Haruki Murakami. Adapted by Jean-Christophe Deveney and illustrated by PMGL. Haruki Murakami: Manga Stories. New York: Tuttle, 2023. 144 pp. $19.99. ISBN 9784805317648. https://www.tuttlepublishing.com/japan/haruki-murakami-manga-stories-1-9784805317648
In the past two decades in Japan,
there has been much effort to adapt classic literary works into manga for
Japanese audiences. Many simply fall
flat. This is true in the West as it is in
Japan. Gems like Robert Crumb’s
adaptation of Kafka or Genesis appear far and few between. The scale is even worse in Japan. For one such
as Taniguchi Jirō Summit of the Gods, there will be ten more manga versions
of novels that are so bad, so poorly conceived, so unskillfully rendered that
one can only imagine this latter group was simply made for cheap profit. To render literary greatness into
visual-storytelling greatness may not be the main consideration for publishers. In Japan today, much as it was one hundred
years ago, publishers put out classic world literature in translations that
Japanese adults and children could enjoy. There has been and still is a hunger
by readers to experience, in a digestible form, manga that captures some of the parent
work’s literary greatness. Manga is an
easy vehicle for that. The worst of such
series in Japan undoubtedly have to be those by East Press in their “Break-thru
Reading” (Dokuha) series, where uncredited artists adapted into cheap
200 yen mini-paperbacks canonical works, such as Marx’s Capital, Natsume
Sōseki’s Kokoro, Miyazawa Kenji’s Night on the Milky Way Railway (Ginga
tetsudō no yoru), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenna, and even haiku poet
Masaoka Shiki’s My Six Foot Sickbed.[1] A proud owner of these books I am not, but,
as a professor of both Japanese literature and manga, one must try to know what
is going on in one’s field. I was surprised
to see Tuttle Publishing, a major publisher of Japanese literary works in
translation for decades, channel their energies into translating and adapting
classic and important Japanese writers into manga. I turn my attention to their recent manga
adaptation of four short stories by the world-famous and almost-Nobel-Prize-winner
Murakami Haruki. I am sad to report that
Murakami Haruki: Manga Stories is a dismal work of illustration and
comic-book adaptation that is headed for the trash bin.
I can understand why Tuttle would
try their hand at manga adaptations, especially of a celebrated writer like
Murakami, who has a huge following in Japan as well as in most countries across
the globe. Adapted by Jean-Christophe
Deveney probably first into French and illustrated by PMGL, these short stories
are bound in a beautiful, solid hardcover of about 150 pages for $19.99. Given that a short story collection by
Murakami retails for about the same price, it might seem a sensible price point
set by Tuttle. However, there is little
inside to justify the price let alone this effort in “manga form” (back cover
blurb). Why not just buy the master’s
short story collections in English, like after the quake or Birthday
Stories (both from Vintage International)?
The magic of “closure” actually would be experienced more in English
translation by Jay Rubin instead of the poor, uninspired translatorese by
Deveney. The images are an insult to the
imaginative power that lurks in Murakami’s well-crafted short stories.
Illustrated by PMGL (a.k.a., Koffi
Gnato), these stories were published each separately in Japan in a booklet
format as part of a series entitled Murakami Haruki: 9 Stories (Switch Publishing)
from 2017 to 2021. Each of the “9
Stories” sold for approximately 1700 yen (or something like $15-$20 at the
time), so Tuttle’s collecting four of the stories into this format for $19.99
is something of a steal for Murakami fanatics who have might have been tempted to
buy the originals from Japanese booksellers, like amazon.co.jp. In France, Delcourt collected all nine
Deveney-PMGL adaptations in one volume (Murakami: Le septième homme et
autres récits, 2021) for a reasonable price, like Tuttle. For our English-language version, Tuttle published
four stories in one volume, featuring “The Seventh Man” (2020), “Where I’m
Likely to Find It” (2019), “Birthday Girl” (2018), and “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo”
(2017). Tuttle will collect the
remaining five stories of the nine in two separate follow-up volumes. Volume 2,
with the stories “The Second Bakery Attack,” “Samsa in Love,” and “Thailand”
was published this past spring.
