‘Chiko,’ ‘A View of the Seaside,’ and ‘Mister Ben of the Igloo’: Visual and Verbal Narrative Technique in Three Classic Manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Tom Gill

(This article is the third in a series on Tsuge Yoshiharu. The two previous articles may be found in here and here)

“Tsuge tries…to grope for images that will enable him to reach the umbilicus of his uncertain existence. … He became a symbol of youth culture and also counter-culture…” (Tsurumi 1987: 417)

“Yoshiharu Tsuge stands among the giants of the world of comics.” (Randall 2003: 135)

“In the history of Japanese comics, Tsuge has his place on top of the mountain.” (Marechal 2005: 28).

As these quotations show, Tsuge Yoshiharuⁱ is widely recognized as one of the truly great manga artists. At least two critics (Yamane 1983, Marechal 2005) specifically place him alongside Tezuka Osamu as one of the ‘twin peaks’ of the modern manga landscape.ⁱⁱ Yet very little of Tsuge’s work has been translated, largely due to the reclusive character of the author, and he remains under-researched and little understood in the English-language world. In two previous papers for IJOCA (Gill 2011a, Gill 2011b) I have discussed some of Tsuge’s seminal works from his golden period of 1966-68 for the underground magazine Garo. In this series of papers for IJOCA, I have attempted to make a start on filling the void in English-language Tsuge criticism. The first paper introduced some of the key Tsuge themes – alienation, madness, spiritual freedom, city-dwellers adrift in the country – through an analysis of a single manga, Nishibeta-mura Jiken (‘The Incident at Nishibeta Village’, December 1967).’ The second compared the treatment of the motif of an abandoned fetus in Tsuge’s Sanshouo (‘Salamander’, May 1967) with several manga by Tsuge’s contemporary, Tatsumi Yoshihiro. In this paper I propose to focus on Tsuge’s brilliant exploitation of the range of literary and visual techniques available only to the manga artist, by taking a close look at three more of Tsuge’s finest manga from his Garo period: Chiko (Chiko), Umibe no Jokei (A View of the Seaside) and Honyara-do no Ben-san (Mister Ben of the Igloo).ⁱⁱⁱ They date respectively from 1966, 1967 and 1968. During these crucible years, Tsuge’s muse was developing so fast that it makes sense to describe these manga as representative of his early, middle and late Garo periods, although they were all written within a period of two years. Since none of these manga have ever been translated,^iv I will give a brief plot summary of each before proceeding to discuss the way literary and visual narratives play off each other in each of the stories. I will also discuss the insights of Japanese critics, especially Shimizu Masashi, who to my mind is the most interesting of Japan’s numerous Tsuge scholars.

‘Chiko’ (Garo, March 1966, 18 pages)

Figure 1: ‘Chiko’, opening frame

The second of Tsuge’s great Garo manga,^v this is one of several that is heavily autobiographical, and hence operates at one level as a reflection on the nature of the manga artist’s profession. It depicts a struggling manga artist living with his girlfriend. His career is stagnating, and she is working at a hostess bar to support both of them. She buys a baby Java sparrow (buncho) with pocket money she has saved by abstaining from playing pachinko. That night she fails to come home at the usual time. He waits at the station until the last train has come and gone, then returns home to find her lying collapsed in the hallway. She is totally drunk and has been out for a drive with a customer from the bar. This triggers an ugly row: he resents the fact that her work involves flirting with other men; she resents the fact that his lack of success forces her to do that kind of work in the first place.

The dark atmosphere of the yarn is dispelled by the antics of Chiko. There is an unsignalled gap of a few weeks or months after page 10. Chiko has grown into a pretty bird who enjoys flying around the apartment. The girlfriend mentions that they have had far fewer fights since Chiko arrived. While she is out, the artist tries to draw a picture of Chiko, and he puts her little body in the sleeve of a cigarette box to keep her still while he draws. Then he playfully tosses the box into the air. Chiko manages to get out and fly to safety. Delighted, he tries to repeat the trick but this time Chiko fails to escape and is killed on impact with the floor after pathetically struggling for a few moments (figure 2). In a small but telling detail, the sparrow’s little red beak turns white before his eyes.

Figure 2: The Death of Chiko

Deeply shocked, he buries Chiko in the garden and pins the picture he has just drawn of her on the doorpost. He lies to the girl that Chiko has escaped; she does not believe him. She accuses him of killing Chiko out of jealousy because she loves the little bird so much, gets a trowel and starts digging around in the garden. She announces she has found Chiko. In fact it is a strange, hysterical joke: she has put the picture he drew of Chiko in a bush so that it looks like the real thing. As they look at it, a gust of wind lifts it into the air and it appears to fly away as they look blankly up at it (figure 3). The End.

Figure 3: The picture in the bush

This is a symbolist fable, in which the sparrow seems to work on at least three levels. First, it symbolizes the girl. She twice refers to the fact that Chiko never tries to escape even if left by an open window. We wonder why she herself does not try to escape from the manga artist, who frequently addresses her rudely and fails to provide for her. When she does make a show of escape, she ends up dead drunk and collapsed on the floor. This scene is later visually echoed by the dying bird on the floor (figure 4).

Figure 4: ‘Chiko’ p. 8 bottom frames, p.14 frame 9

The death of the bird – thrown up in the air in a cigarette packet by the manga artist – results from a casual deprivation of freedom perhaps similar to that he has imposed on the girl. When its red beak turns white on death, that could symbolize the end of their affair: blood draining away equating to passion fading away. Chiko’s little red beak could even be read as a symbolic clitoris, as opposed to the phallic duck in Numa.

Secondly, the sparrow is a symbolic child. One might say that of all pet animals, but especially of this one. Shimizu points out that the wheedling way the girl talks about wanting to get the bird – “I’ve been wanting one for a while now… they become very attached to you if you raise them from chicks” etc., sounds almost as though she is talking about wanting a child, and he even experiments with rewriting the conversation so that she is telling him about an unexpected pregnancy rather than spotting some chicks in a pet-shop (Shimizu 2003: 31-2). He then reads the ensuing events as symbolically representing the abortion of a fetus. That is a speculative reading, but certainly the killing of the bird appears to be killing the relationship, whether you read it as symbolic abortion or infanticide.

Thirdly, like all caged birds, Chiko also represents the trapped human spirit. The story is saved from being unremittingly bleak by the final twist where the picture of Chiko appears to morph into the real thing and fly away in the final frame. The mysterious ending may not signify the saving of the relationship (the shocked/bewildered expressions on their faces tell us this is not such a simple happy ending), but perhaps it does remind us that the end of a relationship can bring freedom as well as loneliness.

Figure 5: ‘Chiko’, final frame (left); detail (right)

There is something very playful in this final image of an image of Chiko: is she really coming back to life, turning this into a magical fable? Or is it just a trick of the light? The bird certainly seems to be coming away from the paper, but it is still in the standing pose as drawn by the artist. It almost seems to be riding a magic carpet. There is of course a layer of ironic self-referentiality here as Inaga (1999: 125) points out: the ‘real’ Chiko is really just a drawing in a manga, which is itself about a manga artist, shown drawing it in the second frame, so at one level the closing frames constitute an intellectual joke at the expense of the reader.

And then Tsuge plays one more trick: though to get it, we have to return to the title page (figure 1). Here’s a charming study of Chiko, sitting on a little branch amid foliage, looking very perky indeed. And then we remember: this scene never happened. Chiko was taken from the pet shop as a fledgling, reared in captivity, and never flew out of the window. So what is she doing on this branch? Perhaps this story, like its predecessor (Numa, the Swamp^vi ), is readable as a loop, in which the first page leads on from the last, in which case Chiko really did come back to life, at least in the artist’s imagination, reminding us again that this is a manga within a manga, and inviting us to reflect on the artist as god on paper, even as he struggles with poverty and alienation outside the frames of his work. Yet another layer of self-referentiality comes from the fact that Chiko’s death follows her entrapment in a cigarette pack (the ‘Peace’ brand) which has a picture of a flying bird on it – the dove of peace. There is a sad irony in Chiko’s death, deprived of her ability to fly by a box with a flying bird depicted on it. She has been trapped by the artist, just as later, on the final page, she will be liberated.

In an interview with Gondo Shin, Tsuge comments about the time when he was writing Chiko: “I felt this sense of liberation from the story-driven, entertainment manga I had been drawing up till then… I think there was some sense of propriety inside me that said this was how manga have to be. That gave way to a feeling of liberation” (Tsuge and Gondo, 1993(2): 38). I would argue that the image of Chiko the sparrow, peeling away from the paper she is drawn on as she drifts into the sky, is an expression of that sense of liberation. It is not a simple achievement of happiness – a story in which the little bird came back to life bringing happiness to all would have been trite indeed – but that final image allows us to hope. Along with the opening image of Chiko, this is one of very few frames which are set outdoors and in daylight. Otherwise the story is set in an unremittingly claustrophobic interior and mostly at night. Note too that the opening and closing frames are by far the largest: most pages in Chiko have 7 to 11 little frames, but the 2/3 of a page devoted to the opening portrait of Chiko, followed by a cinematic half-page frame on p.2 taken from an elevated position in the manga artist’s room and showing him at work, draw us into the story while the whole page of the final scene brings closure/revelation. As Yomota argues, frame design is a device that distinguishes manga from film: variations in size and shape by the author, and the time taken over viewing each frame by the reader, create a unique communicative experience (Yomota 1994).

The rhythm of the frame sequencing is enhanced by some simple graphic techniques. Backgrounds are drawn in alternating shades of white and grey, with hatched shading used at dramatic or ominous junctures. Human figures are sometimes drawn in silhouette, notably the girl when she lies collapsed on the floor. A fairly conservative reliance on rectangular frames gives way to asymmetrical trapezoid frames at four crucial junctures in the story, disrupting the balance and perspective of the visual narrative. Figure 6 shows a good example. The playful antics of the manga artist as he waves a mirror to confuse Chiko are given an ominous tone by the trapezoidal frame and the black silhouette of the dancing doll in the foreground.

Figure 6: ‘Chiko,’ p.10 frames 6-10

Sound effects are faded in and out – with typical manga use of onomatopoeia, Tsuge lets us hear the sound of the bird chirping or the door opening when the girl comes home; but he leaves us in total silence as the crowds of commuters hurry out of the station. Again, the sparrow’s death rattle (kukuku) is the last sound effect in the story. Apart from one slight rustle in the bushes, there are no sound effects in the last four pages of the story – we never hear the digging of the grave, the return of the girlfriend, the opening and closing of the door, or the whistling of the wind that carries off the picture of Chiko. Except for a little dialog, Tsuge has silenced the soundtrack as his fable moves from social realism to magical realism.

‘Umibe no Jokei’ [A Description of the Seaside] Garo September 1967; 27 pp

Visual and literary narratives pull in opposite directions in this story of a young man finding love on a solitary trip to the seaside. It opens with a 2/3 page frame of holidaymakers playing in the surf at a beach, seen in black silhouette while the surf crashes in. The second frame shows the swimmers in close-up, seeming to struggle desperately against the breakers, though they are supposed to playing (figure 7).

Figure 7: ‘A View of the Seaside’, page 1

On page 2 another large frame shows parasols and sunbathers on the beach, one young man sitting separate from the others in the foreground. Two more frames pan in on him from behind (figure 8 top). Each shot is from a different angle, as though we were approaching the boy in a serpentine movement. On page 3 the camera has traversed and we see him from the front, sitting alone in dark glasses, smoking (figure 8 bottom). A pretty young girl in a bikini throws herself down on a towel nearby and looks at him. She seems interested in him. He shyly looks away and lights a cigarette.

Figure 8: ‘Seaside,’ p.2 frames 2 and 3 (top), p.3 frame 2 (bottom)

An older man comes over and warns her of sunburn. She asks him to rub olive oil into her back. Our hero is jealous and walks away. Blazing sun, steepling stratocumulus, black birds tossed across the sky Van Gogh style. He stands in front of a cove with crashing surf; huge cliff on far side. Senses a presence: finds the girl sitting on the other side of an outcrop in a hooped one-piece. As their eyes meet, a big fish leaps out of the sea, hooked on a line (figure 9). A fisherman standing on the cliff has caught it and hoists it up into the air, but the line snaps and the fish falls back. She wonders what kind of fish it is but he doesn’t know.

Figure 9 ‘Seaside’ p. 7 Frame 4

He lights a cigarette and she asks for one. They are shown in a big frame, silhouetted in front of the white surf and black cliff beyond. In conversation, she tells him that she is on her own – she says she enjoys travelling alone, but her eyes are wistful. It turns out they are both from Tokyo. He has been invited to the seaside by his grandmother – he is pale and unhealthy and needs to get some sunshine. He came reluctantly, “but I’m glad I came. I’m really glad.” He speaks in silhouette against a grey sky with a single bird flying across it. “It’s indescribably better than staying put in my gloomy apartment in Tokyo. If only this feeling would continue forever…”

He explains that his mother was born in this town and that he lived here himself for a year when he was small. He is now staying at his grandmother’s house, but doesn’t know the other people there – it’s been twenty years. She says she envies him having relatives in such a lovely place.

Walking along the foot of the cliff, they notice the fish – floating there dead. It must have been killed on impact when it hit the sea. He now recalls an incident from childhood – a drowning victim was found caught in the nets of a fishing boat over by the cape. The victim was totally white, with mouth and nostrils full of seaweed. “Do fishermen sometimes get drowned?” she nervously asks. “It was a woman, with a child,” he replies. “The child was half skeletonized. It was terrifying. There’s a nest of octopuses under that cape.” She thought octopuses were cute, but he tells her they are voracious predators – as one can see from their sharp beaks. While speaking, they pass a set of wooden frames with caught octopuses hung out to dry (figure 10) – some of these voracious predators at least have been defeated.

Figure 10: ‘Seaside’ p. 13 frame 5

Standing in front of two vast silhouetted fishing boats (figure 11), she asks if he will come to the beach again tomorrow. He says yes, probably just after lunchtime. They part at a beached rowing boat. These two frames take up a whole page. The story is moving more slowly, more cinematically, than ‘Chiko.’ Where ‘Chiko’ had 142 frames in 18 pages, this story has 116 frames in 26 pages; 4.5 frames a page, against nearly eight for Chiko.

