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.