Nijigahara Nihilism

Posted on April 28, 2014 by Ng Suat Tong

A review of Inio Asano’s Nijigahara Holograph. Translated by Matt Thorn.

“If only the last dozen years were just a dream my younger self was having, how wonderful that would be.”

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When the publicist for Inio Asano’s Nijigahara Holograph suggests that the work has “Lynchian” qualities, he probably means to evoke David Foster Wallace’s definition of the word:

“An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term ‘refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.’ But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is….ultimately definable only ostensibly— i.e. we know it when we see it.”

There is some of this in Asano’s manga but it never reaches that level of absurdity and distortion which we associate with the films of David Lynch. Far closer is the waking nightmare of a film like Mullholland Drive where the character played by Naomi Watts fantasizes about success and discovers her own dead body even as she festers and decays in a dark apartment.

The clues to the dream state in Nijigahara Holograph are the butterflies which flit around the panels of the manga, an evocation of Zhuangzi’s butterfly:

“Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, a veritable butterfly, enjoying itself to the full of its bent, and not knowing it was Chuang Chou. Suddenly I awoke, and came to myself, the veritable Chuang Chou. Now I do not know whether it was then I dreamt I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man. Between me and the butterfly there must be a difference. This is an instance of transformation.”

The manga begins with a collage of past events; a god’s eye view of humanity which will be inexplicable to the reader until several chapters in. It seems for all intents and purposes to be the day dream of one of the protagonists, a grown-up Amahiko, who stares fixedly into the distance and down into the open mouthed burbling of his dying, cancerous father. Moments later, he is seen talking about his waking dreams to a complete stranger:

“These days…I have dreams. It makes me wonder if what I’m seeing now isn’t really just a dream.”

The rest of this short prologue are disconnected vignettes of characters as yet unknown, sometimes barely perceived: a soon to be familiar man eating dinner in front of his television; a couple having sex (or is it rape); a set of notebooks; and a half-seen girl about to divulge her past to a disembodied psychiatrist-interrogator (or so it seems).

A hundred pages on and a teacher (Kyoko Sakaki) is waking from a dream; lying on her futon, staring motionlessly at the ceiling of her room.

“Recently I have had dreams. Dreams of my days as a teacher. I recall the happy memories and the painful memories.”

The chapters which have preceded this moments have concerned her past students and just those memories. The page before this shows a student diving into a swimming pool as the same teacher cheers him on—a lucid moment before waking; a past recalled imperfectly. As Novalis once said:

“We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.”

Kyoko Sakaki is about to awake to the traumas of her past. The question is whether she will disappear into them.

“I felt I could swim on forever. But I didn’t even know how to kick my legs or breathe properly.”

This is the essence of Asano’s dream narrative: a foreshadowing of events; a retelling of times past; a sequence of events which moves, without warning, between the past and the future—the induction of a hypnopompic state in the minds of his readers where we can barely distinguish between dream and reality.

Much of this comic will only make sense on rereading. Discrete scenes within the author’s framework only gain resonance when the manga is taken as a whole—an experience not uncommon to prose works but quite atypical of the manga industry where ease of reading is prized over much else.

Consider the moment when Kohta meets up with Maki at the latter’s café workplace. They are old schoolmates and Kohta is Maki’s childhood crush. They met the day before after a space of eleven years and have had impulsive but congenial sex. Their meeting in the cafe is intercut with moments from Kohta’s murder of his grocery store employer (a former teacher). His threat of violence to a co-worker (who he has known since childhood) is intercut with his cold, unfeeling embrace of Maki. She agrees to meet with him at the Nijigahara embankment, a place only shown but unnamed up to this point—the monster’s refuge of children’s legend; the place of sacrifice to defer the end of the world; the nexus of all the vicious activities of that school and small community. The entrance to the embankment is an uncovered drainage hole, large enough to fit a child—both Kohta and his friend Kimura Arie are thrown into it earlier in the manga. The exit from this cave is the gaping underbelly of a bridge which yawns open like Grendel’s lair.

As it happens, Maki was involved in the attempted murder of Arie back in her school days, the latter’s body dumped into the same embankment. She reveals this sometime later in a drunken state to an admirer (her employer, Makoto). This short episode of no more than seven relatively silent pages is a repository of all the tension Asano has presented up to this point—the unexplained murders, the sought for vengeance, the desperate love, and sexual deviation.

The bestiality is everywhere but fragmented and barely broached in buried panels: the elicit love of a father for his pre-pubescent daughter (Arie)…

…the marks of abuse on an otherwise happy child…

…a faceless mother (stepmother as revealed later in the book) telling her son (Amahiko) to just die…

… the corporal punishment meted out by one of the teachers (the future grocery store owner)…

…and a senseless act of sororicide…

This last incident where Narumi is murdered off stage by her brother, Makoto, is both strange and painful in its elliptical denouement. Narumi might be the only character in this tale without a trace of malice and her death is an extinguishing of hope.

In fact, most of these acts of savagery are silently inflicted off panel save for an instance of rape.

This latter incident recalling—by means of an upturned umbrella—the previously described murder of Kohta’s employer.

The manga posits a world of existential and moral nihilism. Only the languid pacing and quiet narration prevents these relentless moments of brutality from overwhelming the reader. They seem almost matter of fact—a mother threatening her children with murder becomes no more than a creeping disease, like a father’s erection at the sight of the back of his daughter’s head. Not for these is the distress and despair of common humanity when confronted with “original sin”—like the media circus surrounding the murder of James Bulger for instance.

The appeal to Zhuangzi over the course of the manga suggest a deeper, more metaphysical nihilism if traced to our modern world—the exaltation in meaninglessness. The “monster” of Asano’s tale claims to have lost “something” on the fields of the Nijigahara embankment—perhaps it his conception of any sense of metaphysical values or consequences. As Nietzsche states in On the Genealogy of Morals:

“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” . . . Well now, that was spiritual freedom. With that the very belief in truth was cancelled. . . Has a European, a Christian free spirit ever wandered by mistake into this proposition and its labyrinthine consequences? Has he come to know the Minotaur of this cavern from his own experience?” [emphasis mine]

One proffered explanation for this nihilism (within the context of the manga) is that they are the product of Arie’s consumptive dreams. She has lain in a coma since being pushed into a hole in the Nijigahara embankment by her classmates. On visiting her incidentally in the hospital some ten years after her incident, one of her classmates wonders “what she’s been dreaming about all this time.”

Prior to her rape and attempted murder (these two events being only tangentially related), Arie had been telling and recording a “fantastic story of a world apart from this world”—a nocturnal land where a beautiful girl foretells a terrible future to seven villagers. Fearful of her, the villagers “cut off her head and [offer] her to the monster. ”It so happens, there are seven heads looking down into the hole where she has been cast right at the start of the manga.

