The Pleasures and Pains of the Everyday in Taiyō Matsumoto’s TOKYO THESE DAYS VOL. 1

Tokyo These Days Vol. 1

Creator: Taiyō Matsumoto
Publisher: Viz Media

Review by François Vigneault

It might come as a shock that Taiyō Matsumoto’s low-key, quotidian drama Tokyo These Days Vol. 1 (Viz Media) borrows the rhythms and tropes of heist movies reminiscent of Steven Soderburgh’s Ocean’s Eleven or Christopher Nolan’s Inception: A disciplined but dishonored skilled gathers an unruly band of proficient misfits to tug off “one last job” to safe lasting glory and redemption. But reasonably than a profession felony robbing a trio of casinos or plumbing desires for industrial secrets and techniques, Matsumoto’s unlikely hero is one Kazuo Shiozawa, a soft-spoken veteran manga editor who resides in self-imposed retirement after the journal underneath his path tanked, and the “heist” he’s planning is a brand new manga anthology that includes work from a spread of creators each old-school and trendy.

A bespectacled and buttoned-up bachelor, Shiozawa appears to be the image of decorum and management — all of his workplace provides are fastidiously labeled along with his title — however there are hints of a deep-seeded romanticism lurking behind his stoic floor: He sheds a single tear whereas criticizing a famed mangaka’s latest work (“For the last few years, your work has felt like the life’s gone out of it”), liberally quotes Shakespeare and Goethe, and engages in pleasant, prolonged dialogues with the white songbird he shares his tiny, book-filled residence with. Even his determination to stop after thirty years on the job speaks to the stringent depth with which he approaches his metier; when the journal he edits folds Shiozawa castigates himself mercilessly and shoulders the blame fully: “I didn’t realize how out of touch I was with the readers. That’s all. I betrayed the trust of all the artists and writers I pulled in. This is the only way to atone” he gravely intones, nearly as if he had been a modern-day samurai honor-bound to commit seppuku. Like the umbrella that will get swept from his palms by the wind in the opening pages of the ebook, the “perfection” Shiozawa seeks in manga is the ineffable object that retains him going, tantalizingly shut but finally unattainable (maybe, with Tokyo’s famed misplaced and discovered system and Shiozawa’s penchant for labeling his private results, the editor would possibly hope to be reunited along with his wayward umbrella in a future quantity).

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Passion and the seek for perfection in the face of a world that doesn’t at all times admire the creative soul is a throughline in Tokyo These Days. In the studio of Reiko Tachibana, a not too long ago deceased mangaka, Shiozawa is visited by the girl’s pleasant, peaceable ghost, and the pair replicate on their working relationship (the reader is left to deduce if these two intensely reserved, scrupulously well mannered people secretly longed for one thing else). Years earlier, a quiet, selfless act by Shiozawa impressed Tachibana to comply with her coronary heart and solely create the type of tales that she needed to. “My sales went down pretty quickly after that” she muses with a wry smile. “Even so, taken in full, I had a happy life. I drew many manga and inhabited many worlds.” As Shiozawa imagines it, her lingering spirit’s one “small regret” is that she by no means bought to do a closing venture along with her erstwhile editor Shiozawa.

Shiozawa’s quest to place collectively the “perfect manga” over the course of this sequence (a second quantity of Tokyo These Days arrives in May 2024) might certainly transform futile. The indisputable fact that there isn’t a one-to-one correlation between ardour for one’s artwork and success in the market is made manifestly clear all through Matsumoto’s story. As with any heist narrative price its salt, the motley crew of manga artists which the mild-mannered editor pulls collectively have all seen higher days. Some are nonetheless cranking out work and making a (seemingly snug) residing in the comics biz: Chosaku, the chubby, hard-drinking, chain-smoking creator of the once-famous baseball manga Uniform Number 15, is working in relative obscurity and patently ignoring dire warnings from his physician relating to his poor well being; the long-haired, cat-loving “bad boy” mangaka Aoki Shu is mired in juvenile conflicts along with his new editor Liliko Hayashi. Others have left the world of manga fully: Shin Arishiyama, a once-venerated mangaka, lives a hermit-like existence as the superintendent of a big residence advanced on the outskirts of the metropolis; Kaoru Kisu, the youngest of the creators Shiozawa approaches and the solely girl, works as a cashier at a grocery store when she’s not managing her oddball adolescent son and checked-out videogamer husband. Kisu is the just one of the creators whose work Matsumoto reproduces in this quantity; impressed by her encounter with Shiozawa she picks up some pens at an workplace provide retailer and begins drawing once more at the finish of her workday, her story for the anthology is a blood-soaked, larger-than-life Roman epic that’s expertly counterposed with the considerably drab actuality of her life ringing up purchases of on the spot ramen.

