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

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Tom Gill

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

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

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

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

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

‘Chiko’ (Garo, March 1966, 18 pages)

Figure 1: ‘Chiko’, opening frame

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

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

Figure 2: The Death of Chiko

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

Figure 3: The picture in the bush

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Figure 6: ‘Chiko,’ p.10 frames 6-10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Figure 9 ‘Seaside’ p. 7 Frame 4

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

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

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

Figure 10: ‘Seaside’ p. 13 frame 5

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

Figure 11: ‘Seaside’ p.13 frame 1

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

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

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

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

Figure 13: ‘Seaside,’ last frame

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

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

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

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

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

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

Figure 15 ‘Mr. Ben,’ first frame

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

Figure 16 ‘Mr. Ben,’ p. 2 frame 4

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

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

Figure 17; ‘Mr. Ben’ p. 18 frame 1

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

Figure 18 ‘Mr. Ben’ p.21 frame 3

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

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

Figure 19 ‘Mr. Ben’ p. 27 frames 2, 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Figure 22 ‘Mr. Ben’ p. 25 frames 5, 6

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

Conclusion

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monthly Stumblings # 15: John Porcellino

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Domingos Isabelinho

“Christmas Eve” by John Porcellino in King-Cat Comics & Stories # 72

John Porcellino’s mini-comic series King-Cat Comics & Stories is approaching issue # 75. At the current pace it probably will reach that unusual landmark, in the world of zines, in time to celebrate 25 years of continuous publication.

When it started, in 1989, John Porcellino was an art student attending Northern Illinois University. He graduated, but, in his own words in an interview with Zak Sally (The Comics Journal # 241, February 2002, 49):

[…]making paintings involves a lot of stuff I don’t want to be involved with. In order to have that process, you’re dependent on all these other people and institutions[…]

To tell you the truth, I’ve been there too so, I empathize with someone who stopped painting. Like John Porcellino, though, I can’t fully understand why I stopped either. Here’s what he has to say in the next page of the aforementioned interview:

[…]I was a crazy painter, I loved painting. I loved art. And, at some point I just panicked or freaked out or something. I started tearing it all down instead of putting it together. I still wonder about what happened and what was I afraid of.

Artists with poor social skills tend to avoid competition. They may also view the art market as a morally corrupt place eager for them to sell-out. Anyway, what’s interesting is that the rarefied world of self-published comics was, for John Porcellino, an affirmation of integrity, a cry of freedom and a sign of a life style (an attitude), more than anything else: “Drawing your own comic and putting it together in this day and age really is a revolutionary act” (John P. dixit).

I can’t remember when my eyes crossed a Porcellino drawing, but I’m quite sure that his apparent art training and the complete lack of mainstream comics tropes in his work attracted me immediately. John P. cites many influences: the Chicago 60s funk art scene (the Hairy Who group with Jim Nutt et al), post-punk music (Husker Dü, whose song Perfect Example gave John’s first graphic novel its title, etc…). On the comics side of things John Porcellino cites Lynda Barry, Matt Groening, Gary Panter, and a few Fantagraphics publications, but, above all, because of the self-publishing and DIY total control involved, Julie Doucet’s Dirty Plotte (the zine, not the comic).

Well Wread Whead by Jim Nutt, 1967.

John Porcellino’s minimalist art style is a reason for some incomprehension. This is understandable because the comics subculture is incredibly conservative vis-à-vis art styles. Being anti-intellectual it doesn’t accept concepts behind the visual style. John P. felt this and justified himself in a two-pager published in King-Cat # 21 (September 1991): “Well Drawn Funnies # Ø.”

John Porcellino justifies himself in King-Cat # 21.