Figure 11: ‘Seaside’ p.13 frame 1

The next day, rain is crashing down on the beach. Hero is sitting alone in the shelter of a small hut for boat hire, smoking (figure 12). He tosses the butt into the sea, then lobs a couple of pebbles at a flock of seagulls gathered in the water just off the coast. They fly up, in black silhouette. He is about to give up waiting and go home, when the girl comes running in a tiger-stripe one-piece, a towel over her head. She is sorry she is late – she has been working. He correctly guesses that she is a fashion designer. How did he guess? “The dress you’re wearing now shows very good sense.” “It’s just a towel,” she says, slipping a strap off the shoulder. The pace of the narrative is picking up – we are briefly up to eight frames a page.

Figure 12: ‘Seaside,’ p.15 (top); detail (bottom)

They sit down together in the boat-hire hut. “There’s nobody here at all,” he observes. “Nice and quiet this way,” she replies. He offers her some honey beans^vii he has sneaked from his aunt’s house. She enjoys a spoonful, then says she is going to go swimming in the rain. She strips off to reveal a new bikini; he says it suits her incredibly well. Their eyes meet significantly. “You’re a nice guy” (anata ii hito ne) she says. They run into the sea together, silhouetted and with lots of black gulls above them. She admires his swimming style – now the gulls are all white. He proudly tells her he got a first-class swimming certificate when still in junior high school. But he confesses he has lost strength since then – and indeed, he is puffing and panting now. She notices that he is unhealthily thin and his lips have gone blue. She suggests they should get out. He is about to agree, but changes his mind – since she has praised his swimming, he will do some more.

He starts swimming back and forth amid the dark, swollen breakers, while she retreats to the shore and watches from under a traditional lacquered paper umbrella. He is breathing heavily, totally absorbed in the swimming. She looks on in a half-page frame, saying “you are lovely” (anata suteki yo). The final frame (figure 13) goes over two whole pages and is one of Tsuge’s most famous images. Hero is still swimming, and she is standing under her umbrella saying “feels good” (ii kanji yo). Both of them are black silhouettes, like cut-out holes disrupting the otherwise photographic zero-point perspective of the image. The camera has pulled back from the previous frame, revealing a hazy horizon, vast banks of bulging clouds, and rain coming down like needles. It is a fittingly cinematic conclusion, and prompts Takeuchi Osamu to discuss it at some length (Takeuchi 2005: 76-82) as an exemplar of what he calls “the narrator of perspective” (shiten no katarite).^viiiWhen the protagonists are conversing, the camera is positioned fairly conventionally, close up and just a little above the speaker’s face. But at intervals the camera pulls out, and the narrator of perspective takes over. In these frames either the characters are silhouetted or the landscape is blacked out. The former effect foregrounds the characters; the latter brings the landscape closer and reduces the characters to anonymous ciphers. The net result is to “alienate reality” (genjitsu o kairi saseru) (ibid.81).

Figure 13: ‘Seaside,’ last frame

On the face of it, things seem to have gone very well for our shy and awkward hero – an attractive girl is consistently positive towards him and we might even expect a conventional romantic conclusion. But the relentlessly dark tones of the drawing, and the disturbing imagery of the dead fish, drowned woman, vicious octopuses etc., lead the reader to expect the worst – perhaps the hero’s exertions in attempting to impress her with his swimming will lead to his own drowning. As he dives into the water, his form clearly recalls the dead fish (figure 14). In the end, we get neither the romantic nor the tragic conclusion: instead, the story ends with an upbeat, romantic last line and a dark, foreboding image. Both expectations and fears are left unrequited.

Figure 14: ‘Seaside’ p.12 frame 1, p.23 frame 5.

Shimizu (2003: 413-414) offers a daringly Freudian reading. For him, this is an oedipal fable, the man wanting to return to the womb / eternal mother = the sea. The fish leaps up in the air at the moment our hero catches sight of the girl – a phallic moment. But then we see it is not leaping but caught – hoisted into the air and then dropped to die on impact with the sea.^ix Shimizu sees this as a metaphor for the young man, the fisherman being his father-figure. The girl is a siren, luring him back to the sea / death. On the second day, when he appears sitting in the boat-rental hut with the rain pouring down, he is already dead. As evidence, Shimizu points out that behind his head are two diagonal black lines, resembling the black ribbons at the top corners of a dead person’s photo at a funeral (figure 12 bottom). In the next frame, the diagonal lines have mysteriously disappeared, but he has a small pot next to him (figure 12 top, frame 2). In plot terms it contains the honey beans that he will share with the girl, but in symbolic terms, Shimizu argues, it contains his own ashes.

Tsuge’s fables are more ambiguous than Shimizu’s intermittently brilliant commentaries on them allow. There are plenty of sinister characters in his works, but the girl in ‘Seaside’ is sweet and innocent. She is scared of octopuses and tries to persuade our hero to leave the dangerous cold waters of the sea. She is not a plausible siren. But we do not have to accept the whole of Shimizu’s radical interpretation to appreciate the sinister effect on the atmosphere of the story from the visual devices that he identifies. ‘A View of the Seaside’ is a classic example of Tsuge’s brilliant use of the manga medium: the visual narrative, with its huge brooding cliffs, sinuous black waves and silhouetted hulks of ships, creates a constant undertow pulling against the tentatively optimistic verbal narrative.

‘Honyarado no Ben-san’ [Mr. Ben of the Igloo]. Garo, June 1968, 28 pages

Tsuge published this story in a special issue of Garo devoted to his work, along with ‘Neji-shiki’ (‘Screw-style’), his most famous work and one of the few available in a good English translation (Tsuge 2003). Though ‘Mr. Ben’ is a sad story, it does not have quite the doomed atmosphere of the other two, and it lacks their sexual tensions, focusing instead on the relationship between the artist/narrator and the intriguing man who becomes his host.

Figure 15 ‘Mr. Ben,’ first frame

In the hamlets around Uonuma county in Echigo (Niigata prefecture), they have a custom called Torioi (Chasing off birds), held at Koshogatsu (Little New Year, Jan 14-15), in which the local children build igloos, called honyarado, and then spend the night sleeping in them (figure 15).They wear straw hoods, carry lanterns, and sing a song telling the birds to fly off back to Shinano (neighboring Nagano prefecture in today’s Japan). It is supposed to promote a good harvest in the coming year, by chasing away birds that might otherwise eat seeds, grain etc.

Figure 16 ‘Mr. Ben,’ p. 2 frame 4

Our hero, a struggling manga artist on a solitary journey in quest of inspiration, arrives at Ben’s inn, on the outskirts of the village. Ben has not bothered to sweep the snow off his roof, so the inn resembles a giant igloo. Hero finds Ben lugubriously drinking alone (figure 16). He is Ben’s first guest for six months. They discuss hero’s inability to sell his work. Both men appear to be failing in their respective professions. Hero asks for dinner, but all Ben has is some grilled goldfish that he admits he stole from the neighboring village, where they are farming them. With that he falls asleep – hero has to rouse him to obtain a futon. Ben asks hero why he is traveling in such remote parts so soon after New Year, and suggests he must be lonely. Hero insists he just likes traveling and staying at inns like this one. Old pendulum clock shows 10.10 as they drift to sleep.

Next morning Ben catches a lot of dace, by banging on the ice with his mallet – the reverberations stun the fish and they float to the surface where he catches them in a net. He has placed a brazier in the toilet among various efforts to make the accommodation more comfortable. He has a pet rabbit called Pyon-chan in a cage with its name written on it. Ben is enlivened because he thinks hero will stay a few nights, but as Ben heads off to buy food, hero tells him he is not planning to stay any longer. He can’t afford it. Ben persuades him to stay and draw some manga. Hero says he needs a theme. For instance, the oddity of the rabbit with its cute name in an old man’s inn – there must have been children here lately. The inn is too big for a single man to run. Taken aback, Ben grumpily remarks “manga aren’t what they used to be.” Hero has sensed Ben’s wrecked marriage. Hero cheers Ben up by saying he might as well lay in a pen and some paper during his shopping.

Figure 17; ‘Mr. Ben’ p. 18 frame 1

Night falls; Ben is back from the shops. Snow falling; clock ticking. Hero cannot think of manga idea. He will have to go home tomorrow. Ben suddenly resolves to go out and steal some more goldfish. Hero goes with him. Strong images of their figures struggling through snowbound countryside (figure 17). It is four miles to the neighboring village. Ben nets a beautiful golden carp in a pond there which he says is probably for export and worth about 100,000 yen – over $1,000. He is caught in the act by his daughter, a little girl in a straw hood, who is waiting for her friends to show up for the torioi. Ben asks after her mother. The girl says ‘nanmyohorengekyo’, a sutra, indicating that mother is a Nichiren Buddhist, possibly a member of Soka Gakkai.^x Ben makes his daughter swear that she will tell nobody that she saw him here. Her friends arrive; she runs to join them; all are wearing straw hoods that make them look like birds. They chant the traditional lines and knock wooden blocks together to make the birds leave the crops alone (figure 17).

Figure 18 ‘Mr. Ben’ p.21 frame 3

Ben and hero complete their escape with the carp. Ben explains that his wife thinks the success of her fish-farming enterprise is due to her sincere religious belief. He wonders maliciously how she will account for the disappearance of her prize carp despite all her sutras. When they get home, Ben plans to throw the carp into his own pond, so that he can look at it every day and say “serves you right” to his wife. But when hero takes it out of the net, it is frozen solid with its back bent. It has been a three hour walk home through intense cold. Ben is deeply shocked. They take it indoors, thaw it out and eat it for sashimi instead.

Last two pages. Hero and Ben drinking saké at the hearth. Hero asks: “In the end, what were we really doing in the snow?” (Ben empties saké cup). Hero continues: “If someone looked at us like items added to a landscape, in the final analysis what general meaning would it convey?” Still getting no reply, he asks, “Old man, how do you find the taste of a 100,000 yen carp?” Ben merely rolls over to go to sleep, aying “how you do go on – blah, blah, blah (bera-bera)…” (figure 19). The clock starts striking eleven, bon, bon, bon, seen on its own in dark shadow in the final frame. In a comic that makes very little use of sound effects, the clock is the loudest thing in the house: silent when first observed on page 6, its accentuated ticking (katchi-katchi) dominates page 15, and its funereal chimes on page 27 bring the story to a lonely conclusion.

Figure 19 ‘Mr. Ben’ p. 27 frames 2, 3

Once again, the story ends on an enigmatic note, challenging the reader to decipher it. In the closing pages the reader merges with the manga artist in the story, wondering what on earth the two men have been playing at and fearing that his own interpretation could be no more than the “blah blah” cynically dismissed by Ben.

The first clue is in the title – Mr. Ben of the igloo. It focuses on the relationship between the man and his house. It is a cold and empty house – his family is gone. The house is a macrocosm of the man. With its thatched roof it physically resembles Mr. Ben when wearing his straw coolie hat. When Ben is happy because of the arrival of our hero, the snow is piled up in front of the house in a way that resembles a smile (figure 20 left). In its final exterior shot (figure 20 right), where light pours from two eye-like windows beneath the thatched roof, the snow falling before it suggests lonely tears.

Figure 20 ‘Mr. Ben,’ p. 12 frame12, p.27 frame 1

His solitary igloo is counterpoised to the cozy domesticity of the children sitting in couples in the cluster of igloos in the opening image of the story (figure 15). Shimizu, determined Freudian, also finds a hint of sexual bliss in the image of the little children sitting in boy-girl pairs in their igloos – or maybe the igloos are like little wombs (Shimizu 2003: 134). Later he also describes Ben’s inn as a kind of womb, warm and moist against the cold dry air outside. Ben several times rolls up in a fetal position (figure 19) – he is returning to the womb, and he doesn’t really want to wake up from his frequent drunken stupors (ibid. 164). When we first see Ben (figure 16) he is sitting apathetically in a homely room bathed in warmth and light and dotted with symbols of domesticity – a broom, a ceramic cat, a wooden screen with some clothing hung over it, the hearth, the cooking pot. But by the hearth is an empty cushion – in the position where, as Shimizu points out, we would expect his wife to sit (ibid. 136).

As the yarn unfolds, the sad tale of Mr. Ben’s failed marriage is gradually revealed. The marriage seems to have foundered on religious differences. His wife’s obsession with her religion has taken her and the daughter away from Ben, who is deeply skeptical. She has gone back to her family, who share the same religion and the same obsession with fish farming. These farmed fish are counterpoised to the wild fish that are symbols of freedom in other Tsuge manga such as ‘The Incident at Nishibeta Village’ and ‘A View of the Seaside.’ Ben’s four-mile journeys to the neighboring village to steal carp may well be prompted not only by resentment against his wife and her family, but also by the possibility of catching a glimpse of his daughter.

We may guess that the break-up was fairly recent – the rabbit with its childish name is still alive and well. Perhaps the half year since Ben last had a customer corresponds to the time since his wife went back to her folks.

Once again the final frame (figure 21 bottom) is laden with significance. Shimizu points out a subtle touch: though the chest of drawers next to the clock is shrouded in darkness, we can just about make out a basket, with a small flute and the head of a kokeshi doll protruding from it (ibid. 163). These are no doubt things that Ben’s little daughter used to play with, and they bring a very lonely note to the ending. This chest has already appeared 20 pages earlier (figure 21 top) but there the top of it was deliberately concealed by a talk bubble, so we did not see the reminder of lost domesticity (ibid. 164). In another brilliant use of the manga medium’s potential, Tsuge draws attention to the little basket by concealing it and then revealing it with a device not available to any novelist, painter or film director. One can only nod in agreement when Shimizu admires the skilful use of these subtle devices in Tsuge’s work (ibid.).

Figure 21: ‘Mr. Ben’ p.6 frame 5 and p.27 final frame

Here, however, the acutely observant Shimizu makes an uncharacteristic error. On close inspection the object next to the flute in the final frame proves to be not a doll but a little drum with a handle and two tear-shaped black decorations. This is also a traditional child’s toy, but one more likely to be associated with a boy. This opens up a way for us to get deeper into the hidden back story of Mister Ben than even Shimizu has managed. I would suggest that in fact Mister Ben had two children, a boy and a girl, of which the boy has died. Likely it was the boy’s death that prompted his wife’s departure and increasing obsession with religion; maybe she blamed Ben’s impiety for a greater misfortune than just the decline of their inn-keeping business.

