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 younger kids, but 'One-Dollar Hospital' was just such a 'gag manga' (as they are locally known). The story featured lots of black humor and seems to show influences from the recently-released movie M.A.S.H. (Kaze himself claims, though, that the main influence was the TV comedian Morikawa Shun.) At any rate, there's a comic streak running through all Kaze's work right into his later, more transcendental works like Zeus.

While the young Kaze was busy creating gag manga with idiot heroes, his collaborators at Dynamic Pro were looking much further afield. In particular, they were reading the cult French graphic novelist Philippe Druillet. When he looked through Druillet's Lone Sloane, Kaze was blown away by the ultra-intense coloration and 4-D graphics. He wasn't slow to pay homage. His own work immediately started taking on Druilletesque characteristics like the Frenchman's intense sharpness of line. And as he moved away from gag manga, Kaze really started to come into his own as an artist.

Masterpiece mix

In 1977, Kaze started serialization of what can be justly called his masterpiece – 'Ryū, Strongest Man on the Face of the Planet'(Chijō Saikyū no Otoko, Ryū). This last malign blossom of the 1970s draws on just about every aspect of the decade's countercultures and mashes them face to face in one single work.

The Antichrist roams the earth with the face and clothing of Charles Manson. 'Ryū, Strongest Man on the Face of the Planet' shows the continuing influence of Philippe Druillet on Kaze Shinobu, and there is homage as well to the Art Nouveau master Alphonse Mucha.

Other influences come from East Asia. Christ calls Bruce Lee back to life, in a reflection of the seventies Kung Fu boom. And what's really interesting is the absurd way this Kung Fu fashion is combined with the contemporary 'Spiritualist Craze' spearheaded by the real-life religious cult GLA (headed by its second leader Takahashi “Michael” Keiko) and the writer Hirai Kazumasa, author of the New Wolf Guy Series, who is supposed to be closely connected to the cult. 'Strongest Man on the Face of the Planet lampooned both. There are also logos echoing Yokō Tadanori.

'Ryū, Strongest Man on the Face of the Planet' followed a wayward path both before and after publication. Originally, Kaze planned for the hero and his rival Dokyo to be involved in a gay love affair. The general outline was for a blockbusting karate/sci-fi/gay/horror set of themes. But when he broached his ideas to Nagai Go and the team at Dynamic Pro, they persuaded him to abandon the gag manga style and take a more 'serious-minded' line.(Hence the story as it finally appeared.) However, the spectacular final illustration of the earth splitting in two was in Kaze's mind from the very start.

'Ryū' was first published in Shōnen Magazine in 1977. Unfortunately, the series was too occultist in tone to get enough support from the readership (as constantly surveyed by the mag) and it crashed to a premature death. However, it was later brought out in book form by the publishers Asahi Sonorama, and again in 1996 by Kadokawa Shoten, in 2002 Hutaba-sha.

Apocalypse abroad

Kaze's work found a ready audience among one section of the sci-fi readership. This group took its inspiration from American comics and graphic novels, and they recognized something new and exciting in what he was doing. As a result, the Japanese sci-fi scene became one of Kaze's main platforms for publishing single-episode works and short series.

The occult was big news in the late seventies, and Kaze's 'The Kid who Who Ran the Government' (Gabamento o Motta Shōnen) followed the trend. In this self-selected anthology – and his other works of the time – Kaze developed the unique essentials of his later spiritualist-occultist phase. Again and again, the plots revolve around Armageddon, the near-extinction of humankind, and the recovery of post-apocalyptic humanity in some more highly evolved state.

Kaze followed this flurry of short works with a period of inactivity. But during this time, he gained new audiences abroad for his previous work. Among others,'Being a Guy Is All True Grit' (Otoko wa Dokyō) was published in Heavy Metal, and Heart and Steel was published in Epic. Still, elaborate work like Kaze's took more time and energy than he could muster, and his productivity reflected that. What little else he managed to put together in the late seventies was put out in sympathetic and relatively undemanding sci-fi mags like SF Magazine, SF Adventure and Popcorn. The readers were bug-eyed cognoscenti to a man.

Eighties shorts

The eighties works 'Ghost Man' (Reitai Ningen), 'Love Goddess New Girl in School' (Aizen Tensei) and 'Flowerbird, Bright Moon and Cool Breezes' (Kachō Fūgetsu) were included in the anthology 'The Kid who Ran the Government'. But Kaze put out lots of other short works in this period that were never anthologized. Many of these were published in mags aimed at young girls, or shōjo zasshi. – For example Puchi Furawā, or Petit Flower, which published Kaze's 'My Scary Auntie Midori' (Midori no Obasan ga Kowai).

In this story, a young girl is knocked down at a traffic crossing. Later, she finds that her friends and family start to act weird. They're completely cold to her. Worse, her youthful aunt Midori trails her like a skirt, impossible to shake off. At the very end of the manga, it turns out that she's been dead since the accident. 'Auntie Midori' is in fact an angel, and she herself is a ghost haunting the place where she died. It's an early version of The Sixth Sense, in other words, and Kaze handles the plot very skillfully.

