This new series by Taiyō Matsumoto is about a middle-aged editor in the comics industry who quits his job. Spat out from the daily grind, he loiters with purpose in a city of freehand drawing. There is less in the way of fine detail compared to Cats of the Louvre, Matsumoto's second-most recent completed serial, and a very internationally minded thing; this one feels local, specific, more hatched than ink-washed. You can probably 'read' this book through the characters' relationship with the city and its outskirts: musty used book shelves in Jimbōchō; lunch at a Peanuts café and a coffee meeting above a Lotteria, their logos changed a little. Every chapter, without fail, ends with an splash of buildings and streets, as if Matsumoto has perched himself on a bench somewhere and just drawn it from observation. But I don't know these places, so I'll write about something else.
I have long had a theory about what binds much of Matsumoto's work together. He displays a very deep ambivalence toward the idea of fantasy; of the pleasure of 'escape' and the effects of heroism. Tekkonkinkreet and No. 5 both begin as dynamic action comics, only to seal certain characters in morbid psychological cages which can only be escaped by throwing aside the grandiosity of saving the city, saving the world. GoGo Monster, a more grounded work, treats imaginative children at an adult's cool distance; the goal is not to let them escape into creativity, but to integrate them into the wider society. Stability is something of value to Matsumoto. The final chapter of Ping Pong, his last great sports manga, advances its cast of high school athletes to adulthood where most of them are working jobs either adjacent to sports competition or completely separate; I mean, how many kids who are good at sports in high school are still at it after college anyway? In this manner, Matsumoto puts the tradition of hot-blooded competitive manga at a remove, sealed under soft covers and plastic bookstore wrap as the era of one's youth.
Tokyo These Days—serialized in Japanese from 2019-23 at the relaxed pace of one chapter every two months in Big Comic Original Zōkan, following an abandoned circa 2015 pilot version translated separately last year for the Mangasplaining Extra Substack newsletter—is very much about not being young. Like Matsumoto, the protagonist editor Shiozawa is well into his 50s. Recently, he was in charge of a magazine for the publisher Shogakusha ("novice student") that folded due to low sales; "I betrayed the trust of all the artists and writers I pulled in," he confesses to one of his longtime artists, Chosaku, before abruptly advising him that his comics have felt empty for a long damn time. This is neither meant nor taken as recrimination. It is Matsumoto's theme: the fantasy, the heroic idea of manga, of comics, as enduring and meritorious art versus the abiding reality of comics as a momentary distraction among video games and television celebrities in Japan.
This will not be unfamiliar territory to readers in North America, though the subtleties of it require we know that Japanese authors exist in a healthier comics ecosystem - one where you can, theoretically, just keep on working and ‘succeed’ in tradesman’s terms by simple tenacity. There are more opportunities to see manga as work, in the sense of a basically unimportant day-to-day vocation. But Shiozawa can hear the language of birds - they speak to him in perfect human language. This eccentric touch goes unexplained by Matsumoto, but I take it as indicative of the editor’s ability to look at comics and understand their ambient chirping completely; to see, with insight and certitude, what can be done to make them better.
Better. Not more profitable; to be profitable, manga needs to seize upon audience trends with alacrity. As Shiozawa prepares to sell his personal library, he is transfixed by the covers of work meaningful to men of his age who read comics hard: the oeuvre of Daijirō Morohoshi; Umezz’s Makoto-chan; Ōtomo in the ‘70s, before Akira. He decides, impulsively, inevitably, to blow his severance package on putting together a new anthology of manga he knows is ‘good.’ That Shiozawa ascertains a latent quality to comics is what makes him an imaginative and potentially ill-fated Taiyō Matsumoto protagonist. He is a comics maniac. You too are a maniac for reading this, and I am a pervert for writing it.
