Eiga ni Ke ga Sanbon!

Eiga ni Ke ga Sanbon (映画に毛が3本!)
by Iou Kuroda (黒田硫黄)
published in Young Magazine Uppers (Kodansha)
1 volume (1998-2003)
Amazon.jp

A peculiarly unique oddity among Iou Kuroda's distinguished library. While Kuroda has tackled longer, serialized stories (Japan Tengu Party Illustrated), short story collections (Daioh, Kurofune), melting-pot concept pieces (Nasu) and episodic adventures (Sexy Voice and Robo), Eiga ni Ke ga Sanbon! (Three Hairs on a Movie) is possibly unique among all of manga: a collection of one-page manga movie reviews. (Let me parse that out: Each page is a self-contained manga that is a review of a movie.)

The series appears not to have been created as a primer for Kuroda's favorites, or significant movies, but simply, as with any typical published critic, reviews of the latest movies to be shown in theaters. Therefore the Japanese release dates for these selections start in 1998 and proceed at about a month at a time until 2003, when the book was published. The movies encompass a wide range of sources, from Hollywood blockbusters (Saving Private Ryan, Deep Impact, American Pie) and more sophisticated fare (Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, Road to Perdition) to European (Dancer in the Dark, Life Is Beautiful, Bandits) to Asian (Shaolin Soccer, Shuri, Flowers of Shanghai) and of course, Japanese (Ping Pong, Battle Royale, Spirited Away, Samurai Fiction). The formatting is set up so that one page has the title and main credits, a short blurb, then a quick description of the movie and written comment by Kuroda, including a "moral learned," with the manga itself on the facing page.

I've found that Kuroda's voice within his dialogue requires an acclimation period. I wasn't able to fully follow his nuanced, fill-in-the-blanks flow the very first time I read Nasu, and the novel format he uses in Eiga has several more hurdles to overcome. First of all, there's only so much you can get out of them if you haven't seen the movie, and being a poor excuse for a movie buff, I've only seen a handful of the 60-something reviews in the book. Second, with just a single page to craft a review, Kuroda naturally channels his thoughts as succinctly and vividly as possible, so if you don't really get what his point is, there's no time to let it sink in. Either you see where he's coming from, or you don't. Occasionally he will make a point that is funny or memorable that can be appreciated apart from the movie itself, but for the most part a lot of the reviews blew past me without sticking in my head. Of course, being Kuroda, he wastes little time on formalities and gets straight to the point, so many of these read like thoughts and impressions told directly in person, with a fresh frankness that is befitting the odd medium and quite unlike a stuffy newspaper review. It makes for good bathroom reading, at the very least.

Kuroda stopped his reviews for a few years but has apparently picked them back lately, according to his blog, so one only assumes there will be another "Eiga" book sometime in the distant future.

The World Is Mine

The World Is Mine
by Hideki Arai
Published in Young Sunday (Shogakukan)
14 volumes (1997-2001)
5 volume reprint (2006) [Enterbrain]
Amazon.jp

Hideki Arai's end-of-the-century cult classic, for years out of print, was reissued last year in 5 massive bricks weighing in at over 600 pages each. A controversial masterpiece that defined an era in Young Sunday alongside Koroshiya Ichi, this title has not achieved the worldwide infamy that its cousin has, for the lack of a movie adaptation (though the late Kinji Fukasaku was considering it before his death). However, it commanded an even higher rate of critical praise in comparison to its relative obscurity. Indeed, the catch copy advertisements wrapped around these books come with blaring accolades from beloved figures in contemporary Japanese entertainment: hip writers like Kotaro Isaka and Kazushige Abe, Shigeru Kishida of the rock band Quruli (who even named an album "The World Is Mine") and rap group Rip Slyme adorn TWIM with glowing quotes, a practice that does exist in Japanese publishing, but with nowhere near the frequency of North America. Even actor/director/writer Suzuki Matsuo and Evangelion director Hideaki Anno are counted as fans.

TWIM has alternately been described as the bible to a new millennium and an absolute disaster in the wrong hands. On the surface, it is a blindingly intense and violent action/suspense story about two criminals, the bestial, ferocious Mon and his partner Toshi, a malevolent bomb fanatic. As Toshi-mon (as they are called by the media) orchestrate a campaign of terror across Japan's mainland, they cross paths with the equally violent Higumadon, a creature that seems to resemble an enormous, dinosaur-sized bear. Toshi-mon continue to murder civilians and evade capture by the authorities, striking fear into the heart of the Japanese establishment and destabilizing the very society of their country. As the unexplainable phenomenon of Higumadon grows more and more connected to the unstoppable fugitives, the story begins to take on a religious tone to the psyche of the entire nation. When the series reaches its final story arc, the scope expands exponentially, blasting what began as a crime spree beyond the very history of mankind itself.

