manga palimpsest, for the most-recent-but-one novel by Yoshimoto Banana, which I finished the last time I spent hours on a plane, a couple of weeks ago. I'll blog that. But first I'll blog this. Because it's probably better than the novel...
Basic setup: 17-year-old Sarami is the daughter of Ema, the King of Hell. But she runs away to the world of the living to realize her dream of becoming a supermodel. She settles in a town that seems like it's supposed to be Japan, but looks like Arizona in cowboy days, and gets a job as a waitress at a steakhouse called Jūjū ("sizzle") run by a bunny rabbit named Pyonko ("hopsy"). And hijinks ensue.
It's a light, cute comic, but much less cloying than the description above might make it sound. It's no great shakes narratively - most of the gags work in a pleasant enough way, but aren't funny enough to make you disturb your seatmate, let's say. But the aesthetics - the art, the character renderings, the world - are really hooky. Enough to make it worth a read. In twenty years this'll be a time capsule of a particular variety of turn-of-the-century cute.
What variety? Basically if you could imagine a world, and a story, and characters, based entirely on Ed Hardy clothing designs, this is what you'd come up with. A kind of biker-gang/cowpunk/rocker-chick/tattoo-slut/bling-toothed pirate/fur-Stetson nirvana - all of these varieties of transgressiveness filtered through the Harajuku merchandising machine and made safe for consumption by teenage girls.
And that also makes it sound like I'm condescending to it, but it does a magnificent job of realizing this aesthetic, and any work that can realize a new aesthetic has done something important, in my book.
Recommended.
I spent five hours on a plane today, and most of it I spent reading Jigoku no Saramichan 地獄のサラミちゃん ("Sarami, the Princess of Hell," in the official English title; I'd really rather translate the title as "Salami from Hell," but that would be unwarranted...) by Asakura Sekaiichi 朝倉世界一. A girls' comic from 1998 to 2002; collected, it comes to one thick bunkobon volume.
Basic setup: 17-year-old Sarami is the daughter of Ema, the King of Hell. But she runs away to the world of the living to realize her dream of becoming a supermodel. She settles in a town that seems like it's supposed to be Japan, but looks like Arizona in cowboy days, and gets a job as a waitress at a steakhouse called Jūjū ("sizzle") run by a bunny rabbit named Pyonko ("hopsy"). And hijinks ensue.
It's a light, cute comic, but much less cloying than the description above might make it sound. It's no great shakes narratively - most of the gags work in a pleasant enough way, but aren't funny enough to make you disturb your seatmate, let's say. But the aesthetics - the art, the character renderings, the world - are really hooky. Enough to make it worth a read. In twenty years this'll be a time capsule of a particular variety of turn-of-the-century cute.
What variety? Basically if you could imagine a world, and a story, and characters, based entirely on Ed Hardy clothing designs, this is what you'd come up with. A kind of biker-gang/cowpunk/rocker-chick/tattoo-slut/bling-toothed pirate/fur-Stetson nirvana - all of these varieties of transgressiveness filtered through the Harajuku merchandising machine and made safe for consumption by teenage girls.
And that also makes it sound like I'm condescending to it, but it does a magnificent job of realizing this aesthetic, and any work that can realize a new aesthetic has done something important, in my book.
Recommended.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Suetsugu Yuki: Chihayafuru (2007-present)
The title is Chihayafuru ちはやふる, which pretty much defines the concept of untranslatable title. It's a "pillow-word," one of those lexemes that Japanese poetry has been dragging along as a patrimony since time, literally, immemorial - long enough that scholars have been unable to agree on exactly what they originally meant. Poets tend to use them more for impact and decoration than sense, although since pillow words tend to be associated (in the manner of the poetic epithets in other traditions) with particular words or classes of objects, they do have certain vague connotations. "Chihayafuru" (also pronounced "chihayaburu") tends to get used with "god." In some contexts I tend to translate it as "almighty," for obvious reasons, but that wouldn't work so well here, for a couple of reasons. First, because its use here is meant to conjure up dim memories (the farther out of high school you are, the dimmer, chances are) of a very, very famous poem in which this is the first line; and, second, because the main character's name is Chihaya. Untranslatable.
