Fukushima Masami

My face nearly burned up when I first came across a series called 'The Rapist Monk' (Nyohanbō). I was seventeen, and still in high school. It was 1974. I was browsing through a magazine whose title - Manga Erotopia - pretty much said it all. Ryusui, the powerful hero of the manga, was carrying a horse on one shoulder and penetrating a slutty princess from one end to the other at the same time. Even I was shocked.

Fukushima Masami was born in Daiseicho in 1948. Daiseicho is a fishing port on the freezing Sea of Okhotsk, and his father was a trawler man. His mother ran off with a lover when he was still a small child, and his father abandoned the family shortly after. The young Fukushima was reared by his brothers, heavy laborers. He gravitated to manga "for the money." He got his break in a monthly called COM after a frantic period of mailing work around. (COM was founded in 1967 by Tezuka Osamu as a forum for emerging experimental artists. This was partly in reaction to the success of the alternative magazine Garo).

By 1967 he was out of school and scraping a living as a sketch artist in Shinjuku, Tokyo, when the manga artist Mori Masaki took him on as an assistant. He also started getting his own work published. It a glance it looks pretty normal. But the signs of his later direction were already there, in his heroes' expressions - and heavy musculature. And in his slutty heroines. He debuted under his own name in the magazine Comic VAN, with 'March of Death' (Shi no Kōshinkyoku).

'Slasher Nun' (Hitokiri Ama) 1971-74

The Slasher Nun started life as the heroine of a picaresque tale of derring-do, set in the stirring days of the Meiji Period. This was a clamorous age between 1868 and 1912 when feudal Japan opened itself up to western influences, good bad and indifferent. The tale is set just north of Tokyo, in the yakuza mafia underground. The heroine, Onatsu, is abandoned by her Mafioso husband, who wants to further his nefarious career. Justifiably upset, she slashes him to death and, child in tow, embarks on a pious new career of her own - as the death-dealing Slasher Nun. The resulting heady brew graced the pages of the well-known artistic magazine Manga Comic, under the title Hitokiri Ama. (This work is technically classified as a gekiga, a hardboiled genre with higher production values and artistic input per page than a typical manga.)

However, this was just the beginning. A run-off version of the manga in book form takes things a stage further. Here, the Slasher Nun sports a three-fingered claw for a right hand, and comes from a hidden community of deformed villagers. 'Slasher Nun' is already developing what we have to hail as the Masami Touch: a forceful blend of disturbing women and grotesque villains, a twinning of beauty and cruelty. In his preface to the book, Fukushima declared: "I only went into manga to make money. The manga is all. The artist doesn't matter."

The Rapist Monk (Nyohanbō) 1974-76

Running for three years in the magazine Manga Erotopia, this is Fukushima's longest work, drawn to the script by Takezawa Kai. The hero is a mysterious monk called Ryusui, battling the powers that be on a personal quest to break through to true Buddhism. He is Brother Ryusui, and always surrounded by many woman. Maybe he is practicing the Diamond Sutra in the true sense of the word. Because he justifies murder if it helps turn his ideals into reality.

Part I is set in the early 1800s. In Japan this was a decadent age. It was clear that the shogun's regime was starting to crumble. The monk Ryusui walks the land from one end to another spreading poison wherever he goes, in a study of the aesthetic of evil. When corrupt officials try to crush the people's sexual drives, Ryusui chants the Sutra of Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy - and sends the bad guys packing with his supernatural powers.

Part II is set in a prime nerve center of the Japanese erotic imagination - O-oku, or the shogun's harem, a strictly girls-only space (except for the shogun, of course) in the bowels of Edo Castle. Time has moved on, and the government is now in a state of ever-accelerating collapse. Ryusui makes his entry and takes the fight to the shogun's chief counselor Ii Naosuke. With the collusion of the grand harem mistress Himekoji, he kills the head counselor and seizes power behind the scenes. However, his real target is Edo Castle itself, and the shogun's court.

The plot now careers from (kind of) historically accurate to wild fantasy. Two real-life characters appear as fellow-conspirators against the shogun: Saigo Takamori, a fiery samurai radical, and Katsu Kaishū, the shogun's wily naval commander. Ryusui joins their grouping. (In western terms, this would be something along the lines of the Incredible Hulk teaming up with Jimmy Hoffa and the CIA to assassinate Kennedy.) And together, they do it! The shogunate is overthrown, and the way to a New Japan is opened. At which point Ryusui is confronted with a new enemy - a savage brain-sucking barbarian by the name of Boolliver. They fight. To the death. We last glimpse the victorious Ryusui disappearing into the flaming depths of Edo Castle...

Ryusui comes back to life for Part III, which is set in the late 1800s. Japan is now open and westernizing rapidly, which gives the hero a new set of opponents. Among them is the "Merchant of Death" Iwasaki Yataro, founder of Mitsubishi, and the real-life Scottish merchant Thomas Glover, who was on the scene in Nagasaki at the same time.

The finale sees Ryusui back in Tokyo, bent on overthrowing the government yet again. Crashing a waltz gathering of Japan's new elite at the Rokumeikan dance hall, he faces the ghost of the grand harem mistress Himekoji in the ultimate showdown...

The changeover from feudal to modern Japan was a real event, and a real revolution. The fictional character Ryusui's ultimate aim is to keep the cycle of revolution spinning until it hits anarchy. Hell opens up all around him on his journey through the story. But it doesn't feel like a tragedy - more like a heart-stopping dash through great danger to a new world. Created by some earthshaking, chaotic Power.

'Pirate Ship of Hungry Slaves' (Gareisen) 1975-1976

Fukushima Masami hit the peak of his progress in the period from 1975. All of his works around this time have the same features in common - excessively muscled bodies, startling layouts, and heroes that morph in stature to something like living gods as the storylines progress. 'Pirate Ship of Hungry Slaves' is set in the Japan of the late 1800s. The hero, Shachi, starts life on land but soon runs into trouble. He is found guilty of looting cargo from a shipwreck. The local magistrate punishes him savagely by executing his wife and setting Shachi himself adrift on the open sea. He is saved by a pirate princess called Hime with a strong resemblance to the eighties cult movie star Divine, and her faithful African servant George. Together they join to take on the shogunate, but their pirate forces are put to the ocean floor by government naval squads, and the three main characters are separated. Shachi later finds the princess again, only to see her executed in front of his eyes by his nemesis the magistrate. Their child is executed next, and Shachi is force-fed its flesh in a long drawn out torture sequence. The experience drives him insane.

George, meanwhile, ends up touring with a traveling sumo troupe, and is forced to display his strength by pulling a giant wagon, etc. Finally, using some pretty unconventional methods, Shachi, George and Hime get to take their revenge on the magistrate.

'Pirate Ship' was published in Manga Hot, with a storyline by a writer, Kobori Yō, working for Studio Ship. Fukushima worked out a great many aspects of his mature style in this very strong work, featuring some excellent scenes such as the princess Hime's torture sequence and the pirate-shogunate sea battle.

'Saint Muscle' (San Muscle) 1976, and 'Prince Shōtoku' (Shōtoku Taishi), 1977-79

Fukushima now stopped work for the young readers' magazines he was involved with, and delved into the bizarre world of his subconscious to get his own images onto the page. The graphic style of the creation myth 'Saint Muscle' showed Fukushima's strong similarities to American action comics Later this had a major influence on other extreme-action muscle manga such as 'Fist of the North Star' (Hokuto no Ken).

'Prince Shōtoku' is another tale based on a real-life historical figure, the seventh-century ruler who played a key role in making Japan a Buddhist country. Normally, Shōtoku is pictured as a kind of Yoda figure - all sweetness, light and Buddhist wisdom. This was not the Fukushima way. In his manga we go over to the dark side, to Prince Shōtoku as an avenging occult spirit. His opponents are the powerful Soga clan, originally strong opponents of Buddhism in Japan. To get even with them, the resurrected Shōtoku (who's broken the laws of the underworld) has to challenge Enma, the Buddhist Prince of Hades. The battle is joined by the Red Army of Hell - a league of dead souls seeking to liberate Hades, with backing from the Buddha himself - and turns into a three-sided free-for-all.

The manga's love interest is also triangular - Enma's wife Benten (the Goddess of Knowledge) is also Shōtoku's lover. The stakes now reach as far as the question of who will conceive a new Being transcending the space-time continuum...

As well as 'Saint Muscle' and 'Prince Shōtoku', Fukushima published a number of other works in the productive years of 1977 and 1978. As the name suggests, 'Mugen, Empress of the Yoshiwara' (Arinsu-koku Jotei Mugen) is set in the huge pleasure district of old Edo, the Yoshiwara. The storyline centers on a 'super sex contest' waged by the vengeful courtesan Mugen. Chigira is a near-future science fiction manga set in the pre-Millenium Tokyo underworld, featuring fast-growing foreign mafias, paranormal floods, drug-crazed religious sects, etc. Fighting them all is the eponymous hero Chigira, armed with his trusty 'M61' automatic. 'Beastly Baseball Legend' (Jūkyūden) chronicles the doings of a homicidal batter and a beanball pitcher as they try their luck gambling on baseball games.

To the end of century...

