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Predator Turned Prey: Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Midnight Fishermen

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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 01

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 02

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 03

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 04

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 05

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 06

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 07

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 08

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 09

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.

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

Voices from the Archive: Bill Randall and the Distorted Image of Tatsumi

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This is a comment Bill left on an article by Ng Suat Tong.
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I’ll add that Tatsumi’s story in English is about marketing and a lack of context. D&Q has marketed Tatsumi and “gekiga” very well, though it’s worth noting that the term “gekiga” first appeared in issue 12 (1957) of “Machi,” a rental manga, as a blurb on a Tatsumi title page: “GHOST TAXI” has the title, “Mystery Gekiga” (Encyclopedia of Contemporary Manga, p. 62). It feels closer to “Ghost Taxi Mystery Theater” to me than, say, an equal of any of Kurosawa’s gendai-geki or jidai-geki from the period. Decades later, the gekiga “brand” and an unimpressive body of work have Dwight Garner in the NYTimes saying of Tatsumi’s work, “It’s among this genre’s signal achievements.” (At least Gary Groth, to his credit, never bought it: “I usually only interview artists whose work I like, and I didn’t feel entirely comfortable interviewing Tatsumi. I was troubled by a number of tics that comprised the backbone of Tatsumi’s aesthetic…” TCJ #281, p. 37)

I wanted to add a footnote from a couple Japanese sources: The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Manga, 1945-2005 (Shougakukan), ends its sole entry on Tatsumi with with the fairly tepid, “Recently, his esteem has also grown abroad.” (Just before its publication, in 2003 AX #34 presented an unpublished Tatsumi story with a full-page ad proclaiming his work would be published in the West. AX is from Seirinkogeisha, now the Japanese publisher of his work as well as others in that tradition.)

The rest of the encyclopedia’s entry was a plot summary of the short story “Man-Eating Fish” and a sentence noting how Tatsumi “deeply expressed the dead-end circumstances of men living in society’s lower reaches” (clunky offhand translations mine). A true documentary of those men would be more interesting, but he prefers tidy immorality plays. Even his images, some fine examples of which you selected, no more than equal those of his peers. It’s telling that another Japanese work, the critic Natsume Fusanosuke’s formalist critique “Why Is Manga Interesting,” chooses artists like Nagashima, Tsuge, and Sait? in describing the old gekiga style, but not Tatsumi. Would that D&Q had published five volumes of Shigeru Mizuki and a slim one of Tatsumi. The rest of their gekiga line’s quite strong, but the word’s not very helpful, and the brand even less if it means Tatsumi’s the touchstone for excellent artists like Ouji, Sakabashira, and Mizuki. Mizuki’s a giant; Tatsumi was forgotten until D&Q picked him back up. The result has been a distorted image of his work’s importance more than a valid reassessment, one that even the New York Times repeated uncritically.

 

Tatsumi: The Facsimile as Homage

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A review of Tatsumi. Directed by Eric Khoo. In Japanese with English subtitles. Released 17 May 2011. Un Certain Regard 2011 Cannes Film Festival. [Comics reproduced in article read from right to left.]

 

 

Tatsumi (a cartoon adaptation of the manga of Yoshihiro Tatsumi) could be described as something of an anomaly — a project originating from Singapore which was made on the tiny island of Batam, Indonesia; a project no Japanese animation studio would have taken up if only because of its subject matter: slow, serious, immodest, and unsafe for children. The project’s unlikely instigator is one of Singapore’s most prominent directors, Eric Khoo, whose eighth feature this is.

Tatsumi represents Khoo’s first foray into animation. He dabbled in cartooning in his younger days, and those early works often reflect the urban angst and alienation found in many of his movies. As with Adrian Tomine (editor of the new Tatsumi translations published by Drawn & Quarterly), Khoo developed a passion for the gekiga of Tatsumi through the 1988 Catalan edition of Good-Bye and Other Stories. The motivation behind this project would appear to be simple. When asked about the impact of A Drifting Life (Tatsumi’s autobiographical manga) on him, Khoo had this to say:

“I could not stop thinking about it after reading it for three days and that’s when I decided I had to make a tribute film for Tatsumi.”

At 98 minutes, this is a bare bones version of A Drifting Life, charting in short and somewhat cumbersomely narrated sections his beginnings as a young artist, his meeting with Osamu Tezuka, his family travails, and the birth of gekiga. The film is remarkably faithful to the source text with Tatsumi’s comics panels providing the key animation frames and serving as a near rigid storyboard. Interspersed with the snippets of autobiography are adaptations of  at least five works from the author’s 70s oeuvre, namely “Hell”, “Just a Man”, “Occupied”, “Beloved Monkey”, and “Good-bye”. These stories can be found in the collections Abandon the Old in Tokyo and Goody-bye, and are derived from the best period of Tatsumi’s work. There are also short sequences from Tatsumi’s pulp comic,  Black Blizzard, highlighting and fetishizng its trashy roots by means of a faux four color process not dissimilar to the effect found on the cover of the Drawn & Quarterly edition of the same manga.