On a final trip with her family to that embankment, Sakaki explains that the Nijigahara embankment was named for a legend about “Kudan”, a “cow with a human face” which is known to predict plagues and afflictions for a few days before dying.

“According to legend, whenever a Kudan was sent down the river, twin Kudans would be found at this spot. So “The Plain of Two Children” was its proper name. Someone later changed it to “The Plain of Rainbow.”

As must be obvious, Arie is the “Kudan” of Asano’s narrative. Or at least one of them, for she has a twin. And as Lafcadio Hearn explains in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan:

“…the Kudan always tells the truth.”

It is never made explicitly clear who the original Kudan of the narrative is—perhaps she is hidden in plain sight (see below) under an innocuous name like the illusory embankment of the manga’s title.

In her review of Nijigahara Holograph, Sarah Horrocks submits that it is this suppression of truth which explains all the anguish which follows. Sakaki’s dissolution into a myriad butterflies (see first image above) at the steps of the embankment suggests an inevitable (and symmetrical) recurrence of abandonment and death. The twins, Amahiko and Arie, are “abandoned” by the death of their mother, just as Sakiko’s twin children are abandoned by her grief and torment.

[Spoilers Ahead]

Finding readerly joy in Asano’s manga is not especially difficult, but it is predicated to a certain extent on heavy reconstruction. More than most comics, Nijihgahara Holograph is a web of half-hidden, splintered relationships which need to be pieced together like a jigsaw. The tangled associations of the various characters seem like a kind of inbreeding of cruelty and conception. There is, for instance, the affable pedophile, Makoto, who befriends Arie, encourages her stories of monsters, then rapes her before being stopped by her teacher (Miss Sakaki) who is then assaulted with a cinder block for her pains. Miss Sakaki is seen from the start of the manga with an unexplained patch over her eye and she is the same person who nurses feelings of violence against her own children.

Makoto (the violent pedophile) also happens to be the owner of the café which Maki works at eleven years later, the same café which Sakaki walks into a decade after her initial attack. It is only in retrospect that we recognize a silent panel—with Sakaki shown with her gaze cast downwards—during that fateful meeting as one denoting recognition. On a first reading, the panel in question is entirely unremarkable.

It only through these short hints and interjections that we realize that Makoto is a psychopath—the “monster” of the play. It is never entirely clear if Arie’s Cassandra-like foretellings are the work of her own imagination or a translation of Makoto’s communications to her. At one point early in the manga, Makoto’s sister, Narumi, is observed in class by Amahiko (the framing character of the manga and Arie’s twin) and noted to be “always writing something in a notebook.” Do these notebooks foretell a similar fate and is Narumi the original solitary Kudan of our tale?

The fairy tale of the beautiful girl and the seven villagers is only ever revealed in full by Makoto himself. This uncertainty is brought to the fore when we find out that Makoto has burnt down his parent’s house and (possibly) killed his sister (Narumi) for having discovered his murderous diaries. This is but one instance of Asano’s careful seeding of narrative and memory; not so much an exercise in mysticism but a fastidiously planned look into the suppurating secrets of a backwater town.

Let us return for a moment to Zhuangzi’s butterfly. In an article at Philosophy Now, Raymond Tallis explains the “radical uncertainty” presented in that Daoist text:

“Wittgenstein…pointed out that

‘The argument ‘I may be dreaming’ is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well – and it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.’

Whether or not this is true, it is certainly the case that I must doubt that there is any audience for the words. Dreams are by definition solitary: they permit only the illusion of ‘we’. As Heraclitus said, “Only the waking share a common cosmos; each sleeps alone.” If there is no way out of the notion that the world is entirely my dream, there cannot be any way into it either, if only because there is an implicit ‘we’ in all language use, and even more so in conversation. I cannot truly share a sincere suspicion that I am at present dreaming…It reminds us that when we engage in philosophical inquiries fueled by radical doubt, we often overlook the very context that is necessary for the inquiry to take place, which has to be untouched by doubt. ” [emphasis mine]

There is no place (or need) for such contextual certainties in the encapsulated world of Asano’s manga which is driven entirely by fantasy. But there is everywhere considerable doubt as to the shared nature of Asano’s narrative of dreams—where do one character’s dreams end and another character’s nightmares begin? The closing passages of the manga both explicate and gently confuse the narrative coherency of everything that has preceded it.

The burst of disjointed imagery which opens the manga is as much a reflection of somnolent reverie as it is a statement of authorial intent; a blurring of reality and wish fulfillment; where past, present and future meet in a deliberate and calculated melding of form and content. The work as whole is a marvel of narrative needlework and one of the best comics to have been translated in recent years.

* * *

Further Reading

(1) Sarah Horrocks on Nijigahara Holograph (Parts 1 and 2)

“Violence is an important theme in Nijigahara, because one of the core aspects of the book is the constant repression by the community of prophecy, and the violent feeding of the monster who lives beneath that said community, in the tunnel at the Nijigahara embankment.”

“Life in Nijigahara Holograph is depicted through the management of trauma and memory. Adults become adults by what precious things they are stripped of as children, and how well they function as adults is down to just how well they can deny those memories….But in actuality, no one in Nijigahara forgets.”

(2) Matt Thorn on Inio Asano’s gender identity. No doubt someone out there has already linked Asano’s wish “that he could have a sex change” to the stories of the various twins in Nijigahara Holograph.

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

Tropic of the Sea: Not the way to remember Satoshi Kon

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

A review of Tropic of the Sea

The manga is by Satoshi Kon and that’s probably as much information as most people will need to make a purchasing decision. The forgetful will receive this gentle prod—Kon is the late writer and director of movies like Millennium Actress (2001) and Paprika (2006).

One should never read an afterword before experiencing the work being described but for the purposes of this review it proves somewhat enlightening. For one, Kon was embarrassed by this early work of his (first published in 1990 in Young magazine, and republished in 1999 and 2011) and even considered redrawing it in its entirety. The serialized parts were drawn under extreme time pressure and this is evident in the plotting and pacing if not so much in the actual draftsmanship.

No wonder then that the comic proves to be a standard moralistic pot boiler about abandoning the old ways of Shinto (and living in symbiotic harmony with nature) in favor of modernization and worshiping the works of Mammon. It all does sound a bit Miyazaki-ish but done with considerably less grace. The father of the young protagonist (Yosuke) is a Shinto priest and mermaid’s egg curator—a descendant of a long line of priests charged with protecting a mermaid’s egg which they release into the wild every 60 years. As with many family friendly Asian pop culture products, he’s not a complete douche but someone who has lost his way due to a family tragedy—his wife drowned and could not be resuscitated due to a lack of modern facilities in their rural fishing village. Hence his determination to reconstruct the very traditional village in the image of Japanese modernity.

