Exhibit Review: Background at the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology in Poland

 Reviewed by José Alaniz, University of Washington, Seattle

Background. Ewa Borysiewicz, Barbara Trojanowska, and Jakub Woynarowski (curators); Bartek Buczek and Emilia Kina (exhibit designers); and Magda Budzyńska (graphic designer). Kraków, Poland: Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology. May 17 - September 15, 2024. https://manggha.pl/en

Fig 1. The exhibition space for Background at the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology. Photo by José Alaniz.  

 

 With a field of vision encompassing what felt like a US football field, the cavernous confines of Kraków’s Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology[1] proved the ideal venue for “Background,” an exhibit all about spatial relationships in art and life.

Curated by two art historians and an artist,[2] the exhibit centered, in the words of its introduction:

the role of the background as an active component, one that interacts with its surroundings. Its agency lies in its capacity to initiate and influence events. This, however, unfolds along a logic different from human reasoning. The background engages in interactions with characters, but its influence is more subtle than that exerted by human actions.

Rather than positioning “background” and “characters” in mutual opposition, we aim to present them as complementary elements of a narrative. We seek to highlight a mode of experiencing reality that is not solely centered on human narration but open to non-human perspectives, conveyed through representations of natural features and elements such as rocks, water, wind and plants. These enable narratives to unfold outside human measures of time and often independently of human notions of purposefulness, tending to focus on utility.

     And while the exhibit’s focus resonated with the Humanities’ turn to Posthumanism and New Materialism – e.g. Mel Chen on animacy, or Jane Bennet’s “vibrant matter” – Background destabilized other oft-unexamined presumptions in art, like the distinction between original and copy, the standard account of modern art’s development in Western Europe, even the traditional hierarchies about what counts as art and gallery space.[3] As the introduction further put it: “Dividing the spheres in which people realize themselves creatively into ‘pop culture’ and ‘high culture’ is an arbitrary convention.” Take that, Clement Greenberg!

Even the conventional gallery lighting scheme was subverted, with vast stretches of darkness as central to the experience as were the angled wooden vitrines (elegantly crafted works of art in their own right) designed by Bartek Buczek.

Moreover, exploring these aesthetic/philosophical matters through Japanese graphic narrative and related forms made tremendous sense, given manga’s well-known use of interludes, unpeopled landscapes and other contemplative modes that punctuate the storytelling in ways relatively rare in more “action-driven” national traditions.

Attempts to dethrone the primacy of foreground figures in Western European and US comics have mostly been the province of the avant garde; cue “posthuman” cinematic works like Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961) (to pick one prominent postwar example). In comics, we have experiments like the Swiss artist Niklaus Rüegg’s SPUK (Thesen gegen den Frühling) (“Spook: Theses on Spring,” 2004), which removed all the characters from a set of classic Donald Duck comics, leaving only the settings (empty rooms, bare lawns). Perhaps no Westerner has done as much in this vein as the conceptualist Greek-Belgian artist Ilan Manouach; see his Noirs (2014), in which the background in a sense overflows the foreground, such that the “black” Smurfs blend in to the point of illegibility.

As the show’s organizers declare, the value of foregrounding background comes down to how the move nudges a viewer to displace a human-centered positionality, even a single-point perspective, in favor of a broader understanding of space/time – to such a degree that some works abandon the figure itself, passing on to abstraction. And again, while we see some of this in the “inverted perspective” of Byzantine religious art, Background demonstrates that Asian artists were doing this for much longer and in more diverse ways. In fact, one of the ancillary lessons of the exhibit is how much of the material we might think of as modern has ancient correlates.

To that end, the exhibit featured reproductions of backgrounds used in cult anime productions; 19^th-century woodblock prints; comic books by Yuichi Yokoyama, Tiger Tateishi, Satoshi Kon and others; poster designs; textiles; ceramics; and video game elements by FromSoftware and Kojima Productions, to name a few.

Fig 2. Katsushika Hokusai. Woodblock print from his A Garden of Pictures (Kokusai Gaen, 1843), with waterfall as barcode. 

None stopped me in my tracks like two works from the famed master Katsushika Hokusai (of The Great Wave Off Kanagawa fame). An ukiyo-e print from his A Garden of Pictures (Kokusai Gaen, 1843) shows a fairly conventional landscape dominated by a waterfall. But it’s how he renders the cascading water itself that struck me: with several vertical brushstrokes varying in thickness. They looked like a barcode. That same eerie time warp feeling – like seeing a period portrait of Abraham Lincoln with an iPad – was heightened still further by another Hokusai, a sample pattern from his Banshoku Zukô (Designs for All Artisans, 1835). Here he dispenses completely with figuration, leaving nothing but barcode. Mind-bending.