This interpretation, admittedly speculative, could account for Ben’s bizarre behavior with the stolen carp. He apparently thought it would still be alive after the three-hour journey home, since he proposed to throw it into his own pond. When it turns out that the carp is frozen stiff, he reacts in horror, and stands there cradling it in silence for two frames (figure 22), though to most people there is nothing obviously more shocking about a frozen dead carp than a limp dead carp. Perhaps the carp is a symbolic substitute for the dead boy… and Ben is totally unhinged. Once it is discovered that the carp is frozen stiff, Ben and hero thaw it out and eat it for supper, a fairly sensible thing to do in normal circumstances but deeply shocking if we take the fish as a symbolic equivalent of his son. No wonder Ben is plunged into total silence as hero asks him lots of questions about the meaning of the day’s events. We sense there is a great secret hidden behind his silence… I suggest that the two toys in the final frame represent two children, hinting at a deeper tragedy than the break-up of Mr. Ben’s family.

Figure 22 ‘Mr. Ben’ p. 25 frames 5, 6

There are a few more strands to the sadness of Mister Ben. First, the story is woven around the Torioi festival, designed to expel harmful pests from the village community.^xi Ironically, Ben’s carp thievery means that he himself is now just such a harmful pest. When his daughter joins with her little friends to chant the ritual words of the Torioi festival, she is symbolically expelling her own father from the community. And second, there are times when a certain camaraderie seems to develop between Ben and the traveler, raising the possibility of male friendship as an alternative source of emotional warmth in the igloo. But that hope is dashed in the final frames, when the traveler tries to intellectualize their experience of the night, but Ben just complains about too much talk. He never even formally admits that the girl is his daughter, that his wife has left him, or anything else about his personal circumstances. Rather than opening up to the traveler, he rolls over, in a posture that could resemble a fetus, or maybe a frozen carp, and goes to sleep, next to his probably emptied sake bottle.

Conclusion

All three of these manga turn out to revolve around abnormal emotional states. The destructive relationship in ‘Chiko’ crystallizes around the little bird, functioning in a slightly similar way to the wild duck in Ibsen’s play of that title. Indeed the brooding atmosphere of this story and its sister piece, ‘Numa,’ which also features a duck wounded by a hunter’s shot, often recall the great Norwegian playwright. The woman’s game with the picture of Chiko is an act of madness. The young man in ‘Seaside’ appears to be risking death in a desperate bid to impress the young woman. Mister Ben has rejected society and is losing the will to live. Each of the stories also features a dyadic central relationship, and leaves us to ponder the state of the other partner: when the manga artist sees the image of Chiko fly into the sky, has he too been drawn into madness? Is the pretty young woman in Seaside an innocent, a siren, or both? And what of the artist in ‘Mister Ben,’ lost in the snow, struggling to make sense of his own actions?

Visually, the association between people and animals – a Java sparrow, a hooked sea fish and a frozen farmed carp in the three stories discussed here – is central to the symbolic system throughout. The line between humans making willed, conscious decisions, and animals governed by brute instinct and vulnerable at all times, is deliberately blurred, with ominous implications for the protagonists. The subtle variation in shape, size and shading of frames creates a distinctive narrative rhythm which is further refined by silhouetting and the use/non-use of sound-effects. Subtle changes in perspective and focus leave the reader unsettled and occasionally staring at frames that are works of art in their own right. Where some see comics as an inferior creative medium, literature not good enough to work without pictures, these works of Tsuge’s constantly remind us that in the hands of a master, this is a medium that can surpass the limitations of both art and literature, creating something truly new.

References

Gill 2011a. ‘The Incident at Nishibeta Village: A Classic Manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge from the Garo Years.’ In International Journal of Comic Art 13(1): 475-489.

Gill, Tom. 2011b. ‘Fetuses in the Sewer: A Comparative Study of Classic 1960s Manga by Tatsumi Yoshihiro and Tsuge Yoshiharu.’ In International Journal of Comic Art 13(2): 325-343.

Inaga, Shigemi. 1999. ‘Images of an Oriental Artist in European Literature.’ In Text and Visuality: Word and Image Interactions 3:117-126.

Marechal, Beatrice. 2005. “On Top of the Mountain: The Influential Manga of Yoshiharu Tsuge.” In The Comics Journal, Special Edition: 22-28.

Randall, Bill. 2003. Introduction to his translation of Tsuge’s “Screw-style” in The Comics Journal, vol. 250: 135.

Shimizu, Masashi. 2003. Tsuge Yoshiharu o yome (Read Yoshiharu Tsuge!). Tokyo: Choreisha.

Takeuchi, Osamu. 2005. Manga hyogengaku nyumon (An introduction to manga expressionism). Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu. 1994a. Akai Hana (Red Flowers). Tokyo: Shogakukan.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu. 1994b. Neji-shiki (Screw-style). Tokyo: Shogakukan.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu. 2003. ‘Screw-Style’ (translation of ‘Neji-shiki,’ 1968). In The Comics Journal #250. Seattle: Fantagraphics; 136-157.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu and Shin Gondo. 1993. Tsuge Yoshiharu Manga-jutsu (The Manga Art of Yoshiharu Tsuge). Tokyo: Wise Shuppan. 2 volumes.

Tsurumi, Shunsuke. 1987. A Cultural History of Postwar Japan 1945-1980. London: Routledge.

Yamane, Sadao. 1983. Tezuka Osamu to Tsuge Yoshiharu: Gendai Manga no Shuppatsu-ten (Osamu Tezuka and Yoshiharu Tsuge: The Starting Point of Modern Manga.) Tokyo: Hokuto Shobo.

Yomota, Inuhiko. Manga genron (A basic theory of manga) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1994).

^{i. Born 1937. Though still alive, he has not published a new manga since 1987. Note that in this paper Japanese names are given with the family name first, personal name second except where quoting works that use the reverse order.}

^{ii. Comparisons are odious, but for what it is worth I personally would rank Tsuge far above the overrated Tezuka as an auteur/artist. I would also rank Shigeru Mizuki, Sanpei Shirato and several others above Tezuka.}

^{iii. All three have been reprinted in numerous Japanese editions. I used a cheap paperback edition that handily covers all Tsuge’s major Garo period works in two small volumes (Tsuge 1994a, 1994b). ‘Chiko’ is in volume 1; ‘Seaside’ and ‘Mr. Ben’ in volume 2.}

^{iv. The exception is an unauthorized and rather stilted translation of ‘Chiko.’ Along with various other unofficial Tsuge translations, it can be found at SAP Comics.}

^{v. The first being ‘Numa,’ (‘The Swamp’), published a month earlier. This also has a poorly translated scanlation at SAP Comics.}

^{vi. This story starts with a girl finding a wounded duck struggling in a swamp and ends with a young man standing by the swamp and shooting a bullet into the sky.}

^{vii. Mitsumame – a mixture of gelatin cubes, boiled beans, and fruit topped with molasses.}

^{viii. Readers may object that “narrative of perspective” or “perspective of the narrator” would make more sense, but “narrator of perspective” is the precise meaning of Takeuchi’s Japanese expression.}

^{ix. Readers of my previous IJOCA paper on ‘The Incident at Nishibeta Village’ will notice a recurring theme here in which a fish escapes from a fisherman only to be killed anyway – by hanging in ‘Nishibeta’ and by impact with the sea here. In both stories, the fish and fisherman are both defeated, with nihilistic implications.}

^{x. A popular Japanese religious movement that branched out from Nichiren Buddhism. A massive social phenomenon, Soka Gakkai today controls a major political party, Komeito.}

^{xi. The Torioi Festival also features at a dramatic juncture in the famous novel Yukiguni (Snow Country) by Nobel literature prize winner Kawabata Yasunari. That novel deals with a doomed love affair between a rural geisha and a wealthy traveller from Tokyo. Tsuge’s story echoes Kawabata’s in various suggestive ways, and if my theory about Ben’s son is correct there may be an oblique reference to Yukio, the consumptive youth who dies in Kawabata’s novel.}

Predator Turned Prey: Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Midnight Fishermen

Posted on October 22, 2013 by Tom Gill

Midnight Fishermen: Gekiga of the 1970s by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Singapore: Landmark Books, 2013. ISBN 978-981-4189-38-5

Yoshihiro Tatsumi is big in Singapore. Singaporean director Eric Khoo’s animated film, Tatsumi, premiered at Cannes and has a 100% “fresh” rating from 17 reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. Meanwhile, with Drawn and Quarterly’s series of early Tatsumi gekiga having apparently stalled after three volumes covering 1969 to 1971, the Singapore-based Landmark Books has picked up the baton with the present work, which carries the translated Tatsumi oeuvre a little further, into the years 1972-3. It is a collection of nine stories that I much enjoyed reading, with an informative and perceptive introduction by Lim Cheng Tju and some teasingly brief notes on the stories by Tatsumi himself.

The themes will be familiar enough to readers of the three previous translated collections: the grinding poverty, greed, lust and cynicism seething just below the surface of urban life during Japan’s ‘economic miracle’ of the 1960s and ’70s. My only disagreement with Lim’s introduction is where he says “Compared to his earlier stories, this collection paints a much more pessimistic world.” I would argue that there is a consistently bleak outlook on modern life running through the entire Tatsumi oeuvre, at least as translated into English. This manga artist is noir to the bone.

Critics may argue that there is something simplistic, gleefully ghoulish, even puerile about this collection and its relentless harping on the same nihilistic themes. Yet for me, it works. The way Tatsumi riffs on a series of crude symbolic themes is pleasurable in much the same way that scratching at an itchy insect bite is pleasurable. He scratches away at certain themes in modern (1970s) society that do, in fact, need a good scratch. And as his obsessions return again and again, they are reinforced and modified in interesting ways. Three recurring symbolic motifs, in particular, dominate the collection.

1. The running man

We find this in three of the nine stories. It is incidental in “The Lantern Angler” (p.198), but essential to two stories. The title story, “Midnight Fishermen,” focuses on two men who room together, Ken and Yasu. Ken makes his money as a gigolo, picking up women of a certain age who pay to have sex with him. Yasu is an atariya – a traditional marginal Japanese occupation, which entails deliberately getting hit by cars and then extracting money from the driver. Both men are social predators, but the atariya is an ambiguous figure, who victimizes by being a victim. The story ends with Yasu, who has finally made enough money to retire, buy a car and start farming in Hokkaido, unintentionally getting run down and killed by a hit-and-run driver, completing his transition from self-destructive predator to downright victim. Ken is deeply shocked and runs away. We see him in silhouette (p.32; fig.1), running past brightly-lit office buildings at half an hour to midnight, captioned “Ken could only run and run…” There is no movement in this frame; Ken is running, but it feels as if he is a floating piece of nothingness – antimatter, perhaps.

Fig.1: Midnight Fishermen

The running man theme returns in “Run with the Midnight Train.” In this story a man trapped in the relentless grind of daily urban life seeks escape by buying a plot of land in the country with borrowed money. It is essentially the same theme of rural escape as in Midnight Fishermen, except that this time our hero actually gets out to the country. There he apparently hopes to build a house and start a new life as a farmer. It is in a very remote district, taking a whole day for him and his girlfriend to get there from Tokyo, and she is far less enthusiastic about the whole idea, especially when he tries to have sex with her in the open field (p.80). Once they have arrived in the remote wilderness, it becomes clear that any new life will include separation from her. She loses patience and goes home, leaving our hero to run around the field saying to himself “It’s my land… I can fall but I can run…”The final frame freezes him as he runs through the night towards the reader (p. 86; fig. 2).

Fig. 2 Run With the Midnight Train

2. Physical and spiritual filth

In “Welcome home daddy,” our hero is a prosperous middle-aged man with a dangerous gambling habit. He loses a fortune at a yakuza dice-house, only to win it all back with the final roll of the dice (p.48). Returning to the house he so nearly had to forfeit, and suffused with relief at his near miss, he finds his son touching the white wall in the lobby with grimy hands, leaving hand-prints. In the final frame, we see him screaming at the son for dirtying the walls (p.50; fig.3). It is a surprisingly discordant finale to a story that seemed to be flirting with a happy ending. Our hero may have got off the hook this time, but the spiritual filth has remained, and we sense that disaster has only been temporarily postponed.

Fig. 3 Welcome Home Daddy

In “The Dawn of Porn,” a struggling young manga artist – always a popular choice of protagonist – is given the keys to the penthouse apartment of a highly successful manga artist, to spend the night there with his girlfriend. The one restriction is that they are not to open the west-facing window. Of course, as in a thousand corny fairy tales, our hero cannot resist taking a peek. It turns out the window overlooks the lady’s outdoor section of a public bath house. He also discovers some pornographic photos and is clearly aroused. His girlfriend calls him to bed, but first he cannot resist a look through the forbidden window. As he opens it, a gust of wind fills the room with soot from the chimney of the furnace heating the bath house waters (p.65). It is an unconvincing yarn (sorry to carp, but in reality he would have looked through the glass without opening the window) with a conservative moral message. (He shouldn’t have been trying to peep at a bath house while his girlfriend was calling him to bed in a see-through frilly negligee!) After cleaning up the sullied penthouse, the couple go back to their squalid apartment to catch up on their sleep. Their neighbour, a pervert given to turning down his stereo to listen to their love-making, has to turn it up to drown out their snoring (p.68). It is a rare moment of comedy.

Fig. 4 Misappropriation

In a particularly brutal yarn, “Misappropriation,” the protagonist works on a barge carrying rubbish along the canal, following in a long tradition of Tatsumi protagonists working in sanitation. His boss resents the way people turn their noses up when the stinking barge floats by, although it is they who have created the rubbish. Indeed, he argues, they are the rubbish, cargoes of rubbish in the commuter trains that thunder over the bridge (p.156). Our hero gets a chance to escape when he finds five million yen in a paper bag someone has accidentally left in a telephone box. The next day a suicidal woman plunges to her death from the bridge, just missing the rubbish barge as she hits the water (p.168). It turns out she also had a baby boy, whose body is found atop the barge’s pile of rotting refuse, covered in a thick carpet of avaricious crows competing for meat (fig. 4). Our deeply-shocked hero runs away and starts a new life with his millions, buying an expensive suit and sleeping with a pretty bar hostess, but we know it will not last long. On the last page (p.174; fig. 5), the police are already investigating his disappearance amid rumors he has come into a lot of money, while, in a surprisingly subtle touch, the rubbish barges are shown floating at anchor, empty and clean. In the final frame, our hero is in his room, surrounded by a carpet of bank notes, sitting cross-legged in the space he has created by spending the first million. He comments, “ha ha… now I have some space to sit…” So recently hemmed in by poverty, now he is hemmed in by money. His avarice has doomed him, and he even welcomes the early inroads into his fortune because they give him some space to sit, to breathe.