The eight chapters in this first volume—presented in the same trim and stylish 5.75" x 8.25" hardcover format as VIZ's edition of Matsumoto's Sunny, but now priced at a collar-tugging 28 bucks, speaking of international differences—all represent a discrete moment in time, so that each chapter break advances the story a few days, weeks. In Shiozawa's company, we encounter a variety of manga industry people, all of them struggling in some way. Chosaku, the older artist, is well-off by dint of running a studio (on the topic of health, he jokes that he has an assistant wear the pedometer), but money doesn't fill the hole in him; he fancies himself a noir hero at the local batting cages and cries sometimes at the pachinko parlor. None of the retired artists we meet are in good financial shape. One of them, Arashiyama, lost all passion for manga, abandoned his family, and lives in an apartment complex cultivating a curmudgeon's persona to mask his intense loneliness. A grocery store clerk, Kiso, gave up drawing bloody action comics for domestic life with her dim gamer husband and a son who's possibly joined a cult; she incessantly, by necessity, calculates the price of any items she might need to buy, though thumbnail drawings of teeming armies still leap from her fingers, unbidden by cash.
On the production end, Shiozawa's former subordinate, Hayashi, is having a horrible time editing an artist she has inherited, Aoki, whose last series was abruptly cancelled right after the switchover. Aoki is prone to deriding everyone around him, Shiozawa excluded, as boring mediocrities who have surrendered the lively soul of the art form to wan careerism; he is working on a new comic that everybody knows is absolute dogshit. Is there a degree of self-parody to this portrait of artist misbehavior? Hard to say, but it's as hard not to see the figure of Shiozawa as a fantasy of Matsumoto's former editor, Hideki Egami, who founded Shōgakukan's 'alternative'-styled magazine IKKI, with which Matsumoto was closely associated, and which indeed sputtered and died from reader disinterest - though Matsumoto has said the character bears little resemblance to the real Egami.
If you are wondering: no, Matsumoto does not spell out what makes a 'good' comic in this introductory volume. Actually, in one of his few concrete statements, Shiozawa criticizes the excessive use of cutting back and forth between parallel scenes, which is something Matsumoto himself does pretty frequently, so I think we are not in proscriptive territory; as usual, this artist is interested mainly in expressions of the subjectivity of his characters, the world bending and curving around them, their attitudes contradictory and presented without bias. Or, as Matsumoto once remarked to the cartoonist Daisuke Igarashi: "I’ve come to feel that the characters are really all me. The children left at the orphanage, the parents who left them there, the people taking care of them at the orphanage - all of them are me." In recent works, Sunny and Cats of the Louvre, the artist Saho Tōno, Matsumoto's spouse, has been credited as the co-author; in this volume, she is credited only for "production cooperation," which may be a distinction without a difference, but I wonder if the less washy, fatter-lined quality of this book is reflective of Matsumoto being a bit more "me" on the page than before.
We might get this too from the story's worldview. There is a bromidic sensation to a lot of manga about making manga, and Matsumoto's isn't free of that. It is not like Tatsuki Fujimoto's Look Back, where the souls of the dead cry out from a parallel world to get YOU back in the grindset, kiddo, but when Matsumoto has Shiozawa encounter the ghost of a beloved artist he used to edit who mentions she almost fell seriously ill from overwork, her suffering ennobles her, like the Catholic saints. The sequence ends on a pretty good joke: the ghost mentions that witnessing Shiozawa's dedication inspired her to only make comics which she found personally good and meaningful. Her sales immediately dropped into the toilet. That's the poignancy. The glimmer of inspiration obscured under the canopy of work, to which you will ultimately need to peacefully acclimate yourself if you don't want to incur some personal toll.
The majority of these characters long to pay the toll again, which could mean they want to recapture the reckless feeling of youth. Their author is sympathetic, but one gets the feeling that the vital lines of this city will hum regardless.
In fact, the overall impression I get from this very pleasant book full of expert, winsome drawing and small, sensitive dramas, is that for all the tribulations - manga is okay, people are okay. The outstanding quality of Tokyo These Days may be its placidity. Is this how Matsumoto sees adulthood? It's so rosy, filled with serious young women who tolerate every offense with grace, young men who play the fool but always mean well; second-hand comics dealers, for god’s sake, who warn you when you’re about to sell a particularly rare item. Everyone fat and old has wonderful talents to share. Aging bachelors are watched over by sympathetic neighbors. Pretension is tolerated with a wry grin in the offices of major publishers. You’re bad at comics now, but you will get better. No wonder Matsumoto wants children to grow up in this place. When the birds talk, they have only kind things to say.