From 1978, Fukushima went into a severe slump. Even when his name appeared on magazine covers, there was no sign of his manga inside. Friends like the songwriter Nakanishi Rei held events like the Come On Fukushima! Party, but the creative juices just weren't flowing any more. He published a few works over the following years - 'Love-hate Sisters' (Aien Shimai) and 'Scorpion Nun' (Sasori Ama) - but they lacked his old power. Running in the magazine Young Comic, the series 'Isaac's Ark' (Isaku no Hakobune) was canceled in mid-series in 1980. This began a decade of silence for Fukushima, broken only in 1990 with the book 'Resurrection Crest' (Yomigaeru Monshō). Then the silence began again.

Such is fate. A Fleshbomb manga artist like Fukushima is pretty much bound for destruction. Drawing at the extremes he went to would warp anybody. But the manga scene without him has suffered a sharp, severe temperature drop. I first started searching for Fukushima in person in 1995. The night before I started I had a dream about him, covered in blood, screaming Pay me, if you want to know about me! I got as far as his ex-wife, a music teacher in Saitama (near Tokyo). She assured me that her ex-husband was on the verge of a comeback. I believed her, and the Fukushima Renaissance Cult was born at that moment. The mission: bringing back total manga, affirming the entire range of humanity, good and bad. It developed far beyond my imagination. As The Rapist Monk puts it "Extremism makes miracles".

To quote the man himself: it's not a hundred percent necessary for Fukushima to be morally perfect. It's all in his work, and if he starts drawing again, who can say what he'll come out with? I'd like to join his ex-wife and other fans in calling out to Fukishima Masami:

Coooooooooome Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!

Postscript: The return of Fukushima, and beyond...

Just as I was screaming "Coooooooooome Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!" (in the 1997 edition of Manga Zombie) - whaddya know? A gaggle of publishers were thinking along the same lines. As a result, Ohta Publishing Co. brought out a reissue of 'Saint Muscle' to healthy sales. The following year, Suiseisha published my survey work Fringe Culture, which covered Fukushima Masami among others. So, interest in this artist was definitely on the rise again at this time - at least among a few offbeat sections of the media. When - gasp! - the maestro himself got in touch with Ohta Publishing, in July of 1998. Meaning I got to meet him, along with one of Ohta's editorial staff. Unfortunately, he never divulged the real reason he'd remained silent for over a decade. But he did let us know he was planning a comeback. (The interview was published in the magazine Quick Japan.)

The real push to get Fukushima's work back in print more or less coincided with his resurfacing in public. Ohta reprinted 'The Rapist Monk' in three volumes, along with 'Prince Shōtoku'. Bijutsu Shuppan chimed in with 'Gladiators, Stars of Rome' (Kakutōshi Rōma no Hoshi) and 'Mugen, Empress of the Yoshiwara'. And then in 1999 the real action started - two brand-new Fukushima series. 'The Ballman' (Gyokudan) appeared in Pachinker, a mag dedicated to the Japanese gambling game pachinko. And in a real blast from the past, the series 'Restless Breasts' (Bōnyūkyo) graced the pages of that randy old goat Manga Erotopia.

Both series covered about fifty pages in total, a good two volumes' worth of work for demanding weekly publications. (Though technically Erotopia and Pachinker were what the British call 'fortnightlies' - i.e., released every second week.) Anyway, as the clock ticked towards the millennium, Fukushuma Masami was back in a big way, a cult hero-figure in certain journalistic circles.

However, in early 2000, Fukushima went into another major slump again. His age was probably one factor. He was now in his early fifties, and writing weekly manga is physically draining. There may have been artistic differences with the scriptwriters too. But I think the main problem for Fukushima was that his new stuff didn't achieve the sales figures he'd been hoping for. The Big Comeback flopped, and he was yanked brutally offstage: the mags dropped his series. Silence fell...

Though not completely. He still commanded enough of a following to republish single-volume works like 'The Nothingness of Swordsman Musashi' (Musashi no Mu) and Chemistry. But the weeklies (and therefore commercial success) remained out of his reach. However, in 2005, he got another break - the weekly Shūkan Manga Times started running his series 'Edo Decadence' (Edo Deka). This was a major coup: Shūkan Manga Times is an imprint of the mighty publishing house Kodansha. But the series was axed after only six months.

Another Fukushima manga run by a Kodansha mag fared even worse. Comic Afternoon dropped 'Super-Citizen F' (Chō-shimin F) after a single episode. Fukushima just couldn't seem to take his chances and turn them into achievements. Why not? No doubt there are a million reasons, but the heart of the problem is that Fukushima couldn't produce anything to beat his earlier creations, like 'San Muscle' and 'The Rapist Monk'. His whole style changed after 1978 - more delicate lines, more female leads. He was trying to negate his earlier work, and if anything that was the ultimate cause of his repeated slumps afterwards. Violence and supermuscles were the whole essence of where his art was coming from.

He must have realized this himself, because 'The Rapist Monk Returns' (Nyohanbō Returns) marked a real comeback of his earlier style. The series made its abrupt appearance in Sasuperia, a porn mag not on sale in general bookstores. As the title suggests, 'The Rapist Monk Returns' follows the modern-day adventures of the resurrected hero Ryusui. The series got a lot of attention from people in the scene, but sadly the magazine itself failed to survive the year.

All is not doom and gloom in the Fukushima camp, however. The third reprint of 'San Muscle' came out at the end of 2006 to good reviews. And it seems to me that - at long last - Fukushima Masami has got a handle on what kind of work he should be drawing. As of now (2007), he's in the process of working up his next manga. I expect lots of supermuscles, lots of violence...

Sakaki Masaru

All about love...and hate

From the publication of his debut work, Sakaki Masaru's lifelong obsessions as an artist were very clear: "The love, the hate and the passion that lurk beneath the surface of everyday life." 'Tsuyuko's Grave' (Tsuyuko no Haka) is a melodramatic tale abounding in all three.

The setting is a farming village in the present day. A child's father has been murdered and his sister abducted. Now a teenager, he sets out on a journey to track down the culprit. On the chase, he ends up in a car crash and loses his memory. Fortunately, a young farm girl comes across the scene in time to save him and nurse him back to health. Before you know it, they're in love and thinking of tying the knot. However, the girl's father has other ideas. He's the killer. His 'daughter' is actually the young man's abducted sister. Everything will be revealed if the traveler regains his memory. Time for another murder – but this time the plan fails, the kid survives and the shock brings his childhood memories flooding back. The stage is set for the final catastrophe.

Remote farming villages, murderous Oedipal urges and incest – the plot is like something out of a Greek tragedy. But the really outstanding quality of 'Tsuyuko's Grave' is a sense of claustrophobia so deep it's almost impossible to describe. The seething passions and drives on display in 'Tsuyuko's Grave' were to be a feature of later, better-known works by Sakaki. But, with its gripping claustrophobia, it's no overstatement to say that 'Tsuyuko's Grave' expresses Sakaki in all his aspects.

The sixties and seventies

Sakaki Masaru (real name Miyata Yukinari) was born in 1950 in Fukuoka Prefecture in the northern part of Kyushu. 'Tsuyuko's Grave' was published in 1968 by Tokyo Manga Shuppan; he followed it up with the single-volume works 'The Noodle Angel' (Rāmen Tenshi) and 'The Baby' (Akanbō).

The late sixties in Japan were a turbulent and conflicted period. Like Paris and Chicago, Tokyo saw its fair share of riots, sit-ins and student protests. However, at least some of the forces creating the drama were specifically Japanese. The economy was surging ahead at a breakneck pace, as the major Japanese corporations conquered one foreign market after another. As they graduated from school or college, more and more kids were sucked into these corporations or their sub-contractors. They were welcomed with strict regimentation, brutally long working hours and rigid discipline. While the world learned to call them 'corporate samurai'; but in most cases they were stressed-out, frustrated corporate serfs, suffering acute mental claustrophobia at the very bottom of an ironclad hierarchical pyramid. Young company employees in effect formed a new social sub-class.

One of the best-known gekiga artists who documented their emotional landscape was Miyaya Kazuhiko (also covered in this collection). He became a major influence on Sakaki Masaru. Sakaki was working in much the same mold, but his work lacked the literary style and ideological edge displayed by Miyaya. In fact, it was pretty naïve, crude stuff by comparison – which is part of its appeal. Sakaki was certainly the better artist when it came to getting raw emotion across to the reader. He belonged more to the street. Miyaya's influence was on his drawing style, especially on the way he drew the human form in muscleman mode. This had always been an area where Sakaki had his own particular strength, but he polished his skills through observing what Miyaya was doing.

Shortly after Sakaki came to Tokyo in the late sixties, he shifted his focus to seinenshi – mass-circulation mags aimed at the male teenage market. Manga Erotopia ran his series Ai to Yume (Loves and Dreams), with an erotic storyline of a sexy heroine suffering the attentions of a musclebound laborer. All stereotypical enough, but at the same time Sakaki was honing his craft as an artist to the point where he could produce a gripping, high-impact erotic graphic story. He was also starting to get inspiration from more exotic sources.

This became apparent with the appearance of a string of works in the late seventies in mags like Zōkan Young Comic, Comic King, Manga Erotopia and Manga Hunter. The human anatomy and coloration schemes are influenced by American graphic artists like Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo. At the same time, his graphics are becoming denser; in a sense, he's overtaking his old role model Miyaya. That said, he was a typical Fleshbomb gekiga artist – constantly missing deadlines and having series pulled by magazine editors.

