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.

Exhibition Review: Asian Comics: Evolution of an Art Form

Review and photos by Charles Hatfield

Asian Comics: Evolution of an Art Form. Paul Gravett (curator). Santa Ana, California: Bowers Museum, March 9-September 8, 2024. Admission  US$28.

https://www.bowers.org/index.php/current-exhibition/asian-comics-evolution-of-an-art-form

     Asian Comics: Evolution of an Art Form, now at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California, is a massive traveling exhibition of comic art and artifacts representing some twenty countries across Asia. Consisting of over 400 works, it takes hours to see thoroughly, and I can attest that it is worth revisiting (I have been four times, but have not exhausted what it has to offer). Launched in Europe in 2017, this is the first international exhibition of its type, and is both instructive and stunning. Asian Comics will be on view at the Bowers until September 8, 2024, and, I gather, may then tour further in the United States. I hope so.

Organized by London’s Barbican Centre, Asian Comics is the brainchild of curator Paul Gravett, a well-traveled comics historian and leading English-language scholar on Japanese manga (I should note that Gravett is a longtime colleague and friend of mine, and that the Bowers comped my first visit to the exhibition). To create this show, a process that started in 2014, Gravett collaborated with the Barbican’s Patrick Moran and more than twenty advisors from various countries. The exhibition’s design, including architecture and interiors, digital installations, and branding, is the work of the London-born international firm Pentagram.

Originally titled Mangasia: Wonderlands of Asian Comics, the retitled American version of the exhibit consists of roughly half Japanese work and half comics from other countries and areas, including Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, North Korea, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Tibet, and Vietnam. The blueprint for the exhibit is Gravett’s book Mangasia: The Definitive Guide to Asian Comics (Thames and Hudson, 2017). While rightly acknowledging the prevalence of manga as an international influence, the show goes beyond the Japanophilic stereotype implied by the original Mangasia title. National traditions are treated as distinct, not interchangeable, and the show’s text is properly sensitive to the history of conflict and competition among Asian nations (as well as the influence of Western imperialism and the Cold War). Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Indonesian, and South Korean works are particularly well represented.

The show, as Mangasia, toured six to seven years ago, running at the Palazzo Esposizioni in Rome (October 2017-January 2018), the Villa Reale in Monza, Italy (February-June 2018), and then Le Lieu Unique in Nantes, France (June-September 2018). Its current run at the Bowers marks its American debut and the first time it has been seen since 2018. The exhibit incorporates published comics, autographic original art, digital reproductions, woodblock prints, scroll paintings, digital video, and sundry objects. Published comics are the most heavily represented, but originals are plentiful, and the digital reproductions are exacting (for example, facsimiles of boards from Tezuka’s Buddha fooled me completely). I especially enjoyed those items that stretched my understanding of “comics,” such as two examples of the Kaavad, a Rajasthani tradition in which elaborately hinged boxes covered in sequential art unfold to tell a story—essentially, portable shrines, brought to life by an oral storyteller (as demonstrated in an accompanying video).

My experience of Asian Comics began with a gala opening that my family and I attended on March 8th, a Friday night. A lowkey reception in the Bowers’ sculpture garden was followed by a fairly quick walkthrough of the exhibition, and capped by a well-attended introductory talk by Paul Gravett in the museum’s auditorium. That Sunday, March 10th, Gravett followed up with a more extensive and formal lecture in the same venue, which, again, my family and I attended—and on that day I spent the better part of three hours within the exhibition, where I took hundreds of photos. We returned a third time on Saturday, April 6, for a stimulating lecture on “The Shared Origins of Modern Comics” by scholar Eike Exner (author of the monograph Comics and the Origins of Manga). Again, I spent much time in the exhibit. Finally, we revisited the exhibition on Saturday, July 13, for a sort of refresher course (and much notetaking).

Curator Paul Gravett

Throughout my several visits, my first impressions have not changed. Asian Comics is a triumph of research and design, immersive, transporting, and super-informative. It looks great and is easy to navigate. This is a superbly crafted presentation—evidently a turnkey exhibition, one whose design elements are pre-prepared and provided complete to the host museum, then adapted as needed. Online photos from Italy and France suggest a high degree of consistency from venue to venue despite drastically different spaces. At the Bowers, the show occupies roughly a third of the first floor. It makes for a dense and winding experience—not crowded, but very rich.