I did get the sneaking (but probably totally unjustified) feeling that the manga was chosen for translation and publication because of the current environmental tragedy afflicting Japan, the one resulting in the release of hundreds of tons of irradiated water into the Pacific on a daily basis. The representatives of the condo building and scientifically exploitative Ozaki conglomerate are dressed with all the finesse of the Yakuza elite. They want to turn the fishing village into a land of high rises and shopping centers and might as well be energy executives from TEPCO fiddling while the tuna get sick.

The last bastion of all that is traditional Japanese—hard working, salt of the earth, adherence to rites—is Yosuke’s grandfather. He rises from his sick bed to protect the pearl of great price—the mermaid’s egg which he has sworn to defend and incubate. One presumes that he belongs to the not so culpable generation; the young boys who had adulthood thrust upon them during the Second World War and whose only heritage (presumably) from that period is suffering—too youthful to have influenced that ignominious war which ended in defeat but just old enough to have built Japan up to its former (?) greatness.

His misguided son is a member of that bubble generation of rank and file workers with little chance of career progression and hence motivation; still gripped by the siren call of lucre, eager to abandon the old for a faceless modernization. All hope how rests with the feckless yet capable young who have yet to be corrupted and remain potentially mouldable into some ideal of the Japanese spirit. Their rooms are strewn with idol magazines and other pop culture detritus but deep within remains a core of purity as yet unignited. They also have a not too shabby talent for swimming and are inclined to lick themselves like cats.

This glimpse of generational conflict is safe, conservative, and panders to the potential readership; at once portraying the friction between the young and their parents while extolling the virtuous wisdom of old age. It is also instructive as to Kon’s inclinations as seen in some of his early films—that railing against shallow and corrupt pop culture in Perfect Blue and that pining for simplicity and artistic purity as seen in the films of Ozu and Naruse (in Millennium Actress).

Needless to say, all of this is an illusion. An examination of the work of both these directors will belie the simplistic vision of generational strife seen in Tropic of the Sea. Nor are the seeds of Japan’s troubles (social or otherwise) quite as simplistically delineated as in the manga. There is nothing of the warmth and sadness of Setsuko Hara’s work in Late Spring or the complexity (some have said masochism) of Hideko Takamine’s performances in Floating Clouds and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. Despite this, Kon’s nostalgia remains effective. For one thing, it would probably take some sort of artist ogre not to appreciate the artistry of women like Hara (Ozu’s muse) and Takamine (Naruse’s), the actresses paid homage to in Millennium Actress

In recent years, Western readers have been assailed by articles proclaiming the failing preeminence of the Japanese economy. Visitors to Japan will be very much surprised at these tales of the lost decade (or two), an experience which forms a part of the journalist Eamonn Fingleton’s argument in articles like, “The Myth of Japan’s Lost Decades.” Regardless of its truth, the narrative seems to have taken hold.

In Kon’s manga, this “failure” of modernity has led to a yearning for things past, one coupled with every form of blindness associated with nostalgia. This wistful craving for an earlier age and the guidance of the elderly is no longer tainted by sexism, the repression of the young, outright lies, or bare-faced cronyism. When a supernatural tsunami sweeps over the Ozaki developments, the President of said company resolves to continue with his plans but in a more sensitive and sustainable manner. This is Kon’s compromise and middle ground, the happy ending for all concerned. The Shinto-blessed Japanese walk hand in hand with nature into a brighter eco-friendly future; the pungent turd gilded into a constipated reminder that things past should not always be preserved.

Island of Sex, Panorama of Empire

Posted on August 29, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

A review of Suehiro Maruo’s adaptation of Edogawa Ranpo’s The Strange Tale of Panorama Island

Synopsis (spoilers throughout)

An unsuccessful author named, Hitomi Hirosuke, has visions of creating the ultimate work of art, a Utopian panorama of existence. He hatches a plan to impersonate a university friend (a millionaire named Genzaburo Kodoma) who is not only his physical twin but who has also recently expired due to a seizure (epileptic in the novella, asthmatic in the manga). Hirosuke first feigns his own suicide, then digs up his friend’s grave, disposes of the corpse, and presents himself as a risen victim of an unintended live burial (he is initially mute in the novel but is completely articulate in the manga).

Over the next few months, he manages to seize control of the Kodoma empire and initiates his plan to build his Utopian society—Panorama Island. The only person who suspects his dissemblance is his wife, Chiyoko. He is drawn to her but also finds her unworthy of his attentions (and possibly dangerous) in view of his greater project. He soon decides that he must kill her. Hirosuke arranges for them to travel to the island when it is near completion, and in an extended passage presents her with its wonders. Torn between the life of vulgarity and excess he has created and his strange attraction to Chiyoko, he finally strangles her and buries her remains on an island resembling Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead (a concrete cylinder in the novella). He hides her disappearance and continues a decadent life style on the island, exhausting the Kodoma fortune before finally being confronted with his misdeeds.

* * *

Suehiro Maruo has long been held to be one of the masters of the Japanese “underground” ever since his introduction to American audiences in Comics Underground Japan (ed. Kevin Quigely). His “Planet of the Jap” from that collection is a violently ironic tale of the Japanese conquest of the United States. Propagandistic slogans (lifted from educational songs) proclaiming the superiority of the Japanese race are presented alongside images showing the brutalization of American women. In his compendium of ero-guro tales, Ultra-Gash Inferno, Maruo offers depravity as the only solace for humanity.

We find these aspects of Maruo’s artistry straining for release in all corners of The Strange Tale of Panorama Island (1926-27). The manga is an adaptation of Edogawa Ranpo’s novella of the same name. Ranpo (the pseudonym of Hirai Taro) was one of the key figures in Japanese mystery fiction but his novella (recently released in a new English translation by Elaine Kazu Gerbert) is less concerned with crime then with modern mechanistic entertainments (the panorama and the cinema), the siren call of art, and the obscene depths of the human soul. Ripe ground then for Maruo and not for the first time. His story, “Putrid Night” (1981, collected in Ultra-Gash Inferno) is clearly a bestial homage to Ranpo’s famous anti-war story, “The Caterpillar” (1929). The story concerns a quadruple amputee (“a large , living parcel wrapped in silken kimono”) tended to by his long suffering wife. Not only does the text deny (with a kind of black humor) anything to do with the glory and honor of war but, for the purposes of this review and as a reflection of a common theme which will soon become clear, Ranpo writes the following concerning the wife:

“…like two animals in a caged in a zoo, they pursued their lonely existence…her crippled husband’s greed had infected her own character to the point where she too had become extremely avaricious…[she] also managed to find a secondary source of pleasure in tormenting this helpless creature whenever she felt like it. Cruel? Yes! But it was fun—great fun!”

