Bonten Tarō

She sported an eccentric hairstyle much like the lowbrow artist Rock'in Jellybean. Her leather micro-mini was topped off with a psychedelic tattoo-design t-shirt. The blurb proclaimed her to be "The Glamorous Half-breed with the Broad Leather Belt!" Her name was Rika. She was the heroine of a Bonten Tarō's premier 60s gekiga 'Half-breed Rika' (Konketsuji Rika, published in Shukan Myojo.) (Despite the fact that many children had been born to parents of mixed race in the immediate postwar period, the disgraceful term 'half-breed' or konkestuji was in general use in Japan right up to the eighties. Even today, the common name for a child of an interracial couple is a 'half'.)

Through the late 60s and early 70s, Rika and her gang took on their enemies in one fight scene after another - the yakuza were one, the mysterious millionaire another. The series overflowed with a kitschy B-Movie style, influenced by stuff like Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Tōei action flicks. I'm crazy about catfight gekiga - I can't get enough of this series.

Kamikaze by name, kamikaze by nature

Bonten Tarō was born as Ishii Kiyomi in Tokyo in 1928. He was born with a heroic streak, and joined the air force in 1943 "because I liked the uniform. I wasn't remotely patriotic." The air force was getting ready for kamikaze defense of the home islands.

So, Bonten Tarō got stationed at Kanoya air base near Kagoshima, and flew as a pathfinder guiding kamikaze pilots towards the enemy ships in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. Though he lost a troop of friends to the war, he came out of it himself like the cat with nine lives - "Worse luck", according to himself. He came out of the experience a purged and changed man, living life from moment to moment, obsessed with his own artistic journey and uncompromising in following it through all his remaining days. You could say he'd discovered religion.

I think that's why he chose his artistic name - Bonten Tarō. A bon-jin is a nobody. This bon (meaning mediocre) became the first part of his name. Bon-ten (Vishunu) is the Hidhu-Buddhist god who created the universe. The ten (meaning heaven) became the second part of his name. And the given name Tarō is blue-collar incarnate - Jack, Mac, Horst, Jimmy. So Boten Tarō - the multi-genre artist joining the mundane to the celestial to the mundane - was born.

The enfant terrible

During the heyday of 'Half-breed Rika' in the 70s, Bonten Tarō took Japan by storm. He entered pretty taboo territory when he branched out as a tattoo artist. Up until this time, tattoos were strictly yakuza style. They were applied by hand, in black and red only. Bonten created a revolution in the scene. His tattoo creations were a riot of color, and he developed and marketed mechanical instruments for applying them. He worked his art on the skins of famous actors like Charlie Sheen, and cult figures like Takenaka Rō. At the same time, he also developed a tattoo-influenced fashion line that won favorable mention from Pierre Cardin.

His greatest breakthrough came when Mohammed Ali got in touch with him personally, and asked him to design the gown he wore on the way into the ring. The resulting worldwide publicity led to fashion shows in Paris and London. He joined forces temporarily with the designer Yamamoto Kansai, sashaying down the catwalk in traditional courtesan's ultra-platform clogs and a sumo wrestler's loincloth. Audiences were breathtaken. (Bonten himself summarizes this period with the old Japanese saying 'When you're on the road, you cast off shame'.)

As if that wasn't enough, he used his experience as a band manager to break into the music business and record an album. He appeared on TV as an enka ballad singer.

And of course, he scored a huge success on his first attempt at writing a gekiga for a major weekly magazine. This was 'Half-breed Rika' in Shukan Myojo. The film version made by Tōei Studios (also titled Konketsuji Rika) starred another beautiful Rika of mixed-race parentage. Aoki Rika was the quintessential picture of 70s glamour, but she vanished without trace after a couple of movies and a single on vinyl.

Low Teen and Tokunan Seiichirō

There's a huge archive of Bonten Tarō materials at his home in Saitama Prefecture, just outside Tokyo. His wife is the curator. There are stacks of rare magazines that couldn't be found even in the Diet Library (the Japanese equivalent of the Library of Congress). I was astonished when saw the sheer range of his collection. But there's nothing at all from before 1964. That's when he met his wife.

