AT NIGHT, IN A TWISTING side street of a Japanese city, a single bright interior gleams from among the shadows: a comic-book shop open late, its shelves crammed with thousands of compact, durably bound volumes given over to every imaginable adventure and fantasy. These are the legendary manga, the picture books that account for more than a fourth of Japan’s publishing and that may yet make literature obsolete.
Open one at random and you might find anything—a sleek extraterrestrial landscape, an illustrated treatise on golf or fishing, an episode of torture, an elaborate reconstruction of sixteenth-century court life or twentieth-century gang warfare, a sexy or caricatural romp among high-school students—all rendered in a black-and-white so richly varied it makes color beside the point. It is difficult to tell what age group the books are aimed at, since uniformed schoolchildren and middle-aged businessmen browse along the same aisles. No matter how many customers are on hand (and at some hours the place gets as crowded as a commuter train), the shop remains weirdly silent except for the discreet rustling of pages. It’s a peculiar kind of social center, warm but disconnected: a crowd of strangers, each locked in solitary communion with a carefully selected dream world.
The silence of the shop contrasts with the sound effects radiating from the pages of the comics: the ZUKKAAA of a sword slicing through a neck, the DOKITSU of a passionate kiss, the KIIIII of an airplane taking off. The panels are alive with transcribed noises whose exuberance is more than matched by the images they punctuate. Manga come in an astonishing range of moods and tonalities: each book has its own distinctive rhythm and barometric pressure, its own sense of how a frame should function. To leaf through a baseball comic, for instance, is to fall into a hyperactive world of whizzing balls and thundering bats, an experience not unlike being physically hurled from one page to the next. The romance comics, by contrast, resemble a languorous unraveling, a slow slide into a pool of emotions. Inarticulate yearnings are manifested in the form of liquid glistening eyes and long (usually blond) hair cascading down the page. The samurai comics induce an illusion of rigor and ferocious alertness; the space adventures simulate levitation and free fall.
Whether swirling or galloping or exploding, the page layouts are designed to sustain a relentless flow of energy. One does not so much read a manga as submit to it, entering a state of total absorption in which the book seems to read itself. Manga contain far fewer words than the average American or European comic, so that the reader’s eyes race from frame to frame and his hands turn the page without any awareness of conscious intent. The layouts encourage a lightning-swift reading process. As the indispensable manga historian Frederick Schodt notes, “According to an editor of Kodansha’s Shonen Magazine . . . it takes the reader twenty minutes to finish a 320-page comic magazine. A quick calculation yields a breakdown of 16 pages a minute, or 3.75 seconds spent on each page.” An efficiently executed manga should provide an interlude devoid of hindrances or perplexities, one visual cue gliding into the next faster than the speed of thought. While immersed in his comic, the reader enjoys an effortless trancelike condition; when it’s finished, he tosses it aside and wonders for a moment what that was all about.
The medium did not attain its current ascendancy overnight, but in retrospect manga seem a logical culmination of the caricatural and narrative elements that have always figured in Japanese art—and the perfect vehicle for a country where seemingly almost any five-year-old can produce a passable cartoon. While the modern comic strip may be an Occidental invention, Japanese artists could find roots beyond Blondie in the work of Hokusai (who coined the word manga to describe his sketchbooks), Kuniyoshi (who was given to such cartoonish conceits as a classic Kabuki play performed by ghosts), and yet more anciently in the animal scrolls of the twelfth-century Bishop Toba. In his definitive Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics, Schodt has lovingly traced the stages by which the modern manga found its shape. Schodt’s book provides an unlikely fusion of scholarship, enthusiasm, and wit whose implications go well beyond its ostensible subject. Schodt charts a complex journey whose detours range from the stylistic fine points of wartime propaganda leaflets to the erotic symbolism of eggplants, from the bisexual subtext of girls’ romance comics to the economic structure of the comic-book industry.
