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New at Examiner.com

May 24, 2010 by MJ Leave a Comment

Here’s a quick post to let you know what’s new so far this week from your Boston Manga Examiner.

On Monday, I posted my (now) weekly rundown on weekend manga talk from local bloggers, Latest links from local manga critics, featuring items such as Kate Dacey’s intro to To Terra for this month’s Manga Moveable Feast, the Good Comics for Kids smackdown of DC Comics, and Katherine Hanson’s new review of unlicensed yuri series, Otsu Hiyori’s Mizu-iro Cinema.

Look for my contribution to the To Terra celebration here at Manga Bookshelf sometime over the next couple of days.

Next, a short commentary on the current state of classic shojo from North American publishers, The plight of classic shojo, inspired both by disappointing losses via the shutdown of CMX and exciting recent licenses from DMP and Fantagraphics. …

Manhwa Monday: Scanlation wars reach manhwa?

May 24, 2010 by MJ 1 Comment

Welcome to another Manhwa Monday! This week, a fannish battle that has been raging in the manga blogosphere for ages may be ready to brew amongst manhwa fans, thanks to fan frustration and some unpleasant statistics.

First, from the fannish side, manhwa summarizer Comic Seoul has had enough of readers requesting links to scanlations. It’s a worthy rant, pointing out that even the detailed summaries posted there violate copyright law.

And from the industry side, later in the week, JoongAng Daily (the English-language version of Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo) published this article by Sung So-young, naming illegal downloads as a major culprit in the decline of manhwa sales in South Korea while film and television based on manhwa properties thrive. …

How to Control a Sidecar by Makoto Tateno: B-

May 24, 2010 by Michelle Smith

In this spin-off of How to Capture a Martini, stoic bartender Kiyohito Kousaka is pursued by a pair of guys looking to recruit him for a three-way relationship. He initially wants nothing to do with them, but when one of them goes missing, he cares enough to want to get to the bottom of the mystery.

There are definitely some good things about How to Control a Sidecar. The relationship between the two men—Fumi and Kanashiro—is not exactly what it seems, and I like that the title story ends differently than I’d been expecting. Even the regrettable inclusion of a nonconsensual scene is tempered somewhat by the fact that the victim collects evidence and sees a doctor, though stops short of filing a police report, and that all parties involved acknowledge the act for what it was.

It’s the second story, “How to Subdue a Stinger,” that I found most disappointing, since it completely negates the unconventional ending of the title story and endows Kousaka with a near-total personality transplant. The impression I get from it is that Tateno’s readers were dissatisfied with the original ending and that she wrote this to appease them. That’s really too bad, because it was much better the first way.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Review originally published at Manga Recon.

An Introduction to Keiko Takemiya’s To Terra

May 23, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

Welcome to the May Manga Movable Feast! On the menu: Keiko Takemiya’s award-winning sci-fi epic To Terra. If you’ve never dined with us before, here’s how the MMF works: every month, the manga blogging community holds a week-long virtual book club in which we discuss a particular series or one-shot. Each day, the host shares links to new blog entries focusing on that work, while building an archive for the entire week’s discussion. At the end of the week, the group then selects a new host and a new “menu” for the following month.

Our “feast” has two goals. The first is to promote intelligent, in-depth analysis of manga we love (or, in some cases, hate). Previous contributions have run the gamut from straightforward reviews to an interview with Sexy Voice and Robo editor Eric Searleman, a guided tour through Kaoru Mori’s “Emmaverse,” and an essay contrasting Urushibara’s Mushishi with Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. The second goal is to foster a sense of community among avid manga readers. Everyone is invited to take part in the MMF, regardless of whether you’ve participated before. If you have your own blog, simply send me the link to your To Terra-themed post, whether it’s a brand new essay written expressly for the MMF or an older review that you’d like the share with the community, and I’ll include it in my daily round-up. If you don’t have a blog, send me your text and I’ll post your ideas here. (Click here for my email.) Discussion begins today and will run through the week until Sunday, May 30th.

Below, I’ve provided an overview of the series’ publication history, plot, and place in the manga canon. You can follow the discussion by checking the daily blog posts, clicking on the Manga Movable Feast tag, or visiting the MMF archive: http://mangacritic.com/?page_id=4766.