Approached through a long, narrow foyer, the exhibit opens with a digital marquee visible from far off, flanked by wall murals referencing Osamu Tezuka, Junko Mizuno, and other artists. Passing between the murals and under the marquee, you enter a corridor overhung with vividly crimson drapery printed with comic art. Japanese work dominates this space, but above my head, the first thing I noticed was Nestor Redondo and Mars Ravelo’s classic Filipina superheroine, Darna. The surroundings—walls and ceiling—are made of paper printed with varied and striking imagery, evoking printed comics and Asian paper craft. The effect is brilliant. From there, you are swept down a tunnel of red and black, and around corners, until you reach a transition to yellow, visually noting a new subject section.

Like the Mangasia book, the show divides into six domains, each clearly themed and color-coded. First comes “Mapping Asian Comics” (in red), then “Fables & Folklore” (yellow), “Recreating and Revising the Past” (white), “Stories and Storytellers” (green), “Censorship and Sensibility” (pink), and finally “Asian Comics Go Multimedia” (purple). This scheme, intuitive and subtly didactic, imparts a holistic design in which I never felt lost. The wall text (plentiful yet never a drag) comes in dynamic panels recalling comics pages, another evocative design choice. Pentagram’s use of paper is a wonderful example of simple materials put to mesmerizing use.

The exhibition tends to proceed from manga to broader views, as if using Japanese landmarks to sketch out the larger field. This strategy, while of course debatable, yields big dividends in terms of narrative and flow. For example, the first vitrine samples diverse manga from a seventy-year span (1937 to 2007) but is paired with a second containing works from a dozen different countries, some perhaps expected (China, India, the Philippines, South Korea) but others surprising (Mongolia, Sri Lanka). Right after this, another vitrine poses mid-19th century Japanese ukiyo-e prints beside contemporary Chinese and South Korean works. Radical juxtaposition of cultures, periods, and genres is the show’s logic—that, and a resolve to find commonality across differences. Admittedly, this syncretic approach presents challenges, not least the danger of flattening “Asia” into homogeneity, but it also highlights transnational themes and affinities.

The “Fables & Folklore” section epitomizes this. Spotlighting depictions of spirits and the supernatural as well as adaptations of ancient and classical epics, this area juxtaposes works by renowned Japanese mangaka like Shigeru Mizuki, Masashi Kishimoto, and Junji Ito with a startling variety of others: for example, influential krasue (ghost) comics by Thailand’s Tawee Witsanukorn (from roughly the early 1970s); various issues of India’s famed Amar Chitra Katha (starting in the late 1960s); many Wajang Purwa adaptations by Indonesia’s S. Ardisoma (from the late 1950s); a beautiful scroll (patachitra) painting depicting Krishna by Bengali artist Gurupada Chitrakar (2004); an illuminated page from the Bhagavad Gita (anonymously created circa 1820 to 1840); diverse depictions of the Monkey King; and various originals in voluptuous brush-inked style from Indonesia and the Philippines. Hanging overhead—a lovely touch—are paper lanterns bearing shadow puppet-like silhouettes of monsters from Filipino folklore (adapted from the book The Lost Journal of Alejandro Pardo by Tan, Hontiveros, et al., 2022).

If “Fables & Folklore” stresses commonality, the next section, “Recreating and Revising the Past,” highlights difference. Devoted to national histories and international conflicts, this area challenges any synthetic notion of shared Asianness and is, not coincidentally, the show’s most thickly documented portion. With detailed timelines starting in the mid-nineteenth century, it synopsizes generations of divisive and painful conflict, including imperialism, war, and decolonial struggles. Here the show emphasizes the potential of comics as both propaganda and witness, indoctrination and activism. Works on view span from classic manga (such as Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen) to Chinese lianhuanhua to South Korean and North Korean volumes to Cambodian Prum Vannak’s harrowing memoir of enslavement onboard a Thai fishing vessel, The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea (2013).

The exhibit’s back half gestures in many directions at once. “Stories and Storytellers” focuses on comics creators, from revered auteurs to striving independent artists, and emphasizes markets, struggles for creators’ rights, and material processes. From an unfinished page by Tezuka, to a comic book script by Mars Ravelo, there’s a lot to take in. A roughly 10 x 13-foot installation in the form of a house with glass walls recreates studios used by the late mangaka Takashi Fukutani and by the team behind the popular online manhua Queen’s Palace. Next to this is a drawing station offering visitors a chance to cartoon, a reading area including scores of manga magazines, giant wall photos of Japanese newsstands, and a defiant blurb, “Print is not dead.”