Another memorable Kaze work from the eighties is 'Last of the Bikers' (Saigo no Bōsozoku). Japanese bike gangs are another distinct modern subculture, with their own costumes, rites of passage and even Chinese characters. While not quite as dangerous as the classic Hell's Angels, they certainly caused a storm in urban Japan in their late-seventies heyday, before membership went into steep decline. 'Last of the Bilers' is set in a post-apocalyptic urban landscape, and features stunning graphics of bikers gunning their way through the ruins. In my opinion, Kaze helped pave the way for Akira. 'Last of the Bikers' was published in the sci-fi mag Popcorn as a full series.

'A Tale of the Moon and the Wind' (Ugetsu Monogatari) took Kaze off on a quite new tangent, since the story is set in medieval Japan. However, the graphic style owes a lot to the Art Nouveau maestro Alphonse Mucha, and the combination of style and story works up a unique atmosphere. One of Kaze's own favorites, 'The Moon and the Wind' languished for years before finally coming out under the Seiryusha imprint in 1996. It looked as fresh then as the day it was finished.

Corny and camp

During the eighties, Kaze spent a lot of time schmoozing around at sci-fi conventions in the States, investigating the goings-on and coming home laden down with merchandise. As Nakako Shinji reports in the book Violence and Peace, during this period Kaze had a major thing for low-budget American sci-fi flicks, starting with Wonder Woman. Apparently he loved their particular blend of cheapness and trashiness.

There was obviously some common ground between these movies and his own sensibility – for example, the way that he couldn't resist inserting gags into 'Ryū, Strongest Man on the Face of the Planet'. There's a similar style in later (but not particularly recent) movies like Ed Wood and in the rising popularity of deliberately corny styles. Kaze's work isn't exactly kitsch as such, or camp either, but definitely shares something in common with a lot of eighties camp Americana. I'm thinking along the lines of Tim Burton's Mars Attacks. For my money, Kaze was the only Japanese manga artist to nail down this kind of spoof pop-art sensibility with real finesse.

Kaze's heroines

Kaze's overseas connections carry over to the way he draws his heroines, who often have a fairly exotic quality about them. They're modeled on the Haga shoten Star series. In terms of their costumes alone, Nikaido Kuniko (the heroine of 'Ryū, Strongest Man on the Face of the Planet') clearly looks to the risqué heroine of the American comic Vampillera for inspiration and glamour. Although Kaze never watched Barbarella, he was a major Wonder Woman fan – especially as played by Linda Carter.

He was also a fan of Japanese science fiction, especially the movies Sukeban Deka and Bishōjo Kamen Powatorin. Minamino Youko, the female lead in Sukeban Deka II, was a particular favorite, and the scene where she appears in the movie with her mask split in two was particularly stimulating for him. Kaze also drew UFO illustrations around the themes of Bishōjo Kamen Powatorin, which are worth a look.

The daily grind

In the nineties, Kaze experienced a frenetic period drawing two series for Tokyo Sports, a daily tabloid newspaper. Tiger Mask the Star and Roppongi Soldier were both scripted by Maki Hisao. Personally, I was really doubtful if Kaze could sustain the pace of producing his kind of highly-wrought graphics on a daily basis. What made the projects possible, I think, was that they lacked his normal science-fiction and multi-dimensional pyrotechnics. However, that's not to say that both series don't pack a lot of punch. They do. I'd like to think that the main reason Kaze changed his style here was that he wanted to appeal to a new readership. Anyone who reads them can see that the scripts – with their offbeat ideas and ultra-cool heroes – mesh brilliantly with Kaze's crisp graphics.

Tiger Mask the Star is set in New York. The hero, Tiger Mask, is a homeless downbeat in his normal, everyday life. The villain Tiger's Cave is really original – a cross-dressing mafia don with a penchant for S&M. There's a similar sado-masochistic streak running through 'Roppongi Soldier', the story of an ex-kickboxer private eye. The series is very detailed on Tokyo's Roppongi nightclub and entertainment district, which the scriptwriter knew very thoroughly. The fight scenes in both series are just the same as the ones in 'Ryū, Strongest Man on the Face of the Planet', and just as powerful.

The artist as prophet

In March 1995, the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyō launched a deadly attack on the Tokyo subway, using the nerve gas Sarin. Under the absolute leadership of the half-blind guru Asahara Shōko, the group had attracted a large following of elite science students attracted by Asahara's distorted end-of-the-world blend of Buddhism, yoga and science fiction (Isaac Asimov was a major source of inspiration). The subway attack was planned as a prelude to an assault on the parliament building and a coup to set up an Aum Shinrikyō dictatorship. It was in many ways the most shocking event in Japan since Mishima Yukio's spectacular suicide in 1970, pointing as it did to a deeper and unexpected malaise in the entire culture, and especially among the young.