In an interview with Jeff LeVine (Destroy All Comics # 3, August 1995, 6) Porcellino said that his art style was a conscious choice aimed at a straight-forward, easy to understand, simple, reading. He also characterized his art as populist distancing himself from the high art market. There are two mistakes in the above statements: the first one Porcellino corrected quite humorously in the Sally interview (64) when he said: “People do not say, “Oh, I can’t figure this out, it’s got shading!””; the second mistake is the fact that Porcellino’s art is not populist, on the contrary (his assumption that the average Joe, Porcellino’s words, prefers simpler drawings is completely wrong: most people are more easily attracted by naturalistic, detailed, art showing a display of technique proficiency than to simple, if elegant, drawings). Because that’s what John Porcellino’s best drawings are: well balanced compositions where graphic patterns (leaves, grass, the asphalt) play a slow rhythm. There’s a low-key sweet, quiet, melancholic visual music playing in Porcellino’s backgrounds. As he put it, better than I ever could, it’s: “A really simple grace.” A Schulzian ode to suburbia…

John P.’s art style is a delicate balance. So delicate that it stops working (or stops fully working) if some of the components disappears: the supra-mentioned patterns; the childish descriptive geometry like perspective; the cartoonish, very simple, characters; the transparency given to the drawings by the negative space; the continuous thin lines that always maintain the same width.

Page from “In Walked Bud,” King-Kat Comics and Stories # 50, May 1996.

In the above page, for example, the simple fact that the lines’ width changes changed everything. In my humble opinion these are no longer great Porcellino drawings. On the other hand, the addition of color on the cover below (the use of colored pencils is a smart move on Porcellino’s part because it’s in accordance with the childish perspective) adds a lot to the Porcellino feel of the image.

A German anthology of Porcellino’s comics, September 1998.

The first thirty issues of King-Cat are heavily indebted to Punk aesthetics, but the story “October” in King-Cat # 30, changed it all. According to Porcellino, again (51):

There was a real sensibility shift there… before that story, King-Cat was a little goofier, more of a catch-all, here’s-what-I’m-up-to kind of thing. That strip really marked a shift from the more spontaneous work to a more reflective style of looking back at my life. I remember thinking when I did that story that it was different, in a way that I liked. The mood of that strip was very true. To me. My mentality changed with that strip, about comics and what I could do with them…

Porcellino’s Punk phase: King-Cat Classix Vol. 1, 1990.

The poetic, quiet, ending of “October” as published in King-Cat Classix Vol. 3, September 1994 (originally published in 1991).

Zen Buddhism entered the picture at some point improving Porcellino’s stories immensely. From then on his little vignettes are like haikus. Tom Gill was kind enough to answer a question of mine about the Zen Buddhist concept of evaporation related to the work of Yoshiharu Tsuge. To quote him:

Evaporation, or jôhatsu in Japanese, is an important cultural trope in Japan. Certainly it relates to the Zen Buddhist idealization of “nothingness” (mu) […]. To disappear, to become nothing: that is the dream of Zen thinkers. In Tsuge’s works, (1) death, (2) escape, (3) enlightenment, (4) laziness/irresponsibility, are intertwined concepts. To evaporate is to die, to escape from responsibility, to disappear to a perhaps more enlightened elsewhere. As well as the philosophical/religious aspect of this metaphor there is also a political/sociological one. Tsuge’s semi-autobiographical heroes reject the materialism of mainstream society, or simply cannot relate to it. To be lazy, to refuse/fail to conform to the socially sanctioned image of the “salaryman” is a kind of statement, aligning one with a romantic, escapist, world-renouncing strand in Japanese culture.

All of the above could be said about the political implications of John Porcellino’s mini-comics run, but it fits like a glove to his story “Christmas Eve” published in King-Cat Comics and Stories # 72. I’ll end this post with the comparison below. As Tsuge put it (in an interview with Susumu Gondô, 1993):

[I travel] not only to get free from daily life, [the point of travel for me] is also in the relationship with nature to become oneself a point in the landscape.

Adding pantheism to the mix it’s difficult to find two more kindred spirits.

Panel from “Christmas Eve,” King Cat Comics and Stories # 72, November 2011.

Illustration by Yoshiharu Tsuge as published in a special volume of his complete works, 1994.