A series of large posters commemorating Japanese urban spaces by Koichi Sato approach the austerity of a Rothko in their utter refusal to straightforwardly depict their stated subjects. Instead, you get what resemble a colorful detail of a sunset in The Golden Pond (1995) or an effect of looking up at a starless sky in Urban Frontier — Tokyo ’96 (1996), with the off-frame city’s glow pulsing in the bottom half of the frame. A very full emptiness.

Whereas Koji Iyama’s Nippon poster series (n.d.), while strongly recalling the dour Suprematism of an El Lissitzky, takes a more playful approach. Iyama transmutes the Japanese word for Japan, Nippon (rendered in kanji as 日本), into increasingly abstract shapes of geometrical precision. Dominated by white space, these images dissolve the distinction between foreground and background – yet, quirkily, they still signify “Japan.” 

Fig 3. Koji Iyama’s Nippon poster series (n.d.), playing off the kanji rendering of the Japanese word for Japan.

For all its modernist sheen, though, Iyama’s posters have early 19^th-century roots, as pointed out to me by co-curator Woynarowski. It was then that Japanese monk/painter Sengai Gibon executed his ink drawing popularly known as Circle-Triangle-Square (Maru-sankaku-shikaku, ca. 1825), aka The Universe. Just as someone today might reflexively try to scan Hokusai’s waterfall with their phone, Sengai’s 200-year-old drawing would not look out of place in a 20^th-century avant garde exhibit. We may well read Iyama’s jokey Nippon series as an homage.

Background presented comic art primarily in book form, opened to ambient pages from Seiichi Hayashi’s Red-Colored Elegy (1970); Tiger Tateishi’s colorful Moon Trax (2023), showing non-representational shapes paired with/riffing off of Hokusai’s aforementioned famous wave (which brought to mind Eisenstein’s plasmatic line), as well as his Cheat Sheets (2023), its alien environments strongly recalling Jim Woodring’s Unifactor; and Yokoyama’s Travel (2006) and Garden (2011). 

Fig 4. Display of Yuichi Yokoyama’s works.

 

Fig 5. DayDream Gaming’s Elden Ring — Ambient Walking Tour (2023), based on the videogame Elden Ring (2022) by Hidetaka Miyazaki.

The latter, with their propulsive traversal of a surreal milieu, paired well with the YouTube channel DayDream Gaming’s Elden Ring — Ambient Walking Tour (2023), based on the videogame Elden Ring (2022) by Hidetaka Miyazaki, and Death Stranding – Relaxing Walking in the Rain (2023), based on the game Death Stranding (2019) by Hideo Kojima. 

Here there is no background – or if you will, everything is background, i.e. environs for the characters, backs turned, to explore. These videos last for hours, with no action other than the figure’s movement through the fantasy surroundings. The effect (I’m told) is hypnotic, mesmerizing, what Woynarowski called “a highly contemplative mode of storytelling.” Tarkovsky for the 21^st century. Or maybe Casper David Friedrich, his Romantic subject not just pondering the sea of fog, lording over it, but plunging into its animated depths.

The exhibit provided a number of wall-mounted screens for visitors to view the walking tours. It also displayed some pages from Elden Ring: Official Art Book Vol. II (2022), the better to appreciate the background art. 

Fig 6. DayDream Gaming’s Death Stranding – Relaxing Walking in the Rain (2023), based on the game Death Stranding (2019) by Hideo Kojima.

Another section sampled the detailed backgrounds from cult anime works like Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), coupled with clips and selections from the original manga version (1982), and other Studio Ghibli classics. I was taken by Toshiharu Mizutani’s Akira, Cut No. 1 (1988/2023), a lovely color solegraph of a Tokyo cityscape carved in twain by a massive thoroughfare, like the Grand Canyon. Mizutani served as art director on the film version of Akira (directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988).

Fig 7. Toshiharu Mizutani’s Akira, Cut No. 1 (1988/2023).

 Background was a triumph, the perfect marriage of subject, venue and execution. It more than fulfilled its remit, powerfully demonstrating how in these astounding Japanese works the background achieves a status as important as the actors – if not more so. I also very much appreciated how the show’s design encouraged the visitor to wander; it had no order, no beginning, no end. No foreground except what you chose.

“We didn’t want to create a linear story, but many existing stories,” said Woynarowski.  “This underlies our idea that there is no center in this structure, just as there’s no foreground and background. We wanted to focus on non-human environments, non-human stories. Of course, man is still present here, but it’s not the most important part of the story. It’s decentered.”