Serialized comic strips have existed in Japan since 1902, rising to new heights of popularity during the American occupation. A rich sampling of postwar styles can be found in the Japanese anthology Natsukashi no hiiro manga (Nostalgic Hero Comics), which offers a succession of swift, gag-filled adventures and endearingly roly-poly protagonists. The fluent narration and flair for comic fantasy indicates a fully established national style. Within a decade, these relatively simple stories evolved into the longer and graphically more complex strips that launched the manga boom: the metaphysical epics Phoenix and Buddha created by cartoonist and animator Osamu Tezuka, who functions somewhat as Japan’s answer to Walt Disney; The Rose of Versailles, Riyoko Ikeda’s romantic saga of androgyny and revolution in eighteenth-century France, which generated a stage play, a TV series, and a movie version (Jacques Demy’s Lady Oscar) that although filmed in French was aimed almost exclusively at the Japanese market; and Sanpei Shirato’s Tales of the Ninja, an ultraviolent, politically charged historical adventure, which the filmmaker Nagisa Oshima so admired that he constructed an entire feature from still photographs of its artwork.
During the sixties and seventies, manga continually took on new audiences and new subject matter, and they did so unconstrained by the censorship that has afflicted American mass-market comic books. The reputation of Japanese comic books for dismemberment, scatology, and ingenious perversions is not entirely undeserved, even though such elements are far from predominant. It’s just the way they crop up unexpectedly that unnerves some foreign readers. What appears to be a children’s comic suddenly turns erotic; the stalwart hero of a samurai tale abruptly commits an act of outrageous cruelty. Similar shock effects occur in visual style. Many comics subject the characters to continual oscillations of body image, so that the inhabitants of a realistic story change, depending on their emotional state, into childish stick figures or surreal caricatures. The comic book is a waking dream, volatile and irrational.
That the dreams of the manga artists are deeply in tune with their society can be judged by the extraordinary sales figures Schodt cites. The artists and writers (who, unlike many of their American counterparts, hold the copyright on their creations) sometimes achieve the wealth and fame of rock stars. An outsider might mistake the phantasmagoric bouts of sex and violence, the unrestrained reverie and nonsense, for the manifestations of an avant-garde, but the manga do not represent a subculture. They are the mainstream, and in recent years (owing to the lamentable decline of the Japanese film industry) they have been the country’s most original and wide-ranging form of cultural expression. In Japan, it should be noted, comics are not necessarily ephemeral publications. Following serialization in weekly or monthly magazines, the most popular strips come out in paperback and commonly continue for many installments; a few years back, an adaptation of the Chinese novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms ran to fifty-one 200-page volumes. Enduring classics of the form, such as Phoenix and The Rose of Versailles, may be reissued in deluxe hardcover editions, to be read and reread by one generation after another. Manga in turn spill over into other media, generating live-action and animated film adaptations and TV series. The animated films are so popular that they have resulted in another hybrid form, the full-color anime comics created by laying out film frames in manga form.
The profusion and variety of manga make it hard to generalize about their future direction. Clearly the comic-book format—which is already being used for introductory books on history and economics—will find ever wider applications. A random sampling of books currently on the stands in Tokyo yields something for every taste, age, and level of reading ability. (The comics for younger readers spell out ideograms phonetically in the margin.) On the relatively adult side, there are the Kurosawa-like historical epic Nobunaga, with its stately panoramas punctuated at regular intervals by sex and violence, and the more flavorful Nishitte Monogatari, a picaresque, antiheroic treatment of samurai themes featuring the beautifully stylized artwork of Satomi Koe. More contemporary concerns provide the basis for Money Hunter, a financial saga set against photographically meticulous renderings of banks, offices, coffee shops, and railroad stations, an eerily exact mirror image of its readers’ world. This is only one of many business comics dealing with everything from stocks and bonds to the sushi trade; the trick is an artful mingling of melodrama and down-to-earth information. Notable among the always popular sports comics is the long-running, broadly humorous Weather Permitting, focused exclusively and obsessively on the hallowed realm of golf. (Although the dramatic possibilities of golf might seem limited, the sport has inspired a wide range of comics, from the farcical to the pornographic.)
