Tuesday, September 07, 2004
MANGA CORNER: GARDEN
Once more, there's been a longer wait between appearances of this feature than I'd like, but hopefully the quality of what's being reviewed will partially make up for this. Garden (the title is in English) is a collection of stories by Usamaru Furuya, some of whose works have already been published in the U.S.: Viz published the two-volume Short Cuts, and selections from Furuya'a avant-garde gag strip Palepoli appeared in Secret Comics Japan, also published by Viz (a few Palepoli strips are also included in the non-comics anthology Japan Edge). Both these works are worth checking out, particularly Palepoli (it's a pity that Viz hasn't published a complete collection of this strip), but Garden is quite different from either of them. Both Palepoli and Short Cuts are humor series made up of very brief stories, the former of four-panel strips and the latter mainly of single-page stories. Garden contains seven stories, originally published separately, ranging from 12 to 114 pages, and only one of these stories is humorous. And while the stories in Garden eschew the formal experimentation of Palepoli (with one exception), in terms of content they are far edgier than any of Furuya's work yet published in the U.S. Thematically, in fact, Garden is closer to Suehiro Maruo's work than to any other manga published in the U.S. that I know of. Although Furuya's images are not as extreme as Maruo's (with a few exceptions), three stories in Garden, including the two longest, deal with one of Maruo's characteristic themes: the abuse, often sexual, of young girls.
The first story in Garden, "Ratai no kigen" ("The Origin of Nudity"), is a dreamlike, surrealistic, sixteen-page story in full color inspired by Bosch's painting "The Garden of Earthly Delights." The color is gorgeous: unlike the garish colors of "mainstream" American comics, the coloring here is subtle and restrained. The story itself is virtually impossible to summarize in a coherent manner.
The next story, "Tenshi no ferachio" ("Angel's Fellatio"), is a twelve-page story in black and white (as is the rest of the book) combining sex and humor. In tone and visual style, it's very similar to Short Cuts; in fact, you could consider it "Short Cuts with explicit sex." The heroine, Maria, is a present-day Japanese schoolgirl who has been told by an angel that although a virgin, she will conceive a child. She doesn't like the idea, so she tries to disqualify herself by losing her virginity to a geeky schoolmate; but she is foiled at the critical moment by the "angel's fellatio" of the title, which puts her partner out of commission. Much of the humor derives from the reactions of Maria's geeky partner, who is drawn with a deliberately shaky line, unlike the polished line used for Maria and the rest of the story.
The twenty-four page "Yumekana" (the title derives from the names of the two protagonists; but it could also be read as meaning "Was/is It a Dream?') is also about sex, but it's not humorous. It's about two friends, both schoolgirls (a caption gives their ages as 10,013 [sic]), one of whom forces the other to act out a pornographic comic she found in order to satisfy her own curiosity regarding sexuality. It's a disturbing story which does have a pornographic aspect (though neither of the protagonists is explicitly shown engaging in any sexual act), but it's also a serious portrayal of how sex can appear as an alluring, dangerous enigma. Yume, the girl who forces her friend to act out the comic, is a believable character despite her strange behavior. This is the most recent of the stories collected here, and the art shows a great advance upon Short Cuts and "Tenshi no ferachio," both in the subtlety of facial expressions and in panel composition.
"Umi kara kita kikai" ("The Machine that Came from the Sea") is a twelve-page story about a strange machine that, as the title states, emerges from the sea, follows a high school girl home, and can change its shape to match whatever she thinks about. Like "Yumenaka," it also deals with a girl's awakening sexuality, but it's a slight story compared to that, though Furuya's rendering of the machine and its metamorphoses is amusing.
"Tsuki no fumi" ("Moon Letter"), at forty-eight pages, is the second longest story in the book. It's also the best. Its genre is fantasy, but it's the sort of fantasy that Gene Wolfe or John Crowley might have written. It's about an apprentice alchemist; his master; the bizarre, isolated world they live in; the strange experiments they perform on young girls; the apprentice's friendship with one of these girls who has escaped; and his "birth" into the world and into full humanity as a result of this friendship. The story is narrated by the apprentice, to whom the strange world he lives in is perfectly normal, as he has never known any other; and the subtle, realistic art corresponds to this unquestioning acceptance. I could spend pages analyzing this story; if I'm hesitant to proclaim it a masterpiece outright, it's only because I worry that the symbolism might be a bit too neat and tidy. Still, it's one of the best manga I've ever read. For that matter, it's one of the best comics of any kind I've ever read.