Fig. 5 Misappropriation

3. Fish and fishing

The title story clearly establishes fishing as a metaphor for amoral exploitation, in that case of women by the young gigolo. The theme returns in “Hometown,” the most interesting piece in the book. The protagonist, a young woman from a village on the Nagara river in rural Gifu prefecture, is now working as a prostitute in the red-light district of Yanagase in Gifu city. She returns to her hometown for a few days. Her brother has inherited the family cormorant-fishing business (p. 129; fig. 6), and is unmarried at thirty. As she says, in a wounding sexual insult, “you’re married to the cormorants!” (p.138).

Fig. 6 Hometown

The cormorants themselves, like the atariya in Midnight Fishermen, are an ambiguous symbol, exploiting and exploited. Always libidinous and hungry, they have a beady eye for the fish they prey upon, but can never swallow the fish because their owner has a string round their neck. The fisherman’s grip on the cormorant’s neck is echoed by his hand grasping the neck of a bottle of sake, and hints at violence inflicted on the woman by her recently deceased father when she was a little girl and when she was gang-raped six years before. A Proustian memory rush is triggered by her dropping a saké bottle (p.146), which recalls the bottle broken the night she was raped, as well as the bottles of sake she was sent out to buy at night by her alcoholic, abusive father (p.140).

At the end of the story we learn that this was no nostalgic trip home – she was there to have a discreet abortion away from the prying eyes of her friends back in Yanagase (p.150). The implication is that the earlier experience of rape has ruined her for life. The story ends with her returning to work, cigarette in mouth, glint in eye, ready to resume her cormorant-like, exploitative/exploited existence in the fleshpots of Yanagase (p.151).

Fig. 7 The Lantern Angler

The aquatic motif returns in the final story, “The Lantern Angler.” In a highly implausible ménage à trois, a waif-like young girl lost in the big city is given shelter by a young man who is already shacked up with a coarse, fat girlfriend in a cheap apartment. One day the three of them go to an aquarium, where they see an angler-fish (p. 191; fig. 7). Our hero, a fish-fancier with a fish-tank in his apartment, through which we observe some of the interior scenes, explains that an angler-fish “lures small fish with that fluttery thing sticking out in front of its face and then gulps them up,” which immediately prompts his girlfriend to compare the fish to himself – he too waits in dark places to prey on smaller fish – in this case, the young girl he has picked up. It is a heavy-handed metaphorical cue; nor is there anything very original about the conceit; see my earlier “Reply to comment on Nishibeta article, Jan 27, 2012” for a discussion on the use of sea life, including angler-fish, as metaphors for life in general and low-class urban life in particular.

The identification between man and fish is rubbed in still harder when the young girl’s wealthy father sends a man to take her home to the island of Shikoku, and our hero accompanies her in the bullet train, hoping to marry her and thinking to himself “I might be able to float to the bright surface from the dark depths” (194). Dark frames, showing tropical fish against water expressed in jet-black ink, are interspersed with the narrative to really hammer the point home.

The young girl’s father turns out to be a murderous yakuza boss; the young man barely escapes with his life; he runs away (p.198) and in the final frame (p.200; fig. 8) he is back in his squalid apartment with his coarse, tubby girlfriend, collapsed on the floor while she waves a paper fan over him and echoes another of his earlier comments about angler-fish: “You’re the one who said they die when they float to the surface. Ha ha ha…” Thus the seemingly crude symbolism of the angler-fish turns out to have at least a second layer: like the cormorants in “Homecoming,” the angler-fish is a predator that is nonetheless trapped in its own environment. The same goes for the protagonist of this story, which is saved from banality by a richer use of symbol that we expect, and by the visual power of its imagery: the simple device of depicting water as black creates a gloomy submarine world into which even the most cynical reader is drawn.

Fig. 8 The Lantern Angler

These three symbolic systems dominate the book. Together they present a brutal, Darwinian struggle for survival, in which the weak will always be defeated – caught and exploited, tossed out with the rubbish, or forced to run away. Only once is disgust and pessimism interestingly modified – in a seamy yarn, “My Boobs”, which deals with the relationship between a stripper called Sayuri and a couple of her devoted fans. It is the only story that is not commented on by Tatsumi in the preface, and may come from a slightly different phase in Tatsumi’s development.

In truth the story is more concerned with an even more private part of the female anatomy. Sayuri is twice arrested for showing it to her fans despite knowing there are plainclothes police in the theatre, and this is depicted as self-sacrifice, not dirty in any sense. As she opens her legs for the last time, she says “I was from an orphanage… yet all of you have loved me for what I am…” (p.103). The fans are driven to tears when she is escorted to a police car with a new-born baby in her arms. “She shared those boobs… we have to give them back to her baby now,” reflects one fan, in a slightly clunky think-bubble..

Amid all the wickedness and exploitation, Tatsumi finds love and purity of spirit in the most unexpected of places. For once cynicism and disgust give way to sentimentalism bordering on reverence. As Sayuri displays herself to the spellbound men, there is an apparent reference to Buddhist iconography and images of Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion, usually depicted as female (p.102; fig 9). Note her steady gaze and the fact that she has mysteriously become much larger than the men staring at her. She then shows that like Kannon she has compassion for all men, graciously greeting the police detective who she knows if going to arrest her after the show.

Fig. 9 My Boobs

Landmark Books have done an excellent job of bringing these 40-year-old artefacts to life for the English-reading audience. Admittedly the translation is occasionally wobbly – especially in rendering Japanese onomatopoeia, a notoriously difficult task – and it is a slight pity that the title has been misprinted on the flyleaf. Still, the book succeeds in taking us back to urban Japan, c.1972-3. Unlike the three Drawn & Quarterly volumes, this one has retained the Japanese page layout, so that the book opens on the left rather than the right, and the pages run in the opposite direction to a conventional English-language book. I approve, but would remind readers that frame order also follows the principle of top to bottom followed by right to left. Since the English-language text in the bubbles runs left to right, it can occasionally be slightly confusing.

Those who hated the earlier Tatsumi volumes will hate this one too. Those who enjoyed the previous works will find that despite some very familiar themes and characters, there is an increase in sophistication, noticeable in slightly cleverer imagery, more dynamic artwork and the occasional unpredictable dénouement. I look forward to seeing something from 1974.

This book is not easy to come by – I cannot find it at any on-line book-seller except the Singapore branch of Kinokuniya, where it is priced at 19.80 Singapore dollars.

____
Tom Gill is professor of social anthropology at the Faculty of International Studies, Meiji Gakuin University

The Incident at Nishibeta Village: A Classic Manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge from the Garo Years

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Tom Gill

Tom Gill is a professor at Meiji Gakuin University. This piece first appeared in IJOCA (the International Journal of Comic Art.)

_______________________

“Yoshiharu Tsuge is arguably Japan’s premier eccentric manga artist… he has probably had more written about him than he has himself created.” (Schodt 1996: 200).

Can there be any other manga artist who has been so lavishly praised in the English language and yet been so little read or understood? To date only three short comics have been translated into English (Tsuge 1985, 1990, 2003) [1] a few more into French (Tsuge 2004), and outside the Japanese-reading world, even the most avid manga fans have little idea what Tsuge is all about, beyond a vague awareness that he is difficult, dark and perhaps, surrealist. He is typically accorded a few paragraphs in general surveys of postwar manga, but there is only a single short paper devoted specifically to his own work published on paper in English (Marechal 2005). In Japan he is revered by anyone who takes manga seriously. Five films have been made out of his comics and nine have been adapted for TV. He remains a towering figure, frequently referenced and occasionally parodied, although he has not published any new manga since 1987. I am now engaged in making tentative first steps towards the close reading of word and image in Tsuge that has not hitherto been attempted in English.

Tsuge became famous through his work for the celebrated alternative magazine, Garo, and his work can conveniently be divided into three periods: pre-Garo, Garoand post-Garo. Before Garo, Tsuge was a self-confessed hack, turning out large volumes of hard-boiled manga in the gekiga style pioneered by the likes of Yoshiro Tatsumi, many of them published in pulp magazines designed for pay-libraries. Tsuge churned out gangster stories, samurai yarns, westerns, sci-fi, horror – whatever would sell. Most of these stories are unrelentingly noir – nihilistic yarns that end badly. For example – in ‘Obake Entotsu’ (Ghost Chimney, 1958), a yarn set in a tough industrial city, a particular factory chimney gets a reputation among the chimney sweeps for being unlucky after a series of nine fatal accidents. No-one will dare clean it – except one man, desperate for work after a lengthy spell of unemployment. He ascends the chimney in the midst of a rainstorm – and sure enough, loses his footing and falls to his death. In ‘Shakunetsu no Taiyô no Shita ni’ (Under a Red-Hot Sun, 1960) a group of men from various countries fall into a treacherous pit while being driven to see the pyramids by an Egyptian guide, are trapped there for a week and nearly fried to death, when a rescue helicopter arrives – only for them to accidentally kill the pilot in the rush to get on, and then crash the helicopter, so they are going to be fried to death after all. In ‘Nezumi’ (Mice, 1965) a couple of mice stow away on a space freighter, breed a massive colony, eat the spaceship’s stores and then devour the crew as well.

I hope these very brief summaries give something of the flavor of Tsuge’s pre-Garo output. Many of them are comparable to the boys’ own tales of the British tradition, except with a heavier emphasis on doom. The drawing is dynamic, but nowhere near as sophisticated as in his later work. They are clearly works that have been drawn in a hurry, for cash.

Tsuge was out of work, depressed and contemplating suicide, when he was contacted by Katsuichi Nagai, the legendary editor of Garo. Nagai coaxed him back to the drawing board, and gave him unprecedented editorial freedom. From August 1965 to March 1970, Tsuge would publish 22 manga in Garo (table 1). The first four were only mildly interesting, but the fifth, published in February 1966, would be remembered as Tsuge’s breakthrough work – Numa (The Swamp). This and a dozen more of his Garo manga turned Tsuge into a counter-culture hero. Somehow he had found a way to reach deep into the well of his own sub-consciousness, to produce a string of cameos that were masterpieces of both art and literature – the holy grail of any manga artist. This too, was the moment when “Tsuge helped to free manga from the strictures of narrative and sought a more poetic grammar for them” (Gravett 2004: 134). The best of the Garo works dispense with conventional plot and are full of ambiguity, inviting the reader to engage in interpreting multivalent dream works. After Numa, no-one would ever get killed in a Tsuge manga again; there would be no violence except for some ambiguous cases of sexual assault that I will discuss in another paper; and there would be no more reliance on the stereotyped formulas of gangster yarns, sci-fi etc. Instead, Tsuge came up with works of striking originality.

Table 1: Yoshiharu Tsuge’s 22 manga published in Garo

After he parted from Garo, Tsuge published nothing for two years. He then re-emerged with a new style, or perhaps a pair of styles. Some of the new works were based closely on erotic or horrific dreams and fantasies; others were autobiographical, based on his married life with his wife and son. The Garo period protagonist is always a single male (except for ‘Salamander,’ which is narrated by a salamander); the post-Garo protagonist is a family man and much of their interest comes from the family dynamic. There is a sardonic humor to many of these later works, reflecting on the various unsuccessful attempts made by a struggling manga artist to find alternative employment, for example by recycling old cameras or selling stones found on the riverbed as objets d’art. Sometimes social realism gives way to magical realism, as in the story of a man who strongly resembles a bird and makes a living by enticing birds to him and selling them to pet shops. The emotional coloring of these post- Garo pieces grows steadily darker, culminating in the harrowing Ribetsu (Parting; June 1987), describing the break-up of a sexual relationship followed by an almost-successful suicide attempt. To this day, that remains the last manga that Tsuge ever published.

There are various theories as to why so little of Tsuge’s work has been translated. Some say that the work is too challenging to interest mainstream publishers, others that Tsuge has usually refused to allow his work to be translated because he does not like the way manga tend to be “flipped” when translated into English. Yet another rumour has it that Tsuge promised the translation rights to some long lost friend in American who has never made use of them. Whatever the reason, it has been almost impossible to get close to most of Tsuge’s work without a knowledge of Japanese. As one who has lived in Japan for twenty years and been reading Tsuge’s cartoons in the original Japanese for most of that time, I now propose to take a close look at one of the more interesting works from Tsuge’s Garo period: ‘The Incident at Nishibeta Village.’ It was published just two months after ‘Akai Hana’ (Red Flowers), which is one of the few Tsuge works available in English (Tsuge 1985), and has been discussed at some length by Ng Suat Tong.(Ng 2010). In a sense they are companion pieces, both featuring the same hero, a wandering fisherman who finds himself caught up in some unsettling developments in an alien milieu.

This story is set in Chiba prefecture, just to the east of Tokyo. The south end of the prefecture is the Bôsô peninsula. It is a largely rural area, far less popular with holidaymakers than the fashionable Izu peninsula on the opposite side of Tokyo, having far fewer hot springs. Anyone who visits Bôsô will be surprised to find some quite lonely, depopulated areas, barely an hour’s train ride from Tokyo. Tsuge spent part of his childhood there and has travelled there all his life. The lonely Bôsô landscape features in a number of Tsuge works. The inspiration for this story came from a fishing trip he made to Nishibeta with friend and fellow manga master Shirato Sanpei, in which Shirato managed to get his leg trapped in a hole driven into rock to take a construction peg (Tsuge and Gondô 1993 vol. 2: 94).

In the story, a keen amateur fisherman comes to the village of Nishibeta, on the east side of the Bôsô peninsula, in hopes of catching some dace (haya) at an S-shaped stretch of the Isumi river. The village is quite carefully described and really exists. It has a mild climate and thus is the location of a mental institution called the Nishibeta Sanatorium. This also exists, although in reality it is named the Ôtaki Sanatorium, Ôtaki being a nearby town.

Fig. 1 Opening frame of ‘Nishibeta-mura Jiken.’ Text describes location of the village. [2].