It's a comic about karuta: a card-matching game involving the poems of the famous 13th century anthology A Hundred Poets, One Poem Each (Hyakunin isshu). "Famous" is an understatement: Japanese kids are expected to memorize this in high school. The game depends on having it memorized. You kneel down front of a bunch of cards on which are written the second halves of the poems and somebody reads out the first lines. You try to be the first person to grab the right second-half card. And so on. Most people play it a few times during Japanese classes in school, and maybe at New Year's. But, as most people probably don't know until they encounter this manga, there's a competitive karuta scene. That's where this story is set.
It's a little hard to classify. The art (flowers and lens flares everywhere) and the (after a brief prologue) high-school setting, complete with Young Love stories, mark it as a shōjo manga. The venue where it appears, however, is Be Love, a mag ostensibly aimed at adult women. And the way it depicts the competitive karuta play lifts extensively and knowingly from sports comics - not by any means exclusively a male genre, to be sure, but enough so that at one point one of the characters makes the meta remark that "some people say this is a boys' comic".
That's a lot of the fun of it. The main character, Chihaya, is a figure of amusement precisely because here she is, model-pretty (it's a major plot point), with a hobby that most people would probably consider fairly feminine (classical poetry being rather flowery), but she approaches it with all the killer instinct and athleticism of yer typical jock.
And that's pretty much all there is to say about the comic. It's enjoyable - I've stuck with it through 14 volumes (well, I'm waiting to get my hands on the 14th) so far. Not particularly deep, but clever and well crafted. Attractive secondary characters, introduced at almost a fast enough clip to keep the old ones from getting stale. Well-drawn, dynamic game-play sequences, dragged out to impossible lengths (a single tournament can comprise a whole volume of the manga, and spill over into the next). A background story arc (a love triangle between childhood karuta buddies) that provides occasional tears amidst the laughter (well, "tears" - I don't think the love triangle is working more than gesturally).
Fun.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Nakamura Hikaru: St. Oniisan (2007-present)
A student of mine turned me on to this manga. I turned my wife onto it, and she turned some friends onto it. So we have a regular little St. Oniisan fan club here on the banks of the Willamette. But I never got around to reading the whole series until a couple of weeks ago when I was sick and it was the only thing I felt like reading.
The author is Nakamura Hikaru 中村光. The title in Japanese is Saint Oniisan 聖☆おにいさん, but it comes with its own author-specified English title, which shows up on the cover: Saint Young Men. I actually hate it when manga do this: the pre-supplied English titles are almost always geared toward the Japanese audience, meaning they work for people with only a vague grasp of English (sometimes they work quite well from that perspective), but they're lousy when read by a native English speaker. "Saint Young Men" is a lousy title. Anything would be better. How about "Holy Bros"?
But that's the only thing about this series that misses. Everything else is pure comedy gold.
The gimmick is that, shortly after the millennium, Buddha and Jesus decide they need a vacation, so they come to earth - Tokyo, to be exact - and take an apartment together. If that sounds like a variation on a classic joke set-up - "so Buddha and Jesus walk into a bar, and Buddha says..." - that's because it is. It's a killer premise, legendary from the start - be honest, you smiled the second you read my explanation of it. Already you're imagining the possibilities.
And it gets better, because he's imagined Jesus and Buddha not just as fish out of water, divine personages in modern Japan, but freeters - dudes in their early twenties, aimless and underemployed. There's a wicked subtext about the superfluousness of religion in contemporary Japan, and the sheer numbers of young people falling through the cracks in the system, and oh yeah, the witty observation that Jesus, as traditionally depicted, kinda looks like a modern hipster - skinny, long-haired, with a wispy beard. Buddha, too - looks surprisingly convincing in a puffy North Face coat.
What's amazing about this series is that it lives up to the premise. Nakamura's six volumes in, and so far he's managed to keep coming up with new jokes. A lot of them are of necessity variations on familiar themes, but still he's managed to introduce a new twist every time you think the well's about to go dry. It helps that he's willing to introduce new characters - we get Jesus's homey Uriel and Buddha's boy Brahman, for example, each one of whom brings in train a whole new set of associations to exploit.
I guess what I'm admiring is the craftsmanship. Nakamura had an inspired idea, but what's making it work is his mastery of all the comic techniques you could think of. This series is like a textbook of comedy, everything from complicated visual puns to low comedy, character-driven humor and off-the-wall gags.