However, this all intermingles with the next section, “Asian Comics Go Multimedia,” which suggests a different sort of triumphalism. Here comic art more or less dissolves out into and informs pop culture at large. This section embraces film adaptations, anime, manga-inspired fashion from collections by Mikio Sakabe and Jenny Fax, and the Vocaloid/virtual popstar Hatsune Miku (shown in a concert video). Nearby, in a motion-controlled installation, visitors can play the role of a huge mech (reminding me of an Iron Man installation I saw in the exhibition Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes in 2018). This area marks the exhibition’s big finish, and contains varied delights: for example, a focus on Leping Zhang’s character Sanmao, production cels from Otomo’s film Akira, and the revelation that Satyajit Ray storyboarded his first film, Pather Panchali (1955), in comics form.

Yet the most striking element here, in the show’s back half, is a curtained installation devoted to “images which may not be suitable for visitors under the age of 18”—that is, an adults-only alcove focusing on “Censorship and Sensibility.” This is a potentially controversial thing to include in a show determined to wow a general audience, but I believe it works well.

One could question the logic of this move, as there is much throughout Asian Comics that caregivers might wish to hide from young children. Visitors are advised from the start that the show’s varied “artistic expressions” may include “instances of nudity and violence,” and startling images can be found most everywhere. Moreover, not everything in the curtained “adult” area is explicit; some works seem to have been sequestered simply because they are queer-themed. For example, the selections from Shimura’s Sweet Blue Flowers and Yamaji’s Love My Life, both gentle, character-based queer manga, are quite understated. That said, the curtained area does contain many shocks, from Joji Akiyama’s notorious children’s manga Asura (1970), with its themes of famine and cannibalism, to classic horrors by Umezu and Maruo, to savagely satirical pages by heta-uma icon Takashi Nemoto. Vintage Japanese shunga (erotic art) and muzan-e (“atrocity pictures”) sit beside recent examples of yaoi, yuri, and gay manga of varied explicitness. Some works shown here are elegantly erotic, for instance pages by Chikae Ide, and some are repulsive, like the leering Sleep Rape, a Thai exploitation comic. Some are droll, such as a spread from South Korean Dae-Joong Kim’s “Beautiful Memories of the City of Cocks,” and some overtly political, like Rakudenashiko’s “arrest story,” which recounts the legal persecution of her feminist work on grounds of “obscenity” (a first for any Japanese woman). Cordoning off most of these examples in a separate alcove was probably a wise move, though the differences among them struck me more than anything they had in common.

In sum, Asian Comics is a bountiful, often surprising exhibition, well worth a long visit for scholars and fans who can possibly get to it, wherever it may go in the future. Gravett has cast the net wide, gathering in various artistic traditions under the rubric “comics” and thus affirming the form’s multifaceted cultural and historical relevance (interestingly, Eike Exner’s more specific conception of comics, shared on April 6, contrasted with the show’s inclusive approach). The show’s transnational scope and synoptic ambition are likely to provoke arguments, but the bottom line is, the fields of comics studies and comic art exhibiting are richer for this project. I’ve been exhorting students, colleagues, and friend to go to this show, and I’ll keep on doing that. Go!

Book Reviews: Soseki Natsume’s Botchan: the manga edition & Akutagawa’s Rashômon and Other Stories

 

reviewed by Liz Brown

Kaori Okura and Makiko Itoh (trans). 2024. Soseki Natsume’s Botchan: the manga edition. Tuttle Publishing. US $14.99 ISBN: 9784805317822. https://www.tuttlepublishing.com/japan/soseki-natsumes-botchan-the-manga-edition-9784805317822

mkdeville and Philippe Nicioux (ills). 2024. Akutagawa’s Rashômon and Other Stories. Tuttle Publishing. US $15.99. ISBN: 9784805318393. https://www.tuttlepublishing.com/japan/akutagawas-rashomon-and-other-stories-9784805318393

Comic adaptations of classics have recently become instrumental tools in literature classrooms for their ability to create and sustain interest in traditional stories, after being used for many years as the equivalent of study guides in lieu of reading the actual book. The Manga Classics imprint was created specifically with classrooms in mind since manga remains one of the most popular comic formats among teens and young adults. Canonical works of literature have been adapted into manga formats, such as Junji Ito’s version of Frankenstein and Osamu Tezuka’s adaptation of Crime and Punishment. However, there is a gap in cultural exchange within comics publishing. Overwhelmingly, it is works from the Western canon that are being developed into comics form- manga and otherwise- leaving classic Eastern tales unadapted or unpublished in the English market. Soseki Natsume’s Botchan: the manga edition begins to fill this gap.