"Egao de sayohnara" ("Goodbye with a Smile") is the only story in Garden to share the formal experimentation of Palepoli, which it actually preceded: if I'm reading Furuya's afterword correctly, it's the first "self-conscious" manga he drew. In twelve pages, each in the two-by-two grid of Palepoli, it depicts the dying actions of a man who's been stabbed by his girlfriend in a quasi-Cubist style (according to the afterword, it was inspired by a painting by Francis Bacon that I'm unfamiliar with). It's interesting, but I found it the weakest story in the book.
"Emi-chan" is the longest story, at 114 pages, almost half the book. In the book, the story is divided into groups of approximately sixteen pages apiece, each of which is sealed shut on the outside, making it impossible to browse the story casually, even after you've removed the plastic wrap. Preceding the story is a page on "How to read 'Emi-chan,'" advising readers to take an exacto knife (lacking one, I found a penknife to produce an acceptable if ragged result) and cut open the first group of sixteen pages: if these pages are too upsetting don't read any further; if not, then repeat the procedure with the second group, and so on. While the admonitory tone is partly tongue-in-cheek, "Emi-chan" is indeed horrific, and some of the images are very rough. As the story begins, Emi-chan, a girl of about thirteen, is dragging a mysterious sack through a forest, holding a teddy bear. She runs into a man who has abducted, tortured and killed a bus of nursery-school girls (it's implied, though not actually shown, that he has also sexually assaulted them). Furuya adeptly builds the sensation of mounting horror in these scenes; but we eventually discover that another, deeper, horror lies concealed. The visual style is quite different here from that of the other stories in the book. Furuya's line is much shakier; and several early pages break the action down into numerous small, irregularly-shaped panels, each showing only a small segment of the scene: a technique that can easily be overused, but here works effectively to speed up the tempo of the action.
In Furuya's afterword, he says that the drawing of the original version of "Emi-chan," which was serialized in Garo, was like an explosion, propelled by a sense of professional and personal crisis: Furuya wrote and drew each eight-page installment without having determined the content in advance, without doing a rough draft or any advance planning, and without any thought of what the next installment would be. The version in Garden has been substantially revised; but even so, it's hard to believe that the story had its origin in such a complete improvisation, so well is it constructed. Furuya concludes that though "Emi-chan" was a success in terms of resolving the crisis which inspired it, it is a failure as a manga, but I disagree.
When there are manga of the caliber of "Moon Letter" to be read--and I've already read and reviewed several others which are equal or better than the best U.S. comics, even though I've only looked at a tiny sampling of "alternative" manga--it's not surprising that I can't work up much enthusiasm for 99% of the comics which are lauded in print or online--and this includes alternatives as well as "mainstream" comics. On the other hand, it's frustrating that very few American comic fans are likely to ever see this stuff. Ordinarily, I'd expect Garden to have a better chance of getting translated than the manga whose reviews I've linked to above, since it's more story-oriented and less contemplative. However, the subject matters of "Yumenaka" and "Emi-chan" make this unlikely. Even "Moon Letter" might be dicey, as there are depictions of nude children, and one brief implied sex scene. So, while I hate to say that your only hope is to learn to read Japanese, I'm afraid it's probably true. (It's really not such a dreadful prospect, though; I did so in my forties, entirely on my own. Maybe sometime I'll post about it.)
The other Japanese-language manga by Furuya I own is the first volume of a series called Pi (written as the greek letter), which came out in 2003. Unlike the stories in Garden, which appeared in alternative publications such as Garo and Comic Cue (mainly the latter), Pi, like Short Cuts before it, was serialized in a commercial magazine (Big Comic Spirits in the case of Pi), and is unabashedly designed to appeal to teenage boys and young men. I haven't read it, but it seems pretty clear what it's about: it's a high school sex comedy. The main character is a young man who is obsessed with breasts, though he keeps up a facade of indifference, thereby attracting the interest of a busty but short-tempered girl. The series seems to be popular: the last time I looked, it was up to volume five.
Garden is 240 pages and sells for 1111 yen. It's published by Iisuto Puresu (East Press) and its ISBN is 4-87257-204-1.