What it's missing is a hard edge, but I don't think that's a bad thing. There's plenty of blasphemy in here, but it's all so good-natured and light-hearted that it's hard to imagine anybody getting too het up about it. Maybe Rick Santorum, but nobody sane. In fact, somewhat surprisingly given that it's about young men in their early twenties (well, not really), there's been no mention at all of sex. Nakamura's keeping it family-friendly. Which ends up giving the whole series this really benign glow. I'm not saying it's exactly faith-promoting, but it's not trying to grind any axes either. It's just fun. Endlessly fun.
EDITED 11/26/11: I refer to Nakamura Hikaru as a "he." In fact Nakamura Hikaru is a "she." Imagine my embarrassment. Feel free to doubt anything I write about anything from here on out.
The author is Nakamura Hikaru 中村光. The title in Japanese is Saint Oniisan 聖☆おにいさん, but it comes with its own author-specified English title, which shows up on the cover: Saint Young Men. I actually hate it when manga do this: the pre-supplied English titles are almost always geared toward the Japanese audience, meaning they work for people with only a vague grasp of English (sometimes they work quite well from that perspective), but they're lousy when read by a native English speaker. "Saint Young Men" is a lousy title. Anything would be better. How about "Holy Bros"?
But that's the only thing about this series that misses. Everything else is pure comedy gold.
The gimmick is that, shortly after the millennium, Buddha and Jesus decide they need a vacation, so they come to earth - Tokyo, to be exact - and take an apartment together. If that sounds like a variation on a classic joke set-up - "so Buddha and Jesus walk into a bar, and Buddha says..." - that's because it is. It's a killer premise, legendary from the start - be honest, you smiled the second you read my explanation of it. Already you're imagining the possibilities.
I guess what I'm admiring is the craftsmanship. Nakamura had an inspired idea, but what's making it work is his mastery of all the comic techniques you could think of. This series is like a textbook of comedy, everything from complicated visual puns to low comedy, character-driven humor and off-the-wall gags.
What it's missing is a hard edge, but I don't think that's a bad thing. There's plenty of blasphemy in here, but it's all so good-natured and light-hearted that it's hard to imagine anybody getting too het up about it. Maybe Rick Santorum, but nobody sane. In fact, somewhat surprisingly given that it's about young men in their early twenties (well, not really), there's been no mention at all of sex. Nakamura's keeping it family-friendly. Which ends up giving the whole series this really benign glow. I'm not saying it's exactly faith-promoting, but it's not trying to grind any axes either. It's just fun. Endlessly fun.
EDITED 11/26/11: I refer to Nakamura Hikaru as a "he." In fact Nakamura Hikaru is a "she." Imagine my embarrassment. Feel free to doubt anything I write about anything from here on out.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Asano Inio: Oyasumi Punpun (2007- )
Here's what I wrote in my pre-blogging days:
Punpun is a fifth-grader in an abusive home. His father gets sent to prison for beating his mother almost to death, then they get divorced; his mother’s not too nice either; her slacker brother Yuichi moves in and sort of takes care of Punpun. Meanwhile he has a crush on a girl at school, Aiko, who’s also in a scary family—her mother’s a cultist, and drags her around proselyting. Aiko wants to run away, and makes Punpun promise to come with her, but he has to stand her up when his mother attempts suicide. Then we skip to two years later, Punpun’s a seventh-grader, Aiko hasn’t talked to him for two years, but he still has a crush on her. She, however, is going out with the captain of the badminton team, who Punpun is kind of friends with. Meanwhile, we start to follow Yuichi more, as he meets a cute ex-nurse who likes him; he starts to tell her about a traumatic event in his past, when a sixteen-year-old hottie from an abusive household made a pass at him… And that’s where Vol. 3 ends. It’s a well-told story so far, with just the right number of minor characters, and a lot of dysfunctional-family stuff that’s handled with an appropriate dull ache. By the end of the third volume, though, it’s starting to lose focus—the whole Yuichi bit feels like we’re moving sideways rather than forward. Maybe Asano doesn’t know where he’s going with this after all.
Asano Inio: Nijigahara horogurafu (2006)
The author is Asano Inio 浅野いにお. The title is Nijigahara horografu 虹ヶ原ホログラフ (translatable as Nijigahara holograph, Nijigahara being the name of the town where it's set). It was serialized in the "subculture magazine" (trendspotter central) QuickJapan between 2003 and 2005 before being published in one volume in 2006.The title is never explained. It's that kind of book. If I had to guess I'd say it that (a) the word "holograph" is being used as it sometimes seems to be in Japanese, as a mistake for "hologram", and that (b) Asano's trying to suggest a parallel between the way holograms create the illusion of three dimensions in two, i.e. seem to rotate as your perspective shifts, and his narrative technique here, which involves gradually and piecemeal revealing the identities and relationships between characters, on two timelines ten years apart, so that your understanding and sympathy changes with each chapter. It's that kind of book. (I'd also entertain the idea that he's using the word "holograph" according to its proper meaning: I don't suspect that this manga is autobiographical [I sure hope not], but it may be told, arguably, in the first person, something that isn't always and immediately apparent. It's that kind of book.)
