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Traditionally, Japan is not known for autobiographical comics. True, Frederik Schodt singled several out in
Dreamland Japan, and the works of Hideo Azuma (
Disappearance Diary), Kazuichi Hanawa (
Doing Time) and Yoshihiro Tatsumi (
A Drifting Life) have been acclaimed both in Japan and overseas. But European and American comic artists—Harvey Pekar, Robert Crumb, Marjane Satrapi, Ariel Schrag—produce, proportionally, more and more-acclaimed autobiographical works.
This is certainly, in part, due to the sheer size of the Japanese comics market, whose mainstream works overshadow the autobio genre. There may be cultural reasons as well; compared to American artists who often cultivate a public image as rock stars or High Artistes, many mangaka seem less comfortable stepping out from behind their work. Young adult manga is full of chummy notes from the author, but it's usually just trivia like their favorite food or TV shows. A final possibility, which I've been told with a straight face, is that manga artists simply tend to be shy—you have to be introverted to make those deadlines.
One common feature of Azuma's, Hanawa's and Tatsumi's manga is the avoidance of political statements (it's hard to imagine an American artist viewing his time in prison for gun-related offenses as dispassionately as Hanawa seems to); another is the near-total lack of self-pity. Hideo Azuma presents his descent into alcoholism and homelessness as good-natured comedy. It's a different attitude than the work of autobio artists like Chester Brown, Joe Matt and Justin Brown, whose sexual confessions and self-flagellations created the emo, sometimes mellowcore face of modern autobio comics.
But manga readers do like stories of the lives of the lowly and pathetic. From the poverty humor in
Excel Saga to the degenerate otaku of
Welcome to the NHK to the 40-year-old slacker of
I'll Give It My All…Tomorrow, the comedy of losers, "there but for the grace of God go I" comedy, is a hallowed genre. Mitsuhiro Shinozuka, an editor at manga giant Kodansha, calls the genre
nasakena yaro ("sorry ass", or "pathetic bastard") and describes it as a reaction to the bad economic times; people want to read about the lives of people as miserable as they are, or preferably even more miserable.
Shinozuka should know; it was Kodansha who, in 2006, began publishing the work of the previously underground artist Shigeyuki Fukumitsu. Born in 1976, Fukumitsu dropped out of college to draw manga, and drew pornographic manga for money while submitting short work to
Garo, Japan's longest-running manga magazine, and
Ax, its unofficial successor (the same
Ax coming in an English edition from Top Shelf in 2010).
Fukumitsu's early work combines surrealism, absurdity and body issues in a not atypical underground comic style. In one story, the protagonist has his brains pecked out by a human-headed bird; in others, young boys have traumatic and shaming encounters with women and sexuality. (Fukumitsu's non-adult work is not sexually explicit, but there is a bit of Robert Crumbian detail in the way fabric clings to women's breasts.) One of these early stories, "The Story of Mr. H" (Japanese title
Ojiisan no Uta), will be translated in 2010 in Top Shelf's English edition of
Ax magazine, edited by Sean Michael Wilson.
But the manga which has brought Fukumitsu mainstream recognition is very different. In almost all of Fukumitsu's comics, even the earliest ones, the same character appears: an anxious-looking, scrawny boy with dark-circled eyes. This archetypal "lonely boy", this self-insertion character, grew to explicitly represent Fukumitsu in an autobiographical series,
Boku no Shikobo na Shippai ("My Mundane Failures" or "My Small-Scale Failures"). In this, Fukumitsu dealt directly with his stress and anxieties. He is intimidated by his editors, who tell him his work needs more cute girls or more salaryman characters. He is startled by encounters with homeless people. Riding the subway is torture. He spends a lot of time sitting in stairwells, the claustrophobic space matching the small boxy panels of his art. And of course, he spends half his life drawing, crouched on a futon before the low table that serves as his drawing board.