Once more, there's been a longer wait between appearances of this feature than I'd like, but hopefully the quality of what's being reviewed will partially make up for this. Garden (the title is in English) is a collection of stories by Usamaru Furuya, some of whose works have already been published in the U.S.: Viz published the two-volume Short Cuts, and selections from Furuya'a avant-garde gag strip Palepoli appeared in Secret Comics Japan, also published by Viz (a few Palepoli strips are also included in the non-comics anthology Japan Edge). Both these works are worth checking out, particularly Palepoli (it's a pity that Viz hasn't published a complete collection of this strip), but Garden is quite different from either of them. Both Palepoli and Short Cuts are humor series made up of very brief stories, the former of four-panel strips and the latter mainly of single-page stories. Garden contains seven stories, originally published separately, ranging from 12 to 114 pages, and only one of these stories is humorous. And while the stories in Garden eschew the formal experimentation of Palepoli (with one exception), in terms of content they are far edgier than any of Furuya's work yet published in the U.S. Thematically, in fact, Garden is closer to Suehiro Maruo's work than to any other manga published in the U.S. that I know of. Although Furuya's images are not as extreme as Maruo's (with a few exceptions), three stories in Garden, including the two longest, deal with one of Maruo's characteristic themes: the abuse, often sexual, of young girls.
The first story in Garden, "Ratai no kigen" ("The Origin of Nudity"), is a dreamlike, surrealistic, sixteen-page story in full color inspired by Bosch's painting "The Garden of Earthly Delights." The color is gorgeous: unlike the garish colors of "mainstream" American comics, the coloring here is subtle and restrained. The story itself is virtually impossible to summarize in a coherent manner.
The next story, "Tenshi no ferachio" ("Angel's Fellatio"), is a twelve-page story in black and white (as is the rest of the book) combining sex and humor. In tone and visual style, it's very similar to Short Cuts; in fact, you could consider it "Short Cuts with explicit sex." The heroine, Maria, is a present-day Japanese schoolgirl who has been told by an angel that although a virgin, she will conceive a child. She doesn't like the idea, so she tries to disqualify herself by losing her virginity to a geeky schoolmate; but she is foiled at the critical moment by the "angel's fellatio" of the title, which puts her partner out of commission. Much of the humor derives from the reactions of Maria's geeky partner, who is drawn with a deliberately shaky line, unlike the polished line used for Maria and the rest of the story.
The twenty-four page "Yumekana" (the title derives from the names of the two protagonists; but it could also be read as meaning "Was/is It a Dream?') is also about sex, but it's not humorous. It's about two friends, both schoolgirls (a caption gives their ages as 10,013 [sic]), one of whom forces the other to act out a pornographic comic she found in order to satisfy her own curiosity regarding sexuality. It's a disturbing story which does have a pornographic aspect (though neither of the protagonists is explicitly shown engaging in any sexual act), but it's also a serious portrayal of how sex can appear as an alluring, dangerous enigma. Yume, the girl who forces her friend to act out the comic, is a believable character despite her strange behavior. This is the most recent of the stories collected here, and the art shows a great advance upon Short Cuts and "Tenshi no ferachio," both in the subtlety of facial expressions and in panel composition.
"Umi kara kita kikai" ("The Machine that Came from the Sea") is a twelve-page story about a strange machine that, as the title states, emerges from the sea, follows a high school girl home, and can change its shape to match whatever she thinks about. Like "Yumenaka," it also deals with a girl's awakening sexuality, but it's a slight story compared to that, though Furuya's rendering of the machine and its metamorphoses is amusing.
"Tsuki no fumi" ("Moon Letter"), at forty-eight pages, is the second longest story in the book. It's also the best. Its genre is fantasy, but it's the sort of fantasy that Gene Wolfe or John Crowley might have written. It's about an apprentice alchemist; his master; the bizarre, isolated world they live in; the strange experiments they perform on young girls; the apprentice's friendship with one of these girls who has escaped; and his "birth" into the world and into full humanity as a result of this friendship. The story is narrated by the apprentice, to whom the strange world he lives in is perfectly normal, as he has never known any other; and the subtle, realistic art corresponds to this unquestioning acceptance. I could spend pages analyzing this story; if I'm hesitant to proclaim it a masterpiece outright, it's only because I worry that the symbolism might be a bit too neat and tidy. Still, it's one of the best manga I've ever read. For that matter, it's one of the best comics of any kind I've ever read.