Hero

The series Hero is an outstanding part of Sakaki's portfolio, and a work which allowed him to display his full range of talents in the Fleshbomb gekiga genre. Drawn to a script by Takezawa Kai, it delves deep behind the scenes of the Japanese professional wrestling world. (This is OTT costumed wrestling on American lines, about as far removed from sumo as you can possibly imagine.) The hero is a gentle giant with the requisite exaggerated physique. Once scouted, he starts training to wrestle in the bad-guy role. He gets the required moves and gimmicks beaten into him, and even gets cosmetic surgery to make him look more evil. All set, he enters the ring for his first crack at the championship. In fact it's a sure thing – which is the dilemma. The match is rigged from the start. All the hero has to do to become the champ is have sex – with the champ.

Being King of the professional wrestling circuit comes at a price, however. His girlfriend finds out about his homosexual affair and kills herself in a fit of despair. As a result, the hero decides to go straight and win under his own steam in future, but things quickly spin out of control. He finally gets thrown out of the wrestling scene, and was given very strange sanction to. He ends up spending his days washing dishes in the backroom of a drinking den, being called Good-for-nothing. His nights are spent as a slave, under the lash of an S&M dominatrix.

And there endeth the tale. The storyline has a lot in common with Miyaya Kazuhiko's works 'Wrestling Hell' (Prōresu Jigokuhen, scripted by Kajiwara Ikki) and 'Fleshbomb Life' (Nikudan Jinsei). But Sakaki's grasp of anatomy in Hero owes a lot more to American graphic conventions and artists like Frank Frazetta. Partly thanks to these influences, the density of the page gives the work a really powerful impact.

The Influence of American Comics

Sakaki's debt to American underground comics and graphic novels can be seen in his unfinished series Requiem. The title is a playful pun on the English word 'requiem'. The Chinese characters mean – roughly – 'A Dream Picture of Soul-Sucking Spirits'. The story, such as it is, concerns the doings of Undine, a water-spirit-cum-witch, and her faithful sidekick. The action is about present-day witches, witch-hunters, and the people who hate them and want their revenge. The plot really goes nowhere, though. The whole production is a bustier-popping fantasy epic, with strong influences from Vampirella (popular at the time and available in Japanese), and Frank Frazetta. The emphasis throughout is on graphic style, while the plot degenerates into a tangled mess.

It's easy to imagine the frustrated editor reaching out to grasp the plug, and giving it a good hard pull. (The editor in this case worked for Zōkan Young Comic.) Such is the tragedy of the whole Fleshbomb gekiga genre: the artists poured their hearts and souls into perfecting the graphics, public and plotlines be damned. At any rate, Requiem deserves kudos for transplanting the styles and techniques of the American seventies underground into the Japanese scene.

All about love...

Up to this point, Sakaki's stories featured lots of sexy heroines and muscle-clad heroes. But for all the goings-on between them, it's very difficult to get any real sense of passion, love, hate or general male-female madness off the page. His productions had a weird emotional blankness about them. But in the series 'All About Love' (Renai-ron), he tried his hand at depicting a whole range of different boy-girl scenarios, and finally made a breakthrough into deeper territory. The development was mirrored in his drawing technique. His lines lost the clumsy quality they'd had in favor of a clearer, sharper style. In part, this had something to do with the quality of the script writer, Okazaki Eisei , who achieved notoriety with Kamimura Kazuo's gekiga 'The Age of Cohabitation' (Dōsei-Jidai). 'All About Love' is the novel's Fleshbomb version.

'All About Love' was published as a series of self-contained episodes. Episode 3 – 'Where To?' (Doko e?) – is the story of a young couple's descent into madness. Yoshiko is a high school student who's just given birth in a public toilet. We find her, holding the baby's corpse, walking down a street with her boyfriend Takashi. The graphic images are an impressive series of slaps across the face – the labor scene in a public toilet at Shinjuku Station, splashed across a full-page spread; the wimpy boyfriend Takashi hallucinating as he lugs the dead baby back to his house; the couple's frantic sex scene on a train when the normally tough-as-nails Yoshiko finally loses control.

'Where To?' is the highlight of the nine-part series, which appeared in Zōkan Young Comic. I have to admit that the series as a whole lacks the same flair.

Update: renaissance (?)

As the genre went out of fashion, most of the Fleshbomb manga artists stopped publishing in the early 1980s. Like his fellows, Sakaki Masaru now entered into a prolonged Dark Ages. The Renaissance started in 1998, when Fukushima Masami resurfaced and started publishing again. Suddenly, Sakaki was back in business – his premier work 'Love and Dreams' was republished in part, and Sakaki started drawing again.

According to one version of events, Sakaki spent his personal Dark Ages running a yakitori stall. (Yakitori = getting medieval with chickens; dismembering, skewering and grilling them like heretics of old, then displaying their remains to the faithful over toasts of beer or saké.) There's no way of knowing this for sure, because Sakaki was the most self-effacing of gekiga artists. The one certain thing is that whatever he was doing, it had no connection whatsoever with gekiga.

There's a certain manga artiste who went through a similar period of trial in the 80s – I'm thinking of Azumi Hideo, prince (till he fell) of the pedophiliac Lolicon genre and prophet of today's moe boom. After alcoholism left him homeless on the streets, he was forced to give up manga. He eventually found menial work at a gas company. He told his story in the autobiographical manga Shissō Nikki (Disappearance Diary), which became a bestseller. Even after his comeback, Sasaki Masaru shied away from using his Dark Age experiences like that. I think it's because whatever he had to go through was a lot more medieval than anything Azumi Hideo found himself up against.

Right now (2007) the comeback is at a standstill because of ill health. Time will tell. Get well soon, Sakaki Masaru.

Miyaya Kazuhiko

Miyaya Kazuhiko. Fanatic? Extremist? Narcissist? He answered to all these descriptions and more. His work takes us far beyond the narrow confines of his chosen genre. In his Nikudan Gekiga series, he explored the worlds of combat sports like boxing and wrestling, in true Fleshbomb fashion. But there were other forces at play. The series is also a homage to his hero Mishima Yukio, the ultra-controversial, ultra-aesthetic and ultra-rightist author who shocked the world with his gory suicide in 1970.

Miyaya was especially drawn to the image of the downtrodden loser, desperately trying to make a comeback. His fictional heroes and his real-life hero were losers in the end. Just like the Japanese Empire was the loser, in the end. For Miyaya, this was an integral part of the fascination. Like Mishima, he was spellbound by the titanic violence and energy of pre-war and wartime Japan. Like his hero, he searched for some way of focusing that energy and violence on the present day, and reviving it some form - if only on the page. In different ways, both of them paid the price for their delusions. The gekiga in the title of the series Nikudan Gekiga (Fleshbomb Gekiga) is a play on words meaning 'starving to death'. This may be a pointer to Miyaya's state of mind - he believed in illusions, but he knew at the same time that they could never be real. Just like pre-war Japan.

Miyaya, savior of the gekiga scene

Miyaya Kazuhiko was born as Murase Hajime in Osaka in 1944. After a childhood spent moving with his family around the country, he wound up in Tokyo in 1966. By this stage of his life he was already reading and absorbing the influences of Ishimori Shōtarō (later Ishinomori Shōtarō) and Nagashima Shinji. Success came his way quickly. By 1967, he was being serialized in COM with the story 'When We Go to Sleep' (Nemuri ni Tsuku Toki), a love story with a deaf girl and a racing driver as the protagonists. This started a career in teenage gekiga and mania mags lasting into the early seventies. Miyaya was recognized as the successor of the veteran Ishimori Shōtarō, and as the savior of the gekiga scene. During this period of new-found fame, he even found work doing graphic versions of foreign movies, like Captain Scarlet.

Disciples of Miyaya

Miyaya's success was not a question of pot luck. He was a completely new phenomenon in the gekiga scene, with an unprecedented subtlety in his draftsmanship. He storylines were also something new to the genre, absorbing highbrow literary influences from writers like Oe Kenzaburō, Haniya Yutaka, Mishima Yukio and Tsukamoto Kunio. The recurring scenes of freaky sex in his early works owe a lot to novels of the time, especially Oe Kenzaburo's novel Wareware no Jidai (Our Genaration). Narcissistic characters masturbating with anally-inserted dildoes and bottling their ejaculations; teenage guys petrified of pregnant women and pregnancy; gay love scenes between western men and Japanese boys - all these call Oe and his fellow-literati to mind.

The world of Miyaya's works was liberally sprinkled with fashionable props from the late sixties and early seventies - rock and jazz, flashy cars, bikes and bikers - again in homage to hip writers of the period, like Itsuki Hiroyuki and Ōyabu Haruhiko. Along with the Stones and John Coltrane, these writers were part and parcel of student culture at the time, and it's no surprise that Miyaya shared the same tastes. What was really original about him was that he brought these tastes and influences into the gekiga genre.

The savior of gekiga didn't have to wait long to gather a great many disciples around him. The core of the group consisted of artists who worked as his assistants before going independent - Sakaki Masaru and Hiroki Mafuyu. Other gekiga artists like Fukushima Masami and Nakajima Norihiro (both covered elsewhere) were not so directly affected by Miyaya's style, but they were certainly conscious of his work as they drew their own material. For a time, the mags were flooded with wannabe Miyayas. And for a time, Miyaya was up there with Tezuka Osamu, the revered 'god of manga' himself.