Boku no Shokibo na Shippai led to Fukumitsu's first mainstream series, his autobio comic for Kodansha,
Boku no Shokibo na Seikatsu ("My Mundane Life" or "My Small-Scale Life") (2006). With his mainstream debut a new character rose to prominence in Fukumitsu's manga: Fukumitsu's wife. Surprise! While Fukumitsu struggles to make a living with manga, his younger wife works at a pastry shop and comes home to see if Fukumitsu has done the dishes and cleaned house. At one point Fukumitsu works at a 100-yen store, where his fellow employees quickly find out that he is a mangaka; however, when they actually see his manga, their initial curiosity turns into raised eyebrows and polite smiles.
In addition to drawing manga, Fukumitsu likes to play the guitar and video games, and in one scene he dreads the embarrassment of having to ask his wife for money to buy video games or Transformers. Mostly, the couple gets along, but they argue about money and Fukumitsu's flakiness, and Fukumitsu clearly sees himself as the sub in the relationship. There are purposeful shots of Fukumitsu kneeling behind her, asking her how her day went, as she comes home and sits down after a hard day of works. She sometimes gets mad and kicks him; once, when he sneaks out to play guitar in a band,
she pulls the futon off him as he lies in bed and beats him with both fists. We do not see their love life; at night, Fukumitsu lies awake worrying in bed while his wife rolls around on the next futon. He draws her attractively, a heart-apple pear-shaped woman, but there is also an alienness, an inscrutability, in the way she is drawn with closed or half-closed eyes while Fukumitsu's huge eyes look right down into his emo soul.
After the success of
Boku no Shokibo na Seikatsu, Fukumitsu's star continued to rise, and he began drawing a new manga,
Uchi no Tsumatte do Desho? ("What Do You Think of My Wife?") (2007), for Futabasha's venerable weekly
Manga Action. Surprisingly, it is a second autobiographical story, but
Uchi no Tsumatte has a very different focus. For one thing, it is drawn in a four-panel gag manga format—every four panels do not end in a joke, but many do. For another thing, as the title suggests, the focus is Fukumitsu's wife, and she appears like a chastely clothed pin-up girl on every title page.
Uchi no Tsumatte do Desho? focuses on the little things of their life, the cute things, such as how to open a bag of chips, or the way his wife curls her toes under her feet when she's sitting.
A scene where she lifts her shirt and does a bellydance to cheer up Fukumitsu is as sweet as any relationship comic I've seen. We also see a side of their relationship we never saw in
Shokibo, such as a scene when Fukumitsu yells at her and calls her an idiot for several panels (they are arguing about the title of the manga) until she leaves the room, breaks down and cries. In another scene Fukumitsu gets angry and slams his fist into the wall, regretting it even in midswing. In both cases, apologies are made, and their marriage endures, returning to the daily routine of a four-panel manga: mild everyday humor, small victories and losses, the status quo.
Fukumitsu's work flirts with self-pity, but also shows self-awareness. He's one of the most interesting creators in Japan at the moment—his climb to mainstream success isn't just due to some cultural Revenge of the Nerds. I look forward to the development of his work—will he continue to document his own life, or will he make another shift in subject matter? Reading his current work, I was reminded of the train-wreck fascination of Joe Matt's autobio comics,
Peepshow and
The Poor Bastard, about his even more troubled relationship with his longtime girlfriend.
But Fukumitsu, despite glancing at the attractive lady at the porn manga company, does not seem to draw as an act of self-sabotage. He draws less in the David B./Craig Thompson "grand narrative" mode and more in the Justin Brown/James Kochalka "diary mode," presenting his life and marriage as a series of easily digestible incidents. It's less ambitious, but more suited for the medium of serialized manga—and perhaps more suited to life as well, for grand narrative can only be constructed from events after the fact, not while those events are happening. To tell a story is to steer that story in a certain direction, as Joe Matt must have known when he confessed his dissatisfaction with his relationship in his comics, documenting/instigating a breakup. Life is a story manga when it's done, but a four-panel manga while it happens.
"It's strange," said Fukumitsu in an interview in
Ax #34, "I thought that if I got married, my interest in manga would decrease and I'd become an ordinary father. But that's not the case. Drawing is drawing."
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Thanks to Mark Simmons for translation help.
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