As with the short homage by Maruo, it should be made clear that the manga being reviewed isn’t a completely faithful transcription of Ranpo’s Panorama Island. In many ways, it is a rather different object. Certainly the sequence of events and the skeleton of the plot remain largely intact but there is a distinct difference in emphasis between manga and novella. Read in isolation, the manga overwhelms with its Caligulan decadence and florid imagery. Read alongside the prose work, it shows a preference for narration and wonder over psychological and philosophical depth.

The dream sequence which opens the manga sees Hitomi Hirosuke imagining the strange vistas that will fill his novel, “The Story of RA,” and eventually his creations on Panorama Island. The manuscript which ensues is submitted to an editor and the conversation he has with him replaces the internal monologue which fills the first part of the novella. The stuff of captions not being much in favor in manga publishing, the internal musings and meanderings of the protagonist’s mind in Ranpo’s prose are largely made flesh through conversation and suggestion in the manga.

This alteration plays down the deus ex mechina ending of the prose work where the protagonist is confronted by a manuscript and an editor-detective which the readers have not hitherto been apprised of. In fact, Hitomic Hirosuke’s surprise at being confronted with “The Story of RA” at the end of the novella is as absolute as the reader’s. Ranpo submits this final chapter—this unwinding of deception and evil—with an air of knowing and fatalistic resignation:

“Reader should we here announce the happy ending of this fairy tale? Could Genzaburo Komoda, who was actually Hitomi Hirosuke, continue to immerse himself in the pleasures of this extraordinary land of panorama like this until he was one hundred year old? No, no, not at all. After all, it’s the pattern of in old-fashioned tales that right after the climax an intruder bearing a “catastrophe” is always on hand.”

As Gerbert (Ranpo’s translator) explains, this has everything to do with Ranpo’s predilections—his fascination with the kineoramas of time past and his desire to recreate these childish amusements:

“… a taste for playacting and theater animates [Ranpo’s] stories. They are often presented as if on a stage, with a dramatic buildup leading to a surprise ending that is presented abruptly, as if to the clatter of wooden stage clappers signaling the finale of a show.”

The dream sequence which opens the manga also makes flesh the mysteries with which Ranpo will later titilate his readers. One might say it almost circumvents the awe readers are meant to feel as Hirosuke (disguised as Genzaburo) leads his wife through the nearly finished island of his dreams; this surprise being a part of that darkened space before entering a room filled with the panoramas Ranpo is recreating, a form of entertainment which reached its height in the early 19th century in Japan—a tradition re-enacted today in movie theaters and amusements parks throughout the world.

This final unveiling of the villain seems almost a secondary concern, as is the actual construction of Panorama Island which Ranpo dismisses in the course of a single paragraph:

“Thus a whole year of struggle in every sense went by. To speed up the telling of this story, I’ll leave it to you readers to imagine the troubles Hirosuke experienced…[ ]…I’ll just say that in the face of the power of money the word ‘impossible’ does not exist, and leave it at that.”

This may have been a side effect of the stories original serialization but this giant ellipsis is filled up quite thoroughly by Maruo in imagined scenes of construction and the hiring of specific workers for the island amusement. In so doing, the narrative threads are closed tight, the act of creation emphasized over psychological intensity and dread.

“…no such combination of scenery exists in nature as the painter of genius may produce. No such paradises are to be found in reality as have glowed on the canvas of Claude. In the most enchanting of natural landscapes, there will always be found a defect or an excess- many excesses and defects. While the component parts may defy, individually, the highest skill of the artist, the arrangement of these parts will always be susceptible of improvement.”

The Domain of Arnheim (1846) by Edgar Allan Poe

In the novella, the author is almost at pains to reveal the antecedents of his work; not only Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Domain of Arnheim” which provides inspiration for the descriptive flourishes in the work but also the Utopias imagined by writers and artists over the centuries; societies which have not only been expressions of human yearning but an unguarded divulgement of the creator’s ethics and desires. These utopias have rarely been places of “ideal perfection“, all too often embodying the stuff of nightmares. The only correct modern reaction befitting Thomas Moore’s “first” Utopia might be one of horror and perhaps recognition for it was a state of slavery, territorial confinement, and unapologetic expansion as dictated by the purely selfish motives of population growth and the aura of superiority of its leaders.

As Gerbert tells us in her introduction, the protagonist’s own name (Hitomi Hirosuke) is a play on the Japanese characters meaning “person” (hito) and “see” (mi) as well as “wide” (hiro). This is a counterpart to the meaningful names given by Moore to his characters in Utopia. In fact, the first fifth of the novella dwells extensively on Hirosuke’s tortured idealism, a burnished twin of his final descent into iniquity. Manchuria (latter day Korea) was just such a dreamworld brimming with promise—an undiscovered country conquered, colonized, and transformed following the First Sino-Japanese War. Gerbert notes the public fascination with that land at the time of the work’s serialization:

“Ranpo, in his novella, transformed the expansionist vision of Manchuria into a literal panorama spectacle, complete with a ‘gory battle frightening to behold.’ As few other Japanese writers managed to do, he conveyed the way in which mechanized visions of the twentieth century fed dreams of greatness, and how those dreams might lead to destruction and death.”

The most famous Panorama–kan was located in Asakusa and destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. In The Edogawa Rampo Reader, Seth Jacobwitz describes Asakusa as:

“…a famously disreputable and squalid place even before the hard economic times brought on by Japan’s increased militarism and the Great Depression…for Rampo these were not only locales where tradition butted up against modernity, or high culture encountered low, but contact zones where the firm lines separating the quotidian, bourgeois realities of daily life from the the realm of dreams and unconscious desires terrifyingly blurred and disappeared.”

Maruo transcribes both the mechanistic fantasies—the “dream machines that produce nothing”—and the Manchurian wonderland ripe for harvesting in the climax of the manga. It is in such scenes that the comic excels, making tangible the half imagined; not only placing Hirosuke in the banal depravity of a prostitute’s den and the rigid conformity and poverty of early 20th century Japan but opening our eyes to the unbridled fantasies of capitalistic excess.

If the protagonist (in the novel) had once declared an admiration for William Morris’ socialist utopia, then these feelings have been utterly suppressed by rampant greed and an egoistic gluttony. The novella is littered with instances of Hirosuke’s hypocrisy, on the one hand suggesting a preference for Morris’ socialist News from Nowhere and then dismissing the young peasants who discover him in his feigned helplessness (i.e. as a recently “resurrected” Komoda) as a bunch of foolish simpletons:

“He became aware that he was being stared at like some unusual sideshow attraction by sniveling, runny-nosed children with peasant faces, and as he visualized the comical scene, he grew all the more anxious and angry…He couldn’t help despairing. He couldn’t very well get up and scold them…The whole thing seemed so stupid that he felt like dropping everything and getting up in front of the children and exploding in laughter.”