"Egao de sayohnara" ("Goodbye with a Smile") is the only story in Garden to share the formal experimentation of Palepoli, which it actually preceded: if I'm reading Furuya's afterword correctly, it's the first "self-conscious" manga he drew. In twelve pages, each in the two-by-two grid of Palepoli, it depicts the dying actions of a man who's been stabbed by his girlfriend in a quasi-Cubist style (according to the afterword, it was inspired by a painting by Francis Bacon that I'm unfamiliar with). It's interesting, but I found it the weakest story in the book.
"Emi-chan" is the longest story, at 114 pages, almost half the book. In the book, the story is divided into groups of approximately sixteen pages apiece, each of which is sealed shut on the outside, making it impossible to browse the story casually, even after you've removed the plastic wrap. Preceding the story is a page on "How to read 'Emi-chan,'" advising readers to take an exacto knife (lacking one, I found a penknife to produce an acceptable if ragged result) and cut open the first group of sixteen pages: if these pages are too upsetting don't read any further; if not, then repeat the procedure with the second group, and so on. While the admonitory tone is partly tongue-in-cheek, "Emi-chan" is indeed horrific, and some of the images are very rough. As the story begins, Emi-chan, a girl of about thirteen, is dragging a mysterious sack through a forest, holding a teddy bear. She runs into a man who has abducted, tortured and killed a bus of nursery-school girls (it's implied, though not actually shown, that he has also sexually assaulted them). Furuya adeptly builds the sensation of mounting horror in these scenes; but we eventually discover that another, deeper, horror lies concealed. The visual style is quite different here from that of the other stories in the book. Furuya's line is much shakier; and several early pages break the action down into numerous small, irregularly-shaped panels, each showing only a small segment of the scene: a technique that can easily be overused, but here works effectively to speed up the tempo of the action.
In Furuya's afterword, he says that the drawing of the original version of "Emi-chan," which was serialized in Garo, was like an explosion, propelled by a sense of professional and personal crisis: Furuya wrote and drew each eight-page installment without having determined the content in advance, without doing a rough draft or any advance planning, and without any thought of what the next installment would be. The version in Garden has been substantially revised; but even so, it's hard to believe that the story had its origin in such a complete improvisation, so well is it constructed. Furuya concludes that though "Emi-chan" was a success in terms of resolving the crisis which inspired it, it is a failure as a manga, but I disagree.
When there are manga of the caliber of "Moon Letter" to be read--and I've already read and reviewed several others which are equal or better than the best U.S. comics, even though I've only looked at a tiny sampling of "alternative" manga--it's not surprising that I can't work up much enthusiasm for 99% of the comics which are lauded in print or online--and this includes alternatives as well as "mainstream" comics. On the other hand, it's frustrating that very few American comic fans are likely to ever see this stuff. Ordinarily, I'd expect Garden to have a better chance of getting translated than the manga whose reviews I've linked to above, since it's more story-oriented and less contemplative. However, the subject matters of "Yumenaka" and "Emi-chan" make this unlikely. Even "Moon Letter" might be dicey, as there are depictions of nude children, and one brief implied sex scene. So, while I hate to say that your only hope is to learn to read Japanese, I'm afraid it's probably true. (It's really not such a dreadful prospect, though; I did so in my forties, entirely on my own. Maybe sometime I'll post about it.)
The other Japanese-language manga by Furuya I own is the first volume of a series called Pi (written as the greek letter), which came out in 2003. Unlike the stories in Garden, which appeared in alternative publications such as Garo and Comic Cue (mainly the latter), Pi, like Short Cuts before it, was serialized in a commercial magazine (Big Comic Spirits in the case of Pi), and is unabashedly designed to appeal to teenage boys and young men. I haven't read it, but it seems pretty clear what it's about: it's a high school sex comedy. The main character is a young man who is obsessed with breasts, though he keeps up a facade of indifference, thereby attracting the interest of a busty but short-tempered girl. The series seems to be popular: the last time I looked, it was up to volume five.
Garden is 240 pages and sells for 1111 yen. It's published by Iisuto Puresu (East Press) and its ISBN is 4-87257-204-1.
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