Organizer and Chair: Takayuki Yokota-Murakami, Osaka University
Discussant: Shigemi Nakagawa, Ritsumeikan University
Japanese comics have seen a remarkable growth over the last few decades. Today several weekly comic journals boast a circulation of millions per journal each week. The genre which used to cater only to boys and girls now entertains young and middle-aged readers alike. It has also developed multifarious subgenres: SF, detective, romance, horror, non-fiction, political satire, historical narrative, and, of course, funnies. This notwithstanding, serious criticism on the genre, especially from the "literary" critics' point of view, has been scarce. It only has attracted some attention from sociologists and art historians. Part of the reason may lie in the fact that comics have not developed their own idioms for criticism. A researcher can only use the standard categories of literary criticism such as plot, character, theme, metaphor, etc. in an awkward manner. This lack, however, ironically relates to the fact that the genre is still under the immense influence of the "higher" genre of literature. A "literary" or "artistic" piece of comics is often considered to be a good example. Writers such as Tezuka Osamu and Tsuge Yoshiharu endorsed such a belief. This panel will attempt to explore some paths for breaking such restrictions both on criticism on comics, and on the genre of comics itself, and to propose some new ways of reading.
The Fallen Literature: On the Creation of the Canon of Comics
Takayuki Yokota-Murakami, Osaka University
A novelist who took up "Kaze no tani no Nausika" for review in Asahi shinbun confessed his amazement at having learned that he was the first to discuss comics in the authoritative review pages of the newspaper. Presumably responding to his dismay, Asahi shinbun started to publish a weekly interview featuring some subgenre of comics. Manga, however, still suffered from the stigma of being low-culture, often considered vulgar and even harmful in spite of its established place in Japanese society, accounting for a quarter of total annual publications. Works are evaluated on standards highly dependent on those of literary criticism. Tezuka Osamu's "Black Jack" is considered a classic because of its humanism concealed beneath the anti-hero story, which itself is dependent on a literary genre. "Nausika" is applauded for its epic nature. Would-be artists are encouraged to read the classic literatures of the world. Thus, the dependence of comics on (high) literature is innate and systematic.
There has been, however, much effort to break away from the yoke. Some genres of criticism have been published, aiming at the construction of a "grammar" of comics. Such new genres as "philosophy in the form of comics" have emerged, challenging the "higher" intellectual culture. Nonetheless, such resistance finds difficulty in the alleged claim to its being violent and pornographic. Is it vulgarity or is it an anti-institutional aspect of the genre?
This paper begins with the presumption that "artistry" of a genre is largely determined by the critical heritage and proceeds to explore the relationship between the value of cultural capital and criticism, and the point of resistance in the genre of manga.
Feminine Sexuality as a Political Site: The Widened Discursive Field of Japanese
Girls' Comics
Midori Matsui, Tohoku University
Once considered as a puerile subgenre dominated by the formulaic story of girl-meets-boy, the Japanese "girls' comic" has emerged, since the late seventies, as a potentially experimental media in which the adolescent girls' awakening to their identity is allegorically acted out through the bildungsroman with boy protagonists falling in love with one another. Such "homosexual" comics conveyed the authors' longing to overcome their social determination as second sex through the fictitious gaining of androgyny. Such a disavowal of femininity disappears in the eighties' women's comics. Partly because of the increased freedom of Japanese girls, and partly because of the writer's exposure to feminist and postmodern discourses, the works of the popular cartoonist Kyoko Okazaki present heroines involved in such picaresque adventures as found in the novels of Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. or Haruki Murakami. Integrating the author's knowledge of punk music, the films of Goddard and Terayama, and other fashionable proper nouns into the stories of girls awakening to their own split between anger at social exploitation of their innocence and their own materialistic greed, Okazaki's comics capture a sad contradiction of urban life in the eighties: the longing for freedom ending in prostitution. I will discuss this theme focusing on Okazaki's bestseller, Pink, comparing her ambivalence toward the feminine subject as both the master and the victim of commodity culture with the more consistent exposure of the male mystification of women by another feminist cartoonist, Shungiku Uchida.
Hayao Miyazaki's Epic Comic Series: An Attempt at Interpretation
Shigemi Inaga, Mie University
Consecutively published in feuilleton for no less than eight years, Nausicaä at the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki (b. 1941) came to its completion in March 1994. A long epic comic in seven volumes, published integrally in 1995, the story narrates in the course of more than one thousand pages the adventures of the heroine, who borrowed her name from Greek mythology but echoes at the same time an eccentric "Insect-loving Princess" in a classical Japanese tale of the twelfth century.
Chronologically situated at "the dusk of the humanity after the cataclysm of a Seven-Day nuclear war which completely devastated the industrial mega-civilization," the series opens with the depiction of a tiny village community which survived the disaster but still suffers from the progressive air pollution caused by the viperous germs of the huge Fungi Forest in disruptive hypertrophy under ominous genetic mutations.
Human conflicts and hatred among several clans in desperate search for their own survival on limited viable territory provokes a massive migration of the sacred insects, named Aum, guardian of the forest, presaging total environmental disaster. As it advances, the story takes an apocalyptic tone which defies the imagination.
Doubtlessly marking on the highest summits in the history of Japanese comics, this science fiction, with its ecological undertone, is worth analysis not only for its indebtedness to the cultural heritage of worldwide classics and its ideological criticism of Monotheistic thinking, but also for its skill in narratological technique, partly developed from the vocabulary of comics for young girls.
A representative crystallization of the Japanese subconsciousness at the fin du siècle of the twentieth century, this work itself has come to play a prophetic role in the psychopathology of the post war Japanese, considering the so-called Aum Sect's alleged involvement in the nerve gas attack which occurred on the Tokyo subway in 1995, causing eleven (?) deaths and several thousands of casualties.
Looking Back on Akira
Kojiro Miyahara, Kwansei Gakuin University
Recently, Japanese comics have begun to find a growing readership outside of Japan. Among the comics which attract enthusiastic fans around the world is Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira (1982-1993, 6 vols.). This "violent et beau" (to quote its French ad) work has been translated into various languages and published in the United States, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Germany, Indonesia, Taiwan and Great Britain. Akira's success in the international market requires explanation. One, not surprising but irresistible, explanation is that this "graphic novel" embodies some deadly contemporaneity in the experience of our own body in today's world. Akira's graphics overwhelm us by their almost "maniacal" obsession with details. Be it a skyscraper or a human body, the graphics break down the object into numerous fragments. These fragments, in turn, are carefully drawn with many lines and colors. Such an obsession with meaningless details gives us a curious sense of release. Moreover, Akira depicts ultramodern buildings and the internal organs with utmost care. This gives us an impression that human subjectivity is nullified in front of these overwhelming entities. Such an impression may fit well with the experience of the human body in the contemporary world. I will try to substantiate the above claim through a careful comparison of Japanese (original) and American versions of Akira.