Wider fame and wedding bells

Miyaya's work got a lot more political between 1969 and 1970. This shift was accompanied by a love affair with a woman called Nishiyama Naoe, and this was probably one reason for the change. For Naoe was the daughter of Nishiyama Kōki, a hardline right-winger who had major backroom influence in the political world. Japanese ultra-rightist groups form an underworld of their own, with their famous black 'sound trucks' as their most visible symbol. The trucks still ply the city streets, blaring propaganda and WWII marching songs - with the police turning a blind and fairly sympathetic eye. The movement's foot soldiers are a saddish mix of dropouts, nutcases and members of various downtrodden minorities, but the top brass live comfortable, well-connected lives. Nishiyama pere was one such man, the head of a group called the Shōwa Restoration Union - the idea being that the emperor should take all political power back again. There were lots of radicals before WWII who believed in this idea, and it was sometimes hard to tell the extreme right from the extreme left among them. In the post-war period too, writers like Mishima Yukio found inspiration and food for their obsessions in radical emperor-centered fantasies. It was fairly natural that Miyaya, who was smitten with Mishima, would fall for a woman with Nishiyama Naoe's connections.

However, the path of true love doesn't always run smooth. Naoe's father was incandescent with rage when he heard of the proposed match between his daughter and Miyaya. So, the pair was forced to elope to the large industrial city of Nagoya (think Pittsburgh) in February 1971. (Miyaya covered the story in his autobiographical Like a Rolling Stone (1969) and again in 'Live and Love' (Sirene, 1978). Happily, Nishiyama Senior soon bowed to the inevitable, and wedding bells rang out a few month later. The ceremony was lavish, and the tabloids had a field day. Headlines about the "Gekiga Artist Planning Revolution" and the "Right-wing Big-wig's Daughter" confirmed Miyaya's A-list enfant terrible status.

Now that he was financially secure, his work took on a more radical and experimental color. 'Abode of the Genitomillenial Demons' (Seikimatsu Fukumakō) is an erotic splatterfest hymn of love-hate to Miyaya's hometown. 'A Worm-eaten Chronogenical' (Sei Shokki) opened with a narcissistic nude self-portrait by Naoe. (The bizarre titles of both works are puns on 'genitals' or 'pudenda'. The translations are approximate.) 'Demons' was first was brought out by Seirindō, the publishing arm of Garo magazine. Both works got a lot of public attention.

At the same time, Miyaya found himself getting a reputation as 'artistic' and 'difficult'. Part of the difficulty was that his work was a free-for-all of contrasting ideologies and literary influences - nationalism and anarchism, Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburō. Moreover, it's very doubtful that he had any clear idea of what these writers and ideologies actually stood for. When you look at his stuff today, a lot of the difficulty involved just seems like intellectual posing. I can't hide the fact, though, that Miyaya the poseur has a certain charm. A lot of writers of the period were terrible pseuds - including me.

The slump

Miyaya kept pushing the limits of the gekiga genre through the mid-seventies. But not all of these works sold well, and gradually he made his style more purely entertaining. This was to keep Naoe and himself in the style they were now accustomed to. One of the outcomes was the series 'Wrestling Circuit: Hell Version' (Puroresu Jikoku Hen), published in 1973 in the mag Gekiga Gendai. It was scripted by Kajiwara Ikki, his writing partner since 1968. As the title suggests, this is another behind-the-scenes look at pro wrestling, based on the life story of the villain Nikkei (ethnic Japanese) wrestler Great Togo. However, Kajiwara just couldn't seem to get the main character both right, and Miyaya bowed out of the series. Although the series continued with a fresh artist called Ishiwata Shūichi, it was eventually pulled.

Miyaya's comment on the failure of the project sounds pretty thin - that he was writing "gekiga for the hard core fans, not hit comics for the masses". This was not the only damage his career suffered around this time. Another series in the mag Gekiga Sunday, which had been developed as a masterpiece, was cut. The series, 'The Geocentric Theory' (Tendōsetsu), was a hardboiled story about a politician's bodyguard versus a right-wing gang out to assassinate his boss. One part of the plot acts as a chilling prophecy of real-life things to come: the gang plans to plant nerve agent on the bullet train. Twenty ears later, the religious cult Aum Shinrikyō attacked the Tokyo subway system in the same way, using the nerve gas Sarin.

The masterpiece

The gekiga genre entered its golden age in the late seventies. A string of artists found a forum for their highly experimental work in the youth-oriented Zōkan Young Comic, published by Shonen Gekiga-sha. They included Hirata Hiroshi, Sakaki Masaru, Suzuki Ryosei and Ishii Takashi. They also spread the good word about current underground American artists like Frazetta and Richard Corben. These were legendary times for hard core gekiga fans, who read manga like some kind of new bible.

Needless to say, the folk at Zōkan Young Comic followed Miyaya's career with close interest, and 'Wrestling Circuit: Hell Version' made a big impression. The magazine now gave him a chance to break out of his ongoing slump by commissioning a three-series Fleshbomb project. The result was his masterpiece, which came out as 'Fleshbomb Life: Onizō's Story' (Nikudan Jinsei Onizō Hen), 'Fleshbomb Life: Resurrected Motherfuckin' Giants Baseball Team' (Nikudan Jinsei Fukkatsu Mamauri Giants) and 'The Fleshbomb Age' (Nikudan Jidai).

Part One - Onizō's story - is a wrestling adventure, but Miyaya's take on the sport is well ahead of its time. This was an age when pro wrestling had a large, fanatical and naïve following. By contrast, Miyaya was one of the first commentators to look at wrestling as a performance art, and to accept that the games were rigged as a matter of course. In a kind of high-octane version of Fight Club, a handsome but third-rate wrestler called Yashagami Ryūzō spends his time out of the ring taking on lions in a series of fights to the death. These underground bouts finally make a superstar of him. (In his looks and career, the hero weirdly foreshadows the real-life career of the wrestler Ōnita Atsushi.)

Part Two takes us into the world of baseball, hence the title Mamauri Giants - a pun on the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants. The hero, Donoue, is a pitcher (oddly resembling Giant Baba) with a serious problem: he's not confident about his looks or his abilities. This causes him serious problems on the field, until Yashigami Ryūzō - the hero of Part One - takes him in hand. Thanks to Ryūzō's mind control, the wimpy Donoue turns into a ferocious, straight-down-the-line winner, a champion worshipped like a god by the fans.

Indeed, the whole story has a rater trippy, religious feel to it. Ryūzō is an ex-wrestler now able to let his pent-up inner violence really rip; Donoue, as the story progresses, reaches the point where he takes on yakuza in hand-to-hand combat to the death. But when these ultra-violent scenes are being splashed across the page, we find inserts picturing Donoue's state of mind - with the pitcher floating in space, in yoga poses. This probably means that Donoue's mind is now approaching some sort of unity with the divine. But why is he in space? And why the yoga? Maybe it was just the drugs kicking in for Donoue (and Miyaya himself).

Both Part One and Two of 'Fleshbomb Life' exhibit scenes of extreme sex and violence. There's a heavily gay-narcissist steroid at work throughout, and Part Two takes up where Part One leaves off, cranking things up to quite a pitch. It's hard to make out exactly what Miyaya was aiming at in some of the more depraved scenes - maybe he was trying to spice up the storyline, maybe trying to show his readers a good time. Anyway, the scene where Donoue gives it up for the first time - in a rapid turn of events that segues straight into a fist fuck - is not to be missed. Neither is the recurring phrase "I'm gonna pump some sunshine into youse guys!"

Return to the radical

Part Three of the 'Fleshbomb Life' series was titled 'The Fleshbomb Age' (Nikudan Jidai). It's a form of nightmare, you could say - Miyaya's apocalyptic alternative rendering of Japan's twentieth century, in all its pulverizing violence. The story features a writer called 'M', who resembles Mishima Yukio in more ways than just the initial. He doesn't just look like Mishima. He also leads a fanatical private army much like Mishima's Shield Society - a group of muscular young men bedazzled by the author, who dolled them up in outrageous Captain Scarlet/SS-style uniforms. This time round, M is the mentor figure to a washed-up boxer called Takei Suteo. Under M's guidance he makes a miracle comeback, culminating in a bout against the former World Champion.

Meanwhile, M's private army kidnaps a gaggle of the nation's best and grayest politicians and financiers, forcing them into Tokyo's Budokan arena. There, they're forced to watch the fight of the century - a loser-dies gorefest between Takei and the World Champion. But why, why? M explains that the show is all about "giving some bollocks to a society that's descended to brown-nosing the impossible". Which straightens things up immensely.

One thing does become clear when the revels begin in the ring - Takei has surpassed his mentor to the nth degree. With his back to the wall, the only thing that can save the challenger is his iron will and honed-to-perfection physique. A final last-chance punch finds the champion's jaw, and he drops KO'd to the canvas! At the very same instant, Takei's life deserts him. He's given it his all.

The 'Fleshbomb Life' series brought Miyaya a second round of commercial success, and in this final installment you can see a return to his former radical, experimental style. In terms of his career this was a disaster, and he would later end up on the ropes himself because of it. Something of his fate is foreshadowed in the character of M, his beloved Mishima Yukio, stalking the pages of 'Fleshbomb Life' and spewing out incomprehensible 'literary' verbiage. (At least it's incomprehensible to me.)