In our era of Anthropocene, with human activity destroying the planetary biosphere, nothing and no one can ever really escape … us. Woynarowski and I talked about that too as we navigated the gallery space. But to Background’s achievements I would add this: any experience that gets us to think – even momentarily – beyond human concerns and human egoism is crucial. It’s a step out of the very deep, very dark hole we’ve dug for ourselves.   

As the show’s introduction put it, “the background is not neutral: it has agency and is often governed by a non-human logic.”

That may be our only hope.  

 

[1] The Museum was founded in 1994 at the behest of film director Andrzej Wajda (1926-2016), a great devotee of Japanese culture.

[2] Borysiewicz is a co-editor of MOST, an online journal devoted to Eastern/Central European contemporary art/culture; Trojanowska is a curator at the Manggha Museum; and Jakub Woynarowski is a noted contemporary artist, comics artist and director of the Narrative Drawing Program at Kraków’s Academy of Fine Arts (see interview elsewhere in this volume).  

[3] Background even encompassed within itself an entirely separate, unrelated exhibit!

 

Graphic Novel Review: Kenji Miyazawa’s The Restaurant of Many Orders and Other Stories

 
reviewed by Jon Holt, Portland State University

Kenji Miyazawa.  Adapted by Yasuko Sakuno and translated by Moss Quanci.  Kenji Miyazawa’s The Restaurant of Many Orders and Other Stories.  North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle, 2024.  192 pp. $14.99.  ISBN 9784805318249. https://www.tuttlepublishing.com/japan/kenji-miyazawas-restaurant-of-many-orders-and-other-stories-9784805318249

                      

Billed as “the first manga version of three modern fables by Kenji Miyazawa one of Japan’s most read and best loved authors,” Tuttle’s next entry into their manga-ization of modern Japanese literature is the short and inexpensive collection of The Restaurant of Many Orders and Other Stories.  Those other stories are “The Acorns and the Wildcat” (“Donguri to yamaneko”) and “The Twin Stars” (“Futago no hoshi”).  The press release says that this book is “the first manga version” of Miyazawa’s work, but that is not true at all.  In fact, in the mid-1980s, Shio Shuppansha released a masterful five-volume “Manga House” (“Manga-kan”) anthology series that had some of the most amazing and varied artists of the day doing manga adaptations of Miyazawa’s stories into manga.  Witness that contributor list:  Mizuki Shigeru (Kitarō), Yamada Murasaki (Talk to My Back; Second-Hand Love), Nagashima Shinji (Mangaka zankoku monogatari), children’s picture-book artist Suzuki Kōji, manga artist and animator Murano Moribi, Hatanaka Jun (Mandaraya no Ryōta)—just for starters.[i]  For Tuttle’s book, we instead get Sakuno Yasuko (creator of The Conditions for Being a Princess [Himegimi no jōken], an 8-volume series published from 2002 to 2006).  As manga goes, Sakuno’s adaptation of these classic Miyazawa stories is passable.  She originally published these in Japan in 2010, according to the colophon.  Was her manga good enough to originally justify publishing in almost 200 pages, the equivalent of 47 pages of text (in Japanese)?  Was it then so good enough to republish her work, translated into English for a foreign audience?  After all, whether one reads the stories in Japanese or in English (as in John Bester’s superb translations of the same stories), one could probably actually enjoy the originals in less time than it takes to read them in this manga adaptation. 

If we put that aside, there are some merits to Sakuno’s manga adaptation of this children’s story author, who in Japan has a stature like that of Lewis Carroll in the West.  Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933)[ii] is not only one of Japan’s most well-read children’s story writers (even if during his lifetime no one did read him), but also he was an avant-garde poet.  Actually, he was a modernist writer. So, to adapt him into manga should be a pretty heady and steep challenge.  Fools rush in, as they say.  Compared to Tuttle’s other recent manga outings, like their horrifically awful Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human or their Haruki Murakami’s Manga Stories (volume one reviewed earlier this year in IJOCA), Sakuno’s work on Miyazawa here is not that bad.  Her manga is not great, but it is not that bad either.  She nearly meets the challenge.  For hard-core Miyazawa fans, it might be worth experiencing her effort, but I would not want Tuttle’s manga versions to be anyone’s “first Miyazawa Kenji.”