TO TERRA: THE PUBLICATION HISTORY

To Terra debuted in 1977 in Gekkan Manga Shonen. During its three-year run, To Terra nabbed two honors: the Shogakukan Manga Award and the Seiun Award, an annual prize for the best new science fiction published in Japan. (To Terra was the first manga to receive a Seiun Award; later winners would include Appleseed, Domu: A Child’s Dream, Urusei Yatsura, Cardcaptor Sakura, Planetes, and 20th Century Boys.) The series was originally issued in tankubon format in 1980 by Asahi Sonorama, and reissued again in 2007 by Square Enix, around the same time Vertical, Inc. released the first English-language edition.

To Terra has enjoyed considerable popularity in Japan, thanks, in part, to several adaptations: a 1979 NHK radio drama; a 1980 movie, produced by Toei Animation; and a 2007 animated television series, produced by Aniplex.

TO TERRA: THE STORY

To Terra unfolds in a distant future characterized by environmental devastation. To salvage their dying planet, humans have evacuated Terra (Earth) and, with the aid of a supercomputer named Mother, formed a new government to restore Terra and its people to health. The most striking feature of this era of Superior Domination (S.D.) is the segregation of children from adults. Born in laboratories, raised by foster parents on Ataraxia, a planet far from Terra, children are groomed from infancy to become model citizens. At the age of 14, Mother subjects each child to a grueling battery of psychological tests euphemistically called Maturity Checks. Those who pass are sorted by intelligence, then dispatched to various corners of the galaxy for further training; those who fail are removed from society.

The real purpose of these checks is to weed out an unwanted by-product of S.D.-era genetic engineering: the Mu, a race of telepathic mutants. After decades of persecution, the Mu fled Terra, seeking refuge beneath the surface of Ataraxia. Under the leadership of Soldier Blue, they escaped detection by humans. But Soldier Blue is frail and dying (though he has chosen to project a youthful, sparkly-eyed appearance), and seeks a successor in Jomy Marcus Shin, a 14-year-old who possesses both the telepathic ability of a Mu and the hardier constitution of a human. As the series unfolds, we watch Jomy develop into a formidable leader, capable of inspiring passion, loyalty, and sacrifice among the Mu as they struggle to return to their homeworld. Running in counterpoint to Jomy’s story is that of Keith Anyan, an elite solider-in-training and future Terran leader. Keith enjoys a privileged position in human society. Yet he is plagued by doubt: why doesn’t he remember his childhood? Or his foster parents? And why does Mother refuse to eradicate the Mu when the state has deemed them a threat to mankind?

What makes this unabashedly Romantic mash-up of Star Trek, Star Wars, and 2001 both entertaining and moving is the richness of Keiko Takemiya’s universe. On the surface, To Terra is a beautifully illustrated soap opera, the kind of manga in which the heroes have terrific hair, wear smart jumpsuits, and keep psychic squirrels as pets. But To Terra can also be read a cautionary tale about mankind’s poor custodianship of the Earth; a scathing critique of eugenics and social engineering; a meditation on the relationship between memory and identity; and, most significantly, a critique of adult hypocrisy. It’s this multivalent quality that elevates To Terra from a mere allegory to an epic space opera as engaging, beautiful, and thought-provoking as Tezuka’s best work. (This review originally appeared at PopCultureShock on July 16, 2007.)

TO TERRA: ITS PLACE IN THE CANON

As anyone with a passing familiarity with the Magnificent 49ers knows, the 1970s were a watershed in the development of shojo manga. Not that shojo manga was an invention of the 1970s, of course; shojo manga traces its roots back to the 1910s, when girls’ magazines began running short, one-page gag strips, and underwent several major stages of development before evolving into the medium we know today. Until the mid-1960s, however, shojo manga was written by men for pre-teen girls; the stories were sweet, sentimental, and chaste, often revolving around family, class, and identity in the manner of a Frances Hodgson Burnett story. In an interview with manga scholar Matt Thorn, Keiko Takemiya’s former roommate Moto Hagio remembers the manga from this period:

In the girls’ comics, you would have stories in which the woman you thought was the mother turns not to be the mother, and the real mother is actually somewhere else. There was a variety of settings. For example, the poor child in the story turns out to actually come from a rich family, or the child of a rich family turns to have been adopted from a poor family. And one of the standard device was amnesia… It appeared so often, it makes me think that what with the war and the harsh social conditions, people had an unconscious desire to forget everything. So the heroine goes off in search of her real mother, but along the way she develops amnesia, and ends up being taken care of by a string of kind strangers.

