“Did you know, Mr. Takada? Very few manga editors actually like manga.”
The speaker should know — he’s an executive in a manga publisher. More specifically, he is the editorial executive who canceled the magazine curated by Shiozawa, the protagonist of Taiyō Matsumoto’s Tokyo These Days (published by Viz in 2024 over three volumes, translated by Michael Arias), and he is on his way to perform his duties. No, not any duties that have anything to do with art — you see, one of the anthologies under his indirect supervision featured an unsanctioned ‘cameo’ from a candy brand, and now, as he monologues to his driver about Shiozawa the daydreamer who only cared about art and knew nothing about business, he is on his way to do what any self-respecting editor with two feet planted firmly on the ground must do: he is going to prostrate himself before the candy company and offer them free advertising.
This incident, which takes place two chapters into the third and final volume of Tokyo These Days is thus, without a doubt, one of the series’ standout chapters, for one simple reason: unlike most of Matsumoto’s work, it’s downright mean, and in a very specific way — it feels, inevitably, like a grudge. More specifically, I cannot help but think about Matsumoto himself, whose return to the marketable comfort of sports manga in Ping Pong was likewise the result of a failed experiment, namely the poor sales of No. 5. One recalls Pencil Head, Ted McKeever’s caustic farewell to comics, whose metric to favorable or unfavorable portrayal hinged entirely on how well these largely-revered (and only barely veiled) figures in comics treated McKeever’s own stand-in. By using the executive who, by his own admission, did not know a single thing about manga until he was assigned his editorial position, Matsumoto affords himself the temporary suspension of his own warm viewpoint — he uses the tool of the enemy, flattening the readership into raw, unknowing statistics, before turning the narrative on its face and reminding us exactly where that numbers-minded way of thinking winds up in the end.
But this incident, of course, only stands out because it is an outlier. At least in the works that have been translated into English, there is very little meanness, let alone moral villainy, in Matsumoto’s world. Certainly, there are interpersonal conflicts, there is friction, but rarely does the author step forward to declare the right or wrong party. Shiozawa himself represents the other, more-commonly-seen element of Matsumoto: he is that warm, stoic kindness. He places on himself any and all blame, and we are given no indication that this is disingenuous posturing. In the very first chapter, he says: “The magazine was discontinued because I didn’t recognize 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. [Quitting] is the only way to atone.” Twelve chapters later, speaking to a cartoonist he formerly oversaw, he expresses a similar sentiment: “It’s my fault for failing to attract an audience for the universe you created.”
In his own review of the first volume, Joe McCulloch astutely underlines the binding element of much of Matsumoto’s work, being his ambivalence toward fantastical, escapist thinking; there is always an ‘other world’: in GoGo Monster, it is a Donnie Darko-esque cosmogony; in Ping Pong, sports. In Sunny, the derelict car parked outside of the orphanage is a gateway into the freedom of unfettered ambition that exists in imagination.
Shiozawa, for his part, is hardly different from other Matsumoto protagonists, suspended between two worlds: he speaks to his pet bird, and the bird speaks back; he shares one last heart-to-heart with a cartoonist, at her own wake. Except he, of course, is no child. He has his responsibilities, his livelihood — the fantasy has something to take its toll on, and indeed his resignation does make things harder for people around him, be they on the creative side or the editorial.
To me, however, it seems that this ambivalence most often takes the form of authorial fear of particulars, as Matsumoto forces a distance between the reader and the ‘other world.’ Ping Pong, for all its exhilarating hyper-kinesis, fails to capture the specifics of the actual sport to the extent that it could be any sport, be it table tennis or horse racing; GoGo Monster may tell us, in great detail, how Yuki uses his imaginary world to insulate himself from the human world, but Matsumoto will always underscore the imaginary part, will always hesitate to immerse us in the inner world, as if out of a fear that we may find it more alluring—aesthetically, narratively—than the ‘real’ one.