Botchan is one of a series of manga adaptations of the Japanese literary canon into comic format by Tuttle Publishing, including other classics such as Akutagawa’s Rashomon and Other Stories. Works in this series include adaptations by both Japanese and Western artists. They would make a worthwhile inclusion in libraries and reading lists developed for students of literature, especially Japanese literature.

Botchan is a foundational novel in Japanese literature. Written by one of Japan’s preeminent modern novelists and published in 1906, it is a bildungsroman tale of a young man’s everyday experience of family drama and workplace farce during the Meiji Era- when Japan was expanding and opening up to international influence. The eponymous character is frequently compared with Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye or Huckleberry Finn for his brash, irreverent, yet honest character- clearly flawed but still sympathetic to readers. As a major work of Japanese literature, manga lovers can see Botchan’s pervasive influence within tropes of male characters in contemporary works such as Katsuki Bakugo (My Hero Academia) and Shoyo Hinata (Haikyuu!!) And the novel’s focus on everyday life -- navigating faculty room pettiness and trying to find amusement in a rural town -- carry over into confirming the slice-of-life as a hallmark genre within manga. 

Kaori Okura’s rendition of Botchan is a restrained and faithful adaptation of the novel. She avoids opportunities to play up or exaggerate the embedded humor -- there are no Dr. Slump poop-on-a-stick gags when a character has to fish money out of a toilet and references to the red light district are handled at an arm’s length -- which makes this work an excellent choice for embedding the work in a classroom context. Her drawings depict the mild caricature of the narrator’s playful descriptions of his fellow characters, who are designated by Botchan’s nicknames for them -- “Porcupine,” “Badger,” and “Green Squash” -- rather than their given names. A primary criticism of the novel about the ambiguous relationship between Botchan and his family’s maid, Kiyo, is further complicated in this adaptation because the drawings downplay the age gap between Botchan and Kiyo. The novel establishes at least a twenty-year age difference between the characters while the Okura’s drawings soften Kiyo’s perceived age, in order to make the implications of Botchan and Kiyo’s close relationship more conventionally acceptable.

Akutagawa’s Rashômon is another comic adaptation of the Japanese literary canon, this time from a duo of French comic artists. Rashômon was originally a short story, collected among others by Ryunosuke Akutagawa in 1915. The title is better known for its film version, adapted into cinema by Akira Kurosawa in 1950. The film is not a direct translation of the short stories, melding several of Akutagawa’s narratives together and featuring Kurosawa’s signature artistic flourishes and deviations. This collection attempts to provide a bridge between the two mediums, drawing on the connections that comics have with both the written word and moving picture.

It features four of Akutagawa’s stories. Like the film, the comic unites the stories “Rashômon” and “In a Grove” around the character of Tojômaru, a bandit famously played by actor Toshiro Mifune. The other stories, “Otomi’s Virginity” and “The Martyr,” are standalone. “Otomi’s Virginity” is a tense psychodrama between two characters (and a cat) in an abandoned town. The story is depicted in such a way as to present the narrative as ripe for adaptation into film or live theater. “The Martyr” is a parable about a young monk who suffers after an accusation is flung his way, only to have a surprising twist vindicate him after it is too late. Illustrator Philippe Nicloux’s expressive brushwork manages to convey motion and force, especially in the hand-written sound effects, but without losing texture and detail, such as patterns of the shadow of leaves. Evidence of how he has studied both film and Japanese art forms come through in his work. However, it is also clear that this adaptation represents a cultural exchange that has gone back and forth across Eastern / Western boundaries multiple times, especially in “The Martyr.” Untangling the influences will require a great deal of deliberation. Because of the sexual themes in several of the stories, readers looking to use this comic in the classroom might want to direct it towards upper high school and university classes. 

A version of this review will appear in print in issue 26:1.