Another popular motif was ballet. There was quite a boom in girls’ comics about ballet for a while. For example, the heroine would be a girl from a poor family who’s really good at ballet, but she loses the lead to an untalented girl from a rich family. In the standard story, there would be a mean girl and a kind-hearted heroine, and there would be a very clear-cut struggle between good and evil.

maryloubunko In the mid-1960s, pioneering female artist Yoshiko Nishitani began writing stories aimed at a slightly older audience. Nishitani’s Mary Lou, which made its debut in Weekly Margaret in 1965, was one of the very first shojo manga to document the romantic longings of a teenage girl. (As Thorn notes in “The Multi-Faceted World of Shoujo Manga,” the heroines of early shojo stories were too young for crushes and dates, so romance was the provenance of older, secondary characters.) Though tame by contemporary standards, Mary Lou’s emphasis on the heroine’s emotional life and relationships proved highly influential, paving the way for other artists to write stories that focused on the everyday concerns of teenagers, rather than the melodramatic travails of poor little rich girls.

Nishitani was a pioneer in another sense as well: she inspired dozens of women to enter what had been an overwhelmingly male profession. Those artists who followed Nishitani into the field in the 1970s — women like Takemiya, Hagio, and Ryoko “Rose of Versailles” Ikeda — built on her legacy, helping complete the transformation of shojo manga from staid stories about good girls to a multi-faceted storytelling medium capable of dramatizing the characters’ inner thoughts as forcefully as their physical actions. The 49ers embraced genres such as science fiction and fantasy, and developed new ones as well: the entire boys’ love industry owes a debt to Hagio and Takemiya for ground-breaking stories such as “The Heart of Thomas” and The Song of the Wind in the Trees. Whatever the subject matter, however, the 49ers used the comics medium to explore fundamental questions about identity — what constitutes family? what does it mean to be female? what distinguishes the child from the adult? — and love in all its manifestations, from maternal to carnal.

To Terra, which addresses many of the themes found in Takemiya’s other works, is significant precisely because it isn’t shojo; Takemiya was one of the first female artists to write for a boys’ magazine, bringing a distinctly shojo sensibility to her portrayal of Keith and Jomy’s emotional lives. The popular success of To Terra created opportunities for other manga-ka to cross over as well, a trend important enough for Frederick Schodt to make note of it in Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (1983). Contemporary artists such Rumiko Takahashi, CLAMP, Yellow Tanabe, and Hiromu Arakawa owe a debt to Takemiya, as she helped demonstrate what seems patently obvious to us now: that women are just as capable of writing for male audiences as men are. Oh, and we can draw a pretty bitchin’ space ship if the story calls for one.

FOR FURTHER READING

Aoki, Deb. “Interview: Keiko Takemiya, Creator of To Terra and Andromeda Stories.” About.com: Manga. January 22, 2008. (Accessed 5/23/10.)

Thorn, Matt. “The Moto Hagio Interview.” The Comics Journal 269 (July/August 2005). (Accessed 5/23/10.)

Thorn, Matt. “The Multi-Facted Universe of Shoujo Manga.” Conference paper. 2008. (Accessed 5/23/10.)

MMF: An Introduction to Keiko Takemiya’s To Terra

May 23, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

…

AX, Vol. 1: A Collection of Alternative Manga

May 21, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

The next time someone dismisses manga as a “style” characterized by youthful-looking, big-eyed characters with button noses, I’m going to hand them a copy of AX, a rude, gleeful, and sometimes disturbing rebuke to the homogenized artwork and storylines found in mainstream manga publications. No one will confuse AX for Young Jump or even Big Comic Spirits; the stories in AX run the gamut from the grotesquely detailed to the playfully abstract, often flaunting their ugliness with the cheerful insistence of a ten-year-old boy waving a dead animal at squeamish classmates. Nor will anyone confuse Yoshihiro Tatsumi or Einosuke’s outlook with the humanism of Osamu Tezuka or Keiji Nakazawa; the stories in AX revel in the darker side of human nature, the part of us that’s fascinated with pain, death, sex, and bodily functions.