Sirene, an autobiographical gekiga

In Japan, lots of novelists are mainly interested in Me. Autobiography is a dominant genre. This isn't the case at all with manga or gekiga, but now Miyaya made an unusual break in this direction. His work remained radical and experimental, but it increasingly mutated into what you might call Me manga - gekiga as autobiography. Well, more accurately, Me and Her manga. In the past tense. This was after he got divorced from Nishiyama Naoe.

Thus Seiren, which ran in Garo magazine. It's the story of a young man drawn to a beautiful woman (= the former Mrs. Miyaya), how they blissfully got it together, and how she led him to destruction. There is a great deal more than that to the story, however. The central event of the plot is the real-life siege of a group of Japanese Red Army activists at Asama Lodge in Karuizawa in 1972. This was an extremely hard-core group - the leading cadres had just tortured and killed a dozen of their own members to prove how very sincere they were about the whole thing. Against this violent backdrop, the couple at the center of Miyaya's story struggle through their own claustrophobic tempests as lovers and artists.

Seiren opens with a stunning double-page spread of the human nervous system, upside-down. The drawing doubles as a group of withered branches outside the railroad station at Karuizawa. Gazing over the lush resort district, the 'nervous system' (in fact the hero, and Miyaya himself) muses to itself "This is my prison cell. And that's fine by me." In fact Miyaya had a summer home there apart from his house in Nagoya. The villa was part and parcel of his former marriage, because it was a gift from Naoe's neo-fascist father. This was his 'prison cell.'

Seiren has a storyline of sorts - the hero's encounter with a beautiful enchantress slash stand-in for the artist's ex-wife. But in general it's a completely incoherent piece of work, and the series never reached any kind of conclusion. It's as though Miyaya had lapsed into some kind of beautifully crafted artistic autism. There were reasons for this. He still wasn't making anything like the money his talents deserved. And he was still struggling with pent-up feelings toward Naoe. However hard he tried, these feelings forced their way onto his pages. The turn to autobiography forced him to confront his own dark side in a very damaging way. From this point on, his works became even more confused in their motives and chaotic in form.

'The Peacock Wind Harp' (Kujaku Fūkin)

'The Peacock Wind Harp' is also set in the resort town of Karuizawa, but it's a very different place. For the period is the final months of the Second World War. This dark and melodramatic tale is Miyaya's attempt to sublimate his feelings of isolation and claustrophobia into a lyrical style of gekiga. The first half of the work was serialized in the mass-circulation magazine Big Gold, and later published in book form by Keisei Shuppan.

An old woman called Sara lives out her last days as a prisoner in her own home. The man doing the imprisoning is Ebio, her heir. He has secrets to keep as he awaits her death. He's homosexual, and he's a murderer. He killed his first love (the beautiful Rōza), chopped her up and threw the remains into a natural vent rising from the malachite rocks which was called the Peacock Cave. Now he has a dream - to turn the macabre site into a natural wind harp, and play performances to a series of carefully selected young men. He eventually comes across a stunningly beautiful target, but the boy's beauty hides a poison that will lead the hero to his destruction...And so the story careers on through one of the artist's obsessions after another - Karuizawa, inheritance, gay love and a certain captivating girl.

'The Peacock Wind Harp' is a work spinning further and further out of the artist's control, and it leaves a number of serious questions in its wake. Why did Miyaya publish the piece as a gekiga? What stopped him from putting out this material as a novel? What made him confront his inner demons to this extent? And why did Miyaya force himself onto such a painful, difficult path?

Living the Present

Founded in the 1980s, the mass-circulation mag Big Comic Spirits boosted its sales on the back of hugely popular works like Takahashi Rumiko's Maison Ikkoku (One-minute Maison). Not many people remember that the first ten issues carried a series by Miyaya called 'The Tiger's Daughter' (Tora no Musume).

It comes as no surprise that 'The Tiger's Daughter' is, once again, modeled on Naoe. It's a romance between a neo-fascist gang boss's daughter and a simple-hearted, honest young student. He's awfully pure. He rides horses in the college equestrian club. It was only when I read this work that I realized Miyaya wasn't capable of producing a fictional story. It's all about The Girl - and his messed-up feelings about her. Which goes to show how badly he'd been bitten. Most romance manga in the eighties had a harder edge (e.g. "former-biker-gang-member-turned-star-designer's carefree resort holiday love triangle with wife and mistress" type stuff). In comparison, 'The Tiger's Daughter' stays in cloud cream-puff land, one has to admit. Still, Miyaya was drawing his own version of reality as he was trying to live his way through it. In his own way, he stayed real.

Implosion

The eighties were pretty much the decade of the decline and fall of the gekiga genre. Fukushima Masami lost his pace. Sakaki Masaru disappeared. And Miyaya Kazuhiko lost his platform in the mass-circulation mags. It was a cursed age. That said, Miyaya put in the occasional sporadic appearance in the best-selling Young Jump, but he'd lost his old spark. Apparently, some of his stuff was accepted, then shelved and remains in storage. Some Miyaya freaks swear that a sumo series he drew still lurks in the vaults of Young Magazine, published by the heavyweight Kodansha.

Anyway, the times were changing. For good or ill, the old radicalism of the sixties - with its heavy overtones of machismo - was on the way out. New critiques like postmodernism and feminism moved center-stage. What emerged from the wreckage was the otaku cult, trapped in the endless apocalypse of the everyday. The otaku set off on a vector away from the body and from heartache, in quest of the perfect fantasy image of safety: the pubescent computer-graphic idol. Left high and dry, the gekiga mags changed course or died. Such were the eighties.

Miyaya followed his own extremist path to the end of the line. But his narcissism led him back toward himself. And at the moment he got there, he saw something that even he couldn't draw. The implosion was magnificent.

After implosion

Still Miyaya soldiers on in some unknown location, despite his divorce and rumors of his death. He has announced that he's still working, and storing up material for future publication. When I heard that, I was overjoyed in a really simple, straightforward way. Hope at last for Fleshbomb gekiga! But at the same time I wondered why Miyaya has kept going in this extremely difficult genre. What's he going to draw now that Naoe's out of the picture?

George Akiyama

Akiyama the unstoppable

A lot about George Akiyama is shrouded in mystery and myth. Fact 1: he's a veteran manga artist who's spent the last thirty years and more at the cutting edge of the art-form, and he still shows no signs of slowing down. Fact 2: he has the true artist's gift of sensing what's coming down the line. Long before they happened, both the Aum Shinrikyo death cult and the anime Evangelion are weirdly foreshadowed in his work.

As for the more mundane details of his biography, who knows? A trawl through the internet will tell you that George Akiyama was born Akiyama Yūji in Tochigi (near Tokyo) in 1943. And also that he quit high school to work at a book wholesaler's in Tokyo's Kanda district, the center of universe for bibliophiles in Japan. Some time later he kick-started his career as a manga artist with a spell as assistant in the studio of Morita Kenji. But how much of this is true? In one interview, he claimed that he came up to the big smoke to become a TV personality, and that he became Morita's assistant by pure chance. (He also insisted that he'd gotten his high-school diploma.) Whatever.

It's generally held that he debuted in 1966 in Bessatsu Shonen Magazine with 'The Skeleton Kid' (Gaikotsu Kun). In fact, he'd already put out 'The Storm Ninja' (Arashi no Ninja) the year before as a kashihon manga. From the start, Akiyama was a riddle wrapped inside an enigma. His early works were light-hearted gag manga, like Patman X and Horafuki Dondon, both published in Shonen Magazine. ('Patman X' was especially well-received, and won the prestigious Kodansha Manga Prize). All very giggleworthy, and they're still great fun to read. But at the same time, in 'Marquis de Sade' (Sado Hakushaku) he showed a darker side – which would come to the fore in his later, more serious works. 'Marquis de Sade' mixes childish gags with some very dark humor indeed, as when the character Katsu Shintaro gets his eyelids stuck together with an industrial superglue. ('Marquis de Sade' came out in the magazine Bōkenō.)

Scandal

Starting with Derorinman in 1969, Akiyama cracked out one scandalous manga after another for a full two years, into 1971. Then he capped things off with a hugely publicized disappearing act. Let's go through this period step by step.

Derorinman is the story of a kid whose father tries to kill himself, seriously mutilating his face and chest in the process. The event traumatizes the kid into delusions of grandeur, and he takes to the streets on a mission to save the planet. Like a latter-day Don Quixote, he's ready to pay life and limb to protect the innocent. Like Don Quixote, it all goes wildly wrong from square one. Maybe the most memorable part of the story is the series of (pretty simpleminded) philosophy q-and-a sessions with Dunce Mask – actually the hero Derorinman himself in another guise – who operates under the motto “Might is Right!” The series first appeared in the mass-circulation mag Shonen Jump in 1969. It made for surprisingly heavy-duty reading in such a tweenie/young-adolescent-oriented publication.

(True Akiyama otaku will want to note that Derorinman was republished in a slightly different version in Shonen Magazine in 1975. The hero's family gets a fresh look among other minor changes, but the series still has a more adult cast than its host mag. There was also novelization which appeared in Variety in 1979.)

Derorinman shared a lot of qualities with two other Akiyama manga that he drew around the same time, Ashura and 'The Moneygrubber' (in Shonen Magazine and Shonen Sunday respectively).