Book Review: Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan. The World of Kusazōshi.

reviewed by John A. Lent

Laura Moretti and Satō Yukiko, eds. Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan. The World of Kusazōshi. Leiden and Boston:  Brill, 2024. 634 pp.+xxv. US $114.00 (Hardback). ISBN:  978-90-04-50410-3. https://brill.com/edcollbook/title/61019

 

In recent months, comics scholarship has been enriched by three characteristics that this reviewer has called for since the early 1990s--an approach that covers regions outside of the Euro-American sphere, specifically, Asia, a methodology that digs deep into plentiful, nearly-untouched archival materials, and a roster of foreign (to the U.S.) authors.

Two 2024 books that display these characteristics are Caricatures en Extrême Orient. Origines, Rencontres, Métissages, edited by Laurent Baridon and Marie Laureillard, that consists of 22 chapters dealing with comics in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam, and written by nationals from eight countries, and the subject of this review, Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan, The World of Kusazōshi, edited by Laura Moretti and Satō Yukiko. Both volumes are lavishly-illustrated.

Moretti and Satō’s Graphic Narratives… is a weighty compendium, literally, because of the high-quality paper used and the inclusion of many colored plates; figuratively, because of the content that explores a virgin area (at least to foreign scholars) in a ponderous manner. The 17 chapters (including the Introduction) included nine by Japanese researchers (seven requiring translations), likely because kusazōshi and kibyōshi are relatively unknown topics in Western scholarship, except for the works of a few individuals, a large number of whom are represented in this volume--Laura Moretti, Adam L. Kern, Ellis Tinios, Frederick Feilden, Michael Emmerich, Jaqueline Berndt, Glynne Walley, and Joseph Bills. The book is labeled as the first English, multi-author study of kusazōshi.

Divided into three parts--“Modiality in Kusazōshi,” “The Pleasures of Reading,” and “Approaching Kusazōshi in a Global Context,” Graphic Narratives… goes to great lengths to introduce other affiliates/offshoots/similarities of kusazōshi in chapters on akahon (red cover books), kibyōshi (yellow cover books), and gōkan (combined booklets), meticulously define/describe all terms, and provide snippets of narrative plots and unique techniques employed.

Graphic narratives given as examples are sometimes serious; other times, humorous or facetious. One kibyōshi related the giddiness of a fart contest; another told how Inoue Hisashi overcame stuttering and tenseness by reading kibyōshi, concluding that, “Being silly and useless was just fine.” Some of the semiotic and linguistic techniques used to facilitate reading were ingenious; for instance, using marks to indicate direction, reading methods, and so on, or designing pages with empty space gaps arranged as waves between blocks of text to show motion, wind, or rain; both traits found in gōkan.

Kusazōshi were elaborate productions, every part of which was decorated, from the sales wrappers to the front and back and inside front and inside back covers. It is surprising how many of them have survived war, natural disasters, and normal wear-and-tear, and are found in abundance in the National Diet Library and, to a lesser extent, in some Japanese university libraries. To have 178 of them in one place, as in Graphic Narratives…, definitely augments the field of study.

A chapter that stands apart from the others, but is vital to understanding where kusazōshi and kibyōshi fit into comics studies, is that written by Adam L. Kern. An early Western scholar of kibyōshi (see, the symposium on kibyōshi that he edited in Vol. 9, No. 1 of IJOCA). Kern contributed an excellent critique of comics studies, while making a case that kusazōshi and kibyōshi are comparable to comics and decrying the prevalent notion that comics are Euro-American in origin. In one instance, he mentions my Asian Comics as a resource that defines comics as emanating from Western comic strips, using my chapter on India as an example, where I date the introduction of comics to an Indian imitation of The British Punch. However, Kern fails to mention that in both the Introduction and the first chapter, “A Lead-Up to Asian Comics,” I provide numerous examples of comics-like art that existed for centuries, before Western penetration, not only in India, but also China, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, and Persia.

Laura Moretti and Satō Yukiko should hold an exalted space in the world of comics scholarship for what they have contributed with Graphic Narratives… .They have lifted kusazōshi from a brief footnote to a full-fledged area of study, pulling together a mix of Japanese and Western scholars, bent on providing varying perspectives on the medium, from different approaches, backed up with much first-hand information, sourced from plenty of primary and secondary materials, fully explained in the text, footnotes, and explanatory notes to the reader, and profusely- and brilliantly-illustrated. What more can one ask for? A masterful job!