Adolescent fare (by no means read only by adolescents) caters to a spectrum of sensibilities. At one end is Fist of the Seven Stars, the epitome of post-apocalyptic heavy-metal skull bashing, whose art resembles a collaboration between El Greco and the makers of The Road Warrior, and whose most recent issue includes a slow-motion three-page simulation of a bowie knife being driven through a forehead. For tenderer natures there is Street of Angels, the languid, mildly erotic adventures of a rather androgynous gigolo; on the cover of the first issue he sports a red rose and a bow tie, and (in an innovative bit of romantic imagery) presses a cold can of Budweiser against his pallid and presumably feverish cheek. Toy, the similarly dreamy but sexually milder chronicle of a sensitive young pop star, is notable for the chic starkness of its layouts.
Traditionally, there has been a sharp distinction between boys’ and girls’ comics, but a crossover of readership is now evident, most notably in teenage sex comedies like City Hunter, Be Free!, and the inimitably titled New Sex Life-Style Bible. While some of these appeal mostly to male readers, they have incorporated visual and story elements from the romance comics, and the female characters play an increasingly dominant role. These comics, with their blend of playful raunchiness, romantic tenderness, and elaborate slapstick, have no precise American equivalent. One might try to imagine what Archie comics would be like if they contained nudity, digressed into discussions of clitoral orgasm, and spun off now and again into perverse and sometimes violent fantasy.
American comic book artists have been studying manga for years. Their influence is flagrant in the countless ninja fantasies of the past decade, while Frank Miller’s graphic novel Ronin pays overt homage to the stylistic inventions of the Japanese. A number of factors, however, have prevented the originals from becoming widely available in English. First, there are technical problems: manga read from right to left, so that for an English edition the pages must be reversed or redrawn; the text runs vertically rather than horizontally; the Japanese sound effects are an essential part of the design. Even more crucial, as Schodt notes, are the profound cultural barriers, in both structure and symbolism: “What non-Japanese would guess . . . that when a huge balloon of mucus billows from a character’s nose it means he is sound asleep; that when a male character suddenly has blood gush from his nostrils he is sexually excited; or that when the distance between his nose and his lips suddenly lengthens he is thinking lascivious thoughts?” While it would be fascinating to have the unadulterated manga in English, the process is prohibitively expensive without the support of a mass audience.
The existence of such an audience has until now seemed unlikely, but the growing popularity of Japanese animation (especially on the West Coast) has encouraged a few publishers to gamble. If the experiment works, it could begin a reversal of that cultural trade imbalance in which the Japanese open their markets to Madonna and Sylvester Stallone but find few American buyers for their own pop culture. So far, interest is running high among comic-book freaks; the only question is whether manga can reach the wider audience they command at home. The current contenders include Golgo 13, an enduringly popular serial about an international hit man; the legendary samurai series Lone Wolf and Cub; and, most ambitiously, a whole line of manga from the California-based Eclipse Comics: Area 88, Mai the Psychic Girl, and The Legend of Kamui.
All of these (with the partial exception of Mai) fit comfortably into the action genre—hardly surprising in view of the predominantly male American comic-book readership. We will probably not be seeing English versions anytime soon of the sentimental, erotic, or humorous comics that make up such a large part of the manga culture; nor, because of cultural differences, are we likely to be given a glimpse of the sports, business, or porno subdivisions (although one American publisher has promised a Japanese economics text in manga form). For the moment, Japanese comics will have to rely on swords and rocket ships for their American export business.
Of the manga currently available here, Golgo 13 is superficially the most assimilable, since it represents a fusion of sixties espionage clichés, from Doctor No to Mission Impossible. But its protagonist, superagent Golgo (short for Golgotha), has none of the urbanity of a James Bond; this morose and relentlessly efficient killing machine is characterized only (according to an attached dossier) by “narrow, penetrating eyes” and “nearly total lack of facial expressions.” Nuance has no role in Golgo 13: a Golgo prey to complexity or self-doubt would defeat the purpose of the strip. The writer-artist Takao Saito has spent sixteen years perfecting a single explosive encounter. To a streamlined cosmopolitan world stocked with high-tech weaponry he opposes the solitary destructive force of Golgo smashing through all complications. The backgrounds are as topical as possible—neo-Nazis in Argentina, Soviet troops in Kabul, Amal terrorists in Beirut—and the details of machines and uniforms are drawn with fetishistic precision. The more solid the setup, the bigger the jolt when Golgo barrels through and knocks everything down. The comic works by narrowing its options to a single gesture, to be repeated as often as desired.