For a look at Bonten's work before that, you have to go kashihon magazines like Low Teen. Low Teen was published during the 60s by Akebono Shuppan, and aimed at adolescent males. Each issue featured a roster of artists centered on the then-popular Kawada Mannichi. The content was heavily influenced by Nikkatsu action movies, and the stories featured clean-cut, gutsy teenagers facing life and love with pure hearts and a straight edge. Bonten Tarō was really taken aback when I showed him a copy of Low Teen featuring his 'Provoking Evil' (Aku e no Chōsen). "Did I really put out work like that?" was his comment. "I've never seen the draft of this in my life" chimed in his wife...

'Provoking Evil' came out in Low Teen #7, which also carried Tokunan Seiichirō's 'The Sky is Sometimes Blue' (Sora wa Haretari). It's a creation packed to the margins with Tokunan's 'drawing's-a-drag-and-I-couldn't-give-a-shit' sensibility. Tack on a pointless, moralistic ending (Tokunan did) and you have a perfect example of his style.

Outstanding draftsmanship

Anyway, to get back to Bonten's 'Provoking Evil'. What really sets it apart from other kashihon pulp stories is the way the plot piles one twist on top of another right through to the final page - without leaving a single loose thread. If you've read this far, you'll have realized that resonant, well-crafted plots were very scarce on the ground in kashihon circles (or what I call 'garage gekiga'). Usually, some kind of slapdash ending is tacked on in the last five pages - and in fact I love that approach too, as such. But 'Provoking Evil' is that rare thing in the kashihon market - a piece of work with a fully realized structure. It really deserves kudos for that.

And the draftsmanship. When you compare Bonten's drawing with Tokunan's 'The Sky is Sometimes Blue' you think - were these guys on different planets or something? The sky certainly doesn't look the same...

A tattooist's gekiga

Tattooists use human skin for their canvas, and they compose skin into a unified work of art. Mistakes can happen at any time, and they can't be taken back. Bonten Tarō's gekiga have a special life and strength that stems from his experience as a tattoo artist. You can see it most clearly in his cover illustrations. The covers for 'Half-breed Rika', for example, outdid anything else in the magazine for finish and technique.
He was a multi-talented star in the seventies, but one day Bonten Tarō just walked away from it all and became a painter. Staring death in the face as a kamikaze affected him in lots of ways no doubt. But I think the main thing it did to him was make him fearless. And free.

Takeuchi Kanko

Takeuchi Kanko had vanished into thin air a long time before. I managed to track him down by an unbelievable coincidence. It was April 28th, 1997. I was just wrapping up an interview with the manga artist Bonten Tarō. We'd been talking about all sorts of things - kami shibai (a form of storytelling ancestral to manga, with wandering artists displaying short graphic stories from handcarts), tattooing (Bonten is liberally decorated), enka ballads..."Anyway, thank you so much," I was saying, "let's call it a day."

Bonten: Actually, speaking of [Mizuki Shigeru's] Gegege no Kitarō, did you know that Takeuchi Kanko was the guy who started the series?
Me: Actually, I'm collecting Takeuchi's series 'Kitarō, Demon of the Graveyard' (Hakaba no Kitarō).
Bonten: Really? He was with me for years. As my chief assistant.
Me: Jesus H. Christ! Are you serious?

Two Kitarōs

In 1960, Togetsu Shobō published Mizuki Shigeru's 'Kitarō, Demon of the Graveyard', from a story by Ito Masami. But when Volume 3 came out, Mizuki fell out with the publishing house over money, and jumped ship to the publisher Sanyō-sha. He went on to bring out 'Night Tales of Kitarō' (Kitarō Yawai). Meanwhile back at Togetsu, Takeuchi took over the helm of 'Kitarō, Demon of the Graveyard'. The series was a smash hit as a kashihon, and ran to a grand total of nineteen volumes. Takeuchi took over at Volume 4, and cleared the decks with a general slaughter of Mizuki Shigeru's characters. Mizuki's signature character Nezumi Otoko (the Mouseman) met an abrupt end in the opening pages, killed by Kineko (Treecat Girl). Then Kitarō takes out Treecat Girl before squaring up to the she-demon Yasha. Kitarō's victory over her completes the clean sweep.