Anyone who has read Murakami before
will recognize “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” which is the first story in the
collection. In the after the quake
collection (2002 in English; originally published in Japanese in 2000 with the
title Kami no kodomo-tachi wa mina odoru [All God’s Children Can
Dance]),[2]
this story is perhaps the most central of the six as they all in some way touch
on the Kobe Earthquake of 1995 that devastated this major metropolitan area in
central Japan. Murakami’s after the quake
stories show a battered, traumatized Japanese populace—no one really goes
unaffected by the natural disaster—but he also presents a snapshot of Japanese at
their most callous, most uninterested, and most disconnected time in the
twentieth century. The characters are all essentially empty shells walking
around their lives’ empty boxes (an important motif across all the tales). It is one of Murakami’s greatest and most
focused efforts to capture the Japanese people and their culture instead of his
typical (and forte) tendency to show the world from the perspective of a
largely inarticulate male first-person boku character, who usually is a
stand-in for Murakami. “Super-Frog” as a
story is thus quite interesting because it traces a strange encounter that a
washed-up and older schlub, a boring bank collections manager, has with a giant
frog who appears in his apartment one evening and asks for his cooperation to
stop a giant subterranean Worm from unleashing a giant earthquake upon
Tokyo. More than the magical fantasy
element so common in many of Murakami’s works, this post-middle-aged bank
representative is a portrait not of the artist but of the greater people of
Tokyo, “people like you” (p. 20).
“Super-Frog” is a special Murakami story because the author turned his
lens on regular Japanese in the 1990s, sympathizing with them: even though such “ordinary people” like the
protagonist Katagiri might be completely hum-drum, “no good at sports,”
“tone-deaf,” “losing their hair,” and bad in the sack (p. 16), Frog (and by extension
Murakami) praises them for being “trustworthy,” “quietly responsible,” never
showing any hesitation to “enter the lion’s den” that shows their “courage
[which] can only inspire respect!” (p. 15)—even though they may know nothing of
the greatness of Anna Karenna. In
a strange Murakami-esque twist, the Super-Frog turns to the Japanese Everyman
to stave off another disaster that would kill thousands and further demoralize
the downtrodden public. How should this
genius story, which is all at once humorous, incredible, and inspiring, be
visualized in comic form? That I cannot
say, but I found Deveney and PMGL’s handling of both the imagery and the panel
layouts to be extremely uninspired.
Their “Super Frog” manga is representative of their overall failure to
translate Murakami into a visual medium. This is not “manga Murakami.” It is illustrated-book Murakami. As if anyone really needed such a thing.
Across their twenty-page story, most
panels are simply talking heads. PMGL
takes a combined realistic and exaggerated style to portray the two main
characters. Katagiri is drawn with warts
and all: his widow’s peak, his bald
patches, his wrinkly face all show a kind of specificity that clearly places
him past “middle age.” The artist is
capable of animating that face with exaggerated expressions to enhance more
feeling into the otherwise dry dialogue script.
Frog, for his part, is drawn usually in a hard, heavily realistic
manner. The art looks like it is done
with watercolors at times. Frog is given a naturalistic depiction in colors
(not all Manga Stories are done in color). It is clear that PMGL loves to draw and paint
frogs. Occasionally, Frog is given a more
iconic and cartoony treatment when he howls with laughter or just acting more
like a human than a frog. This sway
between what Scott McCloud would call the scale of reality and icon is what
begins to destabilize this adaptation of Murakami’s story. The reader of the manga, unlike the prose
story, is forced to think this actually is real, after all. In the original Murakami story, the reader
instead can continually forestall any closure on deciding if the events in the
story are real, a dream, a metaphor for the shattered Bubble-Economy Japan, and
so on. Why must be decide one way or the
other? Deveney, PMGL, and Tuttle force us to see things with only one poor
possibility.
Another problem that the
storytellers have with their original material is the way that they lay out the
panels. None of their panel transitions
or page layouts is all that inspired (see pp. 10-11, Figure 1). Most panels simply vacillate between one
talking head to the next. This is not
comics as much as it is storyboarding for an anime short series. All the panels really do is show that
“Katagiri said” and then “Frog said” (markers which are almost never present in
the original Murakami). Truth be told,
one must keep in mind that Murakami’s story really only consists of two characters
talking to each other; asking and answering questions; recounting events for
the listener to visualize. In other
words, nothing actually happens in the original story. That is why it is a bit of a headscratcher
for me why they chose to render this piece into “manga form.” It has a charming frog character that must be
fun to draw for PMGL. Perhaps that’s
why.