There are two great appeals to TWIM: the shockingly vivid violence and the extraordinarily-portrayed characters. The violence can be problematic, as mentioned above. When a truly intense action or emotional scene occurs in TWIM, there is really nothing else like it in the world of manga. Arai has no qualms about pushing the limit for what he will portray. In an extended interview broken up and printed throughout all 5 volumes, he describes his position toward violence as inspired by that of Beat Takeshi's gangster movies. Violence, he says, must not be portrayed as cool or stylish, lest it lose its potency. In order for it to be effective and have meaning, it has to hurt. There are a multitude of simple shootings within the manga, but it is the close-quarters murders, such as when Toshi first takes a life by clumsily stabbing and slashing a young woman as she screams and wails, that are most haunting. As Toshi and Mon come to dominate the national attention, crass, disenchanted youths across Japan flock to them in hero-worship, a jeering mass of cultish followers. In a way, these are a representation of the TWIM readers who see and admire nothing but the endless depravity of the Toshi-mon killing spree. Arai wishes us to weigh the cruelty and immorality of his main duo, while challenging us with the sheer, arresting spectacle of their actions.

The other quality that Arai uses to great effect in TWIM is his characters. Nearly every character is impeccably developed, starting with the dichotomy of the two leads. Mon is a modern-day Mowgli, raised in the wild. He is rash, violent and base, yet also holds an innocent and serene softer side. He is Early Man and childhood. Toshi is a postal worker living a relatively normal life who finds an interest in the internet and explosives. He is cruel, vindictive, petty and cowardly, a Modern Man and the product of a filthy, unjust society. The heroine Maria is unsurprisingly a Mary figure full of empathy and compassion for others, who must balance her strong beliefs with her surging hatred for Toshi-mon's deeds when she is kidnapped and dragged along on their spree. Arai's secondary characters make up for the smaller screen time with vivid eccentricity: A lewd, cherubic prime minister of strong mind who does not play by the politician's book; a newspaper writer who constantly scribbles penises in his notebook as he follows his leads; a catatonic police commander with slack facial muscles, causing him to slobber and spit uncontrollably when he speaks; a wizened, wily bear hunter from Hokkaido who comes to the mainland to hunt down Higumadon and forms a fragile friendship with the newswriter.

Beyond the action and characters, TWIM also received recognition for the frequency and accuracy of the portrayal of regional Japanese dialects. Much of the story takes place on the north end of the main island of Honshu, in the prefectures of Aomori and Akita, northeast of Tokyo, and Arai took special care to recreate the accents and speech patterns of the local people, despite the fact that he himself was raised in the big city, where there is no accent. This feeling of geography is very important to the manga, which uses an almost ludicrous amount of Godard-esque (or would that be Anno-esque?) subtitles, announcing the time and place at every scene change. In this way, the events of the story are given a strong documentary-like realism, a grounding that helps further reinforce the sheer scale of what is portrayed. It is often difficult to follow the dialogue, for a variety of reasons. The regional dialects of Aomori and Akita can be quite unfamiliar compared to standard Tokyo Japanese, and require an acclimation period before the patterns sink in. As well, Arai's voice as an author carries some peculiarities. In moments of quick action or extreme emotion, his characters will often break down from full sentences to choppy, blurted interjections. It's hard for me to tell if these are simply attributable to the idiosyncracy of the writer, or are perhaps a depiction of the slowing of time during sequences Arai wishes to emphasize (thus breaking the comic Golden Rule that you have all the time in the world to give your speech before the next panel advances the sequence). In addition to these more fundamental language issues, Arai also bogs down some of the pacing in the middle of the story with extended technical discussions about things like the military chain of command, political maneuvering and manipulating public perceptions, things that he himself admits he did not understand before drawing the manga, but were necessary to give it the serious portrayal his subject deserved.

The 5-volume reprint was also advertised as having many extra pages added by Arai to flesh out the story. For fun, I found scans of the original 14-volume run and compared them as I read. Ignoring the few niggling typos in the supposedly superior version, the additions to the story (mostly at the end of the last volume) are actually not quite as illuminating as you might expect. There is very little added content; Arai simply stretched out sections that were either cramped or lacked the impact he wanted, taking single expository paragraphs from the original and cutting them up to cover several panels and make the manga read easier.