From Volume 5, Takeuchi populated the series with fresh characters like the ghost of Dracula and his assistant, Baneaze. Kitarō teams up with a mysterious Kumo-Otoko (spider-man) against them.

Until the first half of Volume 7, Takeuchi clearly struggled under the burden of drawing characters in Mizuki's style, and there's not much in the way of originality to be found in the ghostly goings-on up to this point. And there are lots of loose threads in the plot - Dracula and Baneaze, for example, suddenly drop out of the story for no good reason. Mizuki was a past master at western-style ghosts and black magic, and a very hard act to follow. I imagine that Takeuchi had great difficulty filling his shoes.

Takeuchi finally made the series his own by overhauling the basic graphic concept, and moving it in the direction of a more traditional Japanese style. Creating afterworlds and ghosts based on indigenous myths really allowed him to show what he could do. 'Kitarō, Demon of the Graveyard' now became a true original, and truly Takeuchi on all fronts.

Ghost town Tokyo

With the villain Baneaze out of the picture, Volume 7 saw Kitarō up against a new enemy - Jigoku Baba, or 'Hell Hag'. The plotline now careened toward a climax. Takeuchi's graphic style took a complete change of direction. His drawing became far more subtle and finely done.

In the second half of Vol. 7, Hell Hag (accompanied by a demonic nine-tailed fox) hit the bright lights of Tokyo, searching for - and finding - yummy human flesh. They're also on the trail of Kitarō, who's just saved the beautiful and mysterious Kitsuko. All hell breaks loose in Vols 8 and 9. Tokyo becomes the scene of a savage, all-out supernatural war. The action takes place in two parts of Tokyo in particular - the Katsushika and Arakawa districts, lying in the north and northeast of the metropolis. Both places are distinctly untrendy. They're gritty working-class islands of old-school spit-and-sawdust Tokyo - what the locals call the shitamachi (literally 'downtown').

These were the years around the time of the Tokyo Olympics, when the city was transformed from a collection of long-lived and intimate neighborhoods into a sprawling megalopolis. And was at this particular point of change that Takeuchi's very own special scum imagination seized the poorer parts of town and morphed them into a pandemonium steeped in local lore and superstition. I get the feeling that the shitamachi of this dark fantasy is one and the same place as his childhood home.

Takeuchi was born long ago, way back in the Meiji Period, in 1907. My grandfather (now deceased) belonged to the same generation. I well remember the stories he used to tell, about the dead. Our generation would call them 'urban legends' or something, but they were far more in-your-face than that. Even when I was growing up, death was always just around the corner in the shitamachi areas. With my own eyes I saw people killed in accidents lots of times, and suicides. Some of them stand out, like the time I saw a suicide floating in the river, and the two times I saw suicides on the train tracks. Anyway, when Takeuchi was drawing blue collar Tokyo and I was growing up there in the late 50s and early 60s, death was something close. I'd be surprised if it wasn't the same for Takeuchi - and his scriptwriter, Itō Masami , who was another fan of the Katsushika area.

The final showdown

The struggle between Kitarō and Hell Hag spills over and back between the real and spirit worlds, and involves a whole roster of hellish characters. There's Itachi-Otoko, the Fire Sorcerer God, the King of the River Monsters, the Madman of Graveyard Village, the Indian ghost Neshababa- and Enma, the traditional King of Hades. A number of humans are also caught up in the mayhem - the high-ranking Buddhist monk Sainen-Osho, the beauteous Kitsuko, and a private dick by the name of Narumi Hachiro. The epic struggle continues through to Vol. 19.

By the end of the series, all traces of the original artist Mizuki Shigeru are gone. It's 100% Takeuchi Kanko.

In the final volume of the series, Kitarō comes up against the Indian ghost Neshababa, who's trying to infect the world with an ebola-type flesh-eating virus. Her victims turn into zombies, stalking around for human meat. There's one particularly shocking scene where the zombies indulge in a feeding frenzy at a graveyard - but it's drawn with a weirdly comic touch. Maybe Takeuchi was trying to fob off his own conscience? Or maybe not.