A situation played for humor and irony since he very nearly comes from the same stock and is inserting himself into the highest level of Japanese society

One would expect the sybaritism and licentiousness of Ranpo’s tale to be of primary interest to Maruo and this is very much the case. While Maruo excises Ranpo’s improbable image of the happy couple straddling naked servants in the guise of swans, their thighs chaffing against naked flesh as they navigate a man-made river (perhaps this was considered too fantastic), he is altogether more relentless in depicting Hirosuke’s panorama of nudity and libido.

In the manga, sex becomes an indelible counterpart to artistic intent from the outset, in fact it becomes a presentiment of death (note the Death’s-head Hawkmoth beside the prostitute in the image below). Hirosuke’s dalliances with prostitutes precede an encounter with Genzaburo’s wife whom he fixates on. He seems almost struck with lust at the sight of her and almost immediately put his plan of deception into action. This scene doesn’t occur anywhere in the novella. Where Ranpo posits artistic desire and greed as the primary motives, Maruo suggest base sexual appetite as an equal accomplice.

What lies under the surface of Ranpo’s novella is given physical form in the manga. The protagonist of Maruo’s adaptation is vigorous and voracious in his relations with his wife, hardly fearing discovery (and that is exactly what happens in their first encounter):Ranpo’s Hirosuke, in contrast, is characterized by a calculated celibacy, an enforced impotence—a manifestation of his artistic obsession. He abstains absolutely from his wife, ostensibly to avoid detection during intimate contact but inadvertently reveals himself in some unknown way during a drunken stupor. Some bodily deformity or defect of a more sexual nature finally reveals him as an impostor to Chiyoko. The passage in question is left intentionally ambiguous by the author:

“Just seeing her eyes, he understood everything. A distinctive part of his body had been different from the dead Genzaburo’s, and Chiyoko had discovered it the night before.”

Whether this is as simple as Maruo’s mole (see image above) or something of a more sexual nature is anyone’s guess. When Hirosuke finally strangles his wife under an orgasm of thunderous fireworks, it seems almost like a case of erotic asphyxiation. He buries her in an unfinished black pillar (in the novella)—a rather heavy handed symbol of his sexual inadequacy—pouring wet cement over her corpse but leaving tell-tale strands of her hair sticking out of the final stiffened mix. This inescapable, almost fatalistic, sloppiness is the final evidence needed for his exposure as a fake and a murderer.

If Poe’s (of whom Ranpo was a great admirer) taphephobia is counterintuitively a longing for the womb, then Hirosuke’s escape from the tomb is the obverse of this situation—a desire for release from sexual repression and the attainment of romantic gratification. Chiyoko is the stye in his eye which once removed results in unbridled carnality.

Comics as a form has a way of making obvious the carefully hidden aspects of pure prose but Maruo exacerbates this aspect by insistently giving play to Hirosuke’s licentious feelings and actions. One should also consider the demands on visual imagery in modern day horror fantasies; more precisely, an upping of the ante with each passing year. The prose work is characterized by gruesome detail at precise moments, especially where Ranpo dwells in loving detail on the disinterment of the deceased Komoda which the protagonist plans to impersonate:

“Strangely, he realized that Komoda’s mouth was stretched to a size of ten times larger than it had been while he was still alive. It was open to the point where the back teeth were completely exposed as in the mask of an open-mouthed female demon…[ ]…Although he tried, again and again, to lift Komoda’s decomposing body, it slipped off his fingers each time…When he finished the job, the fine skin of the dead body clung tightly to the palms of his hands, like gloves made of jellyfish, and wouldn’t come off no matter how vigorously he shook his hands.”

Here Hirosuke’s encasement in the decaying skin becomes a metaphor for his own duplicity which soon takes on the decomposition of a rotting carcass. Yet Maruo eschews this, instead presenting readers with an even more violent and improbable episode where he extracts his own incisor with his fingers to mimic the dead Komoda.

This is not to say that the manga is without moments of insight, subtlety, and interpretation. The glorious spectacles which Maruo reimagines and illustrates towards the close of his comic represent a high point in his cultivated debauchery. At a deeper and more sophisticated level, as the couple travel to the island, Maruo presents his readers with a scene which does not appear in the novella:

A Japanese battle flag is painted on the side of the steamer, and a fly occupies the center of the page. The latter is a note of corruption and a presentiment of the heroine’s death. It is also silent commentary on the direction the Japanese nation soon will take in its search for power, resources, and hegemony. In this Maruo adds an additional layer of meaning to Ranpo’s text, one gleaned from the passage of several decades since the book’s publication; decades filled with horrors perpetrated and suffered by the Japanese state. He forces a comparison between the pure and beautiful Chiyoko (that essential soul of the Japanese people) and her final fate at the hands of a madman.

Where Ranpo spends several paragraphs describing the push and pull of Hirosuke’s obsession with Chiyoko, Maruo allows the persistent image of a Noh mask (depicting a young woman) to haunt him throughout the palatial surroundings of his new home—both a proxy for the visage of Chiyoko and an echo of the body he has disinterred

This is encapsulated in an exquisite page where Chiyoko first looks weary and frustrated, and then, with barely bridled longing, out at the reader (just like the subtle head positioning of a Noh actor; see above). A silent cicada crawls down the edge of the frame—both a sign of resurrection and of impending sexual ecstasy.

Throughout her tour of Panorama Island, Chiyoko is at once attracted, repulsed, and seduced by all that she sees. She is of no stable state of mind. A critical point in the book is reached when Chiyoko sees a monster “plowing its way through the bubbles” towards her position in an undersea tunnel.

“She felt as if she were being pulled by a magnet. She didn’t have the strength to move away…it looked as if the monster was all head. Its mouth opened just above its short legs, and its small eyes resembling those of an elephant adjoined the protuberances on its back. Its rough and uneven skin was covered with a multitude of bumps topped by ugly black spots.”

It turns out to be nothing more than a “frogfish” magnified through the glass of the tunnel. The monster is the outward expression of Hirosuke’s soul, kept hidden for fear of discovery by his friends and relatives—a natural manifestation of the protagonist’s perfidious character. Chiyoko’s immediate revulsion and then attraction to the sight of this twisted shape is the irresistible yet fatal call of the abyss of technological accomplishment.

This section of the novella is altered in Maruo’s adaptation—no longer stressing the personal excrescence of the protagonist but giving us a tentacled monster with Chiyoko at its heart, perhaps even covering its vaginal maw.

Where Ranpo’s work alludes to a personal and artistic failing, Maruo highlights the contamination brought forth by modernity.

All this suggests that the correct approach to The Strange Tale of Panorama Island would be to first read the manga and then the novel which in many ways is more lurid and certainly more cerebral. In this it reminds me of Fritz Lang’s The Ministry of Fear which while enjoyable in itself suffers from a lack of logical progression and, ultimately, depth of meaning when compared to the Graham Greene novel of which it is an adaptation. The forms and settings of Panorama Island take shape with Maruo’s pictorial representations, sometimes sticking in the mind with their magnificent flourishes, at other times losing in translation that prescient, alluring, and terrible picture of a nation falling into the inferno.