I've read one other title by Asano (I'll blog it soon), and was impressed by his art and his serious themes, but not by his storytelling. Here it all comes together. This is a masterpiece. As a narrative it's as fragmented, multiperspectival, and time-ruptured a story as any postmodernist could wish for, and yet despite its refusal to resolve itself into any final form, it's curiously satisfying anyway. It's not about teasing you. It's about fragmentation as a way to emotional truth, about the possibility that the only possible response to existential horror is myth and wonder.
The plot, as you might guess, can't easily be summarized, partly because you can't be exactly sure what it is. But it concerns a group of people in the small town of Nijigahara (Rainbow Meadow). One timeline follows them when they're all in the same 5th-grade class, and another timeline follows them all 11 years later. We meet some of their parents, teachers, and some of their families. But the narration is cagey about names - only gradually do we become aware that all the characters we're following in one timeline match up with those in the other timeline, and how.
But by the time the book ends, not only have we made all the connections (we think), but we've also learned how grotesquely they're all linked by horrible things: suicide, murder, child abuse, rape, stalking, bullying, assault with deadly weapons. We see a scar, then learn how it was administered, then realize we've been sympathizing with the administerer.
Thematically, then, I guess you could loosely say it's working the rich seam of anxiety about Kids These Days, with their bullying and their tempers and their shut-in tendencies. But it goes so deep, and is so determined to invest all this melodrama with metaphysical significance, that it hardly reminds you of the typical social-issue story. As this very perceptive (and much more coherent than mine) pair of blog posts on Manga Bookshelf Transmissions suggests, it's really trying to make its own myth about familial love and redemption, about where it all went wrong and how it might have turned out if it hadn't.
Yeah, I won't say any more than that.
(Hey. I wasn't the first to blog in English about this.)
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Taniguchi Jirō and Kusumi Masayuki: Sanpomono (2003-2005)
This is a really interesting manga. Perhaps the most junbungaku manga I've yet encountered. It's about a typical salaryman who takes walks. That's it, essentially. He's out on an errand, or visiting a friend, misses his bus, and decides to walk home instead, or whereever he's going; each episode details what he sees while he's walking, and involves some very minor daily-life epiphany. The end result is the sort of apotheosis of the mundane that is one of the major themes of modern Japanese literature. Finding meaning, beauty, delight, solace, in a small thing encountered by accident and seen in just the right light.
The art supports this marvelously; it's probably no exaggeration to say that the whole point of this series was to give Taniguchi a chance to experiment visually, or maybe even to show off. The art combines photorealistic backgrounds with pretty manga-esque humans; just as the scenery of the strolls is the thematic point, the backgrounds are the artistic point.
Photorealistic doesn't quite cover it, because he's giving you more detail than you'd pick up from a photograph. His unbelievably fine lines and exact geometry give you a sort of heightened realism, an almost surreal level of detail and volume: the buildings and trees fairly leap out at you. To this amazing line Taniguchi adds amazing facility with screentones, creating effects of light and shadow, texture and touch, that pretty much define the state of the manga art. If you want to know what it feels like to walk through a Tokyo neighborhood, just read this manga.
The art is so wonderful, and the theme so deep, that it makes the two flaws I find in the project all the more glaring. One is that Taniguchi's handling of human facial expressions, at least in this manga, isn't as subtle as his rendering of the scenery. I came to this right after Billy Bat, and for all the adventure comix cartooniness of that manga, the way figures are rendered in it is incredibly expressive and well-observed. You've seen people make that exact face, stand in just that way. Taniguchi's people, on the other hand, are a little stiff, their expressions a little blunt, and for me that meant the art just barely failed to support the theme.