Another cause for headscratching is
the choice to have the onomatopoeia in the original Japanese (written in
Romanization) by Misato Morita. In fact,
these sound effects are not in the Murakami story and were creatively added as
“original onomatopoeia” by Morita. How
an Anglophone reader is supposed to make sense of “GERO GERO” and “JIRI JIRI”
is beyond my comprehension as a Japanese language teacher. I suspect that Delcourt and Tuttle believed
that readers can automatically grasp these nuanced comic-book words by
osmosis. No one in the post-pandemic
world apparently needs to study Japanese anymore—it’s all intuited.
All
that being said, in “Super-Frog,” there were a few chances for the creative
team to employ some interesting layouts, but with this, too, those
opportunities go wasted at their hands.
For example, when Frog paints a horrific picture of all the kind of
devastation that could result from Worm’s triggering the next Great Tokyo
Earthquake, Murakami lists all the kinds of causalities, infrastructure damage,
vain attempts to rescue and save the victims.
In the manga story, PMGT uses nearly all of one page in six
“scene-to-scene” panel transitions (to borrow McCloud’s concept) that are truly
sad—not because of the graphic depiction of human suffering, but because of the
artist’s limited imagination. Human
suffering and devastation are implied by proxy.
A panel with a hand reaching up out of the ground next to a tennis shoe
and a doll does not convey the horror of Worm.
Likewise, a perpendicular slab of concrete splitting a sedan into two in
the next panel is symbolic of the kind of widespread destruction to property,
but that seems to be all the devastation the artist could muster himself to
draw. With the stakes visualized thus
for both the reader and for Katagiri, it is hard to fathom why Katagiri, in the
next panel on the following page, is so impacted and reacts with such silence. The visual setup is poor, so the payoff is
poor. Further proof of the artist’s
failure to take advantage of the comic form and the power of illustration is
seen on the following page (p. 14), where PMGL attempts to convey the horror of
Worm in a splash page that fails because of the murky tones that make it really
impossible to see Worm. Admittedly,
Murakami describes him as “having no mouth or anus,” so it might be really
impossible to make heads or tails of this mythical creature, but PMGL’s attempt
just confuses the reader: are we
supposed to see something that isn’t really there? One would expect a greater creative payoff
from the artist who dedicates a full page to the villain of the story. In conclusion, given the original story
itself almost seems to resist adaptation because of its talky pacing and unclear
descriptions, the creative team really painted themselves into a corner by
taking on a story like this, which ultimately depends on a large imaginative
contribution from its reader. However,
good manga shouldn’t be like that. Good
manga can make use of quiet or simply non-verbal scenes to convey mood or
feeling (I know I sound like a hardcore McCloudian here). But Deveney and PMGL’s manga trades nuance
and suggestion of the original for verbal noise and overwrought visualizations.
In
fact, all four stories in the tome are guilty of these sins. Having read the original stories, I can
attest that the other three fail to capture the brilliance of Murakami’s
fiction. In another after the quake story,
“Honey Pie,” who does feature a Murakami-esque male writer character, that
first-person narrator-character decides to change his style and focus, wanting
instead to “write about people who dream and wait of the night to end, who long
for the light so they can hold the ones they love.”[3]
No one reading Tuttle’s Manga Stories would feel that kind of Murakami magic
from this sham of a manga. Manga
Stories is, at best, a coffee-table book one puts out to catch the eye of
guests at a party to desperately show off one’s literary taste.
[1] For a discussion of the failures
of East Press and their adaptation of Shiki’s My Six-Foot Sickbed, see my
“Literature Short on Time” in Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese
Literature, edited by Rachael Hutchinson and Leith Morton, (Routledge,
2016), 26-41.
[2] For the English-language
collection of these stories, Murakami insisted that the title appear entirely
in lowercase.
[3] Haruki Murakami , after the quake, trans. Jay Rubin, (New York: Vintage International, 2002), 147.
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