In the final scenes of the series, Kitarō triumphs over all his enemies and ends up in the hospital. Here's there for a very special operation - to get the spirit of his grandfather, a wandering legged eyeball called Medama Oyaji - inserted into his empty eye socket. So he ends up normal. It sucks beyond all belief. Here was a character you believed up till now could fly, and he ends up...normal. Uugh. Anyway. Pressed on by the force of Japanese folk tradition and the violence of his own imagination, Takeuchi Kanko took Mizuki Sigeru's masterpiece and perfected a 'Kitarō world' that only he could have possibly created.

Otaku give Takeuchi's Kitarō a hard time: the graphics are crudely done compared to Mizuki's. The storyline has Crab-nebular sized holes in it. The characters suck. It's too depressing. Too gory. And cetera. Takeuchi - weep, reader - gets zero to minus respect. All well and good. And yet...what is it about Takeuchi's art? There's something primeval at work. If you look closely, you'll start to get the uncanny sense of being pulled back in time, back beyond the birth of gekiga and manga - even back beyond the dawn of the wandering kami shibai and before, to the freak shows, peep shows and clockwork dolls of pre-war Japan, and the roving street artists who pimped them around the streets. More than a feeling of terror, you get a sense of raging disgust from his pages. Mizuki Shigeru's Kitarō had a modern, pop-art sensibility. Takeuchi's version by comparison was grungy, vile, and disgusting. Give me Takeuchi any day.

The Dark Ages of manga

Kitarō belonged to the genre of cheap rental manga books known as kashihon. Another major Takeuchi work in this format was his Sanka series. Ethnically Japanese, the Sanka were an obscure wandering people something along the lines of European gypsies. The obscurity comes from the fact that they lived outside the traditional class system. They weren't even classified as outcastes. The story goes that they lived blameless lives in the deep mountains and river valleys. But there are doubts about when Sanka culture finally died out - and to tell the truth, it's not even clear if such a group ever really existed. Of course, the mystery has only boosted their counter-cultural sex appeal. In the twentieth century, some minor writers claimed Sanka status and wrote Sanka stories. In the main they were wild-haired Geniuses with Romantic Eyes and paisley cravats.

Takeuchi authored two works that more or less belong to this bogus tradition - 'Gale Force Sanka Adventures' (Sanka Kidan Shippū) and 'Sanka Mountain Blade' (Sanka Kidan Umegai, in two volumes). They came out under the Togetsu imprint. The manga were based the novels of Misumi Kan, the exceptionally wild-haired Grand Old Man of the Sanka literature scene. For OTT charm, it's safe to say the manga beat the novels hands down. Actually, Takeuchi Kanko was just one of a team of artists working on this project. Beside him was a whole roster of old-timers with roots in kami shibai - Numa Kiichi, Nannbu Shin and Kariya Kei. Each of them dragged their particular scummy appeal to the proceedings. Takeuchi contributed the title story to 'Gale Force Sanka Adventures'. He also penned the story 'A Record of Mountain Blood Laughter' (Umegai Kesshō Ki) in 'Sanka Mountain Blade'.

'Gale Force Sanka Adventures' is set in Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's main islands and (apparently) a stronghold of Sanka culture during the middle ages. The time is the 1500s. Civil wars are raging all over the country. The setting: a group of wandering Sanka. The problem: their patriarch's seriously ill. The solution: "the fresh blood and still-quivering liver of the Princess of Red Pine Castle". This according to a wrinkled soothsaying crone from China. Who's going to snatch the unfortunate damsel? Two stalwart young Sanka, Jaroku and Haraguro, are deemed up to the task, and they have to draw lots. (Their names aren't exactly from charm school - Jaroku means 'serpent six', and Haraguro 'black-bellied, cunning and vicious'.)

Haraguro wins the toss, and Jaroku doesn't take it terribly well. In a fit of pique, he slaughters the soothsaying crone and causes the sick patriarch's death. He has bigger plans - using special powers known only to his wandering tribe, he wants to make a big splash in the civil wars and become a famous warlord. His rival Haraguro is having none of it. He accesses the occult powers of the murdered Chinese soothsayer, and from there it's game on... Misumi Kan's source fiction is flamboyant enough. When you stir in Takeuchi's ultra-in-your-face characterization, you get a paranormal blockbuster in a class of its own.