Further Reading

A review by Sam Costello at Full Stop.

“Maruo’s artistry also allows him to provocatively expand on the original novel’s themes of developing modernity. For instance, Chiyoko’s distress stems from a distinctly modern problem: the sense of being too observed. Eyes are a visual motif throughout the book…As Hirosuke and Chiyoko enter the island via a clear undersea tube, Maruo arranges tiny fish to appear like sets of eyes lurking in the dark water. Later, the giant feathers of a peacock are dotted with eyes. The island is thick with statues, all of which seem to leer at Chiyoko. In our YouTube age, being seen isn’t shocking — judging by reality TV and social media, not being seen is more terrifying — but when motion pictures were just 30 years old and photography barely more than 50, it’s easy to understand feeling queasy and disturbed at the revelation of this panopticon. Chiyoko seems particularly unsettled because she isn’t the viewer; instead, she’s part of the panorama, forced into playing a dehumanized role similar to a statue.

Maruo’s work also derives strength from its visual nature when illustrating the tension between modernity and tradition that the panorama — both the exhibit and the island of the story — embodies. For instance, in more than one scene, 30-something Hirosuke wears a modern suit while negotiating business deals with kimono-clad, middle-aged men. This costuming choice more effectively conveys, in just a few panels, the liminal state of the 1920s Japan in which the story occurs than pages of description would.”

Utsubora: The Erotic Exigencies of Authorship

Posted on July 12, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

“Utsu…means “depression” or “melancholy.” Tsubo…mean “urn.” …in addition to connotations of a hinter emptiness, the title strongly echoes nouns with a contrary impression of crude vitality… Utsubora is baffling yet familiar; negative yet animate; empty yet organic.” — the editor, Utsubora.

The word online is that Asumiko Nakamura’s Utsubora has had dismal pre-orders. First published in 2008-9 in the pages of Manga Erotics F, it has been released to a patter of enthusiastic notices (see reviews listed below) but little else. While eroticism might sound like a sure seller, this is less the case when it is sold under the guise of “literary” seriousness (the English language edition is by Vertical which does a lot of well-designed Tezuka). And there is certainly a vague kind of high-mindedness trying to crawl out of Nakamura’s manga which is ambiguously subtitled “The Story of a Novelist.”

In the opening pages, a pallid statuesque beauty jumps head first from a tall building leaving an unrecognizable mess on the pavement below. A famous novelist, Shun Mizorogi, is called in by the investigators to identify the body (thought to be that of Aki Fujino) a clearly impossible task since only her lower limbs are well preserved. As it happens, he is one of only two names on her phone contact list and hence a suspect. At the morgue, he meets the victim’s twin sister, a sphinx-like creature going by the name of Sakura Miki, a cipher who leaves a list of false contacts for the police but somehow clings to him in a symbiotic or perhaps parasitical relationship. He has been plagiarizing her sister’s (a budding authoress) manuscripts and becomes dependent on Miki for the remainder of his serialized novel which is also titled, Utsubora. The rest is a metaphorical ramble around questions of authorship and creation, played out in the mystery surrounding the lives of Aki and Miki.

One could be forgiven for assuming that the novelist of the subtitle (an editorial addition or in the original?) is the male protagonist whose fate structures the story, but Nakamura’s ambiguity is purposeful—that appellation refers not only to Mizorogi (the male author) but also the plagiarized suicidal authoress (Aki Fujino), and Nakamura herself. Aki and Miki are not so much characters but personifications of author and story. The “true” author of Utsubora is the woman (Aki) seen flinging herself head first to the sidewalk, a shadowy figure who is seemingly plain and unadorned but then transformed by means of surgery to the physical likeness of her friend and self-professed sister, Miki (the female protagonist of the tale).

This plastic surgery has less to do with soap opera conceits than the way an authoress’ appearance and personality is transformed ( in the imagination of her readers; and personally and insidiously) into something else—a physical likeness of similar, angelic temperament; mysteriously distant yet welcomingly sexual; a hidden, mythic, and unaging figure. A vision of how personal experience when turned to fiction can lead to the molding of the writer herself. We can detect a plot of similar temperament in Roman Polanski’s The Tenant where the actor-director becomes the object and victim of his fears in a movie of his own conception. In the structure and premonitions of Utsubora, we can see an echo of the fatalism of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now—Donald Sutherland’s almost authorial paranoia in that film being the impetus of the plot and entire movie. It is this mixture of grief, writerly fixation, and eroticism which creates that tinge of horror in Nakamura’s manga.

Miki is the personification of Aki’s (and Nakamura’s) story. In deference to this, she is frequently seen conveying handwritten manuscripts to either Shun Mizorogi or his editor. At other times she is depicted against scattered sheets of drafts. The moment Utsubora is released in its final form by Mizorogi is also the moment she disappears from the manga as a character—turning at once into a caricature of the typical cheerful manga heroine—her job and reason for existing finally brought to a close. That segment of the manga where Mizorogi’s editor debates the primacy of the story over authorial credit seems a moment of metatextual self-realization, one might even say a kind of sentience on the part of the manga. It is easy to see a trace of personal experience in that conflict between the physical availability of a story and the act of plagiarism.

As for the eroticism, the authoress seems to take a singular delight in finger fucks but appears more abashed by actual coitus. Scenes involving the latter are broken up and defused through her panel work and other forms of obfuscation. The blow jobs depicted are undeniably squalid and damp; it is an act which is depicted with contempt and disgust.

One might see in this a decidedly feminine approach, the use of lengthy fingers being more readily available or even more attractive than the male sex organ (I have yet to read any of Nakamura’s Boy’s Love manga to confirm this). The reiteration of this device in comics will undoubtedly suggest the work of Guido Crepax to a Western audience—that arch student and adapter of all forms of literary smut. That penchant for gnarled, stringy hands inserted into orifices, as well as a boundless attraction to the sopping juices of a tight cunt are all hallmarks of that Italian cartoonist.

Nakamura’s delicate minimalism and elongated figures suggest the work of Aubrey Beardsley and the smattering of reviews I’ve read offer up an amalgamation of this Western eroticism and that found in Ukiyo-e in explanation of the final product (though examples from the latter seem considerably more frank).

Crepax’s vision suggests violence and control while Nakamura’s allows for desirability and fulfillment; an almost feminine coyness about the penis which is quite the reverse in Crepax where the male organ is an erect weapon.

