The Ice Wanderer

By Jiro Taniguchi
Fanfare/Ponent Mon, 240 pp.
Rating: 16+

Do you ever find yourself thinking, “I wish I could read something like Jiro Taniguchi’s The Walking Man but with more wolf fighting and bear hunting?”

The Ice Wanderer was my introduction to Taniguchi’s work, very little of which has reached our shores. An anthology of short stories thematically centered around man and nature, the first short features Jack London as a character, and the second is based on London’s notes for an early draft of White Fang.

The best shorts in The Ice Wanderer are not Jack London tributes; the highlight of the anthology is “Return to the Sea,” the tale of a marine biologist who follows a whale to a legendary whale cemetery. I was also very impressed by “Shokaro,” a short about an aspiring manga artist recounting his time living in an eclectic boarding house.

“The Ice Wanderer” and “White Wilderness” boast the kind of impressive, breathtaking natural backgrounds required for Jack London adaptations. However, between the Yukon mountains and attacks by hungry wolves, the Fanfare/Ponent dialog is a rough read. The dialects spoken don’t flow smoothly. I also found the character designs off-putting in the first and last shorts, since the natives have identical face structures to the white settlers. (Maybe I’m just racist…? I’m not sure what race the marine biologist is, other than non-Inuit.)

“Shokaro” uses setting as character as much as the other stories, but this time the setting is indoors (in Japan). A young manga-ka living in a communal dorm-style apartment observes the lives of his neighbors while he completes a comic for a contest. The story is set years ago, pre-internet, as the artist draws alone in his small, undecorated room. The tenants of the building are slightly haunted by the structure’s past as a prewar brothel. The setting and characters ring true to life.

“Return to the Sea” is so sincere it was hard for me to take seriously (I had to use “The New Sincerity” to get through it). In a very predictable plotline, a scientist follows a whale who once saved his life as the creature swims off to die. The natives tell him not to go, but he’s driven to find out if the whale graveyard is real. The lyrical splash page as the unnamed protagonist loses consciousness deep below the northern sea is well-worth the book’s Eisner nomination.

I’d like to think Fanfare/Ponent Mon is to manga what the Criterion Collection is to DVDs - but then, where does Vertical fit in to my metaphor? And what about Drawn & Quarterly?

The Ice Wanderer is available now.

Disappearance Diary

By Hideo Azuma
Fanfare/Ponent Mon, 200 pp.
Rating: NR (Older Readers)

Reading Hideo Azuma’s Disappearance Diary is the comic equivalent of watching a foreign film at a film festival alone; afterwards you desperately want to discuss the film/book with someone else, only to find none of your friends have seen/read it yet.

Disappearance Diary is an autobiographical work by manga artist Hideo Azuma. The book covers three periods in Azuma’s life when he stopped creating manga: in his first disappearance a failed suicide attempt ends in Azuma living homeless in the woods for months; in his second disappearance, Azuma becomes a gas pipe fitter under an assumed name; in the final third of the book Azuma’s lifelong history of alcoholism ends in a long-term hospitalization.

The book won Grand Prize in the 2005 Japan Media Arts Festival and was the Grand Prize winner at the 2006 Osama Tezuka Cultural Awards - although, I would have purchased it even without all the accolades. All you had to do was say “homeless” and “autobiography”.

The first panel reads:

“This manga has a positive outlook on life, and so it has been made with as much realism removed as possible.”

As advertised, Azuma’s suicide attempt is drawn as a gag panel. His struggles living in the woods read like a food blog. His misogynist co-worker at the gas company is a character played up for laughs. The artwork is exceedingly cute, even when the alcoholic Azuma is puking in his his sleep. (Azuma helpfully notes, “Warning: This will kill you.”)

Azuma’s negative experiences with his editors and the struggles that caused him to run away are glossed over in about 20 pages. I was left wondering if Azuma enjoyed laying pipes more than making manga. His opinion flies by in a single panel:

“When I was homeless I wanted to start working. When I did physical work I wanted to become an artist.”

Perhaps more alarming than Azuma’s personal story is the untold story of his wife, who also works as his assistant. How did Azuma’s wife feel about his disappearances? She rarely appears in the book she helped create. What did she do for money when her husband/employer failed to return home for months? At one point, she finished comics herself when Azuma was overtaken by delirium tremens.

Disappearance Diary is truly fierce as an autobiographical comic; boring details are made humorous, depressing subjects are amusing to read about, pipe laying technicalities are accompanied by cute chipmunk drawings, and the story so thought provoking it has hounded me for days.

I just wish more supplementary material was provided by the publisher, since little is known about Azuma in the English speaking world. A bibliography of Azuma’s other works would have been useful, or an essay explaining his significance in the world of manga could have rounded out the volume very nicely. This may be a faithful reprint of the Japanese edition, but it left me wanting more. For example, it is mentioned in the text that Azuma is the father of lolicon manga - but why? For what title? Azuma barely mentions it, recalling a 1976 attempt to drive yaoi out of Comiket. I want to hear more about that!

Azuma still attends Comiket on a regular basis, as Ed Chavez explained to me in conversation. Azuma is also renowned for his science fiction works, and he is a pioneer of autobiography comics. According to Chavez, Azuma is very successful in a few small sub-genres of manga, but his success is not financial. It is common for authors like Azuma who are successful in obscure genres to become alcoholics or disappear completely, with a life expectancy of 40. The Disappearance Diary itself was published by a very small label and would have gone unnoticed if it hadn’t won awards.

I hope more of Azuma’s works will be collected and translated for an international audience before he dies of liver failure. I would also like to see a comic by Mrs. Azuma!

The Disappearance Diary is available now.

The Times of Botchan, Vols. 1-3

By Jiro Taniguchi and Natsuo Sekikawa
Fanfare/Ponent Mon
No Rating

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 Botchan the role is fulfilled by Soseki Natsume (1867-1916), a novelist active during 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 working on a novel called The Times of Botchan. He hopes that Botchan will help him—and others like him—achieve catharsis from a vague but nagging sense of anxiety brought on by the period’s considerable social, political, and economic upheavals, from the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement to the first murmurs of suffragism.* 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 daily routine, 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. 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, perhaps, 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 literary and historical ambitions, The Times of Botchan is best read for its superb illustrations. Jiro Taniguchi creates intimate scenes that require little or no dialogue to convey their nuance. Small details—such as the characters’ mix-and-match costumes of Western hats and Japanese robes—capture the transitional nature of the period, and speak volumes about the characters’ ambivalent relationship with the West.

Sekikawa’s script, however, is a different matter altogether. Sekikawa’s 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” Mori** returns to his family after a prolonged stay in Germany. He intends to tell his parents that he loves—and plans to marry—a European, 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 estrangement, but Sekikawa’s voice intrudes on the scene. “I have returned. It has been a long absence,” Ogai says. Then the narrator informs us: “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.” (Mute as a fish? Surely there was a more idiomatic way to translate this phrase.) Such heavy-handed interjections insult the reader’s intelligence, as if the author didn’t trust his audience to decode moments of mystery, poetry, or ambiguity on its 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.

Given the didactic tone and frequent allusions to unfamiliar historical figures, I’m hesitant to give Botchan an unequivocal endorsement. Some readers will find the book long-winded, confusing, and perhaps even 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.

* 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.

** 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 devastating 1954 film.

This review was revised on 6/7/07.