Tom Gill on Tsuge and Evaporation

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

In comments to his post on Tsuge, Tom Gill has a lengthy discussion of Tsuge’s relationship to the zen concept of evaporation. I thought I’d reprint it below.

Dear Domingos,

You ask: Do you think that the fish going away is a symbol of what Tsuge calls “evaporation”?

The short answer to your question is “yes indeed.” Evaporation, or jôhatsu in Japanese, is an important cultural trope in Japan. Certainly it relates to the Zen Buddhist idealization of “nothingness” (mu), which is discussed at some length in the interview you cite (originally in Japanese, translated into French). To disappear, to become nothing: that is the dream of Zen thinkers. In Tsuge’s works, (1) death, (2) escape, (3) enlightenment, (4) laziness/irresponsibility, are intertwined concepts. To evaporate is to die, to escape from responsibility, to disappear to a perhaps more enlightened elsewhere. As well as the philosophical/religious aspect of this metaphor there is also a political/sociological one. Tsuge’s semi-autobiographical heroes reject the materialism of mainstream society, or simply cannot relate to it. To be lazy, to refuse/fail to conform to the socially sanctioned image of the “salaryman” is a kind of statement, aligning one with a romantic, escapist, world-renouncing strand in Japanese culture. I discuss it as a masculine fantasy in a paper I published a few years ago: When Pillars Evaporate: Structuring Masculinity on the Japanese Margins.

Here I oppose the concept of evaporation/jôhatsu to that of the great pillar, or daikoku-bashira, which means both the central pillar supporting a house and a man who is the economic supporter of the household. I stumbled upon this theme while studying Japanese day labourers, the topic of my 2001 book from SUNY Press, Men of Uncertainty. This is why I am interested in Tsuge: he is a kind of hero of the jôhatsu side of Japanese culture. His comics, and also his essays, would no doubt appeal to the more thoughtful day labourer. It may be a translator’s little joke, but the prize-winning memoir of a day labourer, San’ya Gakeppuchi Nikki (A Diary of Life on the Brink in San’ya [a slum district of Tokyo]) was rendered into English as A Man with No Talents – essentially the same title as Tsuge’s book-length manga Munô na Hito, translated into French as L’Homme sans talent. The author of that book is totally anonymous, using the pseudonym Ôyama Shiro, and shuns publicity as Tsuge does.

What I am trying to say is that though Tsuge Yoshiharu is a unique artist/autor, he did not spring out of thin air. He is rooted in a strong tradition of world-renouncing, foot-loose, romantic losers. Like Tsuge and his fictionalized protagonists, day labourers traditionally drift from town to town, stay in the cheapest possible inns, and have no clear idea of their future. The Tsuge protagonist is described as a tramp or vagabond (clochard) in the interview you cite, probably a translation of “furôsha” – day labourers are frequently described similarly. Here is a short extract from my paper, which may be relevant to this discussion. In it I discuss what happens when older day labourers give up the struggle to make a living out of manual labour and apply for welfare.

getting welfare does inevitably affect one’s personal identity. Solitary day laborers have already abandoned or rejected the image of the daikoku-bashira as a man supporting a household; once they apply for welfare, they effectively admit that they cannot even support themselves.… Thus themes of strength and weakness, independence and dependence, mobility and immobility, twine themselves around the day laborer’s career and changing identity.

Protean Passivity at the Margins
These ambiguities are expressed in some of the language associated with day laboring. They often describe themselves as having “drifted” (nagareru) into the doya-gai (skid-row district), a term that elegantly combines the concepts of mobility and passivity. The imagery surrounding these drifting day laborers is often liquid and piscine. They are called ‘angler-fish’ (ankô) as they wait on the seabed of society for a job to come along. They may be caught in abusive labor camps called ‘octopus traps’ (tako-beya). When a man is mugged while sleeping in the street they call the incident a ‘tuna’ (maguro), likening the victim to a tuna helpless on a sushi chef’s chopping board. Day laborers who fail to get a job say they have ‘overflowed’ from the market (abureru); if depressed they may ‘drown themselves’ (oboreru) in vice; and when troubles appear insurmountable, they may disappear overnight, or as they put it, ‘evaporate’ (jôhatsu suru).

