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"What can long-form comics do that other media can't?" With the general decline in print and bookstores over 2008-2009, and the hint of a malaise over manga in particular, I've thought about this a lot lately. If you want to do a serialized narrative, why pin your hopes on the serialized graphic novel model which only
Dramacon and
Scott Pilgrim and a few others have managed to make work, why not just do a novel series? (At least it's easier to read on Kindle.)
If you want to do an online comic, why bother with recreating comic page layout on a computer screen, why not just do a three-panel gag strip (the alligator of comic formats—perfect for its limited function, and unchanged for millions of years) or a limited-animation youtube video instead? (It works for
Brad Neely and
Ben Croshaw.)
And as for superhero-style action comics, their medium (and business model) is rapidly turning into FX-packed live-action movies, as Seth pointed out in his
speech at TCAF in May. (Of course, in Seth's eyes, this is a good thing, like the loudmouths leaving the party, so that the small group that's left can hear themselves talk.)
Talking about the "charm" or "delights" of traditional comics is no answer, of course, because nostalgia is no long-term reason for the survival of a medium. But there is plenty of demand for comics
about charming and delightful things, comics
about relaxing and tranquil subjects which don't try to use the comics page as a thumbnail for an action scene.
Perhaps because manga is so good at the latter kind of story, it's very good at the former as well. Everyday-life manga like Kozue Amano's
Aria and Kiyohiko Azuma's
Yotsuba&!. Jiro Taniguchi's
The Walking Man. Kenji Tsuruta's
Spirit of Wonder and Hitoshi Ashinano's
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikô ("Yokohama Shopping Log," aka the publisher's official English title, "Quiet Country Café"). And the comics where the charm conceals dark depths, like Fumiyo Kono's
Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms.
These are comics which, by their calmness and silence, seem more suited to still images than to moving ones; comics that capture a feeling, or a moment in time, and for whom animation and movement (despite the many great anime in the same vein, such as Hayao Miyazaki's
Kiki's Delivery Service) would be almost redundant, a distraction from the comic panel's eternal Now.
To this mellow group I now add a somewhat spunkier, louder manga, Shota Kikuchi's
Osen.
Osen is largely a food manga, a genre many English readers are now discovering thanks to Tetsu Kariya and Akira Hanasaki's awesome
Oishinbo. Food manga is usually mellow (
Iron Wok Jan being the exception rather than the rule) and food is a perfect subject for comics. The appeal of a beautiful meal is half visual, and animation adds little to it, since food doesn't
do anything; it just waits there for you to eat it. And you can eat food
while you read printed manga, something I don't recommend while reading scanlations on your laptop.
Even if you can't eat the manga itself, like some kind of delicious black & white sheet cake, you can read about the preparation of food, and the culture surrounding the food. When you find that you're interested in the people and events surrounding the food, the characters, you've stepped from a recipe book to a story.
Osen is the story of a traditional Japanese restaurant, Isho-an, and Osen, its proprietress. Ezaki, a college kid apprenticing as a waiter, is our introduction to the place, a venerable, thatched-roofed establishment whose kitchen staff includes a kindly old lady, a couple of feisty young cooks, and Seiji, the head chef, whose unfailing politeness doesn't conceal his former yakuza tattoos. But the star of the show—like a real star, out of reach of the human characters—is Osen, the mistress of the establishment.
At first seemingly lazy, she lolls around the restaurant in half-open kimonos, surrounded by empty sake bottles, taking long baths and doing long stretches which expose the nape of her neck, that traditional Japanese erogenous zone. "Even Hokusai of Edo wouldn't be able to capture (Osen's) beauty if he tried," Kikuchi tells us…but
Kikuchi tries. At first Ezaki is simply smitten by her appearance. But when a dining crisis looms, like a picky sumo wrestler and his entourage demanding gourmet meals which would be enough for twenty men, Osen takes over as head chef and demonstrates her cooking skills.