All in all, The World Is Mine is as grandiose a statement as the title would suggest. It's at once a lurid spectacle, a thrilling adventure, a heady and difficult statement, and a take on some of the most basic questions of humanity and life. Highly recommended.

Palepoli

Palepoli (パレポリ)
by Usamaru Furuya (古屋兎丸)
Published in Garo (Seirindo)
1 volume (1994-1996)
Amazon.jp

Clearly the work of a recent art school graduate. Palepoli has achieved minor recognition for its excerpts reprinted in Secret Comics Japan (it also provided the cover art), so it might look familiar to some readers of this blog. Furuya has really charted a bizarre course with his career: probably the last big successful artist to spring from the pages of venerable old Garo, he went from this book, a veritable bible of clashing art styles, artistic deconstruction/experimentation and subculture attitude, to Short Cuts, a snarky, sarcastic take on mainstream Japanese pop culture and sexual fetishes, to Pi (Pai), a headfirst dive into and acceptance of those same values packaged as the search for "the perfect breasts." But enough about falls from intellectual grace; let's indulge in the past.

Palepoli is a real joy to behold. It employs a 4-panel gag structure that differs from the linear vertical style of typical newspaper strips, rather having the four panels arranged into a square and progressing from UR to UL to LR to LL. The artistic methods Furuya uses often differ wildly from page to page. His most common tool is the use of heavy tones that are cut in crosshatch patterns to emulate elaborate texture and shading, but he also tackles a variety of other styles such as pointillism, European woodcuts, early 20th century cartoons, ubersimple Japanese pop art, as well as individual takes on artists such as Picasso, Michelangelo, Tezuka and Fujiko Fujio's Doraemon. Much like the presentation, the content varies immensely, from simple slapstick gags and wordplay to surrealist humor to serious conceptual pieces. Furuya establishes several recurring skits and situations which he revisits from time to time. One of my favorites is a series combining Furuya's humor and structural experimentation called the "Rejection Ghost." Each entry features Furuya sitting at his desk finishing up the page we are presumably reading. A comical-looking ghost comes out of the wall and dismisses the manga by sabotaging it in some way (doodling on it, crumpling it up, slapping an inky handprint on it, etc.), much to Furuya's horror. The kicker is that since this is the very page we are reading in the book, the signs of the ghost's mischief appear directly on the page, thus, the installment in which the ghost crumples the page appears to have been crumpled up and hastily smoothed out again. Such playfulness can be seen throughout Palepoli.

Another one of the more striking series in the book are the double-image portraits, where Furuya draws four scenes that also form famous faces when seen in a different light. He depicts the four Beatles singing Let It Be out of people contemplating by the waterside, then does up four central characters of Doraemon as people having sex, accompanied by the lyrics of the theme song, which now carry a much more sensual meaning. Heaviest of all is a take on the well-known Japanese saying, "Are there no Gods or Buddhas?" The four pictures are of scenes of suffering (a hung man, two men burned at the stake, a dinosaur weeping for its dead child, and an atomic bomb explosion) all lamenting the question at hand, while their images also form recognizable depictions of Jesus, Buddha, etc, the title of the piece being "Gods and Buddhas Are There."

The melding of all these disparate elements and styles is dizzying at first glance, but the high level of execution and polish makes each pleasing to take in on its own, and despite what the entire package might suggest, there is really a minimum of avant-garde difficulty for difficulty's sake, though a general knowledge of the various artists and comics being parodied will undoubtedly lead to a more rewarding experience. It's a book that chooses its readers, but is very worthwhile for those chosen few.

Danchi Tomoo

Danchi Tomoo (団地ともお)
by Tobira Oda (小田扉)
Published in Big Comic Spirits (Shogakukan)
8 volumes at present (2003-)
Amazon.jp

A charming and curious series from one of the more unique comedic artists in Japan, Danchi Tomoo is a story for adults about the trivialities of being a suburban Japanese child. A "danchi" is a high rise apartment complex that often contains multiple buildings (if you've ever read Otomo's Domu, you've seen one). Our protagonist Tomoo lives in a danchi, and thus, this is the story of his escapades with the eccentric cast of kids and characters that live there.