'Ashura' is set during a famine in medieval Japan. Ashura, the young hero of the story, has a serious problem with his mother: crazed with hunger, she is on the verge of cannibalizing him. The manga's full-on depictions of cannibal behavior led to public outcry, and the story got officially blacklisted as a danger to public morals in a number of prefectures (the Japanese equivalent of states) nationwide.

'The Moneygrubber'(Zenigeba) tells the tale of Gamagori Futaro, a man so poor he can't scrape five yen together to save his sick mother's life. He subsequently embarks on a warped quest for ready cash, killing his wife and kids in the process. Then he kills the detective investigating the murders. He then broadens his scope, becoming the boss of a factory and polluting the surrounding area so that hundreds more get sent to their graves. (Real-life incidents of industrial pollution like the infamous Minamata mercury poisoning case were still fresh in people's memory at the time.) Suicide is Futaro's final flourish. The story later became a movie starring Kara Juro.

Terorinman and The Moon

The late sixties saw the rise and fall of the Japan Red Army, the most violent and radical leftist group in the country's history. Their exploits gave the time a certain feeling (pleasant for some people) of decline and fall. The Red Army also reminded many of another radical group in a different age of decline and fall – the Shinsen-gumi, a doomed band of hard-core shogunate loyalists who made a last-ditch stand back in the 1860s. (Nowadays, the Shinsen-gumi is back in the public eye thanks to a year-long costume drama on the national broadcaster NHK in 2005.)

The final stages of Terorinman feature both a supercharged version of the Shinsen-gumi and the 'Army of the Moon', a group modeled on the Japan Red Army. However, the setting is neither the 1860s nor the 1960s but a sci-fi future. It's actually quite a serious look at both past and present in a space-opera style. Voyagers from the planet Vega reach earth and demand that the planet stops being a galactic hermit. (There are obvious parallels with the American Black Ships of Commodore Perry's fleet. Perry steamed into Tokyo Bay in 1853, in a terrifying display of superior technology, and demanded that Japan open up for free trade.) On earth, the (neo)Shinsen-gumi and the Army of the Moon struggle for first access to Vegan support and technology. In the three-way struggle that follows, the Vegans come to the conclusion that they'd better destroy the planet. So they unveil their ultimate doomsday device – a weapon codenamed 'The Moon'...

The same doomsday device appears in another Akiyama work in 1972, Za Mūn (or 'The Moon' as transcribed in Japanese). It appears that he lifted the no-hope ending of Terorinman and blended it into the finale of later series, which appeared in the mag Shonen Sunday. In 'The Moon', the forces of the planet Kenneru attack the earth using a flesh-eating fungus as a biological weapon. (The attack comes courtesy of a conspiracy by Kinokuniya Shoemon.)

Only a bunch of kids stands between the human race and the flesh-eating fungus from outer space. Voluntarily contaminated and already doomed, they press forward to the counterattack – love and comradeship are all they have to fall back on. Just before the big push, they celebrate the marriage of two of their number, Sansau and his lover Kateika. But then they fall, one after another. The last sound they hear as they die is the howling of The Moon. Thus endeth 'The Moon'. In Terorinman, the only difference is that the final howl goes to the eponymous hero. The tragedy stays the same.

'The Moon' is a kind of coming-of-age story disguised as a blockbusting yarn about robots. In that sense, I get the feeling that Akiyama was the forerunner of a whole swathe of later works by other writers, from Kidō Senshi Gundam (in the late seventies to Shinseiki Evangelion in the nineties, and in the new century, Bokurano. But the sad fact is that nobody save a few diehard fans remembers Akiyama's 'The Moon'. Maybe it's because the plotline was so completely OTT. Or maybe it's the way Akiyama kept pulling badly-judged visual gags in what's supposed to be a basically serious story.

Let me tell you about my life...?

Anyway, the George Akiyama story as it's unfolded so far has brought our hero a good deal of fame and fortune. It's at this point - 1971 - that he puts out a bizarre manga autobiography and stuns all and sundry by announcing his retirement.

Kokuhaku or 'Confessions' laid bare the secrets of Akiyama's soul episode after episode as it appeared in Shonen Sunday - "I was a child of mixed blood" (this was still a shocker in 1971 Japan), "I am a murderer" (which draws a gasp even today) - and so forth. And each episode carried a new confession: "Last's week's confession was a lie". Having dragged his readers through a wilderness of violence, loneliness and despair, Akiyama breaks off the series in a grand finale featuring himself in a chorus line of characters from the script, laughing and dancing off into the sunset, calling "Gooodbyeee!"

Unfuggin'believable. The only thing is, this isn't exactly like the ending of Evangelion, with the full cast of characters shouting "Congratulaaations!" It's exactly the same.

The Kid with the Eyes of a King

Did Akiyama reach some kind of Enlightenment during the time he vanished amid such huge public uproar? No - he didn't change a jot, I'm delighted to say.

After he emerged back into the spotlight, Akiyama put out yet another controversial series, in Shonen Jump in 1972. 'The Hill of Roses' (Bara no Sakamichi) tells the story of Domon Ken, a highly idealistic kid with a special gift and a special problem. The gift: he possesses 'the Eyes of a King'. The problem: his mother is insane, and he's constantly worried that some day he's going to end up the same as her.

By chance, Ken comes into a vast fortune in money and real estate. His idealism immediately takes over, and he decides to "build a utopian village for pure-hearted children to live in". And he decides to do it all alone - we see him desperately lugging huge rocks across the landscape, while his friends look on and wet their pants laughing. Ken keeps trundling on like the damned Sisyphus in the Greek legend, condemned to roll rocks around for eternity. But he doesn't give up, and he doesn't give in. And as time goes by, his friends start changing their minds, and joining the good fight.

This bald summary of the story so far might give the impression that we're dealing with a really wholesome piece of work here (though the insanity scenes are pretty unrelenting). But, at the climax of the story, abruptly - maybe the series wasn't selling well, maybe Akiyama himself wasn't happy with it - we find Ken floating lifeless in a harbor. He's pulled out and put on a respirator, but never regains consciousness. In his coma, he fantasizes about his life as it should have been but wasn't - with a mother who stayed sane, a father who didn't run off, and a marriage partner he truly loved. After three episodes of this, he dies. The series finishes off in It's a Beautiful Life mode, showing how the people he touched in his life heal their wounds and return to fulfilling everyday lives.

Akiyama's work had always had a kind of missionary touch to it, with a vague urge towards saving humanity. In 'The Hill of Roses', this impulse takes on a more concrete form - the building of a utopian community. The series is also very interested in money, and how to get maximum use out of it. It's interesting that even when planning for paradise, Akiyama maintained a cool, hard-headed realism, hidden but definite.

The road to Enlightenment

From this point on, Akiyama shifted his focus to a more adult market. Not immediately though - Shonen Jump published 'A Young Man Turned to Ash' (Hai ni naru Shonen), the story of vampire who found his calling by virtue of suffering from a blood disease. There was also the gag manga 'World's Number One Complete Loser' (Dohazure Tenka Ichi). But, on the whole, the main thrust was erotic works with lots of upskirt shots, sex scenes soaked with every fluid imaginable, incest, gay scenes etc. Pure entertainment.

With series like 'The Wandering Cloud' (Furōgumo, in Big Comic Original) and 'Frogs and Toads of the Japanese Archipelago' (Nihon Rettō Gamagaueru), Akiyama established himself at the top of the heap in the world of shonen shi - magazines aimed at young to middle-aged male audiences. His series The Pink Curtain, printed in Manga Goraku became a movie directed by Moho Jun. But for all his success, I thought that he was turning into just another porn peddler in the late seventies, and I lost interest in him for a while.

But actually, looking at his more recent work, Akiyama's blue period may have been a necessary trip to the sin bin. He later moved on to draw manga that skillfully blend the opposing themes of sexual desire and spiritual enlightenment. The best example of this is 'The Philanthropist' (Hakuai no Hito) in Big Gold. He wouldn't have been able to achieve this without the experience of drawing adult-oriented manga.

'Son of The Buddha' and Aum Shinrikyo

In the eighties, George Akiyama made his creative comeback on the pages of Shonen Jump with two works - 'Son of The Buddha' (Shaka no Musuko) and 'Gonzui the Fisherman' (Kaijin Gonzui). By now, what was known as the 'Jump System' was already in place throughout the Jump magazine conglomerate - i.e., the editors rigidly controlling the artists, with the editors making sure the plotlines and graphics followed what reader surveys told them would sell best. 'Son of the Buddha' and 'Gonzui the Fisherman' can only be read as direct assaults on the 'Jump system', carried out right in the belly of the beast. Did Akiyama turn himself into Terorinman? Or maybe something more along the lines of Don Quixote? These two anarchic series certainly tilted at one gigantic windmill.

As he drew 'Son of The Buddha', Akiyama was knight errant and prophet rolled into one. Scene after scene of the series foretells the rise of Aum Shinrikyo in uncanny detail - only the guru's face is different. Akiyama's guru first gains recruits through a dramatic ploy - launching a bio-attack, and then providing an antidote to the public. Dressed up in a Sai Baba-style getup, he spends day and night in intimate 'spiritual exercises' with three sisters belonging to his cult. Ten years down the line, reality bit even this detail - Aum also had three famous sisters among its membership (famous after the 1995 terror attack, anyway). Other details are more fantastic - the Son of The Buddha is actually a puppet for a shadowy group called Freezone, which is modeled on the Freemasons; the plot climaxes with the sudden appearance of a flotilla of UFOs.