Our hero walks past the sanatorium on his way to a fishing spot. He can see the inmates doing radio calisthenics when he peeps through the fence. The only problem with the fishing spot is the dense undergrowth around it – one can easily get the line caught in overhanging branches. We see an example, which ends with a dead dace hanging from the branch of a tree, the line having broken, out of reach of the fisherman. It is presented as comical (fig. 2 left), but this accidental hanging recalls an earlier manga, Umibe no Jokei (A View of the Sea, the one before Red Flowers) in which the protagonists happen to see a fish get caught by a fisherman standing on a high cliff but then fall back into the water as the line snaps (fig. 2 center). They later see it floating dead (fig. 2 right) – presumably killed on impact. So both stories feature a fishing motif, and both show us the rather rare outcome where the fish escapes the fisherman but nonetheless perishes. If we are looking for a cheap metaphor, in which we can empathize with the fisherman making a catch or with the fish getting away, we will be disappointed; Tsuge permits neither.

Fig. 2: ‘Nishibeta’ p. 3, ‘Umibe no Jokei’ pp. 7, 12

Tsuge employs an ambiguous narrative style as he leads us into the story – he starts out talking in general terms about things that can happen when one visits the place, but then it turns out that the incident with the fish is in the here and now, as he is spotted with the evidence of his embarrassing mistake by the local inn-keeper (at whose establishment he is staying), who warns him that one of the patients has escaped from the sanatorium. The village is in uproar – this is no time to be fishing. The two men run back to the village, where a search party is organized. They divide into two, going round the mountain from opposite directions to cut off the escapee. The villagers are in a state of high excitement; they are drawn comically (fig. 3) in a style reminiscent of Shigeru Mizuki, for whom Tsuge had recently been working as an assistant. Tsuge also admits to literary influence from the humorous novels of Masaji Ibuse (Tsuge and Gondô 1993: 94).

Fig. 3 The search party

Two of the villages claim to have seen the escaped lunatic near the geta (sandal) factory. Note that manufacturing geta is a traditional occupation of the Burakumin outcaste minority in Japan. It is not uncommon for culturally polluted facilities like mental hospitals to be sited in or near Burakumin districts, in a system of nested discrimination whereby one discriminated group is made to put up with another.

The hero nervously says “we’re not going to kill him are we?” He gets no reply, so asks again. “Depends on the circumstances… if he tries to bite us, well, anyone would strike back…” says one villager, pensively scratching his chin.

There’s a false alarm at an oak tree (kashinoki) by the village shrine, an occasion for comic by-play among the rustics. An old man called Sei-chan claims to have seen the lunatic climb up a huge tree next to the torii gate. Another says no man could climb that tree – it has a massive aodaishô (‘Green General’; the Japanese Rat Snake; it grows up to two yards in length) living in it. The old man retorts that he caught a glimpse of the lunatic’s yukata. The other man says it could have been a horned owl (mimizuku). A young boy climbs up the tree and puts his hand in a hole to confirm that there is an owl there. It gradually becomes apparent that the lunatic could not have climbed the tree, and Sei-chan is humiliated. In a last attempt at self-defense, he claims he heard the man cry out, something like kôn. But he has lost all credibility and the company concludes that he must have heard the sound of a kitsunetsuki – a woman possessed by a fox spirit – and mistaken that for the voice of the lunatic.

Clearly the villagers are deeply confused. One moment they are arguing about snakes, then owls, then fox spirits. They have no idea as to what shape or manner this alleged lunatic might really have. Ironically, kitsunetsuki happens to be the best-known variety of possession by a familiar – often used as an explanation for madness in early-modern Japan. They are blissfully unaware of that irony. The villagers appear lost, physically as well as intellectually, several times depicted as a little knot of humanity in a dense, impenetrable jungle (fig. 4)

Fig. 4: The shrine in the jungle

As all this plays out, our hero’s fear of the escapee shifts to a feeling of sympathy, as we would expect from Tsuge. He comments: “As I am so weak myself, I am always moved by weak people.” (Tsuge and Gondô, 1993(2): 95). [3]. He leaves the search party, an event we see through his eyes (fig. 5), heading upstream through fields thick with wild chrysanthemums (nogiku), thinking of doing some more fishing.

Fig. 5: Watching the search party disappear

On the path he bumps into the escapee – on his haunches, looking for matsutake mushrooms in the undergrowth by the path. There can be no mistake – he is dressed in a yukata (a light kimono) and plastic slippers with the name of the sanatorium written on them. He is a tall, thin youth, with round spectacles and floppy hair. When he sees our hero he says “Well, autumn’s already here” (fig. 6 right). He shows hero a large clump of mushrooms growing in a hollow at the foot of a pine tree to prove the point (fig. 6 center), then indicates a tear in his yukata he got while trying to grab some akebia fruit (fig. 6 left).

Fig. 6: Encountering the escapee

Then he notices hero’s fishing tackle and excitedly offers to show him an excellent dace fishing spot. On the way he tells hero he is from the nearby town of Mobara; that his family runs a western-style clothes shop; and that he had to drop out of his second year at Chiba Commercial University due to illness. Hero takes the latter as an oblique reference to his stay in the sanatorium, but overall finds that the youth seems perfectly normal.

Fig. 7: A good spot for dace

They reach the spot – a system of rock pools just below a dam on the way down the mountain side. The pools are teeming with dace. “They seem to be having fun playing around, no?” says the youth (fig. 7 right). He points out that even little holes in the rock have dace swimming in them (fig. 7 left). The only trouble is – it’s too easy. Hero wants a challenge, to swing his rod. Still, he decides to do a little easy fishing with the youth, goes to his tackle box and bites off a length of fishing line for him. But when he returns, he finds the youth has his leg stuck in one of the little holes in the rock. The youth comments: “It’s really strange, don’t you think? Why should there be such a deep hole in a place like this?” (fig. 8). Hero speculates that it might have been caused by a peg being driven into the stone when the nearby dam was being built. There is a live fish caught under the youth’s foot, and it is tickling him to death.

Fig. 8: The escapee trapped in a fishing hole

Hero cannot pull him out, so he goes for help. He returns with a doctor from the sanatorium; the youth has somehow managed to pull himself out, and is lying exhausted on a boulder, his leg smeared with blood. The autumn evening has come early in the valley and he has caught a cold. Once he has cleaned out his runny nose in the river, the doctor and an assistant take him back to the sanatorium, silhouetted in the twilight as they go, apparently restraining the youth with a rope (fig. 9).

Fig 9: Back to the sanatorium

Hero stays behind for a reflective cigarette. “This incident that caused so much of a stir has been brought to a low-key denouement by this unexpected accident,” he reflects, in strangely stilted manner. Then he thinks of the fish that had been trapped under the escapee’s foot. It is still alive, though limp and moribund. He picks it out of the hole and returns it to the river (fig. 10 top right). It rests for a while in the shade of the pussy willow (fig. 10 top left), then swims away powerfully. The final frame shows it disappearing into light while hero is seen from behind, in shadow, watching it go (fig. 10 bottom).

Fig. 10

Like many of Tsuge’s works in this period, ‘The Incident at Nishibeta Village’ has the quality of a fable. On the face of it this is a mild, humorous story – a whimsical yarn with a bit of slapstick comedy, slightly reminiscent of an early Jacques Tati film perhaps. It only gently hints at concealed depths. Shin Gondô, who played Boswell to Tsuge’s Johnson in publishing an 800-page collection of interviews with him, remarks: “There’s a fair bit of slapstick comedy along the way, and it’s not a particularly dark story, but there’s a strangely lonely feeling about the way it ends” (Tsuge and Gondô 1993(2): 95). I would agree. So let us now consider where that lonely feeling comes from.

The story obviously invites us to draw some kind of parallel between the trapped fish and the youth confined in the sanatorium. Indeed, Tsuge himself has stated “I matched the youth and the little fish as doubles. They were both stuck in little holes and swam away lustily. I like to draw in a way that leaves a lingering reverberation” (ibid. 96). At the end of the incident, both the youth and the fish are in a totally exhausted state, and Tsuge uses the same word, guttari (dead tired) to describe both. The youth seems perfectly normal, if very slightly eccentric. The fish is very literally oppressed, by a foot crushing down on it. At the end of the yarn, the fish swims free – liberated, ironically, by a fisherman – while the apparently normal youth is escorted back to captivity. I would argue that here is a gentle, implied criticism of Japan’s mental health system.

Bear in mind that the concept of a perfectly sane person being forcibly incarcerated in a small rural sanatorium is particularly plausible in Japan, which has the world’s highest per-capita mental hospital population, with a relatively small number of psychiatrists to look after them – 206 mental hospital beds but only 9 psychiatrists per 100,000 population, compared to 31 beds and 14 psychiatrists per 100,000 in the US, [4]. leading to a heavy reliance on physical restraint and chemical sedatives. Japan never went through the process of closing down mental hospitals and casting out patients – a process known euphemistically as ‘mainstreaming’ in Reagan’s USA and as ‘care in the community’ in Thatcher’s Britain. Instead mental hospitals – most of them private, many of them set up with government encouragement after World War II when defeat in war had left deep psychological scars and the government had no cash to deal with them – have remained numerous and they are a powerful, well-organized lobby. The result is that it is only too easy to get forcibly incarcerated in Japan – all it takes is two signatures, one from a psychiatrist who may be in charge of the institution expecting to take custody (and profit materially), and the other from a relative, typically one’s own spouse, parent or child. The risks of abuse in such a system are obvious, especially when many of the institutions are small and in remote rural locations, like the one at Nishibeta-mura.

Not that Tsuge comes at us waving a banner about this serious social problem. The tone is muted – a harmless youth with an interest in fishing, and a posse of villagers who are depicted as comical bumpkins, but who nonetheless are willing to consider killing the fugitive. The world’s most frequently quoted Japanese proverb is “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down” (deru kui ga utareru). In other words, Japanese society can come down hard on the eccentric or non-conformist. Tsuge, himself a perennial outsider, no doubt had this kind of thing in mind when he drew this manga, with its dramatic contrast between the dangerous fugitive described by the villagers, and the weak bespectacled youth he turns out to be.

But the fish imagery also works at a deeper level, as we shall see if we go back to the manga Tsuge published immediately before this one – ‘Akai Hana’/Red Flowers.

Fig. 11 ‘Nishibeta’ (left), ‘Akai Hana’ (right)

There is a clear visual parallel between the fugitive youth in ‘Nishibeta,’ and the young girl, named as Sayoko Kikuchi, in ‘Akai Hana.’ Each lies exhausted by the side of the river (fig. 11). Her exhaustion is brought on by menstruation – possibly her first ever – symbolized by red flowers falling onto a river. His exhaustion, likewise, hints at a sexual explanation. When he shoved his foot into the watery hole, that was a kind of spastic penetration – possibly his first ever. His foot was caught, as by a vagina dentate. The struggle to get out has left him lying there like a fish out of water. Freudian critic Masashi Shimizu, who devoted 20 pages to ‘Nishibeta’ in his monumental study of Tsuge (Shimizu 2003) follows that line up to the point where the youth gets his leg stuck, but then argues that the injury to the leg signifies the father figure, represented by the huge boulder where all this happens, punishing the youth for trying to get back to the womb through incestuous penetration, with a threat of castration. The exhaustion and bloody leg are left over from that struggle (Shimizu 2003: 390). As for the little fish, that represents a fetus, one that has succeeded in staying in the womb. When the fisherman lets it go at the end of the story, he is reluctantly admitting the need to get out of the womb and join the river of life. Shimizu further argues that the youth is a subsection of the fisherman’s own personality, so that the entire story is a projection of the fisherman’s own internal psychological state. The fact that the fisherman has to walk round the perimeter of the sanatorium grounds, and presumably will have to do so again on his way home, indicates that he is in a borderline condition between sanity and insanity himself (ibid. 391). When he returns the fish to the river, he is coming back from the brink of the escaped youth’s insanity, which is in fact no more than a rash attempt to do what all men really want to do – return to the womb.

Shimizu’s interpretation is partially persuasive, and I am willing to accept that both the fisherman and the youth represent aspects of Tsuge’s own personality. The fisherman is clearly a version of Tsuge, who we know loved his rural rambles and fishing trips. But in terms of physical appearance it is the escaped youth who more closely resembles Tsuge, as we can see from fig. 12. Nearly all Tsuge’s mature works include a character closely based on himself. Usually he has some function close to that of a narrator, often in the role of a traveler arriving in unfamiliar territory, as here. A year or two later Tsuge started to draw this character so that it bore a physical resemblance to himself, as in the 1970 image on the left from ‘Yanagiya Shujin’. The photo of Tsuge (fig. 12 center) is from roughly this period. But in ‘Nishibeta,’ as in ‘Akai Hana’ and the subsequent ‘Mokkoriya no Shôjo’ (another offbeat tale of a rural fishing trip) the traveler has a plain, button-nosed face. Instead, it is the escaped lunatic who makes us think we might be looking at Tsuge himself, or some version of him, behind his blank, round spectacles (right).

Fig. 12 ‘Yanagiya Shujin’ (left), photo of Tsuge (center), ‘Nishibeta’ (right)

But I would argue that Shimizu does not fully acknowledge the attenuated, shadowy relationship of the surface story to the underlying Freudian/Rankian myth. There are no women at all in this story, unlike many other Tsuge manga that do turn on sexual encounters, and the symbolism has drifted far, far away from anything resembling a real human experience. As father figures go, large boulders are open to question. The youth accidentally gets his foot trapped in the hole – there is no intentionality. But the biggest problem with the Oedipal reading concerns the little fish. It is not happy to be back in the womb, if the little hole is serving that function – it is trapped. I would argue that it has another symbolic role, representing the trapped human spirit. When it swims away in the final frame, we feel the same kind of liberation as at the end of ‘Sanshôuo’ (Salamander), published six months earlier in Garo. That story is narrated by a salamander swimming in a sea of sewage underneath some great city. The salamander finally swims into the distance, remarking “I wonder what will come floating my way tomorrow. Thinking about it brings me a feeling of incredible pleasure.” Tsuge’s final frames are always very significant, and the final frame of Nishibeta is clearly designed to echo that of Sanshôuo (fig. 13). Here the observer is saying “with that, it swam vigorously away.”

Fig. 13 ‘Sanshôuo’ (Salamander), final frame (detail) left; Nishibeta final frame (detail), right

What are we to make of these two similar yet contrasting images of aquatic animals swimming into the distance? Both are bathed in an ethereal light and swimming towards more light, possibly signifying enlightenment, escape, or death/rebirth, as in many accounts of Near Death Experience and Hieronymus Bosch’s famous painting, The Ascent of the Blessed (fig. 14). ‘Sanshôuo’ is Tsuge’s only cartoon with no human characters in it. The phallic salamander represents both the body and spirit of a man. In ‘Nishibeta,’ the fish has swum further into the distance, observed by a real man. We sense a Descartian distinction between body and soul here: and if the little fish is the human spirit, then does its departure imply the death of the human body? For me, the answer is yes. The departure of the little fish hints at the death, not of the traveler but of the youth from the sanatorium. Perhaps he will finally free himself through suicide. Or perhaps his traumatic experiences will make him really go mad, so that the spirit leaves the body in another sense.