If Golgo 13 is a resolutely internationalized fantasy—even the hero’s nationality remains ambiguous—Lone Wolf and Cub is something else again: an intrinsically Japanese entertainment, now virtually enshrined as a masterpiece of manga art. This revenge saga picks up from a long line of Kabuki plays and serialized novels, simplifying them down to their essence. The narrative’s monotony is its point. An outlawed samurai vows vengeance on the clan that slaughtered most of his family; in the meantime, he wanders the back roads of Japan, transporting his infant son in a wooden cart and severing a certain quota of heads and hands in each episode. American audiences have already met this story in Shogun Assassin, the exercise in continuous mayhem that Robert Houston ingeniously stitched together from two of the six movies based on Lone Wolf and Cub. Those movies (most of them directed by action specialist Kenji Misumi) were cult material in themselves, and the original installments now available make it clear just how faithfully Misumi adhered to his source material, at times duplicating the layouts frame for frame. But Goseki Kojima’s artwork for Lone Wolf and Cub is more than a storyboard for a better-than-average samurai movie. It creates, with the most minimal graphic means, a world with its own distinct tempo and its own sense of body weight, setting a sword thrust against a distant mountain peak, a cluster of fighting men against a thick fall of snowflakes.
Kojima avoids the monumentality that can afflict period pieces. His fight scenes are executed in lightning shorthand; he registers sweeping movements rather than static tableaux. No gouts of Technicolor blood could compare with the splashes of black ink that spatter vigorously across the page, shaken from the brush in a carefully controlled variant of action painting. Kojima’s graphics, in short, imitate the hero’s swordsmanship; the slash and its depiction become a single gesture. That calligraphic intensity unites the whole interminable series. Whether it will be enough to sustain most American readers for six thousand pages is another question, but Lone Wolf and Cub can at least be recommended unconditionally to admirers of such films as Sanjuro, Samurai Rebellion, and Sword of Doom.
The Legend of Kamui, billed by Eclipse as “a genuine ninja story,” was another long-running favorite, and judging by the episodes translated so far, it may prove even more appealing than Lone Wolf and Cub. Its creator, Sanpei Shirato, is famous for his infusion of class struggle into traditional adventure modes. His influential Tales of the Ninja was a fresco of peasant rebellions, and Kamui takes us into a world of impoverished fishing villages and nomadic mountain dwellers. Shirato’s tale is slow-paced, sentimental, and dense with homely realities. The requisite displays of ninja skill and cunning are interspersed with lyrical intervals and snippets of practical lore; the scenes that show how to make a fishing lure, or that witness the preparations for a traditional feast, are more absorbing than the scenes of combat. Shirato seasons his melodrama with real places and things. That he can devote eight pages to a chaste and almost wordless love scene, and almost a whole issue to an ordinary fishing expedition, suggests his range. The other Eclipse manga are fun as well (Area 88 is a futurist aerial adventure, Mai a thoroughly Japanese variation on Firestarter and The Fury). But for an introduction to the flavor of manga, The Legend of Kamui is the best place to turn.
The most striking characteristic of Kamui, as of many other manga, is its spaciousness. Incidents that would occupy a single frame in an American comic book go on for many pages. Like the cinematic long takes of Mizoguchi and Ozu, these extended scenes achieve a lifelike continuity; the narrative is given breathing room and escapes the claustrophobia of cluttered panels and compressed plots. An ancient Japanese predilection for empty spaces and periods of silence comes into play once more, to give air and flow to the wordless literature of the space age.
VLS, December 1987