So Tsuge’s little fish comes from a strong cultural tradition in which fish and their environment are metaphors for the human condition. Consider also Tsuge’s salamander, and the floating fetus, in my previous contribution to the Hooded Utilitarian.

In the interview you cite, Tsuge describes a particularly literal and personal case of “evaporation” – when he decided to leave Tokyo, abandon his entire life, taking a train to Kyushu where he hopes to marry and settle down with a female fan of his work whom he has never met. (It is interesting to note that where male escape fantasies often include leaving one’s wife and family, for Tsuge married life is part of his post-evaporation scenario. Loneliness and desire are always in the mix for Tsuge.) He goes through numerous distractions, and actively considers marrying a couple of other women he meets on the way, but in the end he gives up and returns to Tokyo. The adventure is described in one of his essays, “Diary of an Evaporation Journey” (“Jôhatsu Tabi Nikki”), written in 1969, published in Yakô (Night Journey) magazine in 1981, and republished in his 1991 collection, Records of a Poor Man’s Travels (Hinkon Ryokôki)

He discusses it in the interview you cite, alluding to the final line, in which he states that he is now married with a kid, but feels that maybe this is his evaporated self. The implication seems to be that we cannot necessarily distinguish between the life we think we are actually living and those that we think we are merely imagining.

Anyway… yes, there is a desire expressed in the Nishibeta story to be like that little fish in the final frame, to swim away, down the river, destination unknown. Have you ever felt like doing that?

You can read all HU posts on Tsuge here.

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

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Tom Gill

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

_______________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fig. 3 The search party

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

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

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

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

Fig. 4: The shrine in the jungle

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

Fig. 5: Watching the search party disappear

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

Fig. 6: Encountering the escapee

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

Fig. 7: A good spot for dace

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

Fig. 8: The escapee trapped in a fishing hole

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

Fig 9: Back to the sanatorium

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

Fig. 10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REFERENCES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Gill on Tsuge and Tatsume

Posted on July 3, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

Tom Gill has posted a lengthy comment on his essay about Tsuge and Tatsume and fetuses in the sewer from a bit back. I thought I’d reprint it here just to make sure it doesn’t get lost in the internets.

To all the readers who commented on my paper “Fetuses in the Sewer: A comparative study of classic 1960s manga by Tatsumi Yoshihiro and Tsuge Yoshiharu.”

First, many thanks for taking the trouble to read my paper and comment on it; and apologies for taking a very long time to get round to responding. I moved back to Japan from England in April and all my manga and stuff were on a ship for two months, and then there was the Great Tohoku Disaster as an added distraction. Anyway, let me respond now as best I can.

Several people asked how come Tsuge does not get translated into English more. I have heard the following theories, some here at HU, others from friends:

1. Some say the work is too challenging to interest mainstream publishers. Indeed, it is does make more demands on the reader that Tatsumi’s punch-in-the-face approach. Who’s to say whether it would sell?
2. Some say Tsuge has usually refused to allow his work to be translated because of bad experiences in the past. It probably did not help that The Comics Journal got his name wrong on the front cover of their 2005 special issue on Manga Masters. Calling him “Yoshihiro” (that being Tatsumi’s name) may have made it a teeny bit worse.
3. Someone here on HU said that Tsuge does not like the damage done to the flow of the visual narrative when manga get “flipped” when translated into English, though as Ian S pointed out, he has had a substantial chunk of work translated into French.
4. Yet another rumour has it that Tsuge promised the translation rights to some long lost friend in America who has never made use of them.

If anyone knows the truth of the matter, please do share.

Noah Berlatsky says: Here the representation and the reality are both in flux and swimming around each other.
— A very astute comment, and one that speaks to other Tsuge comics too. One reason why people have such a hard time responding to his famous work Neiji-shiki (Screw Style) is because they want to decode it, to refer symbols to reality when in fact neither is solid enough to allow such a reading. My main objection to Masashi Shimizu’s Freudian commentaries on Tsuge is that he thinks such a systematic decoding is possible, which sometimes leads him into far-fetched assertions.