Tomoo (pronounced To-moh, not To-muu, though this is the punchline of a joke that is used once within the manga) is a classic lamewad kid in the vein of Doraemon's Nobita: Clumsy, stupid, lazy, obnoxious, impatient, yet somehow lovable. He's the ideal representation of a fond childhood for the legions of ne'er-do-well slacker 20somethings reading this manga. Tomoo and his classmates and friends are constantly involved in some kids' activity: playing sports (and losing), collecting things, catching bugs, and, as with all kids, getting tired of them. It's a boring set-up, but the trick to enjoying it is to recognize Oda's comedic formula. The special weapon of his arsenal is the shortened length of his chapters, on average 12 pages, rather than the typical 18. By working with less material, Oda is largely free from having to fully develop or stretch out a premise, making them punchy and loose. In fact, his forte is a sort of abrupt anti-conclusion, in which a chapter will end with no punchline or period at all. There is also a bittersweet edge to the mix that works well with the humor, and generally the two sides balance out, neither becoming too slapstick nor too serious. It took me a few volumes to really latch onto Oda's sense of humor and unique build-up and payoff methods, but once I did the flavor of the series really blossomed.

As with the majority of successful episodic comedies, Danchi Tomoo maintains an ever-burgeoning cast of eccentric characters, from Tomoo's classmates and family to the local residents of the danchi. The eccentricity is perfectly pitched to match the general feel of the manga; it's just odd enough to carry a sheen of artifice without being completely unbelievable, as in some of Oda's short material. Danchi Tomoo is a much more balanced and palatable mix than his maddeningly brilliant but inconsistent short story collections, but bits of that distilled nature shine through in the short "Captain Sports" excerpts, a manga that Tomoo and friends read about a mustachioed cyborg in a karate robe with a gyoza for an ear. Oda expertly fleshes out his side characters and reuses them, building details and staying consistent with them. Small arcs exist here and there: Tomoo visits his dad, who lives apart from the family on work assignment, an old man dies and his identical brother moves in, Tomoo befriends a baseball player. Tomoo gets a new jacket, and he is seen wearing it constantly several volumes from that point onward until it gets ratty. For an attentive reader, there is a wealth of such small surprises.

For me, Danchi Tomoo also carries another meaning. I've read my share of great series from Big Comic Spirits in the past, but when I visualize it in my head, I have a tendency to focus on the man-boy oriented schlock that chokes it, as in any weekly seinen magazine. But little gems like Danchi Tomoo always remind me that BCS is always good for at least 2-3 brilliant serials at any one time.

Kijin Gahoh

Kijin Gahoh (奇人画報)
by Shintaro Kago (駕籠真太郎)
Published in Manga Erotics and Manga Erotics F (Ohta)
1 volume (2002-2003)
Amazon.jp

Marginally infamous in the English-speaking world for his piece in Secret Comics Underground and his inclusion in Pulp's (R.I.P.) list of the 10 Manga That Must Never Be Translated for Kagayake! Daitoakyoeiken, a satirical manga in which Japan lays waste to all in WW2 with giant schoolgirl tanks that shoots cannons of shit, Shintaro Kago is... well, he's just kind of a sick fuck. Kijin Gahoh (Eccentrics Illustrated) finds him balancing black humor with the grotesque in a way that is both appalling and amusing.

The majority of the book is a series of stories about collections. The first one starts out innocuously enough, compared to the rest of the book. A girl with a fanatical crush on a boy in her class takes samples of everything he touches, to add to her collection. What starts off with bits of chalk, library books and umbrella handles eventually turns to pieces of her own skin when he makes bodily contact with her. When she learns he's been making out with another girl, she kidnaps the offender and removes the skin of her hands, her mouth, and (because he had gotten to second base) her breasts. This mutilation proves fatal for the poor girl, which sets up the punchline when her dad walks in on the gory scene. Rather than being shocked or upset, he is pleased that he can now add another brain to his brain collection.

The following story is far more disturbing, the test of mettle I had to pass to be able to read the rest of the book. A playboy with a penchant for taking pictures decides to combine photography with his favorite pastime of receiving head. In a structural move reminiscent of some of Naoki Yamamoto's short stories, Kago tells the story through a simple chronology of repetitive snapshots with descriptions. The pictures, each of a woman with his penis in her mouth, start off plainly enough, but as the playboy grows tired of the same old thing, the entries get more and more adventurous. He has one girl attempt the act with various types of food in her mouth. Each time, he describes the sensation and whether or not he was able to ejaculate. Eventually he is moving on to animals and women with horrible mouth infections. The entries get more and more sadistic, introducing torture until each one is of a corpse killed and mutilated in a specific way. As with the first chapter, Kago saves a punchline for the final snapshot. Finally out of all other options, the sicko decides to go for the final frontier by severing his own head and using it on himself.

