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rushthatspeaksI really love this thing where Drawn & Quarterly has been fairly quietly putting out a whole line of gekiga and underground manga. My household pretty much buys whatever they do in that direction-- it's all worthwhile. Red Snow came out last year, so I'm just catching up.
Susumu Katsumata debuted his work in the late nineteen-sixties in Garo, which is undisputedly considered the greatest magazine of underground manga. Unusually, Katsumata's work consisted of four-panel comics, a format I had not realized Garo ever did. Four-panel comics can be spectacular, but the most famous examples of them I'm aware of are comedic, and it's fascinating to contemplate what a regularly-running four-panel in a seriously literary magazine intended for avant-garde readers would look like. Somebody could maybe think about putting those out? Red Snow is a collection of his longer work, i.e. short stories.
This is an interesting set of pieces which grew on me more as they went on. His art is consistently fluid, but sometimes visually hard to follow, and as many mangaka do he seems to have a set of faces and bodies he continually reuses for separate characters in separate stories. I'm not entirely sure this is a flaw, because it means that his people meld together in a way that might even be intentional: he's writing very specifically about village life, village stories, the same kinds of tangled interrelationships, so it makes sense that the same faces pop up again and again in villages that are superficially each different villages.
As far as the story content, well, pre-industrial village life. Sex is grimy and/or transcendental, violence is endemic, hard work a constant, humor obscene. What makes it interesting is the complete blurring of the line between reality and myth. A young boy who can't figure out how to talk to a girl complains about it to the temple-pet tanuki who follows him around, and no one blinks an eye when the tanuki talks back. A woman pregnant with an illegitimate child is gossiped about not just because it isn't her husband's, but because it's the child of the local kappa. A man who mistreats a pregnant woman is smothered to death by a million fireflies in the shape of her ghost. This is just the way things are, reflected on momentarily by people in passing, going on with their lives. There is, in some ways, very little story here in story's conventional shapes, and in other ways a great deal happens.
I think this is the missing link between something like Shigeru Mizuki's Kitaro, with its pulp-adventure tales of youkai and demons, and the quiet melancholy of something like today's Mushishi or Natsume Yuujinchou; but far grimmer than either. As gekiga always intended, this is work meant not only to be read by adults, but to disquiet them, and yet it isn't horror-- that's part of the point. It's too raw to be nostalgia and too lively to be condemnation. It feels like an attempt at an accurate portrait of a time and place and way of living that never quite were, and should not, perhaps, be lamented, but that, nonetheless, had good things about them. I can't say this is an entertaining collection to read-- it's sometimes boring, sometimes confusing, snarls of genealogy going by for pages and then individual images thrown into high and sudden relief and interest. But I have seen nothing else like it, and it has the quality of sticking in the mind.
In the appendix, it says that Katsumata's longest work is a graphic novel about a legal trial regarding the discrimination against the burakumin, who are Japan's hereditary untouchables. If anyone wanted to bring that over, I wouldn't mind either.
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Susumu Katsumata debuted his work in the late nineteen-sixties in Garo, which is undisputedly considered the greatest magazine of underground manga. Unusually, Katsumata's work consisted of four-panel comics, a format I had not realized Garo ever did. Four-panel comics can be spectacular, but the most famous examples of them I'm aware of are comedic, and it's fascinating to contemplate what a regularly-running four-panel in a seriously literary magazine intended for avant-garde readers would look like. Somebody could maybe think about putting those out? Red Snow is a collection of his longer work, i.e. short stories.
This is an interesting set of pieces which grew on me more as they went on. His art is consistently fluid, but sometimes visually hard to follow, and as many mangaka do he seems to have a set of faces and bodies he continually reuses for separate characters in separate stories. I'm not entirely sure this is a flaw, because it means that his people meld together in a way that might even be intentional: he's writing very specifically about village life, village stories, the same kinds of tangled interrelationships, so it makes sense that the same faces pop up again and again in villages that are superficially each different villages.
As far as the story content, well, pre-industrial village life. Sex is grimy and/or transcendental, violence is endemic, hard work a constant, humor obscene. What makes it interesting is the complete blurring of the line between reality and myth. A young boy who can't figure out how to talk to a girl complains about it to the temple-pet tanuki who follows him around, and no one blinks an eye when the tanuki talks back. A woman pregnant with an illegitimate child is gossiped about not just because it isn't her husband's, but because it's the child of the local kappa. A man who mistreats a pregnant woman is smothered to death by a million fireflies in the shape of her ghost. This is just the way things are, reflected on momentarily by people in passing, going on with their lives. There is, in some ways, very little story here in story's conventional shapes, and in other ways a great deal happens.
I think this is the missing link between something like Shigeru Mizuki's Kitaro, with its pulp-adventure tales of youkai and demons, and the quiet melancholy of something like today's Mushishi or Natsume Yuujinchou; but far grimmer than either. As gekiga always intended, this is work meant not only to be read by adults, but to disquiet them, and yet it isn't horror-- that's part of the point. It's too raw to be nostalgia and too lively to be condemnation. It feels like an attempt at an accurate portrait of a time and place and way of living that never quite were, and should not, perhaps, be lamented, but that, nonetheless, had good things about them. I can't say this is an entertaining collection to read-- it's sometimes boring, sometimes confusing, snarls of genealogy going by for pages and then individual images thrown into high and sudden relief and interest. But I have seen nothing else like it, and it has the quality of sticking in the mind.
In the appendix, it says that Katsumata's longest work is a graphic novel about a legal trial regarding the discrimination against the burakumin, who are Japan's hereditary untouchables. If anyone wanted to bring that over, I wouldn't mind either.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