However much the message got lost among the pyrotechnics, Takeuchi and his fellow artists probably had some kind of human rights statement in mind when they took on a story about the Sanka, the classic outsiders' outsiders. The paradox is that the work is brimming with words and phrases that are now considered offensive and banned from print. Even so, it'd be a real shame to shove it under the carpet just to stay polite. Takeuchi's Sanka material is an important historical source from another age, the Dark Ages of manga.

The Private Life of a Manga Artist: Bonten Tarō testifies...

Kashihon rental manga died a death in the prosperous seventies. Takeuchi Kanko was out of a market. So, he came to Bonten Tarō for work as a chief assistant. Bonten was kind enough to fill me in on a few episodes from those days:

"Kanko-san dropped by my house one day and asked 'Is there any work going?' So I said 'How about being my general assistant?' He was a really gifted draftsman - the fact is I learned a lot from him. So he ended up working for me for a good ten years or so, in my place in Yokohama. When I say he was my main man, I really mean main."

At this time, Bonten Tarō was active on a whole range of fronts, not just gekiga. He was a tattoo artist, fashion designer and enka balladeer as well. Takeuchi was his assistant in his manifestation as a gekiga artist:

"The funny thing was, he [Takeuchi] always tied some kind of cloth around his waist and hung a bottle opener from it. I'd sometimes be holed up in a rooming house somewhere finishing a project. As soon as I got back, sure enough he'd appear - bottle opener swinging. He'd march in and start grabbing beers. I was a round-the-clock drinker myself, and so was he.

"On the other side of the bottle opener he hung a cloth bag. He always had a notebook and pencil and stuff in it. When I asked him what for, he said it took him a long time to get to my place. (I lived in Yokohama, and he was living in Katsushika, across town.) 'So use this stuff to draw on the train.' He was constantly sketching people."

Like his employer, Takeuchi had multiple sidelines apart from being Bonten's assistant. He painted movie billboards and did portraits on the street to get by. Not that Bonten knew anything about that: the only information he got from Takeuchi was 'I live in Katsushika'.

"And he was quite the ladies' man. He was always bringing some different woman to the studio. Quite the old goat. He still had it. All the kids on my staff used to say - 'Where does he get the stamina? Where does all this energy come from in such a doddering ancient?' Did he have a wife? Not that I ever heard of. He'd bring someone along pretty much every day, and hang out with her here. Then kiss her off when she went. Every so often, a new woman would appear. 'What, you've changed girlfriends again?' 'Yeah. This'un's a keeper' he'd say, or whatever." At this stage of his life, Takeuchi was already past 60. Randy old bastard..."

Could Takeuchi Kanko actually still be alive?

And finally we get to the million-dollar question. Bonten Tarō continues:

"Is he still alive? Hmm...good question. Even after I stopped doing gekiga, I still used to run across him sometimes at Kata Kōji's new year parties. But he stopped throwing them over the past couple of years. So, Takeuchi's been off the screen for a good five years or so."

Takeuchi Kanko was still alive just five years ago! Even that was major news for me.

"If he was still alive, he'd be getting really old by now. Over 80, I reckon. Because he was over 60 back then. Still, I'd have given the old bollocks good odds for living to a hundred. Short and unstoppable, total mister eager beaver, y'know?"

If Takeuchi was still living it'd be a true miracle. At least for me.

"If you wanted to trace him after he quit drawing gekiga...how about Hashimoto Shoji? They used to be in the kami shibai scene together. He just might be able to help you out." Hashimoto Shoji is the guy who drew 'Beheader Demon' (Dantōki), the manga about parasite human copulation. Like Takeuchi, he came to the cheap rental manga scene from kami shibai.

The day after I interviewed Bonten Tarō, the team at my publisher's headed up a posse to track down Takeuchi Kanko. Alive, preferably. Here's my version of their findings:

The trail

They first got in touch with Hashimoto Shoji:

"I think the last time I met Kanko-san was Kata Kōji's new year party 5 years ago. We used to hang out drinking quite a lot together around that time."

Still this 5-year event horizon.

"If you're really serious about tracking him down, there's this guy in the Katsushika district, in Aoto - he's been there all along, so you should get in touch with him. Kikuchi Yoshinori. He used to be Takeuchi's neighbor. They often used to go drinking together."