The images are horrific to be sure, but Kago retains a playful air while telling the stories. There is a constant air of amusement and aloofness present that prevents any particular images from being too heavily repeated or emphasized by the author. Indeed, some of the stories are more humorous than shocking, most particularly the final chapter, in which Santa Claus is a figure of terror, striking without warning at any moment and deluging his victims with a bombardment of presents that crush them to death.

Kago's artwork is relatively detailed, but his use of predominantly straight lines, spindly physiques and slight hatching gives off a nervous, stark air that suits the macabre subject matter. Unsurprisingly, there is a noticeable increase in detail and attention on the more grotesque scenes. Between the unflinching portrayals of violence and the obvious lack of hesitation to use any subject matter that comes to his mind (fetuses, sexual fetishes, mutilation), Kago's work is a very heady and sometimes fascinating brew, but the kind of thing that could shatter social relationships if someone happened to stumble across it on your bookshelf. I'll get around to reading more of him someday... once I work up my stomach.

Ranman

Ranman (乱漫)
by Shinkichi Kato (加藤伸吉)
Published in Shosetsu Gendai and Esora (Kodansha)
1 volume (2002-2006)
Amazon.jp

Shinkichi Kato is one of those rare authors where you're not quite sure whether to be furious that he publishes so little, or grateful that what he does finally put out is always so brilliant. His career goes back to the early 90s, when he drew his signature series Kokumin Quiz (National Quiz) with author Reiichi Sugimoto. That 4-volume series (his longest) was set in a world where Japan was a world superpower, and the highest-acting branch of the government was a quiz TV show where regular citizens would compete to see their wishes granted, whether it was "bring me the Eiffel Tower," or "find my pet dog." It was an extremely cynical series satirizing the excesses of the height of Japan's bubble economy in the 80s, featuring a flamboyant host that was perfectly suited for Kato's wild and imaginitive artwork. After that, Kato followed it up with the now out-of-print Rurou Seinen Shishio, which was a self described "total flop," and then the heartwarming Baka to Gogh, the story of a group of friends struggling to find their places in life without having to grow up. The differences between Quiz and Gogh is all one needs to find the range in Kato's style. Quiz is wild, bold, fanciful and cynical; Gogh is emotional, optimistic and touching. Since Gogh's two volumes were issued in 2000, Kato has been largely withdrawn from serialized work, issuing only two books of collected short material: Obrigado in 2003 and Ranman in 2006. If Quiz and Gogh were starkly opposing examples of Kato's range, these collections are the best place to find a melding of all of his requisite flavors in one place. Ranman, particularly, excels in variety and content.

Published entirely in Shosetsu Gendai (Contemporary Novels), a serialized fiction magazine, and its sister publication Esora, which features short stories from both novelists and manga artists, Ranman has several fascinating concepts worked into it. The material from Shosetsu Gendai comes in two forms. One is a series of short 4-6 page vignettes about a variety of subjects, each just long enough to establish a mood and tell a short story before moving on to another. The other is a collection of even shorter 2-4 page "mixed quotations," in which Kato takes a quote from a famous book, whether War and Peace, Tom Sawyer, Alice in Wonderland or a number of Eastern texts, and fits them with new imagery he has reinterpreted on a whim. For example, the Tom Sawyer quote is a conversation where Tom asks Becky if she likes dead rats tied up in a string to be twirled around the head, and she responds that she'd rather have chewing gum. In Kato's reimagining, a young boy and girl in Wild West get-up are surrounded by a gang of giant rats. The boy lassoes one around the neck and swings it about, scattering the others, while the girl blows bubbles and shoots at the remaining rats with a pistol. In another quotation, from Prince Shotoku's Seventeen-Article Constitution ("Matters must not be decided by one, but argued between all"), a class of children is taking a vote. On the blackboard, nearly all votes are listed under a drawing of a haunch of meat, with a lone vote underneath a heart. On the next page, the class is visiting the bunny cage behind the school, where they are seen roasting an enormous 4-foot tall rabbit on a spit over a blazing fire. In the last panel, the lone girl who voted to care for the rabbit is seen crying as she chews on a drumstick.