            In fact, like a lot of other of Tuttle’s new manga series entries, it really is better to think of these books as collections of illustrated stories, probably intended for a younger or teenage audience as a way to encourage students to read more Japanese literature.  At times, Tuttle’s offerings have barely aspired to be more than digest versions of novels or short stories. At the very worst, they are “Modern Japanese Literature for Dummies in Pictures.”  Certainly, the Dazai and Murakami collections reveal only a minimal desire either by the artist or the publisher to make the pictures really matter and add something to the enjoyment of the original author’s writing.  When Sakuno does succeed in elevating the pictures beyond visually answering the question of “what happens next?”, she does so by using small, quiet moments that require the reader to wonder instead “wait, what just happened?” or “what is happening now?”  These moments of quiet mystery are really what can make the original Miyazawa stories tick—so Sakuno is wise to try to use multiple panels or even the whole page to open up questions instead of simply providing answers, answers, answers to the reader.  Plot is never the point of a Miyazawa story, so kudos to Sakuno for respectfully handling the source material.

Figure 1.  A shōjo (girls’) manga approach to Miyazawa Kenji’s children’s story, “The Restaurant of Many Orders.”  Sakuno Yasuko, Kenji Miyazawa’s The Restaurant of Many Orders and Other Stories (Tuttle, 2024), pp. 22-23.

            A case in point comes early in Sakuno’s adaptation of the title story, “The Restaurant of Many Orders” (“Chūmon no ōi ryōriten”), where two avaricious and gluttonous hunters first have the tables turned on them when the remote mountain restaurant starts to give them orders.  Sakuno takes two pages to deliver this ironic turnabout in very minimal (but in no way minimally satisfying) panels (Figure 1, pages 22-23).  Much of the original story simply involves cutaways from the narrative to show isolated “sign” texts that both protagonist pair and the reader must pause to consider.  In Sakuno’s manga, too, she dedicates a whole panel to a panel of whitespace with text written on it.  It might seem a bit lazy or unimaginative, but in her way, Sakuno is respecting the source material.  She takes some liberties with the Miyazawa text in having her protagonists sometimes think (thought balloons) rather than voice (speech balloons) their impressions of the signs, but that is not altogether out of keeping with the feeling of the original story and it provides an interesting flow for the reader.  In Sakuno’s adaptation, the two bigoted hunters sometimes keep their ugly thoughts to themselves, as if each man is a bit embarrassed to share his petty thoughts with his petty companion.  The last panel on the page is a completely silent shot of the next (of many) doors leading deeper into the restaurant, effectively working to set up a growing sense of foreboding doom and claustrophobia.  If you want to keep score, this two-page and five-panel sequence came out of only four truncated lines of text.  This is why I mentioned that readers of the original text could probably enjoy the richness the Miyazawa in the original (or translated English) prose faster than by reading this Tuttle manga version. 

            Overall, Sakuno’s style here reads like a shōjo manga, with her open and airy panels.  Sometimes there is even the trademark layered page, where panels overlap over panels, balloons overlap panels, characters pop out and are layered over other panels and characters.  Many of the panels are cut into diagonals, so it feels much more like a shōjo manga from the 1970s or the 1980s than a contemporary text in girls’ manga mode.[iii]  As with other Tuttle manga books, the company seems to be targeting older readers with classic manga sensibilities in terms of the art, but the packaging otherwise is designed for readers actually in their teens.  For this reader, who enjoys classic shōjo manga, the older touch was quite welcome and at times I could completely appreciate what Sakuno was doing by opening up the story and the manga to moments of reflection.  The most important characteristic of classic shōjo manga is seen here every few pages:  we see the “interiority” (naimen)—the thoughts and feelings—of Miyazawa’s characters, who really only had such feelings inferred by his readers.  In other words, Sakuno’s greatest skill in adapting these stories into manga form was her brave move to allow her own manga readers to slow down and infer from minimal, often blanked-out visual context, that her characters are thinking.  Her manga readers too are forced to think and ponder what the characters are thinking and feeling.  Compare though her approach to that of Murano Moribi, who instead uses numerous beautiful panels to render with love and respect the wilderness of Miyazawa’s beloved Iwate prefecture (Figure 2), as seen in the Miyazawa Kenji Manga House (1985) anthology.  I must say that I favor the Murano over the Sakuno in terms of the former’s ability to present in pictures the larger worldview of Miyazawa, but Sakuno can convey something palpable and real, even though it is invisible.  Such is the power of manga.

Figure 2. Miyazawa’s worldview: what you do not get in the Tuttle Miyazawa manga.  Murano Moribi, “Oinomori to Zarumori, Nusutomori,” in Miyazawa Kenji Manga House (Vol. 2, Shio Shuppansha, 1985), pp. 6-7.