Very little of Tokyo These Days, similarly, is about comics, per se; certainly, there is merit in the key tenet that comics are made by people—indeed, that people exist without comics but that comics are nothing without people—but I nonetheless find myself yearning for this world, for this context, to be more than backdrop and set-dressing. See the chapter in volume three where the mangaka Chosaku and his daughter Luna go to another mangaka’s exhibition. On inspecting the pages, Chosaku observes the way the other mangaka, Tsuchinoko, ‘patchworked’ her screentones — unable to afford sheets of screentone, she used the leftover bits and pieces, lining up the dots in such a way that it’d be harder to tell. This shop-talk minutia is also a strong observation of character — a humanizing moment, an elucidation of how real-life circumstance informs, if not downright encroaches on, the supposedly-insular world of the work itself.
These moments of specificity, though, are entirely fleeting, as Shiozawa himself handily demonstrates. Throughout the series we are told time and time again that the problem with Shiozawa lay not with its quality but with its failure to find a readership; even the editorial executive who canceled it concedes that it was great, that it was avant-garde. Yet we are shown tremendously little of what avant-garde actually means in specific terms — I find myself wanting to understand what Shiozawa’s curatorial vision actually is, as well as what Matsumoto’s perception of anthology editing is, as a contributor-but-not-editor. And yet, as ‘avant-garde’ as Matsumoto wants us to view him, from an aesthetic perspective Shiozawa is downright conservative in aesthetic, or at the very least a thorough classicist — repeatedly he goes back not to the cutting-edge creators but to the old and forgotten; in one chapter he even tells one of them, a cartoonist whose narratives of anthropomorphic cats in upper-class dress are reminiscent of contemporary mangaka Nishimura Tsuchika’s delightful (and distinctly childlike and comfort-minded) illustrations of ursine black-and-white cubs, that his work is “particularly essential in this age of information overload.” Likewise, see the quotes he pulls out readily when the moment is right: Shakespeare, Goethe, Nakamura Kusatao — he is an educated man, but educated in that very distinct and recognizable way that deftly dodges accusations of pretension, which is to say, the orthodox shorthand of education that at this point feels more like a signifier than what is signified.
In the broader ‘human world’ of Tokyo These Days, too, Matsumoto finds himself the victim of his own shorthand1. My major qualm with Sunny was that, for a six-volume serial, there was fairly little in the way of long-running concerns; any narrative problems are sorted out within the chapter, a perfectly episodic rhythm that teeters on the verge of, if not forgettability, certainly a reduced significance, as resolution is prioritized over its corresponding problem. The case can easily, and quite compellingly, be made that the overarching long-term concern in Matsumoto’s bibliography is the creation of a universal, indiscriminate empathy; the central thesis is that, whether they are children in a foster home or mangaka in the throes of a mid-life crisis, it is their humanity, their emotional existence in the world, that takes precedence over their circumstances, and it is through this realization that they reach some sort of peace.
But this thesis, taken to its logical next step (that, thanks to this empathy, life is alright, all in all) limits the ability of the cartoonist to view moments of genuine struggle outside of the lens of its overcoming. In Chapter 7, one of the series’ most affecting scenes, Aoki—a cartoonist that Shiozawa used to edit until his sudden departure, and who, given his preexisting mental-health struggles, handles the handover of his serial to a new editor very poorly—leaves his window open, allowing one of his cats to escape. He runs through the streets, panicking, and, in his internal monologue, we see how quickly he falls into an anxious spiral, flashing back to a childhood memory of accidentally letting his dog slip out of its collar and get hit by a car. Although he finds his cat within a handful of pages, it’s a strikingly effective way of indicating to the reader how prone Aoki is to moments of downright abyssal thinking.
Matsumoto follows up on Aoki’s downslide in the second volume. Freaked out by his success, he absconds to his hometown, just about ready to give up on comics — except all it takes is a call and a visit from his editor, Hayashi, to talk Aoki off of his ledge and get back to work. This time he does, in fact, get himself together. He gets a haircut, he shaves. He’s a person in the world again — and now he’s here to stay.