The other flaw is more interesting. I mentioned that each episode culminates in a kind of daily-life epiphany, usually through an encounter with some object. In classic modern J-lit this object would be a cherry tree in bloom, or a locket that belonged to a former lover - those are clichés, but you can see what I mean. Here, almost all the objects are items for sale. A particular kind of light bulb, lunch at a particular curry shop in Kichijōji. And the kind of epiphanies the main character experiences - the lessons he takes from them - have to do with nostalgia for a better time, but that better time is basically the Tokyo of thirty to fifty years ago. More mid-Shōwa nostalgia, in other words.
And this was, for me, pretty disappointing. I like a good curry lunch, a good unchanged '50s neighborhood, as much as the next guy, I really do, but this manga was so aesthetically promising that it was a let-down to realize that the meaning-in-life it was finding was basically just a cool thing to buy, or a Tokyo with simply a slightly lower degree of commercial exploitation. Like, that's the best you can imagine? Really?
That's where I'm glad I read the paperback (which otherwise is a bad deal, because the art really deserves to be seen as large as it can be), because it has lots of prose in the back by Kusumi detailing the making of this series, and where each episode is set (they're all real neighborhoods). And he comes right out and admits that it was the publisher's insistence that each episode involve a product. This was serialized in a magazine that's half general-interest mag and half mail-order catalog. Of course they want the comix to celebrate consumption.
So I can't make up my mind whether this is art compromised by commercial concerns, or a case of art sneaking in under the radar of commercial concerns.
Kokurikozaka kara (manga version)
Taken on its own terms, it's an utterly typical shōjo manga. Average. I guess I mean that as both a pejorative and a mere descriptor. That is, I don't find the manga really remarkable in any way; but there's a certain value in reading unremarkable works, too, because they help you appreciate the excellent ones.
The art: it's undistinguished. Very few compositions struck me as being memorable or arresting. At the same time it's obviously using the visual vocabulary of girls' comix circa 1980 in typical way: the flowers, the floating-in-space emotional moments, the dizzy-angle closeups of eyes, mouths, etc. It's kind of a primer on the genre.
The story: same. Puppy love presented with an accent on beautiful boys just out of reach, and the endless internal sufferings of a girl in love. Just enough complications to keep the plot going, and a resolution just in time to bring tears to your eyes. (Theoretically.)
Read in terms of the movie, however, it's fascinating, precisely because Ghibli was able to make such a deeply resonant movie out of such average source material. They kept the basic outlines of the story (Mer and Kazama's relationship, the boarding house, the school), but changed the setting from "contemporary" (in 1980 the manga was set in 1980) to "past," and thus the tone from up-to-the-minute (in the manga the boys all have Shaun Cassidy long hair) to nostalgic. Furthermore they drew out the emotional, almost mythic power of the dad-lost-at-sea motif.
Here's an example of what they did. High-school-student protest is a theme in both. In the manga, it's a gag: Kazama manufactures a student uprising against school uniforms, as a way of selling more papers (he's on the school newspaper). It's mildly funny, but mostly a shockingly cynical parody of the student protests that had swept the country just ten years before. Takahashi and Sayama's youngest readers may or may not have had any memory of them, but older readers would have, and it's some kind of sign of the new decade that student unrest in 1980 could only be thought of in terms of this kind of ridiculous parody.
In the movie they keep the theme, but transform it into a crusade to save the Latin Quarter dorm. Notably, this too neutralizes the student-protest theme - what in the late '60s would have potent political significance is recast in the film as pure-hearted young people trying to save their community. But at least it's taken seriously by the filmmakers - commitment to something other than puppy-love and hairbrushes is held up as a real thing.
Friday, September 9, 2011
Kusaka Riki: Kumarajiva (2009-present)
It's probably worth mentioning that Ushio is put out by the publishing arm of the Soka Gakkai. I don't think that necessarily means that this comic is going to be mere hagiography; not only is Ushio a seemingly fairly mainstream publication, but they're the same publisher that did Tezuka's Buddha, although it ran in a different magazine. The pedigree doesn't seem to have prevented that work from being taken seriously. So I'll take this seriously.
Tezuka's life of the Buddha is the obvious precedent for this, and the thing I couldn't help but compare it to even before I noticed that they were from the same publisher. After only one volume it's not going to be possible to say much, but we can start with the art. This is a lot less distinguished, artistically: I doubt anybody would disagree. But visually, I like it a lot more.