Most stunning of all is the range of style that Kato wields from piece to piece. The artwork can change dramatically to suit the nature of the setting, from bubbly and poppy on the lighthearted bits to heavy and noir-ish on the dark ones. Because of the very low output and visibility of these pieces (2-6 pages published only once a month or less), Kato is free not only to pursue whatever whim he chooses with a piece, but to cram it full of as much detail as he possibly can, making even the most flippant throwaway scraps enormously evocative and stunning to behold. The two stories taken from Esora are longer, and unsurprisingly, vastly different from each other. One is a text-free story of a wild jungle princess who rescues a gorilla friend from King Kong-style captivity in a comedic physical adventure. The other is of a nihilistic, disconnected young man in an increasingly warlike Japan who discovers a girl's diary buried beside a riverbank. As he reads more and more of it, he begins to fall in love with the unseen owner of the diary and to awaken to his situation and reality, until he discovers in a vision that she had committed suicide. In the final scene, he is seen reburying her diary by the river and murmuring that he hopes he can see her again someday.

Ranman is best described as the manga equivalent of a book of poetry, lacking in any kind of story or plot but densely packed with vivid splashes of ideas and images. Shinkichi Kato is absolutely one of the finest and most criminally underappreciated artists in Japan, and Ranman is possibly his best collection of material. I'll be ready for 2009, when my calculations say he should be due for another book to outdo the previous.

Kaiki Hanga Otoko

Kaiki Hanga Otoko (怪奇版画男)
by Naoki Karasawa (唐沢なをき)
Published in Big Comic Spirits 21 (Shogakukan)
1 volume (1994-1997)
Amazon.jp

Quite possibly the most amusing, selfless, masochistic novelty manga ever made, Naoki Karasawa's Kaiki Hanga Otoko (Bizarre Woodcut Man) is the first and only manga consisting entirely of woodcuts. Karasawa is known as one of the leading artists in the gag manga field (primarily for stunts such as this one), where presentation and ideas are generally second to the ability to mass-produce stale or surreal jokes. His ability to create high quality, readable content out of bizarre and experimental ideas has been praised far and wide in Japan. Out of a career in which he has taken on such disparate ideas as lampooning the mangaka profession, a manga entirely about Macintosh computers, and a retelling of the original Gundam in which all the characters are dogs, Kaiki Hanga Otoko is easily the strangest and most creative.

Literally everything in Kaiki Hanga Otoko, with the exception of the barcode on the cover, was created from a woodcut. The art, the text, the cover, the contents page, the afterword, even the copyright page were all carved in relief into a block of wood, then dipped in ink and stamped on a piece of paper. According to Karasawa, he wanted to do the barcode as well, but was not allowed. The manga consists of about 20 chapters published over a period of four years in a special monthly supplement to the weekly Big Comic Spirits. Each 4-8 page installment features Hanga Otoko (Woodcut Man), a freakish, irascible character who pops out of nowhere to accost random passersby and demand various tasks, such as that their New Year's postcards to friends and family (a Japanese tradition) be made in the old-fashioned woodcut style. When the bystanders comment on how lame/old-fashioned/labor-intensive the concept is, he inevitably flies into a violent rage, often using his victims as woodblocks for his own art. Over the course of the book, Karasawa throws in numerous experiments in new "woodcuts," taking vegetables, thumbprints, even a whole fish, and inking, stamping and integrating them into the manga. Most of the chapter titles are spoofs of other media, including "Hanga 1/2" and "Picnic at Hangang Rock." One chapter features two bilingual, middle-aged men speaking in both Japanese and English. The Japanese is a hushed conversation about a Hanga Otoko encounter as if it were a UFO sighting, but the English sentences appear to have been taken from a Japanese-English handbook on naughty language, including such lines as "Have you ever had anal sex? How many times? Did you like it?" and "Wouldn't you like to bury your face in my hot vagina."

Taken all together in a short description like the one above, it sounds like the most wonderful treasure trove of Pythonesque conceptual humor that could possibly be hidden away in the Far East, but despite the best efforts of the author to find new ways to torture himself (multicolor pages requiring a new woodcut for each color, intentially drawing enormous crowd scenes), over 100 pages, the concept begins to wear thin, and it becomes apparent that cracking nerdy jokes about woodcut art is really just a distant cousin of Jerry Seinfeld riffing on pen caps or tennis rackets. What is truly interesting is the infinitesimally small ratio of laughs to effort expended. Not only did the creation of this manga require Karasawa to carve out his manga two separate times for each page (art and text), but the image itself must be carved in mirror, as the act of stamping it turns the image around. The overriding thought while flipping through the book is not "Gee whiz, this manga sure is funny" (though it is), but "Gee whiz, how goddamn long did it take to do all this?!" Thereby shifting appreciation from the art itself to the process of creating it, and proving why people think Karasawa is such a big deal in such a particular and limiting genre of manga.