Furthermore, Osen isn't just an expert cook; she's a potter, woodcarver, gardener, sake-brewer and more. She is a master of all the traditional skills of old Japan, and a living goddess to the local villagers. Kikuchi's author's notes make it very clear that
Osen is a homage to Japan's vanishing small-town culture, and to his favorite beautiful, visually appreciable, hands-on arts: "Drink. Food. Thatched roofs…the things that make me recall the beauty of Japan…when I tried to create a manga of all the many events and affairs that I am hopelessly caught up in, this was the result. Oh, and of course there are women…"
Osen is a sitcom, not an epic. In each chapter, Osen and her restaurant staff face some food and crafts challenge (often involving another woman with mad food/crafting/blue-collar skillz), and overcome it. It's a simple formula, but it makes a charming manga, thanks largely to the art. Kikuchi (1961-) is influenced by Akira Toriyama's
Dr. Slump, with which
Osen shares a similar mixture of detailed environments, cartoony character designs, a perky mood and mild risqué humor. (Kikuchi's earlier work is even more clearly Toriyama-esque, such as his boys' manga
Dakini no Kyûma, a fantasy about an androgynous fox spirit and various traditional Japanese ghoulies.)
His use of positive and negative space is incredible, his linework illustrative where Toriyama's is sketchy. Kikuchi does beautiful drawings of food and traditional handicrafts, lush linework of figures and fabrics and kimonos (and wearing those kimonos, beautiful lushes). The cultural details—shrine processions, Buddhist statues, daruma—are as detailed as the food, the fish and the plants, and the effect is to draw you into Osen's world, a place almost but not quite as fanciful as
Dr. Slump's Penguin Village. "Oh, and of course there are women…"
Osen runs in the Japanese men's magazine
Evening (a slightly more adult spinoff of the better-known magazine
Morning), but the manga, while suggestive, is tamer than the busty, half-disrobed images on the covers suggest. It is what it is, of course, not just a food/craft manga but a fawning appreciation of gorgeous, disheveled, super-genius DIY crafty women. Since the women almost all wear glasses, too, it reminded me of Shaenon Garrity's
Narbonic.
In 2008,
Osen was adapted into
a live-action TV drama, with mixed results. Probably the biggest change was the casting of Aoi Yu as Osen, turning the original eyes-half-closed sexpot into a perky, petite, chastely hard-working restaurant manager. (They didn't even keep the glasses!)
Bill Randall thought the change was a good thing, pointing out that the casting of real people brought a welcome three-dimensionality to
Osen's fetishistic cartoon world.
Admittedly, Kikuchi is a cartoonist first and a realistic artist second; his women all have the same face, and they only grow more stylized as the series goes on, until their bodies are as elongated as drawings by Boris Artzybasheff, and their faces and lips are thrust forward like a fox's. But this is a dimension where live-action and comics must simply agree to disagree; again like Akira Toriyama, whose
Dragon Ball looks ridiculous with live actors, Kikuchi is an artist whose character designs are perfect in art and impossible in the real world.
In comics—and especially in manga, which largely disdains the artificially chiseled realism of American mainstream comics—the subjectivity of the artist is a given, and extreme stylization is to be embraced, not avoided. (To take this logic to the extreme—if you have a problem with specific fetishes and stereotypes, good. But if you have a problem with fetishes and stereotypes in general, DO NOT READ COMICS.) Kikuchi is a master cartoonist, and his tribute to Old Small-Town Japan is entirely his own, no matter what TV shows and foody culture have been built up around it. (The live-action TV show devotes plenty of screen time to traditional organic "slow food" cooking tips.) A place like Isho-an may not really exist, but thanks to manga, you can take it with you.
Images from Osen Vol.1, ©Shota Kikuchi
Jason Thompson is one of the best-known manga critics in the US. He currently writes for Otaku USA and is the author of Manga: The Complete Guide. His website is www.mockman.com.
Manga Salad is © Jason Thompson, 2010