Kikuuchi Yoshinori was a colorist of kami shibai, and he worked with Takeuchi at a kami shibai production company, Dai Nippon Gageki Kaisha. After that, he drew display at a department store.

"Kanko-san phoned me during the holiday season three years ago, but that's the last I heard from him" - which still narrowed the gap by two years. "He really loved his drink. Whenever he felt like going on a binge, he'd always come over to my place. And he wasn't a bad sort, so we used to do quite a bit of boozing together." No surprises there. But Kikuchi did have another lead - "There's one person who'll know if he's still alive, and that's Honda Michiko. She was his girlfriend, he was always around at her place."

So, on to lead number three. Honda Michiko was another fixture on the kami shibai scene, and sure enough she knew the full story: "Kanko-san? He died in Osaka, in his daughter's house."

At that moment, Takeuchi Kanko's death became a reality.

The final years

Honda Michiko continued: "His wife died young, and after that Kanko-san lived in a rooming house in Katsushika. Eventually, the place got demolished and he had to move. Now, even for a guy like him it's no good being old and on your own, right? So, he called his daughter who was married and living in Osaka, and more or less forced his way into her place. That was about three years ago. And about a year after that, he dies."

So he was dead. I nearly fainted when I heard. Starting with Bonten Tarō, the first thing everyone had said about him was "He was so full of life". And I believed them. I even thought that maybe he was still holed up somewhere in Katsushika, painting movie billboards or something.

When he heard about his death, Kikuchi Yoshinori shared some other memories of Takeuchi Kanko with me. He showed me two portraits, of him and his father, drawn by Takeuchi. "See the signature here? H.T.? Those are the initials of his real name, Takeuchi Hachiro. There'd been various theories about his real name - Takeuchi Hiroyuki, Takeuchi Hiroshi, Kujira Ippei, et cetera. So this was his real name.

Bonten Tarō was down in the far south, on the island of Okinawa. When he heard that Takeuchi was dead, he'd only one thing to say: "He had a good life."

A happy ending

Takeuchi Kanko was born in 1907 in Hyogo Prefecture, near Osaka. He was a kami shibai artist in the Osaka area before the war, where he made his name. He joined Kata's company, Dai Nippon Gageki Sha, and took his talents to Tokyo. When kami shibai went out of fashion he moved into the pulp kashihon manga book genre, but he also published on occasion in magazines from 1955, e.g., 'Sword-wind Ichikawa Utaemon' (Kenpū Ichikawa Utaemon, in the mag Tsūkai Book), etc. After his time as Bonten Tarō's assistant, he supported himself drawing movie billboards into his eighties. He moved to Osaka in 1994, and passed away the following year. He was eighty-seven.

Tokunan Seiichirō

This is the 'theme song' from Tokunan Seichirō's debut work, 'The Samurai Who Cut Through Shadows' (Kage wo Kiru Samurai). It's a story of the rebel warriors who fought the dying shogunate and its group of hand-picked heavies - the Shinsen Gumi, or 'Newly Chosen Brigade'. It's just possible you might be able to guess from the lyrics whose side the artist was on. The interesting point about this work is that the main elements betray a strong influence of Tezuka Osamu. And there's something in the graphic style of 'Samurai' that calls to mind Tokunan's later breathtaking achievements.

The only thing that gets me is that 'Samurai' was produced for the kashihon rental manga market - i.e., it's pulp. Tokunan was being pretty damn precious by giving it a Theme Song, no less.

Purity

'The Samurai Who Cut Through Shadows' came out in 1955, published by Tokodo. Tokunan was the manga-crazed kid in its purest form. He was sending manuscripts to Manga Shonen magazine from his childhood. From an early age, he was also a card-carrying member of the East Japan Manga Research Association (Higashi Nihon Manga Kenkyū Kai - despite what the name might suggest, more otaku than academic). Because of this, he was strongly influenced by the cursive lines and rounded forms of artists like Walt Disney and Tezuka Osamu. Unlike Tokunan's later works, this source material was based on historically accurate research.