I interviewed George Akiyama for a book I wrote earlier (Manga Jigoku Hen) and asked him about the connections between 'Son of The Buddha', Aum Shinrikyo and occultism in general. His answer was "I just drew what my editor told me to". I felt he was dodging the question for dear life. Or should I say to this day I hope he was.

It has to be said that "Son of The Buddha" suffers a severe hangover from Akiyama's porn period I mentioned earlier. There's lots of gratuitous nudity, pants, bikinis, miniskirts, mile-long legs and cetera. Granted, the hangovers hardest to cure are the ones best forgotten. Given its abrupt ending, the series probably had trouble keeping its ratings up. Still, as it faces into the twenty-first century, 'Son of The Buddha' continues to throw a multifaceted new light on the present.

The trauma of Gonzui the Fisherman

'Gonzui the Fisherman' fared even more tragically then 'Son of the Buddha'. George Akiyama has never darkened the pages of Shonen Jump since. Gonzui is an ex-slave washed up on a desert island. The story is about his fate as shared with his fellow castaways. Not that the series had much breathing space to develop - after a great opening fanfare Shonen Jump cut it in fewer than ten episodes. Maybe the way the hero was drawn was open to charges of racism, well or ill-founded (this was a persistent problem in Japanese manga throughout the eighties). Maybe the readers didn't warm to the graphic sadism on display from the word go. Anyway, it was cut.

Personally, my favorite character in the manga is Azusa, a mentally unbalanced fisherwoman who appears at the beginning of the story and takes care of Gonzui because she can't distinguish him from her dead son. So I was really disappointed by the brutal plot change in the middle of the series, where the entire adult population of the desert island was shipped off to another location, leaving the manga populated by a half-naked, strictly kids-only crowd. In other words, Akiyama was jumping on the Lolicon bandwagon - the craze for sexualized prepubescent characters was in full swing at the time. Anyway, from asking around I get the feeling that 'Gonzui the Fisherman' ranks right up there at number one or two as a trauma manga among guys in their late twenties.

A force of nature that knows no limits

Even now, George Akiyama is still on the boil. Already he has a string of entertainment works for the young male seinenshi market under his belt, like 'The Wandering Cloud', 'The Pink Curtain' and 'Kisaburō the Female Impersonator' (Onnagata Kisaburō, in Big Comic Original Zōkan). But he still keeps producing one scandalous series after another in a nicely-balanced sequence -Lovelin Monroe in Young Magazine, 'The Philanthropist' and 'The People You Can't Get Rid Of' (Sutegataki Hitobito) in Big Gold. Then there's 'Kūkai, Master Buddhist Teacher' (Kōbō Daishi Kūkai) in ALLMAN...and the list goes on.

These works are all still scandalous and brimming with anarchic spirit. George Akiyama really is the last of the titans. Other manga writers of his generation have mellowed with age; not Akiyama. He keeps pushing the envelope as hard as he can. And his lifestyle shows no sign whatsoever of any drop in his prodigious energy level. Even his addictive lying (?) is still in full throttle. He's not just a manga artist with his hands. He's a manga artist in every fiber of his body.

Growing up tramatized...

At present, two series by Akiyama are in magazine publication - 'The People You Can't Get Rid Of' and 'Kūkai, Master Buddhist Teacher'. In character, they're both continuations of the series 'The Philanthropist'. Both of them cover the life of Ninomiya Kinjiro, and his philosophy of satori (Buddhist enlightenment).

'The People You Can't Get Rid Of' is a love story between Yūsuke - a dim, unemployed truck driver who's no great hit with the ladies - and Kyōko, a bento shop worker who was traumatized when raped as a teenager. It seems as though their relationship is going to make it - or so Akiyama sets it up. Suddenly, though, Kyōko starts spouting the doctrines of "The Lake of the Godhead" (this is a fictional cult, but it could easily pass as just about any one of Japan's 'new religions' that cater to the lonely, the poor and the ignorant). Yusuke's body breaks into occult spasms, and the story as a whole plunges into a spiritual world, as Tsunoda Jiro always desicribes in his manga.

In Vol. 1 of the book version, Yūsuke refers to the vagina as 'The Sacred Portal' when accused by the "Lake of the Godhead" congregation of raping Kyōko just the night before. -In fact, he'd done no such thing. He'd just been trying to get laid in his normal way.

At one time, Akiyama enjoyed considerable commercial success with the string of works he drew for kids' shonen magazines. Even so, he must have given his young readers a fairly heavy dose of trauma with his sharp sense of wrenching controversial life problems. And then there was his graphic style, which was such a mismatch - nothing bold or dramatic, all faltering wispy lines.

Even now that they're grown up, his readers (and I'm one of them) still appreciate his particular ghastly kind of weirdness. Maybe we can do that exactly because we've grown up. I get the feeling that the kind of relationship Akiyama's fans have to his work is the best kind going.

Murotani Tsunezō

"I don't talk about this very often, but I actually died once...Astral projection, is it? Well, I was floating in space, and all behind me it was pitch dark. It was just like being in hell." (Interview in QJ magazine #14)

After his (temporary) death, Murotani Tsunezō went on to draw a series of hellish works based on his hands-on research, the two most outstanding being 'Hell Boy' (Jigoku Kun) and 'Doll Hell' (Ningyo Jigoku). The backgrounds in 'Hell Boy' are especially striking, and they couldn't get much blacker. They really do seem to bear witness to time spent in the underworld.

Murotani Tsunezō was born in Osaka in 1934. His background was relatively comfortable, his family running a clothes store. He was manga-obsessed from childhood, and especially loved Imoto Suimei's 'Longboots Three Musketeers' (Nagakutsu Sanjūshi). These three musketeers consisted of two humans and one monkey, with their boots worn on their heads in a clear departure from original Alexander Dumas version. Anyway, their adventures were one of the things that sparked the young Murotani's imagination.

He kept drawing incessantly right through the difficult years of World War II, when he was evacuated to a rural district in the southern island of Kyushu. His schoolmates there were hard-as-nails country kids. Near the school stood 'Fight Hill'; the custom was to go there after school and slug out any little disagreements they had during class time, with an older boy refereeing. As a city slicker cast into a den of feral rednecks, Murotani was an obvious prime target for hazing. He managed to save his hide, however, by drawing caricatures for his classmates. The permanent moral of the story for him was "If you can make people laugh, you'll survive". His Kyushu years impacted his later work in other ways, too. The hero of 'Hell Boy' is based on his Kyushu school janitor's son.

Murotani the Gag Manga writer

After the war ended, Murotani stayed involved with amateur manga circles, but his main interest had shifted to oil painting. After he graduated high school he applied to study art in Kyushu University, but his manga experience must have taken its toll. He was turned down, and now became a 'wandering samurai' - a high school graduate studying for a second shot at the college entrance exams. But he kept drawing manga, and his first break came during this period from an unexpected source - the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper, which took him on as a cartoonist.

Working with the Mainichi opened up a new path for Murotani - a path with no exact equivalent for artists in the west. Regular appearances in the Mainichi stable of children's papers (Mainichi Shōgakusei Shimbun and Mainichi Chūgakusei Shimbun) led on to a flourishing career in 'educational manga'. True to their name, educational manga tackle the subject matter of school textbooks - which are very often masterpieces of crushing boredom - and try to get the goods across in a more graphic and interesting manner.

So, when Murotani finally headed for Tokyo and art school, he already had a good degree of success under his belt. His student years were spent absorbing influences from Picasso and Matisse, and painting in oils in the surrealist style. All the while he financed himself by drawing educational manga, but his horizons soon broadened. When a friend got published in a manga magazine he decided to try his luck outside the educational field. The result was 'Naughty Turbo Kid' (Wanpaku Tābō), published in 1958 in the magazine Mangaō. From this point through to the mid-sixties, Murotani put out a string of gag-filled manga series aimed at young kids. With one major exception: 'Thriller Kid: The Terrifying Fly-Man' (Surirā Kozō Kyōfū no Hae Otoko). The Fly-Man is heavily influenced by fifties pulp sci-fi. The offspring of a wartime biological weapons experiment, he wreaks his revenge in a school setting. Both the setting and the horror-story element pointed towards Murotani's future; for the time being, however, he stuck with the gag manga for kids.

The road to 'Hell'

Apart from the fact that he'd died already, there were a couple of factors that spurred Murotani towards drawing horror manga - his experience of surrealist painting, his voracious reading of fifties sci-fi novels, and the imagery of fifties sci-fi movies all had an influence. A major shift in his work came in 1967 with the publication of SF 'Sci-fi Theater: Alternative Earth' (Gekijō Dai-ni no Chikyū) in the Mainichi Chūgakusei Shimbun, which catered to high school kids. This kicked off a series of works heavily indebted to fifties sci-fi; the most successful of them was 'Spaceman' (Supēsuman), which the Chūgakusei Shimbun ran over three years. The story - the interplanetary quest of a multiracial group of teen space crusaders - was a big success with its high school audience, thanks to its perfectly-calculated mix of horror, sci-fi and eroticism. In fact, 'Spaceman' is a plausible forerunner to Galactic Railroad 999 (Ginga Tetsudō 999). The period of 'Spaceman' was a highly productive one for Murotani; he also put out the series 'Microman' (Mikuroman: no connection to the toy by the same name produced by Takara) and 'Time Patrol' (Taimu Patrōru) among others. All were published in the Mainichi Chūgakusei Shimbun, and all bore the same imprint of fifties science fiction.