Noah Berlatsky says: I was thinking about Anne Allison’s book Permitted and Prohibited Desires…
– Yes, it is interesting to speculate that the “absent father” may be hovering off-stage in these productions. Theories emphasizing Japan’s uniqueness are deeply unfashionable these days, which may explain why Shimizu never references Kosawa Heisaku (Anne Allison’s principle reference for alternative non-Oedipal development in Japan), or Doi Takeo, another absent father theorist well-known outside Japan, preferring to follow a relentlessly orthodox Freudian line in his analyses. In my paper on Tsuge’s ‘The Incident at Nishibeta Village’, recently published in IJOCA (spring 2011) I describe how Shimizu makes a large boulder stand in for a father figure in one of these forced interpretations.

Anyway…it seems like that might link up somehow with the fascination with fetuses you’re talking about here. It’s more direct with Tatsumi; the flip side of his misogyny is disempowerment fantasies; identifying with the fetus as revenge against the all-powerful feminine and as a capitulation to it. The bleak vision seems less like a look at the dark realities of life than an excuse to crawl back into the womb.

– Identifying with the fetus? A lot of horrible things are done to fetuses in Tatsumi’s comics. And also there are moments of tenderness – the window-cleaner carrying his daughter’s baby on his back in The Washer, for instance. I think a careful look at the role of fetuses/babies in these Tatsumi works shows that he is not quite as blunt and predictable as some readers seem to think.

>> Tsuge it’s harder to pin down…he’s more playing with the notion of returning to the womb than he is in thrall to it, perhaps?

– I think you are probably on target there.

>> As you say, the salamander seems like both sperm and fetus. If it’s pushing the fetus out to be born, it could also be in some sense the mother, or associated with the mother. A sperm dreaming it’s a mother, maybe? Or at least dreaming it’s gone back to the womb…though a womb reimagined as post-apocalyptic eden, too.

— With Tsuge, all is possible.

Maybe that makes sense of the womb/freedom symbolism you’re seeing in the water? That is, if the Oedipal relationship is reimagined so that mothers are actually the lawgivers, then it makes sense to think of the womb as not just safety but freedom.

— I don’t really get this.

ryanholmberg says:
Tom, I enjoyed your piece. Nice to read a baseline analysis of Tsuge and Tatsumi’s heavy-handed symbolism.

— I think you are rather unfair to both authors to call their symbolism heavy-handed.

>> There’s an interview between Tsuge and Tatsumi in Garo in 1971 that you should read. There Tatsumi more or less admits that Tsuge’s Garo work is what inspired Tatsumi’s circa 1970 stuff.

— Any chance of a photocopy?

>> The knocking-off is painfully obvious in some cases, and the work you have analyzed is not even the most extreme. Tatsumi produced some interesting things in the 50s, but most of his 60s material is just plain junk. Were it not for Tsuge, Tatsumi would probably have disappeared.

— I would not call Tatsumi’s 60s work plain junk. I much enjoyed reading these works. They are page turners. Then again, I also enjoy listening to loud, repetitive punk rock music. For me, Tatsumi is Johnny Rotten to Tsuge’s Roger Waters. That said, there does some to be fairly obvious ripping-off going on here. I am beginning to wonder if Adrian Tomine ever reads the postings here, and if so, whether he is going to jump in and launch a spirited defence of Tatsumi.

>> A couple corrections: Tsuge was not plucked out of oblivion by Nagai in 1965. He had already been making comics for close to a decade and was well-known in the kashihon circuit and even published work in mass-print magazines.

— I do of course know that Tsuge had already published a lot of stuff, Ryan, but is it not also true that Tsuge’s career was fairly moribund by 1965, and that Nagai heard he was struggling, wanted to help, couldn’t find anyone who knew of his whereabouts, and finally had to find him by putting a notice in Garo asking him to come forward and make himself known? Such at least is the legend… I’ve read it several times.