Kaze Shinobu's daring reaction to the event was his 'Aum Armageddon Plan is Go!', (Harumagedon 'Aum Keikaku' Seikō Seri!) published in the weekly tabloid Flash Zōkan and edited by Arita Yoshio. The manga was an exercise in alternative history, prophesying what Japan would have been like under an Aum dictatorship. The climax depicts Asahara – grown to monstrous proportions – smashing the parliament building in a blaze of light. The extraordinary spread won praise from Taku Hachiro, then appearing in the well-known magazine Spa!.

Maybe Kaze had finally learned to cope with the pressures of producing work for the daily newspapers and weekly mags. Whatever the reason, from 1995 his work in all genres started to show a real resurgence in spirit. Later, Kaze had a major spat with the artist Tsuji Naoki over copyright issues relating to Tiger Mask the Star. However, this did nothing to slow down his creative surge, which has continued up to the present. The ultimate reason for this surge lies in the nature of modern life in Japan. 1995 wasn't just Aum's year. It also saw the Kobe earthquake, which killed five thousand and left the city looking like Akira had jumped off the page. In other words, the boundary between modern Japan and the world of Kaze's imagination was being obliterated. Kaze Shinobu increasingly began to reveal himself in his true form – as a prophet of urban dystopia. Either that or reality was finally catching up as the millennium approached. You be the judge.

A voyage into Greek mythology

In 1996, Tokuma Shōbo published 'Zeus' (Zeos), Part One of Kaze's excursion into Greek mythology. The story: Chaos gives birth to Uranus (heaven), Gaia (earth) and Eros (love). They in turn parent many gods who form the first-generation pantheon. Uranus becomes an overbearing tyrant and is overthrown because of this by his child Chronos, but Chronos ends up just as bad an oppressor himself. He devours his own children one by one because of a prophesy that one of them will steal the throne. But there's one survivor who got away – Zeus. Zeus takes out Chronos, rescues his devoured siblings, and takes charge of the show on Olympus...And that's just the first half of the story. 'Zeus' in fact covers only as far as the eponymous hero's birth.

'Zeus' is chock-full of Kaze's science fiction style and multi-dimensional pyrotechnics . It's a fantastically enjoyable story. Kaze still has a lot of great manga left in him, and there are still lots of full-color unpublished works slumbering in the archives at Dynamic Pro.

Suzuki Ryōsei

During the seventies, I used to devour Zōkan Young Comic because Miyaya Kazuhiko and Sakaki Masaru wrote for it. While devouring, I often came across single-episode gekiga by Suzuki Ryōsei. And they were weird. I pushed them to the corner of my mind marked 'unpleasant memories' - and there they stayed.

Years later - actually, when I was researching this book - I bumped into his stuff again. I was fishing through the gekiga magazines in the National Diet Library, and suddenly there he was. An ex-editor at Zōkan Young Comic told me that right from the start, Suzuki was gunning to become An Artist. This was when he was coming out with gekiga like 'Puberty? No Thanks!' (Seishun Danki) and 'Youth Blood Cherry Street' (Seishun Chizakura Dōri).

Suzuki finally managed to make a highly Artistic gekiga with his one and only ever work dealing with social issues - 'The Rough Guide to Davy Jones's Locker' (Gyōfuku Ki). It's a story about a sports teacher who ends up marrying a badass girl he used to teach (this isn't seen as particularly scandalous in Japan). Then it gets creepy. Day by day, the wife starts to morph back gradually into a little girl. One day, the couple find themselves in a sleepy seaside town, when something decisive happens inside the girl-woman's body... The husband is completely freaked out at what's happening. The rest of the gekiga follows his descent into insanity.

Losing it

To be honest, Suzuki Ryōsei's graphic style was crude and outdated even for the time. Still, his work gives off the stench of real life in its own strange way. Poverty and violence in dreary provincial towns just after the war - when he draws these themes, he really gets down to the bone. He was especially good at capturing the twisted mentality of a certain kind of seventies adolescent. This is a kid who's missed the boat when it comes to fashionable student politics but is still too young to care about a car and a mortgage, and who's a big fan of third-rate porn gekiga. Something about the way Suzuki attempts to give them literary names makes it easy to imagine that he spent a lot of time in the company of kids like this. Without a doubt, Suzuki had his finger right on the pulse for a short time around 1978.

Anyway, the brute fact of the matter is - whether he worked his fingers to the bone trying to be an Artistic gekiga writer or whether pumped out third-rate porn, the money was going to be just the same. “One day, he just went postal”, says one of his ex-editors. He had good reason. He ended up as a hack porn artist before disappearing from the scene.

After writing the above, I heard that a signed drawing by Suzuki was hanging in the Contemporary Manga Library. It was dated April 9, 1979. This was just before he lost it. The Manga Library doesn't even have his name on its files, but Suzuki Ryōsei left this small scrap of paper behind him to prove that he once existed.