Despite all this, there are immense difficulties for the would be reader before we get to that final moment of legerdemain. There are about 50 pages of scattered plot here fluffed out to 450 pages of mind numbing repetition of figuration and expression, as well as pointless nudity and pin-ups. All to often this is a suspense novel without any suspense, an exercise in eroticism without sensuality, a depiction of authorial obsession with nary any artistry—a torrent of metaphors with almost no consequence or real depth. It’s as if you bought a comic and all you got was paper and ink. The high page count and, one suspects, the pace of publishing has resulted in far too many pages of quite insipid mood, depiction of place, and composition. Only at the end does some form of concentrated artistry rear its head.

The flurry of barely developed plot devices is oppressive and infuriating. For instance, the incessant cradle snatching and the reassertion of the “natural” attraction of young girls for boring wrinkly, old farts (especially when they spend all day cooking for them)—all this clipped from the celebrated annals of incest in Japanese Adult Videos. Yes, even female mangakas can be idiots (or maybe ironic, it’s hard to tell). Tired tropes abound, it is almost as if dutiful eroticism had anesthetized creativity. And thus we have Aki as an assertive succubus, entrapping the author with her wiles and literature, her form transformed not by smothering the devil’s bottom with adulation but by heeding the surgeon’s knife.

The tear jerking moment when Nakamura lifts a plot point from episode Z of your favorite police procedural crap—the cop who gets overly involved because the victim reminds him of his sister (or was that wife, mother, or child)—is certainly incitement to book burning.

A trying experience then but one alleviated by a lengthy and well inscribed denouement—the solitary reason one might pause in the act of casting a copy into the outer darkness to mention this work at all.

_____

Other reactions

There aren’t many to choose from as yet but there’s a review by Sean Gaffney, another at Otaku Champloo, and finally one by Connie C..

Heart of Thomas, Heart of Tedium

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

[Those looking for background details and a synopsis of The Heart of Thomas can do no better than to read Jason Thompson’s review.]

In the opening pages of The Heart of Thomas, the eponymous object of desire and remembrance, Thomas Werner, leaps from a railway bridge to his death.

But who is he? This intangible ghost of doomed naivete crushed by the morass of faithlessness and abandon which has inundated the boarding school which he attends. Perhaps, a metaphor for innocence lost, reborn in the form of his more resilient lookalike, Erich Fruhling—a boy who soon becomes an indelible memory of that life carelessly thrown away; a soul on the path of transmigration in an alien and barbaric Christian world of torment.

Of course, Thomas’ body isn’t subjected to any tragic or tangible mangling despite the suggestion that “his face was crushed.” Death in Hagio’s world is as chaste as the heated embraces and kisses which reach a crescendo towards the closing chapters of the manga. Even Goethe’s Werther (no first name, similar last name) had the presence of mind to die slowly and painfully 12 hours after shooting himself in the head. Mortality is nothing more than a stylized leap into an endless stream of romantic possibilities in Hagio’s manga. Thomas’ suicide is performed out of love for a senior student by the name of Juli, a distant and correct individual who like all suffering, misunderstood heroes, conceals hidden depths of anguish. The appearance of Thomas’ lookalike, Erich, quite early in the tale—strolling past Thomas’ grave as it were—presents Juli and his classmates with a second chance. He is nothing less than an angelic being. Even the school master seems enraptured by this unspoilt youth—like Hadrian lusting after Antinous. One might almost call it a process of deification. And as with his historical counterpart, Erich is subject to both adoration and recriminations. As Hagio asserts at the start of her story:

“They say a person dies twice. First comes the death of the self. Then, later, comes the death of being forgotten by friends. If that is so, I shall never know that second death. (Even if he should die, he will never forget me.) In this way, I shall always be alive in his eyes.”

These lines define the authoress’ purpose. The Heart of Thomas rests on a physical manifestation of this remembrance, as florid as a grief stricken emperor’s commerorations of his lover—as if memory had the power to evoke a second incarnation or avatar. Still others might see everything which follows Thomas’suicide as the fantasy of a collapsed mind, the tangled memories and imaginings of a dying brain hoping for a happy corrective to a tragically short life. Certainly, that Germany of the mid-twentieth century imagined by Hagio has no anchor in on our reality. It is an alien planet both to the Japanese and European reader alike—a dream which has no interest in the tradition of Mann, Grass, and Boll but rather adheres to the hysterical breathing, coincidence, and fainting spells of wish fulfillment and hallucination. If these young male students had breasts, they would be ripping their bodices from their angular bodies

In one early episode, Juli suffers one of his recurrent fainting spells, a neurotic turn resulting from an earlier psychological trauma. It is perhaps the only time you will see an individual getting mouth to mouth resuscitation while he is having a “fit”. The fraudulence of this medical act suggest it’s placement—if it isn’t clear already—for erotic effect. The penis is verboten but a number of alternatives are grasped with both hands. A teacher’s attempt to stroke Erich with his cane is nothing less than a metaphor for the sexual tensions within the school. When the reigning queens of that exclusive institution arrange to converse with and touch Erich at a tawdry but chaste tea session, he barely manages to fend off their ministrations. This high tea of the mildly depraved is a kind of half-baked, elementary school version of the Hellfire Club where “Do what thou wilt” shall be the whole of the law.

There is the pesudo-coitus—between Juli and Erich—of grasping with sharp objects: first in the fencing room and then, somewhat less subtly, in the bedroom with a pair of scissors. Later, Erich recounts a tale where he indulges in the predominantly male practice of autoerotic asphyxiation. These recurrent acts of strangulation are brought on by the sight of his mother kissing her lover—his mental torment (and patent mommy issues) relieved only by the death of his mother and a profession of fatherly love by his mother’s lover.

This incessant intermingling of pain, death, and love is Hagio’s idée fixe; and the purity of male love the panacea for all depicted ailments. The only exception to this gloss on idealized homosexuality (a fanciful and hopeful template for a paradigmatic relationship between the sexes) is Juli’s physical and likely sexual abuse at the hands of another student named, Siegfried—that swaggering, heroic betrayer of Wagner’s Ring cycle here seen as lascivious, preening monster with an appetite for sadism and young boys.

Erich’s allusion to a meeting between Beethoven and Goethe suggests the essence of the relationship at the center of Hagio’s manga. Here is an excerpt from a Gramophone article concerning Goethe’s feelings after that fateful meeting:

“Shortly afterwards Goethe penned a more qualified verdict to his musical guru Carl Zelter: ‘His [Beethoven’s] talent astounded me; nevertheless, he unfortunately has an utterly untamed personality, not completely wrong in thinking the world detestable, but hardly making it more pleasant for himself or others by his attitude.’”

Erich is of course Beethoven in our boarding school equation. Juli’s rejection of his “untamed” sensuality—forged and broken through terror by Siegfried—is the root of all his troubles. When Juli tells Erich, “I am going to kill you,” it is not merely a prediction based upon his earlier role in the death of Thomas Werner but a sign of Juli’s repressed sexuality—a disease which manifests itself in the weird science of mild attacks of “anemia” which have no basis in medicine.