>> You also write that both artists wrote plenty of gangster yarns, ghost stories, and samurai bloodbaths in the 50s. I have not read everything by either of these artists, but from what I have I would to say that this incorrect. Tatsumi wrote very very few pieces set in the premodern period, and the one that I have seen was most certainly not a samurai bloodbath, but rather a ghost story set in the Edo era.

– You are probably right about Tatsumi. I wrote rather casually there, I must confess.

>> Tsuge also to my knowledge did not write that many gangster pieces (that was more a Gekiga Studio thing). He did write a number of samurai swashbucklers in the 50s, but the bloody samurai pieces didn’t come until around 1960, after Shirato Sanpei’s Ninja bugeicho made dismembered and splattered blood a prerequisite for the genre. Now that most of Tsuge’s pre-Garo work is in bunko (paperback), it should be easy to check this.

— Tsuge’s 1950s samurai bloodbaths include ‘Namida no Adauchi’ (The Tears of Revenge, 1955, 128pp.), ‘Sen’un no Kanata’ (Beyond the Clouds of War, 1955, 144 pp.), ‘Norawareta Katana’ (The Cursed Sword, 1958, 12pp.), leading into a series of four stories derived from the life and legend of swordsman Miyamoto Musashi in 1960. OK, that’s not strictly the 50s. His gangster yarns include ‘Hannin wa Dare da?’ (Who is the Criminal?, 1957, 40pp.), ‘Akatsuki no Hijousen’ (The Dawn Emergency Line, 1957, 66pp.), ‘San’nin no Toubousha’(Three Escapees, 1958,48pp), ‘Oyabun’ (The Boss), 1958, 20pp..
On the matter of bloodiness, I think you perhaps exaggerate Shirato Sanpei’s originality here. Tagawa Suiho has plenty of heads and limbs flying around the place in his 1930s Norakuro comics, for instance; Shirato’s contribution is more in the brilliant penmanship than the old ultraviolence itself, no?

ryanholmberg says:
I agree with Noah that if one is going to pursue some sort of psychoanalytical frame for Tsuge, you have to deal with the general absence of fathers. The wrench-carrying suit in Nejishiki could be read as a father figure, but otherwise they are pretty absent from Tsuge`s work, no? And when they do appear, they seem to be background color and not allegorical symbols.

— I think that in this Garo period, Tsuge typically has a male protagonist trying to come to terms with women, represented by actual women/girls he encounters on his travels, or by a feminized landscape, such as that of the Marsh (Numa). It is an obsession, and doesn’t seem to leave much room for fathers – or indeed for mothers, save as attenuated symbolic wombs like the one the salamander has found himself in.

>> Second, I think the Ibuse Masuji short story (which non-Japanese readers can read in Ibuse`s Salamander anthology) deserves more than a footnote, regardless of what Tsuge says about it himself. There is obviously more than a passing resemblance, and it is certainly more important than Western existentialist writing.

— You are right about this, though I wondered whether Hooded Utilitarian readers had enough interest in Japanese literature to warrant a full discussion. Tsuge freely admits borrowing from Ibuse – it is a famous story, a cameo literary classic, and by using the same title for his own work, Tsuge invites comparison. The offhand comment I mentioned him making about the Ibuse story in conversation with Gondo is typical of his sometimes infuriating reluctance to seriously grapple with his influences. I would make the following observations:

1. Tsuge has certainly borrowed the basic idea of the salamander as an existential figure from Ibuse’s story (first written around 1919; published in 1929). Both salamanders are literally in a hole, and forced by their predicament to reflect on the meaning of life. Even the way Tsuge’s salamander talks – or thinks out loud – sometimes recalls Ibuse’s salamander. Both are reflective, lugubrious voices, moody and sometimes capable of humour.
2. But this is creative adaptation, not plagiarism. Ibuse’s salamander is trapped in a very small cave, where Tsuge’s is relatively free, to wonder through the high-ceilinged labyrinth of a massive system of sewers. And where Ibuse’s salamander goes through a series of moods over a period of two years, we see Tsuge’s in a fleeting moment of his existence. His reflections make it clear that he has made a distinct progress, from disgust at his fetid environment to acceptance and even pleasure at the chance encounters that come his way. The final frame, in which he swims off into an ethereal light, is far from the image of permanent entrapment in Ibuse’s yarn. Whether that light signifies death/rebirth/enlightenment or what, it is probably better than just being stuck in a cave. So Tsuge’s salamander enjoys a lot more freedom of movement than Ibuse’s.
3. On the other hand, Ibuse’s salamander is considerably less isolated than Tsuge’s. He has a series of encounters with other animals – some killifish, a shrimp, then a frog. Tsuge’s salamander is completely alone – all the other animals we see are dead, except possibly for one water-rat glimpsed in a single frame. Hence the nightmarish, post-apocalyptic atmosphere of Tsuge’s piece. Ibuse’s salamander, though trapped, is at least in a familiar natural world. Outside his cave is a bright pool teeming with life. Who knows what lies outside the sewer inhabited by Tsuge’s salamander?
4. Both salamanders show a malicious streak, Ibuse’s trapping a frog to share his confinement, Tsuge’s head-butting the fetus he encounters. Despite his brutal behavior towards the frog, who is dying of starvation by the end of the story, Ibuse’s salamander is finally forgiven by the frog, and the story fades out ends on a note of quiet resignation. At least they have each other. In Tsuge, the fetus is not so much bullied as discarded, being too alien to the salamander’s experience to be understood. Again, there’s a deep isolation here that we do not find in the Ibuse story. Going back to Noah’s comment about use of metaphor, if Tsuge’s story is a metaphor for the human condition, then the arrival of a real human, albeit an unborn/still-born fetus, is a gross intrusion by the signified upon the world of the signifier. This may help to explain the deeply unsettling atmosphere of the Tsuge story.
5. Ibuse’s story is told through several voices: that of the salamander, those of the shrimp and the frog, and an authorial voice which invites the reader to laugh at or sympathise with the salamander. Tsuge has boiled the narrative down to a single interior monologue as the solitary salamander ruminates in solitude. The absence of authorial voice or other characters leaves the story more intense and focused than Ibuse’s.

In short, I think the interplay between these two salamanders adds a fascinating further layer of complexity and density to this little 7-page vignette for those who are familiar with the Ibuse story.

>> This isn`t the only story Tsuge borrowed liberally from.

— Tell me more!

>> Also, I feel like an artist can get that “existential” feel from anywhere, from life as much as from books. Probably a better track of interpretation would be to go back to the beginning of your essay and try to explain this through demographic or historical context.

— I don’t quite follow. Please tell me more.

>> I will probably post a related piece about Numa on TCJ sometime in the summer, so I will leave my thoughts for now at that.

— I look forward to seeing that piece.

>>e reason I made the comment last week about what sorts of genres who was working in in the 50s was because I think it’s important to see how both Tatsumi and Tsuge started in a detective-thriller mode. However they diverged in the early and mid 60s, I think their re-convergence in the late 60s is in part a return to those 50s origins.

— Thanks for the clarification.

Ryan Holmberg has responded here.

I’ve closed comments on this post. If you have a response, please put it on the original post.

Ryan Holmberg on Tsuge and Tatsumi

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

Ryan Holmberg has left a bunch of interesting comments on Suat’s essay about Tatsumi. I thought I’d highlight some of them here.

Here’s the first.

I realize I am commenting on a two-month old post, but I just now read it.

I agree with the basic crux of this analysis of Tatsumi. I think it is harsh but fair when it comes to metaphor and sexual values. In that era of Tatsumi’s work every oblong is a phallus and every hole a vagina, no doubt, and the misogyny is unmistakable.

Given this – given that Tatsumi’s work is unsubtle – I have to say your review is about as obvious as Tatsumi’s work. I sympathize with the desire to serve up a corrective to the promotional garbage that fills the press, but you are fighting straw men. I am not sure if you are saying much more than what any of us who have had doubts about Tatsumi’s glory have thought at one time or the other.