Here's what I mean by that. Tezuka famously never managed to leave behind his Disney-influenced art style. His characters always had that roundness; they always looked like they were rubber bendy-toys. And his backgrounds, his things, weren't much different - they could boast a high degree of detail, and he could do atmosphere, but they always looked cartoony. I've written about how for me that ruins some of his more ambitious work. That's more or less my take on his Buddha. In it he takes his cartoony style about as far as it can possibly go - I can recognize that he's really pushing himself there, and he does achieve some marvelous effects. But in the end it's still rubbery, and it's off-putting to me. I just can't get around this. I don't love Buddha.
I find myself much more at home in Kusaka's art. But the thing is, objectively I would probably rate it lower than Tezuka's. She's drawing in a quite typical contemporary seinen-manga style: utterly typical. I'd be hard pressed to cite anything at all about the art in this volume that sets it apart from any other average manga aimed at your average late teen or adult. It's reasonably well executed, but artistically unambitious. Undistinguished. As opposed to the great ambition, care, and skill evident in Tezuka's work.
So why do I prefer Kusaka's? Idiom. It's simply that the seinen style, even when executed in an uninspiring way, feels more appropriate to this story, this kind of story. It's somehow more effective at conveying adult emotions, adult thoughts, than the cartoony style of Tezuka, no matter how well executed. At least, that's my impression. This story, even though the characters are shallow, begins to move me, reflexively, in ways that Tezuka's didn't.
Maybe the best way to get at what I'm trying to say is this. I tend to think of the art in manga as being equivalent, in some ways, to the words that it's replacing: and artistic style can be likened to prose style. In that metaphor, Tezuka's art in Buddha is the visual equivalent of: a story in short words! aimed at a boy with a fifth-grade reading level! with lots of exclamation points! There's a lot you can do with that! kind of writing! sure! but it still has! lots! of! exclamation points!
Whereas Kusaka's art is the visual equivalent of adult prose, aimed at adults. Certainly not the most eloquent prose, but at least it only has a few! exclamation points.
I feel like such a heretic now.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Urasawa Naoki/Nagasaki Takashi: Billy Bat (2008-present)
So: Billy Bat ビリーバット, by Urasawa Naoki 浦沢直樹 and Nagasaki Takashi 長崎尚志. It's been serialized in Morning モーニング since 2008, and the book version is up to Volume 7. It's the first thing I've read by Urasawa, but it won't be the last. For at least the first couple of volumes, I was convinced this might be the greatest comic ever written. It loses a little intensity when it decides to spend a full volume on a ninja story, but it's still pretty cool.
For the first couple of volumes it's following a Japanese-American comic-book author named Kevin Yamagata who, in immediate postwar LA, has a hit series called Billy Bat. Billy Bat, the comic-with-a-comic, is a furry story with a bat as a hardboiled detective. It's black-bat noir. Kevin's proud of his creation, but a visiting cop makes an offhand remark that he saw a similar comic as an Occupation soldier in Japan. This gives Kevin the Anxiety of Influence, since he himself is an Occupation Vet; he rushes back to Japan to find out whether he has unconsciously plagiarized someone or something. Once in Japan he gets caught up in a conspiracy to subvert the democratization of Japan by assassinating an industrial leader. And, oh yeah, Billy the Bat starts talking to him...
It's a wacky story, when you put the elements of it down like that. And it just gets wackier: it jumps back centuries to follow the fortunes of ninja clans in Iga, ahead decades to encompass the moon landing and the JFK assassination, way back to Jerusalem in Jesus' day; and I think they're going to work their way up to 9/11, too. In addition to Kevin we get a host of other characters, from cops to other comics artists to cowboys to Lee Harvey Oswald. We also get excerpts from episodes of Billy Bat, both Kevin's version and that of his successor (his assistant, who usurped the series) And then, of course, there's the bat: it pops out of the page from time to drop cryptic clues about good'n'evil and the destiny of man...
So the series is, among other things: an occult alternate history of the world in which comix artists (cave painters, picture-scroll makers) are the oracles of a Manichaean struggle between good and evil, light and darkness, creation and destruction, the avatar(s) of which are bats; a commentary on the uneasy relationship between American comics and Japanese manga in the postwar period; an elegy to the betrayed postwar promise of both America and Japan; a meditation on Disney; and a hell of an adventure story, presented in art and writing that manages to have all the dynamism it needs to keep you turning the pages swiftly and an almost gratuitous subtlety that makes you want to linger over every composition, every facial expression.