The reader’s mileage with respect to Hagio’s subtle eroticism will vary depending on his/her passion for the artist’s figure work and for characters with brittle foreheads in need of warm towels. Not that these aspects aren’t apparent to Hagio. There is, for example, that moment of epiphany when one of the characters complains that his fellow students feel that he has “a girl’s face;” an otherwise unremarkable statement except for the fact that just about everyone in that boarding school looks like a pre-pubescent (i.e. breast-less) girl. To be sure, readers of The Heart of Thomas should always assume that every woman in Hagio’s work is actually a man until proven otherwise. This isn’t a problem so much as a feature of the genre, the attractiveness of slightly feminine men (or in this case feminized yet adequately virile men) being the entire point. To imagine the alternative—consider going to an action movie in which nobody dies and no violence is performed. It just wouldn’t do.

Noah in his article at The Atlantic offers little in the comics’ defense except for the standard, “Well, it’s meant to be crap and succeeds admirably at it.” Not his actual words of course, but here they are for those so inclined:

“In a lot of ways, The Heart of Thomas is an Orientalist harem fantasy in reverse. Instead of a Westerner thinking about veiled maidens on cushions in some distant palace, the Japanese Hagio fantasizes about beautiful boys in an exotic Europe.

The genre of boys’ love, in other words, allows Hagio and her readers to place themselves in a position of power and aggrandizement that is rare for women—as the distanced, masterful position, letting his (or her) eyes roam across variegated objects of desire….Thus, the prurient fan-service which is usually doled out only to men is here explicitly taken up by women, who get to watch more exotic male bodies than you can shake a spectacle at.”

And on Juli’s emotional (and likely physical) rape:

“Instead, Juli’s rape emphasizes the universality of what is often presented as a particularly female experience. Similarly, Juli’s shame, his self-loathing, and his tortured effort to allow himself to love and be loved, are all character traits or struggles which are often stereotyped as feminine. The fact that Juli is male seems, then, not an aspect of otherness, but rather a way to underline his similarity to Hagio and her audience. If readers can with Siegfried experience distance as mastery, with Juli they experience an empathic collapse of distance so powerful it erases gender altogether…The boys’ love genre, then, freed Hagio and her audience to cross and recross boundaries of identity, sexuality, and gender.”

As Noah periodically ejaculates on this blog, this is a case where the criticism is of far more interest than the text; a situation where purpose is more interesting than result, intention far better than the delivery, and (presumed) effect more fascinating than the actual reading experience. And if, as Noah claims, Hagio is an “aesthete”, this does little to explain the inadequate metaphors, and the banal structure and prose which litters the narrative. The romance here is as invigorating as ice on genitals. Certainly, nothing works so well to preserve mood than a comic chorus commenting on every loving decision and every act of forbearance. At every turn, the manga engenders not so much an “empathic collapse” but a complete nullification of empathy.

The tacked on and thoroughly mangled Christian metaphors (angels without wings; Judas and Christ; a cursory mention of justification) serve only to highlight Hagio’s poor grasp of European culture and religion in general. Even worse is the “shocking” revelation (of abuse) which is anything but. I let out a mental gasp of incredulity when the a plot twist near the close of the comic had Juli threatening to retire to a seminary; a time honored old chestnut seen in both modern and period Asian dramas since time immemorial where women have retired to nunneries for one reason or another. The immense superficiality and unadorned derivativeness of The Heart of Thomas suggests that whatever dividends one might gain from it are largely skin deep. It is nothing less than a time capsule of high camp.

Apart for the tangy taste of forbidden fruit, is the love of one man for another any different than the much more familiar sight of a man and a woman pining for each other? As both the novel and film adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man suggests, the mere unfamiliarity of that object of affection is no hindrance to empathy. But just as truly great heterosexual romances remain in short supply in the medium (I’d be hard pressed to name more than a handful in manga and anime), so too does this rule apply to gay love in comics. Yet, to demand these standards of The Heart of Thomas is almost certainly a mistake for the comic in question was originally created for the enjoyment of women and has as much to do with the day to day issues of romance and gay love as the women in traditional harem manga have to do with flesh and blood females. Any resemblance to the gay liberation movement of the late twentieth century is simply good fortune if not purely coincidental. Some will say that the manga deserves praise because of its daring sexuality for its time—it is nothing less a seminal work in the boy’s love genre—but such a statement would be a demeaning admission that the comic is merely of historical interest.

The main inspiration for the manga at hand was apparently the film adaptation of Roger Peyrefitte’s Les amitiés particulières (novel published 1943, and film adaptation,1964). The similarities between the film and the manga are certainly striking.

There is the setting and sexual orientation of the protagonists as well as their relative ages. The lovers at the center of the film also struggle with ideas of purity and impurity (“It wasn’t his purity I loved.”) to the extent of expunging their sins of romantic (homosexual) love at confession. As with the final note left by Thomas, the letters between the young lovers act as erotic talismans. In the film, the letters are linked to the legend of St. Tarcisius—a young boy who defended the Blessed Sacrament with his life. These pieces of paper become nothing less than the body and blood of Christ to the lovers (they are certainly held in higher regard). Then there is the younger lover’s (Alexandre) suicide by jumping from a railway bridge (in this case, while traveling on a train) and the confusion of accident and suicide made more pressing in the film than in the comic because of the intransigent Catholicism which hangs heavy over the events.

While the love affair depicted in the film is not entirely convincing, it is certainly far more effective than anything found in Hagio’s comic. Peyrefitte’s work is restrained and classical in approach, and altogether more serious and real, especially in the interaction of the boys and a liberal minded priest named, Trennes. The priestly test commanded by Father Lauzon of the older lover (Georges; Juli’s counterpart) is nothing less than an act of temptation on the part of Satan. Hagio, of course, takes an alternative route. One might call it a disavowal of authenticity in setting, conversation, religion, and, perhaps, even sexuality—all of these becoming as putty and playthings in the authoress’ hand. A perfectly acceptable approach except for the decisive failure in delivery and communion.

The Heart of Thomas is in certain ways a sequel to the film, a fitful re-imagining of everything that could have been, but the final page of this book presents itself as a consummate evocation of my state of mind as I flipped through its pages.

The work was not clever enough, not brazen enough, not idiotic enough, and simply insufficiently well wrought to provide me with even a moment’s pleasure. It was, in short, interminable.

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

Posted on August 28, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

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.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: manga

Nijigahara Nihilism

Predator Turned Prey: Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Midnight Fishermen

Tropic of the Sea: Not the way to remember Satoshi Kon

Island of Sex, Panorama of Empire

Utsubora: The Erotic Exigencies of Authorship

Heart of Thomas, Heart of Tedium

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