Founded in 1997, AX was a direct descendant of Garo (1964-2002), Katsuichi Nagai’s seminal avant garde manga magazine. As historian Paul Gravett explains in his introduction to A Collection of Alternative Manga, both publications served an essential purpose, providing artists a place to break free of the influence of commercial manga publishing — its rigid house styles, tight deadlines, strong editorial presence, and reader polls — and find more idiosyncratic forms of expression. At the same time, Gravett argues, Garo and AX gave artists a platform for speaking out against the dominant culture, to loudly question the truth that everyone can and should be “doing one’s best” while trying hard to fit in.

The thirty-three stories in A Collection of Alternative Manga nicely illustrate Gravett’s thesis, encompassing a true diversity of styles and subject-matters. At one end of the spectrum are artists such as Yuka Goto, whose work reflects a heta-uma, or “bad-good” aesthetic, with crudely-drawn figures in absurd situations (her feuding neighbors resolve their differences with a judo match), while at the other are artists such as Takato Yamato, whose intricate, naturalistic style becomes a vehicle for juxtaposing pornographically beautiful human bodies with explicit images of decay and rot. Most of the work in AX falls somewhere in between: the magical realism of Akina Kondo (“Rainy Day Blouse and The Umbrella”); the primitivist abstraction of Otoya Mitsusashi (“Sacred Light”); the horror-comedy of Kazuichi Hanawa (“Six Paths of Wealth”); the kawaii-grotesque of Mimyo Tomozawa (“300 Years”). Then there are stories which are parodies in the truest sense, borrowing the visual language of shonen manga for dark farce: Namie Fujieda’s “The Brilliant Ones,” in which an earnest group of students tries to help the class loser find a way to shine — even after his body has exploded into a thousand small parasites — and Tomohiro Koizumi’s “Stand By Me,” a story about a pair of peeping teens caught in the act.

For me, the biggest obstacle to enjoying the collection — as opposed to appreciating it — is that for every story like Ayuke Akiyama’s lovely, folkloric “In the Gourd” or Toranasuke Shimada’s historical phantasmagoria “Enrique Kobayashi’s El Dorado,” there are two that read like stunts, deliberate attempts to provoke, and maybe even disgust, the audience by rubbing its nose in taboo subjects and uncomfortable truths. Such confrontational art can be thought-provoking, to be sure, making us reconsider socially determined categories such as “parent,” “teacher,” and “child”: Yusaku Hanakuma’s “Puppy Love” is one such example, a bizarre, funny, upsetting story in which a woman gives birth to a litter of puppies and resolves to raise them as normal children. The struggles she and her “sons” face remind us of how difficult it is for anyone to raise a child whose behavior or appearance makes others uncomfortable; it’s With the Light, minus the easy sentiment (and with a dollop of David Cronenberg’s perverse sense of humor).

The need to elicit a strong, visceral response from the reader can also inspire puerile excess. Shigiheru Okada (“Me”), Saito Yunosuke (“Arizona Sizzler”), Kataoko Toyo (“The Ballad of Non-Stop Farting”), and Takashi Nemoto’s (“Black Sushi Party Piece”) repeated depictions of body parts and bodily fluids reminded me of sixth graders testing out every permutation of a new swearword to see which ones had the greatest shock value. Other stories, such as Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s “Lover’s Bride,” inspire an immediate ewwwww, and maybe a chuckle, but not much else: what deeper truths could possibly be gleaned from a sad-sack character’s decision to woo a primate instead of a human?

My other stumbling block to fully embracing AX is the way in which female characters are depicted in stories such as Yuichi Kiriyama’s “A Well-Dressed Corpse,” Hiroji Tani’s “Alraune Fatale,” and Osamu Kanna’s “The Watcher.” The female characters often seem more like receptacles for male anger, sexual aggression, or disappointment than they do actual human beings. I suppose one could argue that these artists are simply exaggerating a tendency found in manga across the spectrum, making explicit what’s normally implicit in a lot of material directed at male audiences. Yet none of these artists seem to be critiquing the male gaze in any meaningful way; they cast a pitiless, often lascivious eye on their female subjects, reducing them to a monstrous assortment of breasts and mouths and legs. It’s to editor Sean Michael Wilson’s great credit that he includes so many distinctive female voices in the anthology as well, preventing AX from becoming too dourly macho or grossly juvenile.