The writer of wild sci-fi story No. 5 (to not point out the sports activities energy fantasy Ping Pong), Matsumoto clearly understands the points of interest of escapism—and the distinctive capability for manga and comics to scratch that itch—however Tokyo These Days is deeply invested in the refined pleasures and pains of the quotidian world (the Japanese title, 東京ヒゴロ Tokyo Higoro may also be translated as “Everyday” or “Normal” Tokyo). As in his six-volume sequence Sunny, right here Matsumoto takes a affected person strategy to his storytelling, little of import appears to occur, and the writer lingers on scenes that in one other story may need been truncated, or neglected fully. Here the routine takes middle stage: Each chapter heading has the clipped tone of an entry in Shiozawa’s datebook ( “Today: I’m retiring for personal reasons,” “Ofuna, 11 a.m.: Funeral for Reiko Tachibana Sensei”). A life, Matsumoto appears to underline, is made up of the quiet moments, minor occasions, and important errands that replenish our days, one after one other.

Matsumoto’s delicate, bande dessinée-influenced art work, rendered in a combination of scritchy-scratchy linework and smooth grey ink wash—often punctuated by sections in pale watercolors—is right here notably grounded in the small particulars that make up day by day residing in the metropolis: bins of dog-eared manga, a pair of black-rimmed eyeglasses repaired with white tape, dip pens and sleeping tablets on a tidy drawing desk, leaves swaying in the rain. Over and over all through the ebook Matsumoto takes the time and area to give attention to the streetlights, powerlines, and different detritus of the dense interwoven structure of the metropolis’s many neighborhoods. These objects and locales function greater than place setting, they elaborate and deepen the ebook’s underlying themes of mortality and the quest for the elegant. Matsumoto’s consideration to the energy of the materials world in our day by day existence strongly suggests the Japanese literary idea of mono no conscious (物の哀れ), which may be roughly translated as “’the pathos of things”; a sensitivity to the transient magnificence and melancholic sorrow of the world. The most well-known instance of mono no conscious may be the falling of cherry blossoms in the spring, a elegant scene which solely highlights the non permanent nature of its magnificence, a shocking reminder that nothing lasts.

In distinction, the creation of manga would possibly promise a kind of literary immortality: The phrases and photos on the web page have the potential to far outlive their creators, in any case. But it’s clear that Matsumoto has come to grasp that nothing, not even a comic book ebook, will final eternally. Magazines fold, authors fade into obscurity, and cherished volumes find yourself being offered on the low cost at a used bookstore. This doesn’t make them much less significant, nonetheless, like human lives, it’s exactly the finally transitory nature of all our inventive efforts that give them weight and which means. When Shiozawa makes an attempt to chop ties along with his previous by promoting his huge assortment of manga, the sight of some of the volumes spilling from a field (together with books by Katsuhiro Otomo and Daijiro Morohoshi) finally stops him in his tracks. He’s not fairly able to let go of this dream fairly but. The beleaguered bookseller, having spent hours cataloging the books for nought, is knowing: “I get it. I love manga too.”

Tokyo These Days is a slow-paced story by a grasp of his craft, and any fan of the medium will discover a lot to like in these pages, from the insider have a look at the manga business to the low-key thrills of watching grim professionals pull off “one last job.” Matsumoto’s deliberate pacing and consideration to element simply would possibly make you admire the little issues in life—together with a well-worn, beloved ebook—that rather more… But don’t neglect that nothing lasts eternally.