I miss Japan. I lived there for eight years. In that time I became addicted to comics, got married, had a kid, worked harder than I had ever done before in my life and started this column. Then I returned very suddenly to Australia. That was over a year ago.
As Dr Seuss once said “this may not seem very important I know
but it is
and that’s why I’m bothering
telling you so”.
When I first came back, my country had become strange to me. On the credit side, the physical surroundings were beautiful. Suburbs I’d written off as slums were now full of gorgeous old buildings and grass you could walk on. There were parks everywhere. The air was fresh. On the debit side, the people looked so bad that they seemed to have only dressed because it’s illegal to be naked. Everyone looked so tired or angry. And fat! In Japan I used to commit adultery in my heart five times between my house and the railway station. In Australia the same short trip would lead me to reflect that celibacy wouldn’t be so bad.
On the good side, the people were friendly. Every cup of coffee came with a ‘how’s it going?’ which could be answered quickly or turned into a short cheerful conversation. Such warmth! The downside to this informality is that staff tell you about their problems in annoying detail. I don’t want to know about the trouble you’ve been having with the new cash register since Brian brought it last Tuesday, I just want my change. But I’m a people person and I think the price is worth paying. In Japan the question “how’s it going?” is meaningless or frightening to a waiter.
Other things happened to make it extra nice for me personally. My son got into a kindergarten and then a school, both of which I like. The school seems full of motivated teachers who like him. His primary school teacher belly dances on the weekends. He has ‘play dates’ and gets invited to parties. Japanese people don’t do much of either of these and it’s a delight to see an only child play with other kids, although it makes me realise how lame my attempts to be ‘the other kid’ were.
And I can watch Dr Who on the TV.
Okay, so now you know how Australia feels for an ex-pat nerd who’s been away from home for the best part of a decade. So what? Whence with comics?
My latest comics boom is ‘Lone Wolf and Cub’. In case you haven’t heard of it, this is an interminable series (well, twenty eight books) of comics about a lone warrior called Ogami Itto in Edo period Japan. It was written by Kazuo Koike and drawn by Goseki Kojima, and both do a fantastic job. Assasins killed Itto’s wife and daughters, leaving only his adorable son alive. They also made it look as if he wanted the Shogun to die. Since wishing the Shogun would croak was illegal and, more importantly, very bad manners then, Ogami is hunted down by all right thinking people. The wrong-thinking people also want to hunt him down because he knows about their evil scheme. So he puts his son in a cart and pushes him around Japan, seeking revenge while pretty much every other human being in Edo wants to kill him.
Personally I would find this predicament dispiriting. I found it hard enough getting a six-year old from Japan to Australia via New Zealand with only the normal number of people wanting to kill me. Itto however, is made of tougher stuff than me. Even his enemies (all six million of them) admit he has bushi spirit, aka bushido or ‘way of the warrior’. This means that he never once stops to observe how little his life resembles a bowl of cherries. Like me, the Lone Wolf has help from his kid. I can get Roy to carry the odd bag, hold a door open or be quiet for short periods of time. Lone Wolf’s kid is quiet almost all the time and doesn’t mind pushing a special button so as to kill people with the spikes concealed in the handle of the wheel barrow (come to think of it, my son would think that was cool too. The difference is that Roy would keep pushing the button until the concealed spikes stopped working). On one occasion, Daigoro (as the Lone Wolf’s son is called) manages to find his dad’s sword, put it in the frozen earth and get the horse to drag his father to a river for a drink. All this whist suffering from frostbite! Daigoro has got bushi spirit too, as you can probably guess. Either Bushi is genetic or you pick it up from hanging with a father who’s the greatest killer in Japan. If it’s genetic, that means my son has some bushi too, on his mother’s side, if it comes from the father’s behaviour, he doesn’t. My wife claims to have bushi but does not sleep with little swords under her pillow and wouldn’t be seen dead in Electra’s red tights. Red is far too flashy.
The Lone Wolf and his adorable kid prowl Japan, wondering what ‘anamorphic widescreen’ is.
I’m addicted to Lone Wolf and Cub. The art is very expressive and the story is well-researched. Importantly, the script wears its research lightly. Nobody stops in mid-sword fight to say “I am the chief ninja of the Lord Kawabunga. As such I come from a disliked caste called the bunrakumin because assasination is considered beneath gentlepeople”. People do this sort of thing all the time in Marvel comics and it niggles to my adult brain; would you explain your social status and the reason you chose your job whilst dodging energy beams? In Lone Wolf and Cub we get all that sort of information – for example that samurai learned to cook so that they would not be helpless during long battles – but it seems to come out naturally. Over the long term, the story is pure cheese, a kind of oriental The Fugitive with our hero always on the run. Where the Fugitive stopped to help people, Lone Wolf stops to eviscerate pursuing armies. Both he and the boy are as ridiculously invulnerable as Superman, but the story feels more like real life.
I think I like Lone Wolf more because the vagaries of the Melbourne library system mean that I can’t read all twenty eight volumes and completely overdose. Libraries are cruel to nerdy completists like me. I can borrow volumes 17, 24 and 14 and that’ s it. Who knows, if I get to the library again this week, volume 25 might be there. While this is agony, it keeps me wanting more, rather than overdosing.
Irony of ironies, I can read more manga here than I could in Japan. There I could pick up manga for free on the train. When people finish their comics, they usually just throw them on the luggage racks, from whence homeless people collect them to sell at second hand stalls. There are always some around the place. I could read some of the sound effects and boggle at the naughty pictures, but couldn’t read them. Comics are a terrible place to start with a second language – all that slang, all those nonce-words*. I was busy reading my beloved 2000 AD. Now, thanks to people called ‘scanlators’ I can read translated manga online. ‘Scanlator’ comes from ‘scan’ and ‘translate’ and refers to people who scan manga onto thei r computers, translate them into English and then upload them to the net for your edificationa and enjoyment. Here are two links for you manga.ignition-one.com and caterpillar.voiea.net. Please note that caterpillar.voiea.net is not work-safe. In fact parts of it are not wife-and-or-girlfriend safe and should be read only from computers in Holland. You have been warned, and I expect the caterpillar servers to crash from overuse any moment now.
a rare non-obscene image from the caterpillar website.
So why do I miss Japan? Well, I miss being able to peek at the marvellously strange civilisation that produced all this strange stuff. I miss green tea-flavoured kit kats. Luckily I’ll be back very soon for a visit, just a few weeks of going to bath houses, looking at the picture of Mt Fuji on the wall and pretending I’m Lone Wolf taking a breather.
Happy Scanlation reading. Don’t go blind.
*nonce-word: a word made up for a particular situation
