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?