You were fairly generous about the menstrual flowers in Tsuge’s Red Flowers. Why is it that clichéd sexual euphemisms are okay in a pastoral “literary” genre but not in pulp? Is the problem that the cicadas and babbling brooks are peeled away?

Also, on what basis are Tatsumi’s drawings “crude” and “inept”? For the most part (some exceptions), they seem pretty finished to me, and work perfectly well for what he was trying to do. “Unpolished skills?” He was a 15-year veteran in 1970.

“A failure to move beyond what remains totally acceptable in modern day manga”? You mean manga then? If so, tell me who was doing stories like Tatsumi’s in 1970, aside from Tsuge. Second, Tatsumi was black-listed by Shonen Magazine, supposedly (according to Tatsumi in “Gekiga kurashi”) after their print-run fell after publishing one of his works) – clearly he was not “totally acceptable.”

Also, “Tatsumi was no different from those individuals (the factory mangaka)”? Just on the basis of a lack of character types? I think you also mention pressing deadlines as a reason for how the work looks the way it does. I doubt it. At this point, he was writing for very few weeklies (this changes in the mid 70s, after the period in question). An artist like him with a 15 year career, having produced hundreds of pages a month for many years, do you think writing one 20 page story per month was rush work? At least be generous enough to assume that the artist knew what he was doing and had complete control over the product. He might not have been a poet or a Kojima Goseki-caliber draftsman, but he was also not an amateur.

Again, I sympathize with your basic distaste. But not with the venting.

And here’s a follow up.

The difference in finish between Projectionist and Forked Road is obvious, and as you pointed out it probably has something to do with Tatsumi`s circumstances at the end of the 60s. (Side note: your quote about Tatsumi having a bunch of artists working for him…I think that means artists writing comics for the magazine-anthologies he was publishing, not assistants for his own work…but I will have to check this.) But first of all Projectionist-type crude drawing has a long tradition in kashihon comics in Japan (this is the point where is moving from kashihon to magazines), so I don`t think it can be chalked up to lack of time or skill, and the increase in finish over those two years also has to do with the different standards of the manga monthlies and weeklies, not just a personal aesthetic decision on Tatsumi`s part. That doesnt make the work better or worse, but I think one should, especially when critiquing an artist so harshly, have some consideration for context.

And one more.

Just quickly, on Imamura, I haven’t watched these in years, but the Pornographers maybe, Insect Woman, Ningen johatsu (probably not in English). They are much more humorous than Tatsumi, but there is some overlapping setting and gender views. The impact of Nikkatsu films is also big on all of the Gekiga artists, from the Action stuff to the romantic stuff. To me, Tatsumi belongs in that world.

As for Tatsumi’s busy schedule in the late 60s, when he started doing those dirty-men stories. His prose (versus manga) autobiography “Gekiga kurashi,” published last year, has a bit on this period. It says in short, the mid 60s were a difficult time. Then an editor from a second-tier magazine name Gekiga Young commissioned 2 x 8 pages a month from him, which he claims was hard work given his publishing venture. The editor apparently requested lots of revisions, less speech balloons, etc for a tighter more visual product. I would have to check, but these are probably the short works in Pushman. He also thanks the editor for getting him inspired about making manga again.

Later, he talks about how he had a long standing feeling against using assistants, arguing that one’s work should be one’s own. He says that in 1974 he had to swallow his pride and hire two assistants to complete a commission from Shukan Manga Sunday (a weekly). I will have to do more poking around, but the way things are worded here is that this was a turning point in the way he made comics. Maybe at the height of his popularity in the late 50s he had assistants, but given the economic difficulties of kashihon publishing in the mid 60s, I doubt he had them then.

Do click through the links, as there are additional remarks by Ryan, and comments by Suat and others.

Fetuses in the Sewer

Posted on March 15, 2011 by Tom Gill

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discussion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REFERENCES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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

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

[2] Historical Abortion Statistics Japan [back]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BIO

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

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

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