Despite Khoo’s personal affection for A Drifting Life, the fragments in the film derived from that novel are undoubtedly the weakest sections, serving largely as somewhat forgettable links to the five main manga adaptations found therein. Even cut down to its basics these segments will try the patience of viewers with any familiarity with the source material. The segment on Tatsumi’s meeting with Tezuka are the most coherent, the rest is inconsequential filler with little emotional drive. Worst of all is the clumsy and melodramatic episode depicting the destruction of the young Tatsumi’s art by his ailing brother.

The real aesthetic failure of Khoo’s film occurs in the differentiation between the autobiographical scenes and the fictional story elements. This blurring of lines may in fact be intentional — a reflection of the largely unvarying style Tatsumi uses for all his projects and also a subtle suggestion that Tatsumi’s violent themes emerged from his own torn psyche. The autobiographical sections are done in a kind of animation short hand (undoubtedly the product both of intention as well as budgetary constraints) and are shown in color for the most part. The fiction adaptations are done in raw black and white, and are more purposefully two dimensional to indicate the source material. Blurred elements intrude into the frame to mimic a camera lens’ shallow depth of field, and the figures are designed and drawn in a vigorous scrawl typical of Tatsumi’s pre-70s comics. They have none of the refinement of Tatsumi’s ink work found in stories such as “Sky Burial” and “Abandon the Old in Tokyo”. The light and breezy tone of A Drifting Life barely registers, and the segments covering it remain resolutely stiff and leaden, no different from the pre-70s strips they unwittingly mimic. The overall effect is not unlike a slightly evolved motion comic. The lack of aesthetic separation between the two narrative strands leads to a certain monotony; life and art inseparable yet flat in affect.

Sound is the one enhancing element in Khoo’s film. While the dubbing of the American soldier in “Good-bye” is calamitous (imagine John Wayne in a sex scene), the panting and gasping of coitus is wisely heightened to a pornographic hyper-reality which is totally in keeping with Tatsumi’s narrative ethos. Where Tatsumi shows us no more than one page of incestuous licentiousness, Khoo’s version is a loud, drawn out fucking.

It surpasses its source material because of its perverse animalism and utter lack of subtlety. The central hook of incest in “Good-bye” might have been sufficient in Tatsumi’s era but no longer.  Producing an adaptation some 40 years later, Khoo periodic attempts to intensify the audience’s disgust and revulsion is largely a successful one.

This isn’t the only time that the film adaptation highlights minor weaknesses in the original. The  words streaming across the panels in an apartment scene in “Beloved Monkey” (see below) fall short of the more effective and annoying repetition of a stuck record player in Khoo’s movie.

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Similarly, the crowd in the final moments of the same story is considerably more threatening — closer, less accommodating, and more menacing — in the film version .

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This may be a case of creative licence. The placidity of Tatsumi’s pedestrians suggest an over-reaction on the protagonist’s part, a festering agoraphobia. Khoo’s adaptation assures us of the validity of this fear. Whether these divergences simply reflect the relative strength and weaknesses of the respective mediums is a subject for another day.

The decision to animate the pornographic graffiti in “Occupied” also yields good results; coarsening the almost asexual nature of Tatsumi’s depictions of female nuditity.

Yet Khoo oversteps the material near the end of his adaptation, introducing a cacophony of siren sounds where none exist in the manga; dampening the faint ambiguity of the manga’s conclusion. It is never clear from the manga whether the protagonist of “Occupied” is apprehended by the police. The film makes certain of this by adding the sound of handcuffs.

The subjective lengthening of the material which works so effectively for the scenes of lasciviousness has its occasional drawbacks. For instance, the opening scenes of a bombed out Hiroshima in “Hell” which are tediously drawn out and which quickly outstay their welcome. Every scene Khoo includes in his adaptation may be found in the original comic, and those 3 pages of ineffectual drawing are faithfully refashioned into a ham-fisted opening sequence only likely to impress the naive and uninitiated.

One might say that the weaknesses in Tatsumi’s stories are brought to vivid life in Khoo’s animation. The manner in which the secretary (Okawa) propositions her elderly boss towards the close of “Just A Man” drew giggles of disbelief from the audience on the night of my screening. In contrast, the panel work in Tatsumi’s manga simply slips past the reader in a matter of seconds causing little if any consternation.

More damaging than all of this is the frigid depiction of creativity; devoid of any sense of the artist’s passion except through the histrionics of the young Tatsumi (in the animation) and the personal claims of the narrator. The final act — that final moment of artistic revelation — where Tatsumi creates a drawing of his old neighborhood falls flat on its face due to the consummate mediocrity of the final product.

Still, the sheer faithfulness of Khoo’s adaptation makes it a perfect tool for publicity, particularly in reference to those who still see comics and animation as the province of children. As Khoo suggests in his interview at Indie Movies Online:

“Because I’m such a fanboy, I hope that people will see Tatsumi and realise “Hey, there’s something to these stories,” and maybe go and buy A Drifting Life, and read 800 pages-worth of his life.”

This is a perfect encapsulation of the film’s worth — a paean to a cartooning deity, a devoted act of promotion, and middling entertainment for the most discerning.

 

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Related Material

A substantive interview with Eric Khoo at Indie Movies Online

EK: What I told everyone is that, “We will use all his panels as the storyboard of the film.” We do not create any additional shots. Everything must be from the source. And what that meant was that some of the stories I had to edit. The hardest was his life. 800 pages! I had to condense it down to 35 minutes!