Yet for all my discomfort and distance from the material, I can’t look away. As a historian, AX excites me, providing a meticulously curated introduction to Japan’s underground comics scene. As a reader, AX challenges me to move beyond my notion of what constitutes manga, helping me understand what artists like Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Yoshiharu Tsuge were trying to do in the 1950s and 1960s with their “manga that isn’t manga”: to push the medium outside its comfort zone, to show us ugly truths, to make us laugh with recognition and discomfort, and to encourage artistic expression that, in Gravett’s words, is “as personalized as handwriting or a signature.” Recommended.

Review copy provided by Top Shelf. AX, Vol. 1: A Collection of Alternative Manga will be released on July 15, 2010.

AX, VOL. 1: A COLLECTION OF ALTERNATIVE MANGA • EDITED BY SEAN MICHAEL WILSON, WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PAUL GRAVETT • TOP SHELF • NO RATING • 400 pp.

AX, Vol. 1: A Collection of Alternative Manga

May 21, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

ax cover The next time someone dismisses manga as a “style” characterized by youthful-looking, big-eyed characters with button noses, I’m going to hand them a copy of AX, a rude, gleeful, and sometimes disturbing rebuke to the homogenized artwork and storylines found in mainstream manga publications. No one will confuse AX for Young Jump or even Big Comic Spirits; the stories in AX run the gamut from the grotesquely detailed to the playfully abstract, often flaunting their ugliness with the cheerful insistence of a ten-year-old boy waving a dead animal at squeamish classmates. Nor will anyone confuse Yoshihiro Tatsumi or Einosuke’s outlook with the humanism of Osamu Tezuka or Keiji Nakazawa; the stories in AX revel in the darker side of human nature, the part of us that’s fascinated with pain, death, sex, and bodily functions.

…

Hinako Takanaga at Yaoi-Con 2010

May 20, 2010 by MJ 18 Comments

The big news in the yaoi corner today is last night’s announcement from DMP that Hinako Takanaga will be appearing as their special guest at this year’s Yaoi-Con.

I’ll admit I’m ambivalent on Takanaga. Though I enjoyed You Will Fall in Love (sequel You Will Drown in Love somewhat less so), my greatest criticism of it was the same as the first work of hers I read, Little Butterfly. I know everyone loves Little Butterfly, but my impression of it when I first read it (when I had not yet read a lot of yaoi) was that the main relationship was too rushed to be truly believable. Though Kate Dacey’s recent review has inspired me to put Little Butterfly back on my list for another try, I can’t help but wish that I could experience Takanaga over the course of a much longer series.

As you know, I have a few chronic complaints about yaoi in general, but the one that frustrates me most often is the fact that the genre (and I don’t know who to attribute this to… publishers? fans? both?) doesn’t take romance seriously enough. It is hard to write good romance, with the right balance of careful pacing and giddy excitement, and there are not all that many instances in which this can be accomplished in under five volumes.

People have done it. Fumi Yoshinaga manages better than most (Ichigenme… The First Class is Civil Law is one of my favorite short yaoi series) and Korean manhwa-ga Rakun (aka Yeri Na) even managed it in a single volume with U Don’t Know Me. But these successes are rare, at least in my experience reviewing yaoi manga over the past couple of years.

The point I’m slowly coming around to here, is that I’ll soon get my wish! Hinako Takanaga’s The Tyrant Falls in Love stands at five volumes (and counting?) and though there are things I’ve read about it that suggest it may not be quite my kind of story in other ways, I’m pretty interested in seeing what Takanaga does with something longer than three volumes. (Question to fans: do I need to read Challengers first?)

Check out my post at Examiner.com for the official word on Takanaga’s appearance at Yaoi-Con. Here’s the info from DMP on The Tyrant Falls in Love:

THE TYRANT FALLS IN LOVE, VOL. 1, Rated M+ (for ages 18+), MSRP: $12.95, Available: August 18, 2010, B6 Size, June’ Imprint

University study Tetsuhiro Morinaga has been in love with his homophobic, violent and tyrannical sempai Souichi Tatsumi for more than four years now. Even though he’s told Tatsumi how he feels and even managed to steal a kiss, expecting anything more seems like nothing more than the stuff of dreams… That is until the long-oppressed Morinaga gets his biggest chance ever. Might his unendingly unrequited love finally be returned?