            Lastly, when it comes to manga-izing literature, one is curious how the translators and adapters will choose to comic-book-up the story through the use of onomatopoeia.  As seen in my review of Tuttle’s Murakami Manga Stories, the team had a special person who added onomatopoeia words to Murakami’s text that were never there.  In that case, the words were kept in the original Japanese in Romanized form, so unless the Anglophone reader knew some Japanese, most of those additions must have come across as noise and distractions.  In this Sakuno edition, it seems that she conservatively added or swapped in her own onomatopoeia on her own to convey action or feeling in combination with her panels and layout.  For example, in the original Japanese, Miyazawa often has the doors open with a clicking sound, perhaps showing the two hunters’ anticipation of the next door and the next room; in her manga, Sakuno often makes the sounds of the doors SLAM or BA-TAN shut— as written in this English translation.  Overall, this move on her part enhances instead the creepiness of this Restaurant of Many Orders. Moss Quanci, the translator, has wisely provided these English equivalents, so the action soundtrack is intelligible, even if not always necessary for the reader.  Sometimes Quanci fails to consistently do this, so among the sounds of WOOOSH and BANG, there is the odd holdover of ZAWA-ZAWA from the Japanese left untranslated. Having read these stories numerous times in the original Japanese, I can attest that Quanci’s English translations of the narration and dialogue are appropriate, and, for the most part, are in keeping with the spirit of the original text with minimal contemporizing of the language from the way it originally read in Japanese in the 1920s.  John Bester and Roger Pulvers are still, to my mind, the best translators of Miyazawa into English, but Quanci does not do injustice to the words of this beloved literary figure.          

      Is Tuttle’s Miyazawa manga worth buying?  Probably not when comparted to other manga adapted from literature.  Consider other options one has out there for one’s dollar that do something similar.  Zack Davisson’s superior and thrice Eisner-nominated translations of Tanabe Goh’s Lovecraft manga (Dark Horse Comics) are much more wondrous cross-media and cross-cultural comic adaptations of literature.  Fueled by an English translation based on that by Columbia Professor Emeritus Donald Keene, when Viz released Itō Junji’s adaptation of No Longer Human, the classic Dazai angst novel, they provided North American audiences with a far superior reading experience than Sakuno’s Miyazawa manga, because Itō’s manga visuals truly adds to one’s understanding and appreciation of Dazai’s words.  Interest in contemporary and modern Japanese literature is quite strong these days—which is a very welcome thing for this reviewer—so perhaps one should not complain about Tuttle’s effort to bring classic stories and novels to a younger demographic here in North America.  Will Sakuno’s comic-book version of Miyazawa spark a reader to go out and try to read him in the original prose format?  I have my doubts about that.  What is most interesting about this effort—and Tuttle’s larger push—to put modern/manga Japanese literature into the hands of new readers is that a major publisher of Japan-related books in North America believes that the market is hungry again to read Japanese authors, and, that manga is the vehicle to get them to do just that.  No one ordered Tuttle to produce all of these fusion dishes—much of them mediocre fare—but then again, maybe the customer isn’t always right.

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[i] I would be remiss if I failed to mention the most famous manga illustrator of Miyazawa Kenji’s works:  Masumura Hiroshi, an artist who always turns human protagonists into anthropomorphized cats.  His 1983 cat-charactered adaptation of Night on the Milky Way Railway (Ginga tetsudō no yoru), Miyazawa’s greatest full-length story, into manga was even adapted later into a full-length anime film.  To read more about the difficulty of working with Miyazawa’s stories like it that were often never completed, see my article on Night of the Milky Way Railway:  Holt, “Ticket to Salvation: Nichiren Buddhism in Miyazawa Kenji’s Ginga tetsudō no yoru,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 42:2 (2014), 305-345.

[ii] Japanese names should be listed in their proper order of first surname, then personal name, which I follow: Miyazawa Kenji, not Kenji Miyazawa.  I only deviate from this traditional practice when I am quoting PR material or book titles by Tuttle, who has chosen to reverse the order to please Anglophone readers and is not proper in Japan.

[iii] For a concise description of the genre’s visual characteristics, see Deborah Shamoon, Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan (Univ. of Hawai’i Press, 2012), especially Chapter Five.  For further discussion on how to teach shōjo manga in the classroom using Shamoon’s insights, see my chapter “Type Five and Beyond: Tools to Teach Manga in the College Classroom” in Exploring Comics and Graphic Novels in the Classroom (edited by Jason DeHart, IGI Global [2022]), pp. 46-63.

Book Review: Haruki Murakami : Manga Stories

 reviewed by Jon Holt

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.

 

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[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.