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.
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.
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.
[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.
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