Fig. 14 Hieronymus Bosch, The Ascent of the Blessed (detail)

Fish and other aquatic animals make many appearances in Tsuge’s work. The fish can do a lot of symbolic work: its shape and its little fins make it a purposeful symbol, always swimming in a clear direction. At the same time it is liable to be swept along by strong currents once it ventures forth from a womb-like pond or backwater, making it serve as an apt metaphor for the human condition. And those little fins can indeed hint at the not-yet-developed limbs of a human fetus.

I hope this short paper has given some idea of the complexity of symbolism in the works of Yoshiharu Tsuge. For him, meaning is diffused to the point where it becomes emotion. That may sound silly, but I do feel that the complex symbolic system behind this seemingly simple tale perhaps accounts for the feeling of resignation and calm that comes over us as we view its final frame, the “loneliness” (sabishisa) mentioned by Gondô. Tsuge says he worked hard to produce that effect. Normally modest to a fault, he allows himself a note of pride in the way he made the little fish not just swim away, but pause for a moment, motionless under the pussy willow. It is a moment that reminds us that freedom includes the freedom to stay, as well as to go; and perhaps, to stay alive, as well as to die. “I thought that was quite a good scene within the fantasy,” he admits (Tsuge and Gondô 1993(2): 95-6). This leads to the discussion quoted earlier, about trying to leave a “lingering reverberation.” That is my translation of the Japanese word yo’in, and it is a key term for understanding Tsuge. His tales are not secretly coded narratives with a one-to-one identity between surface narrative signifier and psychosexual signified, as Shimizu would have us believe. Rather they are deliberately diffuse and ambiguous, not crossword puzzles but kôans, stories put out there to invite the reader to think, to seek for meaning. We will never come to the definitive interpretation, for there is no such thing, but we can still enjoy the quest.
____________________

[1]There are also very poorly translated ‘scanlations’ of ‘Numa’ (Marsh) and ‘Chiko’ (Chico) floating around the internet. His works are readily available in Japanese, and all the ones discussed here are included in Tsuge 1994a or Tsuge 1994b, each of which is a handy paperback currently available at Amazon Japan for 610 yen, or about $7. [back]

[2]Note the teasing shape of what appears to be smoke rising from a bonfire on the left, perhaps suggesting a peacock or phoenix stooping down to peck. [back]

[3] All translations of Japanese works by Gill. [back]

[4] Entries for Japan and the US in Mental Health Atlas 2005. World Health Organization. Dept. of Mental Health and Substance Abuse. [back]

REFERENCES

Gravett, Paul. 2004. Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. London: Laurence King Publishing.

Marechal, Beatrice. 2005. “On Top of the Mountain: The Influential Manga of Yoshiharu Tsuge.” In The Comics Journal, Special Edition (2005), 22-28.

Ng, Suat Tong. 2010. ‘Yoshiharu Tsuge’s Red Flowers’ Available at . Accessed January 30, 2011.

Schodt, Frederick. 1996. Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press.

Shimizu, Masashi. 2003. Tsuge Yoshiharu o Yome (Read Yoshiharu Tsuge!). Tokyo: Chôreisha.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu. 1985. ‘Red Flowers’ (translation of ‘Akai hana,’ 1967). In Raw vol. 1 #7. New York: Raw Books.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu. 1990. ‘Oba’s Electroplate Factory’ (translation of ‘Oba Denki Mekki Kôgyôsho,’ 1973), in Raw vol. 2 #2. New York: Penguin Books.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu. 1994a. Akai Hana (Red Flowers). Tokyo: Shôgakkan. In Japanese.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu. 1994b. Neji-shiki (Screw-style). Tokyo: Shôgakkan. In Japanese.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu. 2003. ‘Screw-Style’ (translation of ‘Neji-shiki,’ 1968). In The Comics Journal #250. Seattle: Fantagraphics.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu. 2004. L’Homme sans talent (translation of Munô no Hito, 1984-85). Angoulême: Ego comme X. In French.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu and Shin Gondô. 1993. Tsuge Yoshiharu Manga-jutsu (The Manga Art of Yoshiharu Tsuge). Tokyo: Wise Shuppan. 2 volumes. In Japanese.

Fetuses in the Sewer

Posted on March 15, 2011 by Tom Gill

A comparative study of classic 1960s manga by Tatsumi Yoshihiro and Tsuge Yoshiharu by Tom Gill, Meiji Gakuin University.

(Note: Japanese names are given in Japanese order, surname followed by personal name. The author would like to acknowledge the kind assistance of Bill Randall who read an earlier version of this paper and made many valuable comments on it.)

Introduction

Urban Japan in the 1960s was an exciting but bewildering place. World-beating levels of economic growth were accompanied by huge demographic upheavals. From 1950 to 1970, the population of Japan grew by roughly one million people per year. At the same time, the rural population came funneling into the cities at the rate of 1% of the total population every year [1]. Tokyo and Osaka became two of the most overpopulated and polluted cities in the world. One aspect of the massive shift from rural to urban lifestyles was that children started changing from being an economic asset (manpower in the fields or fishing boats who would one day inherit the business and look after their aging parents) to being a liability, as they had to be educated to ever higher levels and became increasingly unlikely to live with their parents in the latter’s old age as farmhouses gave way to cramped apartments. The cost of education was rising as an ever-expanding population of high-school graduates competed for ever more highly prized places at elite public universities and even the also-rans would increasingly expect their parents to pay for four years at a less prestigious private school.

One side effect of all this was a huge increase in the number of abortions. During the 1960s even official government statistics found that there were 400 to 700 abortions for every 1,000 live births [2]. Under-reporting of abortions means that the true figure was probably between twice and three times that level (Norgren 2007: 7). The Japanese government refused to license the contraceptive pill; it was not to legalize it for several more decades. Poorer women were often forced to go to back street abortionists or do it themselves. Abandoned fetuses became one of the sad little byproducts of Japan’s frenetic urbanization and industrialization.

Fig. 1 Images of fetuses in Tsuge Yoshiharu’s ‘Sanshôuo’ (p. 6, frames 3 and 4; left) and Tatsumi Yoshihiro’s ‘Sewer’ (p. 2, frames 6 and 7; right). Tsuge reads right to left; Tatsumi left to right.

It was against this backdrop that the two works I wish to focus on here were written. They are both short manga, written by intense young men whose names were closely associated with the gekiga style – literally, “dramatic pictures.” Gekiga artists replaced cute tales for children with hard boiled stories based on real life situations. In these two cases the real life situation was the abandonment of an aborted fetus in the sewers under some great city. In ‘Sewer’ by Tatsumi Yoshihiro (1969), a sewage worker finds a fetus while at work and later is obliged to throw away his own girlfriend’s fetus in the same place. In ‘Sanshôuo’ (Salamander) by Tsuge Yoshiharu (1967), a salamander swimming in the sewers beneath a great city encounters a floating fetus and puzzles over its meaning. In this paper, I will compare the way these two great manga artists make use of the same motif for very different artistic and political ends.

‘Sewer’ by Tatsumi Yoshihiro (1969; 8 pages)

Tatsumi Yoshihiro (born 1935, in Osaka) is widely credited with coining the word gekiga in 1957 [3]. His late ‘60s manga are typically short, brutal accounts of modern urban life in the Japanese working class or underclass. Many are now available in English thanks to the efforts of Japanese-American manga artist Adrian Tomine and the Drawn & Quarterly publishing house, which is now translating Tatsumi’s work at the rate of one volume per year [4]. ‘Sewer’ appears in The Push-man and other stories (Tatsumi 2005). In the Introduction, Tomine describes Tatsumi’s work as reading like “the direct expression of a personality that is keenly observant, deeply self critical, and constantly torn between sympathy and misanthropy.” The work in question is very much in character.

A young man, anonymous, dressed in overalls, gumboots and cap, is working in a massive underground sewer, using a three pronged hook to remove blockages. One day, something bumps against his leg. It is wrapped in a furoshiki, a Japanese kerchief used for carrying small bundles. It turns out to be a fetus, clearly recognizable and with a crucifix hanging from its neck. The young man’s face shows no expression. He raises the furoshiki above his head and is about to throw its back into the sewage when he is stopped by his boss. The boss removes the crucifix and then tosses the fetus back into the sewage without even bothering to put it back in its wrapping. He plans to sell the crucifix, which could be gold. After work, the two men take a shower. The boss, a tough old working class man, calls our hero ‘an odd one.’ Why should a young man like him want to work in the sewers? The young man says nothing. We sense his alienation as he walks home past busy streets in a great crowd of people.

‘Home’ turns out to be his girlfriend’s apartment. She does sewing work at home, and has just finished sewing a wedding gown as he arrives. She is pregnant, and she tries the wedding gown on for size in a less than subtle hint that she thinks he should take responsibility and marry her. He responds by approaching her from behind, putting his hands on her breasts, and initiating sex. As usual, there is no expression on his face. A tap dripping into the dirty sink conveys the passing of time and the squalid nature of their surroundings and, by implication, their relationship. She accuses him of only wanting her for sex. His response is to take her to a disco, where they dance intensely to a large rock band. She starts to feel unwell (fig. 2 left) – a touch of morning sickness, perhaps. He breaks into a sweat and finally lets out a scream (fig. 2 right) – the only moment in the whole story when his face shows some kind of expression, and the only sound he makes in the whole story as well.

Fig. 2 Tatsumi, ‘The Sewer’ p. 5, frames 9, 10 (read left to right)

We next see them asking for directions in a rundown neighborhood, looking for a backstreet abortionist. While the job is being done, the camera stays with our hero outside the closed doors (fig. 3).

Fig. 3 Tatsumi, ‘The Sewer’, p.6 frames 6, 7, 8 (read left to right)

We never see the fetus, but the next day he arrives for work with his own little furoshiki. His boss complains that he is late and that the sewers are badly clogged up today. Our hero carefully places the furoshiki in the water and watches it float away, a slight reddening of his cheeks the only indication of shame or embarrassment. But the furoshiki is spotted by his boss who picks it up and opens it to see if there is any gold or silver with this fetus. As the crucifix on the previous fetus showed, it was not uncommon for women having back-street abortions to assuage their guilt feelings by putting small items of jewelry with the fetus. There is none, however, so he tosses it back into the sewage, the baby this time clearly visible as he has not bothered to tie up the furoshiki. Our hero, still expressionless, stands there dumbstruck. The boss tells him to get back to his work. They carry on (fig 4 left). The final frame shows a manhole cover, presumably just over where they are working, with the feet of half a dozen pedestrians going past it (fig. 4 right).

Fig. 4 Tatsumi, ‘The Sewer’, p. 8, final 2 frames (read left to right)

It is a chilling yarn, vividly recalling the Japanese proverb ‘kusai mono ni futa’ – if something smells, put a lid on it. The legs we see in the final frame are moving fast, looking purposeful, helping to keep the busy city running smoothly. Any little problems that may arise from that society are quietly disposed of in places where most people will never see them. The muted expressions of the characters accentuate the alienated atmosphere. This is true of all the characters – we never see more than a vestigial smile or a faintly downturned mouth on the face of the girlfriend, and often her face is turned away from us or concealed by hair; while the abortionist and the sewer boss are just phlegmatically getting on with business. But our hero is the extreme case. Not only is he blank faced almost throughout the story, looking innocent, at a loss, or resigned, but he is also mute. One inarticulate scream at a disco is the only sound he makes; no words escape his lips. His anonymity, expressionless face and silence express the inner repression needed to survive in the darker backwaters of modern industrial society. Note also that there is no interior narrative either: the thought bubble is one manga device that Tatsumi never uses in this story, or in many others from this period. Nor is there any use of explanatory text to tell you what is happening or about to happen. We are left with manga stripped down to its bare essentials: action with almost no explanation; images that have to explain themselves. This is the way most of the stories are told in Tatsumi’s 1969 collection, The Push Man and Other Stories, and it is interesting to see how characters’ inner thoughts start to be featured in the 1970 collection, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, and explanatory text in the 1971-2 volume, Good-Bye. For me, these textual explanations, though a handy narrative tool, dilute the alienated intensity of Tatsumi’s manga. (Tsuge also wrote many of his classic late 1960s manga without any use of thought bubbles or textual explanation, though ‘Sanshôuo’ is an exception in which Tsuge chooses to make the salamander think rather than speak.)

Tatsumi makes cinematic use of sound effects to generate atmosphere. Typical manga onomatopoeia conveys the sound of water dripping and splashing, the whirr of the girlfriend’s sewing machine, and the tiny metallic sound of the abortionist picking up his tools (fig. 3 center). When the couple go to the disco, every frame is bursting with noise – thumping drums, screaming guitars (fig. 2 left) – but the frames immediately before and after that episode are silent. And after the final splash of our hero’s baby being thrown back into the sewage, the rest – the men working amid the flowing sewage (fig. 4 left), the clattering footsteps of the crowd passing the manhole (fig. 4 right) – is silence.

There is nothing fancy about Tatsumi’s frame sequencing. After a large opening frame introducing our hero and displaying the title of the story, the narrative proceeds pretty steadily at 9 to 12 frames a page, a succession of small frames with dark backgrounds contributing to the claustrophobic atmosphere of the story. There is almost no embellishment: for example, it is almost impossible to identify any other objects in the sewage besides the two fetuses. A few boxes and sticks, and a single rather disturbing little animal – a rabbit fetus? a deformed piglet? – on page 1 (fig. 5 left; detail right), are the only objects we see that are not essential to the plot.

Fig. 5 Tatsumi, ‘The Sewer’, p.1, frame 2 with detail

The fetuses themselves are depicted with a grim, stained realism. Twice Tatsumi briefly allows us to dream of a mystical or sentimental way out of this cruel little tale. When the first fetus is discovered it has the crucifix hanging from it and our hero raises it above his head still swaddled in its furoshiki. It is a surprising image, especially in a non-Christian society like Japan. For a moment we are reminded of the baby Moses, found drifting amid bulrushes, or of the baby Jesus wrapped in his swaddling clothes. In fact, as far as we know, our hero is raising the baby above his head only in order to hurl it further away from him and back into the river of sewage from which it came. Then, when our hero’s own aborted baby is found by his boss, the boss cradles it in his arms with a look of sadness on his face, and says “that’s a shame.” A moment later we realize that the boss is only sad because there is no valuable gold or silver in the furoshiki, and he casually tosses the fetus back into the sewage. This is nihilistic theatre of cruelty. There is no humor, hope, or any other redeeming feature to cheer our hearts at the end of the story.