This week at Examiner.com

May 19, 2010 by MJ Leave a Comment

Though we’ve barely cleared hump day, it’s been an eventful week already for my new gig at Examiner.com.

Monday began with a round-up of weekend posts from Boston-area critics. I’m thinking of continuing this each week as sort of a bleary-eyed, Monday-morning treat. I’m still not sure exactly who my audience is at Examiner.com, but for the moment I’m operating on the assumption that it may not be the usual manga crowd who could just get all those links at MangaBlog. The fact that my posts stand alongside everything in the Arts & Entertainment section, from concert reviews to celebrity gossip, suggests the possibility of a very different readership.

On Tuesday, I posted a bite-sized version of my review of Twin Spica, Vol. 1, in my continued effort to make sure recent titles are covered on the site. All happy manga thoughts were crushed later that night, however, by news of the CMX shutdown. …

The Times of Botchan, Vols. 1-4

May 19, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

Reading The Times of Botchan reminded me of watching Alexander Sakurov’s cryptic 2002 film Russian Ark. Both employ a similar gambit: a literary figure from the country’s past wanders through a landscape populated by real people who played pivotal roles in its modernization. In Russian Ark, the author/protagonist role is filled by the Marquis de Custine, a French aristocrat who published Empire of the Czar: Journey Through Eternal Russia in 1839, while in The Times of Botchan the role is fulfilled by Soseki Natsume (1867-1916), the defining novelist of the Meiji Restoration. Neither Ark nor Botchan employs a clear, linear narrative; both works are episodic — even, at times, picaresque — in nature as their principle characters rub shoulders with poets, composers, czars, and politicians.

When we first meet Natsume, he is writing a novel called Botchan, a short, satirical work about a energetic young man who suffers from a Holden Caufield-esque desire to expose phoniness wherever he goes. Nastume hopes Botchan will help him achieve catharsis from a vague but nagging sense of anxiety brought on by the period’s social, political, and economic upheavals, from the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement to the first murmurs of suffragism.¹ Though we occasionally see Natsume in his study drafting chapters, or admiring the inky paw prints left behind by his cat, much of the manga is devoted to Natsume’s travels through Tokyo, which brings him into contact with historical figures from An Jung-Geun, an activist who assassinated the Korean governor in 1909, to Hiruko Haratsuka, a feminist active in the Seito suffrage movement of the 1910s, to Lafcadio Hearn, a Western journalist whose fascination with old Japan inspired him to write Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things.

Some of these encounters are the jumping off point for vignettes about Westerners living in Japan, or the state of Japanese literature, while others are mere coincidence and treated in just one or two panels. The resulting manga feels like a tableau, or the Japanese equivalent of a guided tour through Colonial Williamsburg, as our unseen narrator identifies the sprawling cast of characters and mentions key events in Meiji-era history.

Despite its historical ambitions, The Times of Botchan is best read for its quieter moments. Jiro Taniguchi creates intimate scenes that require little or no dialogue to convey their nuance: two acquaintances walking silently through a snowing streetscape, Natsume working in his study. Small details capture the transitional nature of the period, and speak volumes about the characters’ ambivalent relationship with the West, with some embracing European dress, others flatly rejecting it, and most, like Natsume, striking a compromise, combining a yukata with a button-down shirt and bowler hat.

Sekikawa’s script, however, is less artful than Taniguchi’s visuals, as the omniscient narrator often supplies the reader with information that can be readily inferred from the pictures. In one scene, for example, the writer Rintaro “Ogai” Mori² returns to his family after a prolonged stay in Europe. He intends to tell his parents that he loves — and plans to marry — a young German dancer named Elise Weigert, but cannot bring himself to do so now that he is back on Japanese soil. Taniguchi’s illustrations instill in us a powerful sense of Mori’s estrangement from his roots, using his characters’ body language and placement within the picture plane to convey the emotional distance between Mori and his parents, but Sekikawa’s narrator intrudes on the scene:

At that moment, Ogai felt, for the first time, that he was back in Japan. In this country, individualism was not regarded as a personal virtue, the ‘family’ had to be considered. Ogai was unable to speak the words he had prepared and became mute as a fish.