Though Matsumoto himself is not naïve enough to outright ignore moments of deeper, more ongoing strife, he does find his ways to skirt around them. Iidabashi, one of the cartoonists Shiozawa edited earlier in his career, suffers greatly under the iron fist of an abusive editor who beat every inch of indulgence—and, indeed, of authorial uniqueness—out of her in the name of sales, going from “Readers don’t want your masturbation!” to “We’re gonna get you a serialization… so you better be ready to work yourself to death!”. Another rare bit of level-headed bleakness from Matsumoto, only compounded by her remark, “I don’t even remember how it feels to have affection for my manga like I did [under Shiozawa].” Only Shiozawa’s meeting with Iidabashi ends on a surprising, even-more-sober note: “As bad as Mr. Onijima is,” says the cartoonist, “I owe him, and… I won’t betray him.” Faced with the fear that there would be no one to break her fall should Shiozawa’s efforts not pan out, she resigns herself instead to the familiar reality of an abusive dynamic, coupled with the fear that, should Shiozawa’s efforts not pan out, there would be no one left to break her fall; just like Shiozawa himself, she falls back on old reliable stoicism, even when alleviation is within sight. (Shiozawa himself naturally engages in similar behavior: when Hayashi offers to try and help him distribute his anthology in bookstores by using the publisher’s sales code, Shiozawa politely declines, going so far as to ask Hayashi to stop trying to help him.) Pain is thus undercut by the author’s inescapable trapping of honor, of permanent and inescapable uprightness.
Artistically, Tokyo These Days is about as good as Matsumoto has ever been. In particular, what sticks out is the occasional rendering of certain elements in ink-washes to contrast them with the drier, crisper pen of the rest: the unruly man on editor Iga’s head, changing shape constantly; the gentle shadow that glasses cast on the cheeks of those who wear them, a detail so fine—so intimate, almost—that hardly any other cartoonist would even bother. Notably, Tokyo These Days has, by design, fairly few opportunities for the frenetic melt-your-skin-clean-off dynamism for which the cartoonist is so known – there’s a lot less excitement in watching a middle-aged man running after his umbrella than there is in a game of ping pong. But this only means that the cartoonist shifts his focus to one of his most appealing and most distinct graphic features; his is not the realism of reference but of pure observation. Rarely will a straight line be found in his work — only a plurality of minuscule hatches and scratches that will feel straight enough without losing the spontaneity.
Yet this spontaneity is sorely lacking in the drama of Matsumoto’s story. “Joy is a fruit that grows on a tree of great suffering,” Shiozawa quotes Victor Hugo in the third volume. The cartoonist, for his part, consistently focuses on the fruit as, for the first time in the Sunny cartoonist’s bibliography, the fantasy prevails. Some artists may suffer for their art, while others have enough of the suffering and unceremoniously leave, but Matsumoto certainly idealizes the idea that, through conviction and perseverance, You Too Can Prevail.
The final chapter of Tokyo These Days skips forward in time to show us just about exactly what we wanted to see: the first issue of Shiozawa’s new endeavor—Dawn Comics, to distinguish it from his previous, Night Comics—is finally out, and, against all odds for a self-published anthology, it’s selling pretty well. He’s hard at work on the second issue, and he’s even managed to sway some erstwhile skeptics to contribute to it. A Kierkegaardian triumph if there ever was one: the knight of faith has warped reality around him. Go on, Don Quixote, Matsumoto tells us. You may ruin some windmills, but don’t worry about property damage — one of them’s bound to be a dragon eventually. So you just keep your chin up — and get ready to take aim.
- On the subject of shorthand, let it be noted that translator Michael Arias likewise seems to struggle in the same field, his attempts at colloquialisms often falling short due to egregious repetition – in one chapter of Vol. 3, the phrase dontcha know appears four times within a span of three pages. ↩︎
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