‘Sanshôuo’ (Salamander) by Tsuge Yoshiharu (1967; 7 pages)

Born in Tokyo in 1937, Tsuge Yoshiharu scraped a living by drawing hard-boiled adventure yarns for pay libraries until 1965, when he was plucked from obscurity by Nagai Katsuichi, the legendary editor of Garo, the monthly alternative manga magazine which was already well on its way to becoming an essential element of the counter culture by the time Tsuge came on board. Although Tsuge is highly respected in Japan, and far better known than Tatsumi, he has not had the English-language exposure that Tatsumi is now enjoying. This manga of Tsuge’s, published in Garo in May 1967, has never been translated into English or any other language as far as I know [5].

A salamander [6], depicted in exquisite anatomical detail, is seen swimming in the sewers beneath some great city. It reflects on its own being: it cannot remember how it got here, though it vaguely recollects some very distant hometown. It recalls how disgusted it was at first by the vile stench of the dead and rotting things floating in the sewer – “There were times when I vomited and had diarrhea at the same time.” Now however, he has quite got to like it – he is on his own, undisturbed, and enjoys exploring the variety of flotsam and jetsam floating around the labyrinth of sewers.

Fig. 6 Tsuge, ‘Sanshôuo’, p.7, frame 1.

He recalls a recent incident (fig. 1 left, above). “One day while I was having my siesta, a strange thing came and bumped up against my head” (fig. 1, center left). “I’d never seen anything like it. I couldn’t imagine what it was. I thought about it for three whole days” (fig. 1 far left). “In the end I just couldn’t figure it out so I got irritated and gave it two or three butts with my head” (fig. 6). “Well… I’ve never seen anything as weird as that” (fig. 7). The picture tells us that the strange thing was a human fetus. It is not clear whether it is alive or dead. It is surrounded by an aura of light, drawn as if it were still in the womb (fig. 1 far left). The salamander’s head butts send it drifting on down the sewer, the aura of light changing to one of darkness (fig. 7).

Fig. 7 Tsuge, ‘Sanshôuo’, p.7, frame 2

In the final frame (fig.8) we return to the present moment. The salamander finally swims into the distance, remarking “I wonder what will come floating my way tomorrow. Thinking about it brings me a feeling of incredible pleasure.”

Fig. 8 Tsuge, ‘Sanshôuo’, p. 7 frame 3 (final frame)

Where Tatsumi offers us brutal social realism, Tsuge is more of a symbolist. At one level, the sewers in his story are the real thing, with far more attention to depicting the detritus in them than we find in Tatsumi. But they are also teeming with symbols. In the haunting opening frame (fig. 9 left), the deformed brickwork on the sewer walls hints at sad or menacing masks (fig. 10, left), a mélange of random flotsam, looked at closely (fig. 10, right) hints at drowning arms (yellow ring), battleships (blue rings), a word in Roman letters, possibly “PEACE” or “TRACE” (green ring) and, intriguingly, a tiny image of a human figure, possibly Disney’s Snow White (red ring). The eddying water (fig. 9 left) hints at giant eyes and a nose, anticipating the emergence from the depths of the salamander. Among the items that float past the salamander during the story (some visible in fig. 9 right) are two large clocks, a bicycle wheel, a couple of crumpled books or magazines, sandals, a goat’s skull, a dead dog, bottles, tin cans, rubber gloves, a parasol, the giant eye from an optician’s shop sign, broken pots, a basket, bamboo sticks, a picture frame, a dharma doll, a birdhouse, a small animal (maybe a water rat, possibly alive), a toy car, and, rather worryingly, a gas mask.

Fig. 9 Tsuge, ‘Sanshôuo’ p.1 frame 1 (left), p. 6 frames 1, 2 (right)

Fig. 10 Tsuge, ‘Sanshôuo’ p. 1, details

Some of these images are used by Tsuge elsewhere [7]. Here they have an ominous effect. The broken clocks – both seem to have lost their hands – tell us that time has no meaning here. Perhaps, too, they recall the famous images of stopped clocks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Combined with the gas mask, they hint that perhaps some awful catastrophe has occurred. Maybe above the sewers, everyone is dead. The fetus may possibly recall the one that used to be on display, preserved in formaldehyde, at the Peace Museum in Nagasaki. The cheerful disposition of the salamander takes on a ghastly irony here. We see the end of religion (dharma doll; it has both eyes painted in indicating a wish fulfilled, yet looks terrified), science (clocks, optician’s sign), industry (toy car), art (picture frame), literature (books and magazines), and even nature (dead animals and skulls). It seems the salamander is frolicking amid a compendium of life now destroyed.

At another level, Tsuge’s sewer could be a birth canal. Certainly when the fetus comes bobbing along we cannot escape that implication. Then the story takes on an even more brutal misanthropy. Human life springs not from a pure wellspring but from a putrid sewer. When the salamander head-butts the fetus downstream, we are left to contemplate the horrible possibility that it is actually going to be born when it emerges from the sewer. If the sewer is a birth canal, the salamander could be a deformed penis, lolling around in filthy sexual juices, or a spermatozoa, or possibly even another, hideously deformed, fetus. At times it looks more like a lump of shit floating around in somebody’s bowels. The salamander mentions that it has grown to three times its previous weight, thriving on the various unmentionable things that it eats. There is another hint at nuclear/chemical warfare in the salamander’s comment on p.3 that “at some point I stopped being myself and became some quite different living creature” – i.e. it has mutated.

But surely the salamander is also a symbol of the artist’s diseased imagination. He takes a perverse pleasure in floating around in all the filth of the sewers, as Tsuge does in exploring the perverted sexuality and necrophilia of modern man. “It’s actually quite enjoyable to get absorbed in this kind of stuff,” the salamander comments on p.6. Perhaps that is the same kind of lugubrious pleasure that Tsuge gets from exploring the darker side of human nature. The salamander is a thoughtful creature, who enjoys carefully studying the various things that float its way. Among its reflections: “I suppose that if your environment and eating patterns change, your constitution can change too.” A conservative critic would read that as referencing the corruption of humanity by the depravity of modern culture. Perhaps the salamander has not so much mutated as adapted.

The salamander’s comments on the fetus are interesting too: is this “strange thing” a representative of humankind? Gondô [8], in conversation with Tsuge, calls this an existential manga and asks if Tsuge had read Sartre and Camus when he wrote it. Tsuge says he had read only Camus, and name-checks The Myth of Sisyphus. Certainly the salamander, with only a vague recollection of where he came from, and no idea how or why he got to where he is now, is a bit of an existentialist. The fact that he has learned to take pleasure in his filthy surroundings also hints at Camus’ accommodation with the cruel and absurd universe: either to commit suicide or to laugh at it. The salamander seems inclined to the latter. But I also seem to detect an echo of Swift. In Gulliver’s Travels Swift has the houyhnhnms puzzling over the strange behavior of men. When Tsuge’s salamander says “I’ve never seen anything as weird as that,” we suspect that like the houyhnhnms who treat Gulliver as representative of mankind, the salamander may indeed be referring obliquely to humankind in general, the weird species that has deposited all this wreckage into the sewers.

Discussion

In the years since these two manga were drawn, the image of the fetus in the sewer has become a staple of horror stories. In the 1970s and ‘80s a slightly younger manga artist, Hino Hideshi (b. 1946), turned the image into a personal trademark with a string of shocking works centering on deformed fetuses and babies emerging from the sewers – some, such as ‘Hell Baby’ (Hino 1995) and ‘Mermaid in a Manhole’ (Hino 1988) would be translated into English and help him acquire a cult international following. In 1990 a low-budget American movie called The Suckling or Sewage Baby, in which an aborted fetus flushed down the toilet in a brothel mutates under the influence of toxic sewage and comes back to kill all the prostitutes, carved out a small niche for itself in underground horror culture. The expression ‘sewer baby’ has entered modern street slang to mean a baby conceived in the sewers from an encounter between semen and menstrual blood flushed down toilets, in the gleeful grand guignol of the 21st century. And yet these two manga could not accurately be described as horror stories. These fetuses do not come out from the sewers to take revenge on humankind – they are entirely passive. If Tatsumi’s story is horrific, it is the horror of social reality, not fantasy [9]. And Tsuge’s story is not so much horrific as disquieting.

The shared motif of the fetus in the sewer is unlikely to be coincidental, and it was Tsuge’s that appeared first. Tatsumi says in an interview with Tomine that he “hardly read any manga” in the 1960s (Tatsumi 2005: 206). Tomine presses him again a year later (Tatsumi 2006: 199) and is told “I am so ignorant… I’m sure there are many talented manga artists, but I don’t know any I could recommend.” This cannot possibly be taken at face value – he and Tsuge were publishing in the same magazine, and there are countless similarities of theme and style. We must generously assume that Tatsumi was pulling Tomine’s leg here. Interviewed a third time by Tomine (Tatsumi 2008: 208), Tatsumi does at least name-check Tsuge and a few other Garo artists, without actually acknowledging influence. Tsuge himself has frequently admitted to borrowing ideas and images from other artists and stated it was common practice in the desperate struggle to make a living from manga in the 1950s and ‘60s. There are several cases of striking parallels between manga drawn by Tatsumi and Tsuge, and as far as I can see, Tsuge mostly seems to have been first.

For Tatsumi, the two symbols of fetus and sewer mark the intersection of some intense obsessions, which are repeatedly reworked in his manga of this period. The fetus-in-sewer motif gets another work-out in ‘My Hitler’ (1969). A man feels frustrated because his girlfriend always washes out her vagina after they have sex, washing his sperm into the sewer. He imagines what would happen if one of them made it to her womb – the result might be a Napoleon, or a Hitler. She leaves him, apparently temporarily, out of fear of a vicious rat that comes up from the sewers to attack her. He feels a strange fellow feeling for the rat and cannot bring himself to kill it. We see the rat sitting in the sewer; a fetus is swept past it on the current (fig. 11 right). The last time he sees his girlfriend, she says “that pest is like a wife to you” and deliberately flirts with another customer at the bar where she works. His parting words to her: “The rat gave birth. Six little ones… cute baby rats… none of them are like Hitler” (201). The message seems to be that humans – or perhaps women in particular – are an inferior life form to rats.. Much later, in 1982-3, Tatsumi would publish Jigoku no Gundan (The Army from Hell), a fantasy epic published in six volumes in which a baby abandoned in a sewer is brought up by rats and ends up being the king of a rat empire that emerges from the sewers to terrorize humankind – a variant on the horror theme of the revenge of the abandoned fetus.

Fig. 11 Tatsumi, ‘My Hitler’ (The Push Man, p. 195)

The mute sewer worker returns in Tatsumi’s ‘Eel’ (1970), which arguably recalls Tsuge’s ‘Sanshôuo’ even more closely (fig. 12 left). The man is now part of a three-man team, and they have discovered a pair of large eels swimming around in the sewers. Meanwhile, back home our hero’s girlfriend is pregnant and freezing cold because he cannot afford to buy a stove to heat their shabby apartment. She falls down the stairs, miscarries, and subsequently leaves him to return to work as a bar hostess, calling him a loser. The next day hero catches the two eels and carries them home in a bucket. There is a yakuza waiting at the door to collect his ex-girlfriend’s possessions. Having handed them over, hero chops up one of the eels, grills it and eats it with tears streaming down his face. The story ends with him returning to the sewer with the bucket to free the remaining eel, in a moment slightly reminiscent of the salamander’s swimming off to freedom at the end of the Tsuge story.

Fig. 12 Tatsumi, ‘Eel’ (far left); ‘Black Smoke’ (three frames on right)

A fetus also features in Tatsumi’s ‘Black Smoke’ (1969), which seems to have been designed as another companion piece for ‘Sewer.’ This time our hero’s job involves incinerating garbage. He collects a couple of furoshikis from the local gynaecology clinic and then realizes that one of them contains his own wife’s aborted fetus (fig. 12, right). He knows it is not his because he was rendered impotent and infertile by a traffic accident and his wife has boasted of her own promiscuity. So he deliberately burns down his own house while his wife is asleep, watching the smoke arise from a nearby hilltop. His comment, “it’s a filthy city. Everything here is trash. Eventually someone’s gotta burn it” interestingly anticipates Robert de Niro’s famous line in Taxi Driver (1976), “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets” – albeit using fire rather than water as its cleansing metaphor.

Yet another story from this period, ‘The Burden’ (1969) also dwells upon pregnancy, childbirth and death. The hero strangles his wife to death just as she is on the point of giving birth to their baby. Six months later, as he is finally arrested for murder, he spots a mentally retarded prostitute with whom he had sex earlier in the story, who tried but failed to induce an abortion by standing up to her thighs in a cold river. The baby has been born and she is apparently happy to be petting it (fig. 13 left). An unseen voice finally comments “to survive in the crowd, you have to struggle alone.”

In ‘The Washer’ (1970), a window-cleaner witnesses his own daughter having sex with the president of the firm where she works as a secretary. When next he sees her, he rips off her clothes and forces her to shower – she is defiled. The next time he is out cleaning windows he witnesses his daughter suffer an apparently fatal seizure (eclampsia?) while he looks on helplessly from the other side of a plate-glass window. The story ends with him watching the president seduce another secretary, while on his back he carries the newly-born baby of his own daughter (fig. 13 center). Again a de Niro note is struck when a co-worker comments “You… taught us how the world behind these windows is different. How some stains can’t be washed off.” This hero too is virtually mute, breaking silence only once, to utter the name of his daughter, Ruriko. Like the scream at the disco in ‘The Sewer,’ this one-word utterance signals an emotional breaking-point. These inarticulate heroes are drawn as essentially the same character: a clumsy, broad-faced man with a button nose.

These two stories (‘The Burden’ and ‘The Washer’), both turning on a pregnancy that ends with a living baby, slightly offset the morbid fatalism of the abortion yarns, although both births occur in very grim contexts. Another story, ‘Test Tube’ (1969; fig. 13, right), turns on failure to conceive. A young medical intern serves as a sperm donor for a beautiful woman who has been unable to conceive. After the test tubes filled with his semen fail to produce results, she requests a different donor. The humiliated intern attempts to rape her and ends up in prison.