Such heavy-handed interjections suggest that Sekikawa doesn’t trust us to decode moments of mystery, poetry, or ambiguity on our own; at least the Marquis de Custine never bothered to explain why Nicholas II and victims of the Kursk disaster haunted the same wing of the Hermitage.

The Times of Botchan‘s other great flaw is its deadly serious tone. The two novels that Natsume wrote during the period portrayed in the manga, I Am a Cat and Botchan, are both satirical, filled with wry observations about human nature and sharp critiques of pomposity, greed, toadyism, and empty-minded embrace of Western mores.³ Though the manga is filled with visual signifiers for both works — cats, in particular, are a recurring motif throughout the first two volumes — the manga lacks the delicate touch of either novel; one might reasonably conclude from Sekikawa’s narration that Botchan was a Zola-esque expose on the evils of Westernization, rather than a comedy about a young teacher coping with the inept faculty at a podunk boys’ boarding school.

From time to time, however, the narrative snaps out of its staid, vaguely pompous tone. In one genuinely funny scene, for example, Japan’s leading literary figures gather in the home of a prominent politician for a meeting of “The Perpetual and Immutable Literary Circle.” Two are asked to compose a poem on the spot. The first, intoned by the host, is greeted with respectful, if vague praise (“It reminds one of the tranquility and beauty of Turner’s paintings,” one opines):

The great canon is heard from afar
On the left diagonal of the hands that hold the horse’s reins.

The second stuns them into uncomfortable silence:

When the cowherd makes a poem
A new air rises in the world.

A lively debate follows, with some detecting a whiff of socialism in the cowherd’s profession, and others praising it for its direct simplicity; not until the group’s acknowledged expert interprets both poems does the group reach consensus on their quality. The punchline comes in the final panel, when one member acknowledges that the first poem made no sense. In that brief scene, Sekikawa and Taniguchi capture the spirit of Botchan without slavishly recreating a scene from it; one could almost imagine the savage nicknames that a younger, less pretentious member of the circle might lavish on his elders as they debated the merits of both poems.

In another rare moment of levity, Natsume witnesses a young suffragette making out with her paramour in a restaurant, noting the length — three and a half minutes — and intensity of their kiss. Taniguichi draws that kiss in almost pornographic detail, with panel after panel of the two lovers’ mouths drenched in saliva, in essence showing us how Natsume views their contact, with a mixture of prurient fascination and revulsion. Sesikawa and Taniguchi then takes things a step further, borrowing a page from Milos Foreman’s Amadeus to suggest how this brief, everyday experience found its way into the pages of Botchan, with the suffragette morphing neatly into the Madonna, a social-climbing temptress who switches romantic allegiances when it suits her interest.

Given the didactic tone and frequent allusions to unfamiliar historical figures, I’m hesitant to give The Times of Botchan an unequivocal endorsement. Some readers will find the book long-winded, confusing, and perhaps even a little boring. But for those already enamored of Taniguchi’s superb draftsmanship or well-versed in Japanese culture, The Times of Botchan offers readers a lovely reward: a window into one of the most fascinating periods in Japanese history, and the creative process of one its most important voices.

NOTES

1. The Freedom and People’s Rights Movement in Japan began in the 1870s. Building on the reforms established in the Charter Oath of 1868 (which abolished Japan’s rigid class structure, among other provisions), urban intellectuals lobbied for the drafting of a constitution and the creation of a parliament.

2. Ogai Mori is best known to Western audiences for his novels The Wild Geese and Sansho the Bailiff, the latter being the basis of Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1954 film.

3. As translator Joel Cohn notes, Botchan (the novel) occupies a similar place in the Japanese canon as Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn, and is a standard text in most high schools. See the introduction to Natsume Soseki, Botchan, Translated by J. Cohn (New York: Kodandsha International, 2005).

Review copy of volume four provided by the publisher. This is an expanded version of a review that appeared at PopCultureShock on 6/5/2007. The original review focused on volumes 1-3 of the series.