YKK, or Record of a Yokahoma Shopping Trip, ran for about 150 episodes. Here at HU we decided to read the first seven chapters and compare notes. Bill started here, Noah continued here. Miriam will talk tomorrow, and tonight I do my post.
This is the first manga I’ve sat down and read thru, not counting 10 issues of Akira back in 1988. It’s all new terrain to me. So I will treat this post as live blogging and just record my impressions.
Two things hit me right off:
1) the drawing is excellent
2) the story is close to nonexistent
A third realization hits me:
3) the setting is the future and everything has fallen apart. But it’s pleasant.
That last one throws me a bit: a pleasant post-apocalypse. But we’re talking Japan, so whatever.
I read the pages fast. They’re printed out from my computer, one page per file, 150 total: the first seven chapters, published back in 1994 for (I gather) middle-aged Japanese men riding the train between office and home. My printer’s ok, and the art is all black and white, but the pictures still drop a notch from the originals. They’re in decent form but not at their best. Even so … that is some great art. A pile of it, just like that.
This is my first time around with right-left pages, but the layouts are huge and that helps. The series has got flow like crazy; every page has a gentle sway that starts in the linework and runs up into the panel arrangements, or vice versa. The detail work is splendid: look at that man draw a sack of rice or a porch’s floorboards or the mellowed, going-to-seed, post-apocalyptic motorways the characters travel along. And everything has life: bodies, trees, clouds in the sky. Page after page. Is this ordinary for Japan?
From Bill and Noah, and from Bill’s links to Dirk Deppey, Jog, and Madink, [UPDATE: I just found out Madink is DerikB] I gather that this level of play is admirable but not exceptional. I would gather that Ashinano is respected but not held out as an outstanding master. Well, damn. That’s encouraging as to the state of Japanese art.
The story … well, the story’s title is Record of a Yokohama Shopping Trip, that’s for the whole series, and there’s just one shopping trip to Yokohama, in the prologue. When you’ve been gaslighted like that, it’s hard to think straight about story. You don’t expect to be in a frame of mind where you can make reasonable judgments about connections. Does the story make sense? Is it worth following? Yeah, I don’t know.
From the posts before mine, I gather that YKK is especially uneventful. Other Japanese comics aren’t this tranquil.
The style of caricature … but the counter guy just told me they’re closing the Cafe Depot, so there goes my Internet. I will go now. Miriam can pick up tomorrow.
YKK’s art is excellent, but I wouldn’t say it’s all that unusually excellent for manga. The story is definitely an exception to all the other manga I’ve read, though someone like Bill may have a better field for comparison.
You have to get into the right frame of mind for YKK. Don’t go into expecting action or strong storylines. Think of it more like a poem, a meditation, or even a diary. You enjoy it for the moments, and you don’t expect that in the end there will be climax and a resolution (there isn’t).
What did you think of those ten issues of AKIRA?
Tom, I think Hitoshi Ashinano’s art is very, very good; definitely towards the top of what you see in manga. The thing about manga is, the top is pretty crowded; there are a lot of great artists working in the field. Ai Yazawa, Clamp, Fumi Yoshinaga, Jung-Hyun Uhm, Hitoshi Iwaaki — I think they’re all, in their way, as good as Ashinano.
That’s not to say there aren’t second rate (and third rate) manga-ka. But the percentage of first-rate artists is way higher than among American comics creators I think.
I”m kind of surprised you enjoyed the book, though. It is fairly shojo-like; big eyes, cutesy, the sort of thing you said turned you off manga. Did you feel it really differed in some way, or was it just more to your taste than you expected once you got beyond your initial repulsion?
Derik’s comment sent me back to my sole copy of Afternoon, which makes a fine bookend, from July 2002.
No YKK, but other similar artists: Kenji Tsuruta, who draws beautifully but needs a writer; the Oh My Goddess guy; some others. Similar art, and a lot mirror the fantasy girl of YKK. (These all have some traction in the US, perhaps for the art & girls.)
I can't think of a truly simliar story, nor can my manga encyclopedia. The closest is Jiro Taniguchi's Walking Man, where the plot’s the seasons.
I used to teach my students abstract film (Brakhage, Ruttmann) by saying you should watch it for 15 minutes after work every day, just to clean out your psyche. YKK works in a very simliar way, I think.
Bill: Walking Man was the one other manga that came to mind. Some similarities in its everydayness but otherwise much less… ethereal? Walking Man is everydayness in a “normal” setting. YKK has that wonderfully unique quality of everydayness in a sci-fi setting.
Very good point, Derik. I think too the sympathy’s different: in Walking Man, Taniguchi sets it up so that we see what the WM sees. We observe with him, gazing on a sumptuous, hyperdetailed world. Even when he’s skinny-dipping, he’s looking at the night sky rather than worried the cops are gonna get him.
In YKK, Alpha is there to be seen. In a way she’s part of the scenery? Either way, the landscapes have a lyrical sweep absent in Taniguchi, who focuses on details.
you guys are insane. in a good way.