This guy's a genius, and I can't wait to see where the story goes from here.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Saimon Fumi: Tokyo Love Story (1988-1990)
Generically, it's a romantic comedy. It follows the conventions of this genre right down to the meet-cutes and the best-friends and the unexpected reversals, etc. It's also a seishun monogatari, in this case the very end of youth, that moment in your early 20s when you're done with college, you're working, you're out on your own with disposable income and a driver's license that says you can drink legally and there's nobody to tell you not to sleep with person X and you're wondering if all this means you should start settling down but you're having too much fun in the big city... (Mrs. Sgt. T notes that this manga is St. Elmo's Fire, and by God she's right. But it's a little more than that.)
It centers around four main characters. Nagao Kanji and his friend Mikami, who grew up together in Ehime and have now wound up in Tokyo, Nagao as a salaryman and Mikami as a med student; their friend Sekiguchi Satomi, a fellow classmate from Ehime who's now working at a kindergarten in Tokyo; and Akana Rika, an OL in Nagao's office. Nagao is a painfully sincere, good-hearted guy who's a country boy at heart, lost in the big city, and he's been in love with Sekiguchi for years but she only thinks of him as a friend. Mikami is a playboy, a dissolute son of wealthy parents, but he has, of course, a heart of gold, and he's been in love with Sekiguchi for years, too. Rika is an overseas returnee - she spent her childhood in Africa - and this is held up as emblematic of her approach to life: she has a freedom, an impatience with rules and customs, and a self-directedness that her countrymen (the manga sez) lack. She sets her sights on Nagao.
From here we get the expected love triangles in their various permutations. As a love story, what makes it work is the fact that it never feels like Saimon is extending it needlessly. It's not a very long manga as these things go, and given its popularity at the time it must have been a temptation to spin it out endlessly, but she didn't. Each development feels like it was planned from the start, adding new depth and complexity to each character and their relationships. And so it succeeds as a romantic comedy. You really root for each of these people - if you're open to this genre at all - and you laugh and cry along with them as they fall in and out of love.
But what makes it work as literature (and what is literature? whatever you want it to be; in this case what I want it to be is something that makes me think, something that says something, something that somehow transcends itself) is how elegantly each of the characters represents this particular moment. She's writing during the later bubble years, just before things went to hell, and so her characters are effortlessly affluent and enjoy the best of everything. (There's more than a little Gatsby in here, too.) And it's not just unprecedented material freedom that this manga captures: it's the utter freedom from tradition.
Sex is a fact in this manga; it's not particularly explicit, but it portrays characters thinking about sex with an openness, a matter-of-factness, that feels quite fresh. Of course it's not precisely new, and it's not universal either: part of the subtlety of the book is how it brings out a tension between the sexual fastness of Tokyo and the perceived conservatism of the countryside. And of course Tokyo in literature has been sexually fast for decades - it's something each new generation discovers to its delight and shock, at least since Tanizaki's day. (But then, every generation thinks it was the one to discover sex.)
Rika is held up as the exemplar of all of this fast Tokyo-osity. At one point Nagao even says she's Tokyo itself. Which means that of course she's yet another take on the age-old theme of the moga. But it's the specificity of the character that is so powerful: the details of her position in the company, the work she's expected to do, how she does it; her ease with fashion, international travel, communication in English; the way she represents for the men in the company a kind of consumption-based sexually-inflected freedom that both fascinates and threatens them. All of this makes her a compelling new character, and simultaneously a perfect expression of the place of Tokyo in the cultural imagination in the late '80s. There was, and is, a dynamic in Japanese culture that sees Tokyo as somehow un-Japanese (despite the metro area being home to something like a quarter of the population), something to be shunned, even as it's plainly something that attracts vast numbers of people. Rika is all that.
Which is why it's so wonderful that this manga doesn't punish her. This manga doesn't look at Tokyo with horror. Rika isn't an aberration to be contained. Saimon's vision of contemporary Japan is big enough to have room for Rika just as she is - just as Saimon accepts (depicts with loving surehandedness) Nagao's awkwardness as a common reaction to the newness of someone like Rika.
I could go on. This manga is rich in theme, character psychology, dramatic detail. And it's something to behold visually, as well: Saimon's art is just light enough to deliver the comedy, while being just detailed enough to sustain the seriousness. And on top of it all she has a great eye for fashion. This is exactly how people dressed in Tokyo offices in 1989. That reaching for a '20s kind of elegance - the scarves, the corduroy, the culottes and baggy suits. It not only captures the era, but it resonates nicely with the characters' desire to be grown up.
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