In the heavily regimented world of manga production, Murotani was unusual in being a loner; he employed no assistants. He was also a technical perfectionist who eschewed the use of screentone in his backgrounds. But when the pace got just too frantic, he had to compromise. His nephews, wife and sister-in-law pitched in as a kind of artisinal family, setting up the studio, pasting and screentoning (literally) in the background. By the late sixties, Murotani was getting a lot of name recognition, and the big time finally started to beckon. 'Flash-Bang' (Pikkari Bii) and 'Go For It, Pyūta!' (Faito Da! Pyūta). Both hit the big screen as anime, and he began publishing in the massive-circulation weekly tabloid magazines known as shūkanshi.

However, fame brought its own problems. Murotani's distaste for screentone still hadn't deserted him (he was coming from a fine arts background, after all). But drawing in background shading by hand took a tremendous amount of time given the volume of production now demanded of him, he became more and more overworked. And the major tabloids were big business. Their main content was celebrity scandal, their main concern was the bottom line, and they showed precious little consideration towards the manga artists they carried as a minor sideline. Editors kept an eagle eye on the manga artists, and they didn't hesitate to cut whole sections without consent let alone consultation.

Murotani created his masterpiece in this harsh and pressurized environment. This was the Jigoku - 'Hell' - series.

Hell Boy the Cool

Jigoku Kun (Hell Boy) forms the first half of the 'Hell' series. It was serialized in a magazine aimed at younger readers, so Muortani laid on the gore with a fairly light touch. The hero's mission is pretty grim: "The villain gets sent to hell every single time". But even so, 'Hell Boy' is a fun piece of work with a character all its own. The hero has a strong appeal, along with surreal characters like the Undead Dad (Mannnen Totsan), the bone-marrow munching Dokurobotan, and a constantly varying cast of hellish ghouls. You get the feeling that Murotani himself had a lot of fun himself making this work, from a lot of different elements that appear: the elaborate page compositions, the ultra-realistic depictions of hell, the offbeat hero, the ultrasexy heroine, and the mixed cast of supporting characters, sometimes beautiful and sometimes cruel.

The highlight of the series is the third episode, 'Devil Fire' (Akumabi). Here, Murotani gives free rein to one aspect of Hell Boy's character: he's devilishly cool. The villain of the piece is a student who dabbles in arson in his free time. Hell Boy uses his magic powers to stick the criminal's arm onto his (the criminal's, that is) forehead. This episode also introduces the character Akutsu; he's quite the square, a good husband and father and the manager of a construction company. Yet at the same time, he's a fiend towards the evil (in this story he traps the student/arsonist/villain). In fact, 'Hell Boy' is an extremely righteous piece of work; you can feel Murotani's anger towards the villains, and his strong sense of justice - to the point where Murotani's own anger comes across as a mangaized enactment of divine wrath. And this is one of the things I really like about 'Hell Boy'. At the same time, however much Murotani's vision was based on his near-death experience, there isn't a hint of religious feeling or teaching in the series. 'Hell Boy' remains quite cool throughout.

Jigoku Kun was put out in book form by Ota Shuppann in a single-volume set along with Surirā Kozō Kyōfū no Hae Otoko (Thriller Kid: The Terrifying Fly-Man). It remains a great read.

The second half of the 'Hell' series was aimed at an older readership, and it shows. Murotani cranked up the horror level and gave stronger voice to his outrage in episodes like 'Doll Hell' (Ningyō Jigoku), 'Insect Hell' (Mushi Jigoku), 'Jirō the Ghost-Devil' (Kaiki Jirō) and 'Pavilion Hell' (Pabirion Jigoku). Among them, the strongest episodes are 'Doll Hell' and 'Pavilion Hell'. They're also quite political.

Murotani the Modernist

'Doll Hell' is a revenge drama starring Misuzu Reika, a traditional doll-maker and atomic bomb survivor. Gifted with magic powers, she decides to take an appropriate form of revenge on the American pilots who dropped the bomb - by turning them into dolls. The pilots (one of them a woman) will remain alive, trapped inside the dolls' bodies. There is an underlying eroticism in the scenes where Reika works her magic, and in the appearance of the blond blue-eyed American character Jane, now transformed into a living doll.

In 'Pavilion Hell', a kid visiting the Osaka International Exposition of 1970 gets lost among the crowds, and somehow finds that he's wandered into hell. There are two kinds of demons, he finds - black demons and white demons - and the black ones are the masters, lording over and discriminating against the whites. Soon a war of liberation starts, with the young hero caught up in it. The plot is thickened with a trans-dimensional romance between him and a female knight of the liberation army. This aspect of 'Pavilion Hell' points forward to Takahashi Rumiko's Urusei Yatsura (Lamu, the Invader Girl).

This kind of socially aware horror manga wasn't particularly rare in this period, and it's hard to deny that Murotani was aiming for large sales when he drew the 'Hell' series. What really makes the 'Hell' series stand out from the rest is the way hell itself is depicted. Unlike other artists working on similar material, Murotani doesn't rely on local Japanese traditional art or folklore at all. If anything, his underworld and the demons who live there are drawn in a quasi-surrealist style. Here we see Murotani the modernist in action.

Murotani in Paris

In the mid seventies, Murotani dropped out of the youth-oriented shōnen magazine scene and shifted his focus back to educational manga. The pace of work required in the weeklies is absolutely crushing, and this was partly the reason for the move. But the major factor in the move was that he left Japan for a sabbatical year in Paris towards the end of the seventies.

Murotani's Parisian year was spent cruising the major galleries, starting with the National Library, the Musée Carnavalet and the Museum of Fashion. A year is a really long time in manga, and normally it'd be unthinkable for an established artist to go a whole year without publishing anything at all. But by shifting to educational manga again, Murotani had fixed himself up with a reliable and steady source of income. Hence Paris.

Towards a complete 'Hell Boy'

Since his return from Paris to the present day, Murotani has continued to keep his main focus on educational manga. And he had remained tremendously successful in this line of work. His biographical manga like Himiko, Katsu Kaishū and Date Masamune went through anything between twenty and forty-two reprints. (Himiko was the shamanistic prophet-ruler of the Yamatai, a third-century forerunner of the Japanese state; Katsu Kaishū was the shogunate's last naval commander; and Date Masamune was a famous one-eyed feudal lord from northern Japan). He's also opened up new areas in educational manga, such as the history-of-science dramas he put out in popular Japanese science magazines like Newton and Einstein.

However, he ran into serious trouble with his 'Mohammed and Islam' (Mahometto to Isuram-kyo), which was withdrawn among protests by Muslims offended at the portrayal of the Prophet in pictures. He also had a run-in with the French government over the inclusion of his anti-nuclear poster Moon Over Mururoa in an exhibition that coincided with a state visit by the President of France to Japan. The sponsors of the exhibition, a department store called Yokohama Sogō, pulled Murotani's work from the show; this time the furious protests came from the artist himself. In both cases, Murotani stuck to an uncompromising freedom-of-speech position, and he declared that he 'absolutely refused to recognize any taboos against freedom of expression'. He still had his old unyielding sense of anger and passion for justice. I think that's why he was able to stick to his guns in the face of considerable pressure.

Murotani Tsunezō has continued to publish educational manga to this day, while also keeping active in the anti-nuclear movement. He also teaches at the Lifelong Learning Center, and plays tennis in his free time. (There are unconfirmed reports that he's practiced his volleys against a number of world-famous structures including the Parthenon and Arc de Triomphe). He still has a lot of ideas in his head, and plans further installments of 'Pavilion Hell' and other projects like 'Murotani's Grotesque Greek Mythology. He's also planning a complete, finalized version of 'Hell Boy' - in the unlikely event that the series could ever be wrestled to a halt'. In any case, Murotani Tsunezō is still an artist worth keeping an eye on.

Kaze Shinobu

A natural high

As a manga artist, Kaze Shinobu has a pretty unique approach to his trans-dimensional material. He opens up his subconscious and draws what appears to him without plan or pause. It's a kind of automatic drawing. Maybe his editors press for changes later on in the process, but fundamentally that's his method. Apparently he holes himself up in a purpose-made cardboard pyramid to give the astral juices a chance to flow. With his psychedelic color sense and oddball drawing habits, you might reasonably suspect that Kaze's creative processes are chemically assisted. But that's actually not the case. His trances are naturally induced. To reach them he lives a healthy – almost monkish – existence. He's practically a vegetarian, which is very rare indeed in today's Japan (oddly enough, given its vegetarian past).

The apprentice

Kaze Shinobu was born in 1952 in Yokosuka, a city near Tokyo with a large US naval base. His manga-obsessed childhood was immediately followed by a spell as assistant in Dynamic Pro, a manga studio run by the artist Nagai Gō . After gophering on 'Kikkai' (Kikkai Kun) and 'The Most Boring Guy in School' (Gakuen Taikutsu Otoko), he debuted under his own name in 1970 in the mag Gekkan Shōnen Magajin with the story 'One-Dollar Hospital, Inc.' (Hyakuen Byōin). (Japanese readers of his well-known later works are stunned to find out that Kaze started off as a comic manga writer for you