Fig. 13 Tatsumi, ‘The Burden,’ ‘The Washer,’ ‘Test-tube’

By now the key Tatsumi themes should be apparent. Sexual humiliation, often accompanied by economic inadequacy, so that a woman cannot be satisfied either sexually or materially; lowly occupations that involve cleaning up the mess created by main-stream society (sewer worker / incinerator / window cleaner); and a visceral disgust about the biological processes of sex and reproduction that parallels a disgust about the inhumanity of modern urban mass society – often shading into downright misanthropy, with a corresponding sympathy for animals. We have seen sympathy for rats and eels; other Tatsumi stories go further – one hero lives with his pet monkey (‘Beloved Monkey’ 1970), and another, in abject despair, has sex with a dog (‘Unpaid’ 1970).

Let us turn now to Tsuge. Though there are many stylistic similarities between the two artists, the unremittingly nihilistic atmosphere of the Tatsumi story is more like Tsuge in the years before his mature period. He and Tatsumi both drew plenty of pulp gangster yarns, ghost stories and samurai bloodbaths in the 1950s, but by 1967 Tsuge was only a gekiga artist in the limited sense that he drew characters relatively realistically rather than with the comically exaggerated features associated with mainstream manga for children. In thematic terms, Tsuge was already moving away from grim social realism and into uncharted territory of personal symbolism. He and Tatsumi both make heavy use of animals in their manga, but unlike Tatsumi, Tsuge uses them symbolically rather than literally. No-one has sex with animals in Tsuge cartoons. Instead, the device of making the salamander the narrator of this story is a leap of the imagination of a kind that we do not find in Tatsumi. Tsuge’s nihilism is leavened with a playful sense of humor.

The Tatsumi fetuses are casually discarded by a dehumanized society, and the filth in the sewers runs parallel to respectable society above ground in a fairly straightforward comment on the cynicism of Japanese society in the high-growth years. Unborn babies, like old people in the title story of Abandon the Old in Tokyo, will be discarded if not needed. Tsuge’s fetus is a more ambiguous, teasing image. It reminds one not so much of Tatsumi’s cruelly abandoned abortions as of the fetus floating in space at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which (surely coincidentally) was released in 1969, the same year as Tatsumi’s story and two years after Tsuge’s. We are not quite sure whether it is dead or alive, or what symbolic role it has in this unsettling subterranean world with its playful yet thoughtful salamander.

In many ways this manga is exceptional – I believe it is the only one Tsuge ever wrote with the device of a non-human protagonist, and also the only one using the image of a fetus. Indeed it is striking that among the 22 stories that Tsuge published in Garo (1965-70), there is no direct reference to conception, pregnancy, childbirth, or abortion. There are many on the theme of male/female relations and even a couple touching on marriage, but no offspring are depicted. The only Garo manga to feature a baby is the early work Unmei (Fate, 1965), and even here the baby is found abandoned in bulrushes with 150 gold coins hidden in his clothes – the links between sex, pregnancy and childbirth are bypassed. Interestingly, there does not seem to be a single work by Tsuge in which sex leads to pregnancy and thence to abortion or childbirth. Perhaps when the salamander head-butts the fetus to send it floating away he is symbolizing Tsuge’s reluctance to engage directly with the Facts of Life.

On the other hand, there are plenty of indirect, symbolic references to fertility issues – some obvious, others debatable. The most direct reference is in ‘Akai Hana’ (The Red Flowers, 1967), a rural idyll based on a young girl’s first menstruation, symbolized by red flowers falling into a stream. But Tsuge’s best-known Freudian critic, Shimizu Masashi, sees the hunter’s arrival in some countryside around a swamp in ‘Numa’ (The Swamp) as a phallic incursion into a symbolic womb (Shimizu 2003: 472-473). He also argues that the little pet bird kept by a poverty-stricken cartoonist and his wife in ‘Chiko’ (1966) is a symbolic fetus and the accidental killing of it by the man (fig. 14 far left) is a symbolic forced abortion (ibid. 31-32). The following month Tsuge published ‘Hatsu-takegari’ (The First Mushroom Hunt, 1966), in the final frame of which a small boy, plagued by insomnia over excitement at going mushroom-hunting, finally falls asleep in the womb-like body of a grandfather clock (fig. 14 center left; Shimizu 2003: 432). Shimizu further reads the snow-bound inn inhabited by an elderly man estranged from his family in ‘Honyara-dô no Ben-san’ (Mr. Ben of the Igloo, 1968) as a symbolic womb to which the old man has retreated, noting that Ben sometimes rolls up in an embryonic ball (fig. 14 center right; Shimizu 2003: 164). When the unhealthy young man in ‘Umibe no Jokei’ (A View of the Seaside, 1967) is seen swimming intensely in a swollen sea, Shimizu argues that the young man is embracing his own death, returning to the great womb of them all, the sea (Shimizu 2003: 413) [10] (fig. 14 far right). Note how the white turbulence of the water around him echoes the white aura around the fetus in ‘Sanshôuo’ (fig. 1, far left).

Fig. 14 Tsuge, ‘Chiko,’ ‘Hatsutake-gari,’ ‘Honyara-dô no Ben-san,’ ‘Umibe no Jokei’

These interpretations of Shimizu are open to debate, but I find them largely persuasive. Taken as a whole, Shimizu’s monumental writings on Tsuge amount to arguing that a grand obsession with the Oedipal desire to return to the womb as a form of death wish underlies the entire post-1965 ouevre. ‘Sanshôuo,’ exceptional in so many ways, does share one feature with other works of this period – namely, the watery environment. Whether it be a swamp, a hotspring, a river, a sewer, a gutter or the sea, water is a virtually ever-present feature. For Shimizu (2003 passim), water signifies the womb, the eternal mother, death. I would add that in these Tsuge works water can also signify freedom – perhaps a lonely kind of freedom, the freedom that comes with detachment from society, from responsibility, from human connections of all kinds.

Consider the two images in fig. 15. On the left is the final frame from ‘Numa’ (The Swamp), in which the solitary hunter fires an ambiguous shot into the air above the swamp. On the right is a frame from ‘Sanshôuo,’ in which the salamander splashes cheerfully around in the fetid water of the sewer, saying “that’s right, nobody comes to interrupt me – I am free to do as I please.” The two frames both show an area of white, featureless water, forming a distinct shape. It might not be too much of a stretch to see the outline of a womb with a birth canal leading away from it in these patterns – that is certainly what Shimizu sees. At the same time, the two frames each have a solitary masculine figure: the hunter with the gun as his phallic symbol, and the salamander, in whom the man and his phallic symbol have merged [11]. It is shortly after this scene in ‘Sanshôuo’ that the fetus appears. It is an interruption we would expect to annoy the salamander. On the previous page it has just remarked “other than me there is no-one at all here in this hole. If I think of the whole place as one big house of my own, there’s nothing scary about it all.” Who can say precisely how many layers of irony surround the arrival of the fetus to interrupt this solitary, masturbatory orgy of self-satisfaction? It is almost as if the salamander were himself a fetus, resenting the arrival of a twin.

Fig. 15 ‘Numa’ (left), ‘Sanshôuo’ (right)

Later the same year (1967), Tsuge published ‘Nishibeta-mura Jiken’ (The Incident at Nishibeta Village) [12]. A travelling fisherman encounters a young man who has escaped from a lunatic asylum. The escapee (who seems perfectly sane) accidentally traps his foot in a hole in the rock with a small fish stuck underneath it. The supposedly mad young man is taken back to captivity, whereas the fish, which has also endured a horrible experience, is returned to the river by our hero. After pausing in the shade of the pussy willow, it swims off into the distance, apparently unharmed by its experience (fig. 16). As it does so, it bears a striking resemblance to the contented salamander in the earlier story. Both creatures are bathed in an ethereal light. A mutant salamander in a stinking sewer; a freshwater fish in a mountain stream. Ultimately both will serve as multilayered symbols of masculinity, escapism, freedom. And if there is something comic about the symbols chosen to represent these things, it can be put down to a layer of ironic self-awareness that is part of the unique charm of Tsuge Yoshiharu.

Fig. 16 ‘Nishibeta-mura Jiken,’ final frame

REFERENCES

Hino, Hideshi (director). 1988. The Guinea Pig: Mermaid in a Manhole. Citrus Springs, Florida: Unearthed Films (animation).

Hino, Hideshi. 1995. Hell Baby. New York: Blast Books.

Norgren, Tina. 2001. Abortion Before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Shimizu, Masashi. 2003. Tsuge Yoshiharu o Yome (Read Tsuge Yoshiharu!). Tokyo: Chôreisha.

Tatsumi, Yoshihiro. 2005. The Push Man and other stories. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly.

Tatsumi, Yoshihiro. 2006. Abandon the Old in Tokyo. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly.

Tatsumi, Yoshihiro. 2008. Good-bye. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly.

Tatsumi, Yoshihiro. 2009. A Drifting Life. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly.

Tatsumi, Yoshihiro. 2010. Black Blizzard. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu. 1985. ‘Red Flowers’ (translation of ‘Akai hana,’ 1967). In Raw vol. 1 #7. New York: Raw Books.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu. 1990. ‘Oba’s Electroplate Factory’ (translation of ‘Oba Denki Mekki Kôgyôsho,’ 1973), in Raw vol. 2 #2. New York: Penguin Books.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu. 1994a. Akai Hana (Red Flowers). Tokyo: Shôgakkan.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu. 1994b. Neji-shiki (Screw-style). Tokyo: Shôgakkan.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu. 2003. ‘Screw-Style’ (translation of ‘Neji-shiki,’ 1968). In The Comics Journal #250. Seattle: Fantagraphics.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu and Gondô, Shin. 1993. Tsuge Yoshiharu Manga-jutsu (The Manga Art of Tsuge Yoshiharu). Tokyo: Wise Shuppan.

Tsurumi, Shunsuke. 1991. Manga no Dokusha toshite (As a Reader of Manga). Tokyo: Chikuma Shobô.

NOTES

[1] In 1950 Japan’s population stood at 83.6 million. By 1970 it had reached 104.3 million.

As for urbanization, definitions vary, but according to the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Japan’s urban population climbed from 34.9% in 1950 to 53.2% in 1970, a rise of 18% in 20 years. [back]

[2] Historical Abortion Statistics Japan [back]

[3] The word makes its first appearance on the cover page of Tatsumi’s 1957 work, Yûrei Takushi (Ghost Taxi). [back]

[4] To date Drawn & Quarterly have published five volumes of Tatsumi’s manga (Tatsumi 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010). [back]

[5] The only works of Tsuge that have been translated into English are three short stories, ‘Red Flowers,’ ‘Mr. Oba’s Electro-plating Factory’ and ‘Screw-style.’ See bibliography for details. There are also very poorly translated scanlations of ‘Numa’ (Marsh) and ‘Chiko’ (Chico) floating around the internet. His works are readily available in Japanese, and all the ones discussed here are included in Tsuge 1994a or Tsuge 1994b, each of which is a handy paperback currently available at Amazon Japan for 610 yen, or about $7. [back]

[6] Tsuge admits in conversation with Gondô (Tsuge and Gondô 1993 vol.2: 57) to being influenced by Ibuse Masaji’s short story, also called Salamander (Sanshôuo), in which an overgrown salamander gets stuck while struggling to get through the narrow opening of its underwater cave and reflects amusingly on its predicament. Tsuge says he does not particularly like the Ibuse tale but happened to have read it recently. [back]

[7] The giant eye anticipates his most famous work, Screw-style (‘Neji-shiki’), in which a boy urgently needing a doctor to heal a jellyfish sting on his arm finds himself in a town full of opticians; clocks appear in many works, including the work published immediately before this one, The First Mushroom Hunt (‘Hatsutake-gari’) (see fig. 14 center left); the bird house anticipates The House of Mr. Lee, (‘Li Ikka no Ie’), in which the eponymous Mr. Lee can converse with birds; the dead dog resembles Goro in The Dog at the Pass (‘Tôge no Inu’), etc. [back]

[8] Gondô Shin, a close friend of Tsuge’s, played Boswell to his Johnson, producing a hefty two-volume record of conversations (Tsuge and Gondô 1993) in which the two men discuss every single comic Tsuge ever published. [back]

[9] Googling for terms like ‘fetus/foetus/embryo’ and ‘sewer’ will produce quite a few media reports of actual cases like this, most of them from the United States. [back]

[10] Tsuge would return to the symbolic sea many times, notably in ‘Yanagiya Shujin’ (Master of the Yanagiya, 1970) and ‘Umi e’ (To the Sea, 1987). The famous critic and manga fan Tsurumi Shunsuke entitles his essay on Tsuge (1991) simply ‘Umi’ (Sea). [back]

[11] Tsuge’s salamander is male, since it refers to itself as ore, a specifically masculine form of the first person pronoun in Japanese. [back]

[12] See my paper forthcoming in the International Journal of Comic Art (spring 2011): “The Incident at Nishibeta Village: A Classic Manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge from the Garo Years.” [back]

BIO

Tom Gill was born in Portsmouth, UK and got his doctorate in social anthropology from the London School of Economics. Since 2003 he has been a professor at the Faculty of International Studies of Meiji Gakuin University, Yokohama, Japan. His research interests include marginal labor, homelessness and masculinity. He has written many papers in English and Japanese on these topics and one book – Men of Uncertainty: the Social Organization of Day Laborers in Contemporary Japan (State University of New York Press, 2001). His favourite mangaka is Tsuge Yoshiharu, and his favourite American cartoonist is Chris Ware. “Actually I would not call comics a side interest,” he says. “Tsuge Yoshiharu is the voice of homeless, marginalized masculinity in Japan and Chris Ware is his American blood brother.”

Editor’s Note: For other Hooded Utilitarian articles on Tatsumi Yoshihiro and Tsuge Yoshiharu, please click on the name tags below.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Author Archives: Tom Gill

‘Chiko,’ ‘A View of the Seaside,’ and ‘Mister Ben of the Igloo’: Visual and Verbal Narrative Technique in Three Classic Manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge

Predator Turned Prey: Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Midnight Fishermen

The Incident at Nishibeta Village: A Classic Manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge from the Garo Years

Fetuses in the Sewer