The drawings of costumes and settings from the dying days of the shogunate were equally well-researched. Tokunan obviously took a lot of pains to get the details just right. 'Samurai' shows a certain kind of dogged, proud craftsmanship, and you get the feeling that he hadn't changed from when he was a kid. He was still the pure article.

The road to 'The Human Clock' (Ningen Tokei)

After 'Samurai', Tokunan wrote a succession of ghost stories and other period pieces published under a variety of imprints. None of them were hits. It may be because he was still too much under the spell of Tezuka Osamu, and couldn't break free of the master's grip.

Another point is that Tokunan was in a bind at this time because he couldn't break into the monthly manga magazines, which were then at the peak of their fortunes. His stage was still the pulp kashihon rental genre. In order to keep his personal ship afloat, he had no choice but to pump out one series after another in a wide range of genres. He was caught in a very specific circle of manga hell - publish or die. Literally.

The strain soon told. Before long, the typical Tokunan manga featured seriously weird characters drawn in warped compositions with slapdash lines. He was obviously cracking up. It was then that the miracle took place. His work crossed the line from soldierly craftsmanship to some form of greatness - the circumstances were ironic, to say the least.

Temperature drop

Everybody agrees that Tokunan's greatest works are 'The Human Clock' (Ningen Tokei) and 'The Cat's Mourning Suit' (Neko no Mofuku). But he was working up to these heights from long before, through a whole succession of prototypes. I get the urge to call this period 'Tokunan's early chill-out phase'.

Tokunan spent a short spell in 1960-61 churning out youth-oriented seishun gekiga under the alias 'Ichikawa Seiichi'. This was in the service of the publishers Akebono Shuppan, or rather their roster of kids' mags, such as Low Teen (i.e. tweenies) and Teen Ager. These were kashihon, pulp rental affairs published monthly or thereabouts as omnibus editions featuring multiple artists. The mainstay of the group was Kawada Mannichi, followed by Nagatani Kunio, Bonten Tarō (see separate article) and other usual suspects, all writing single-episode stories showing influences from Nikkatsu studio's action movies.

But, in this rich platter of thrills and spills, there was one odd man out: Tokunan Seiichirō. He concentrated instead on dark, gloomy stories that were bound to give his teenage readers deep bouts of depression. He really stood out as the negative face of the troupe. In the process, his drawing veered suddenly towards a harsh, edgy style.
The story 'As You Like It' (O-ki ni Mesu Mama) appeared in Issue 13 of Teen Ager. True to its title, the tale carries a Shakespearean cargo of lust, revenge and betrayal. A journalist working for a scandal sheet uncovers an explosive piece of gossip - about the woman who happens to be his younger brother's lover. The journalist's boss uses the scoop to blackmail the lover's father, in a startling departure from the paternalistic style of the average Japanese company manager. He also frames the journalist and gets him arrested. It's clearly time for action.

So the journalist's younger brother storms into the newspaper office for a climactic confrontation where he will prove his elder sibling's innocence and get the girl (he's been dumped) back. This is just the kind of gung-ho scene that the Teen Ager readership lapped up in a frenzy of youthful identification - and Tokunan breezed through it in just three lackadaisical pages. Behind the slapdash approach lay a good deal of bitterness and cynicism about the whole process on the part of Tokunan Seichirō.

The hero of 'Get It Done Right!' (Kata wo Tsukero!) is a restaurant delivery boy fresh out of reform school. On his rounds, he happens to witness a hit-and-run accident, giving blackmail a chance to rear its ugly head in this story, too. His former gang boss uses the incident to pressurize the kid back into the underworld. The only thing standing between him and a wasted life of petty crime is a sympathetic police detective. And there you have the story, again a rather slapdash, cynical affair. What really brings tears to the eyes is the sub-plot that "The hit-and-run-victim hoarded bullion during the War" - it's so completely, pointlessly tacked-on.

Tokunan Seichirō's work was slovenly beyond belief. I think the reason why is that there were very clear inner tensions at work within this artist. His heart wasn't in these stories, but he had to sell out or starve. It's that simple. The result is on every page of his youth manga, set in a closely-observed, grungy rendering of downbeat urban Japan. His heroes live in surroundings of terrific squalor. The plots run like miscarried hardboiled detective thrillers. Authority figures like bosses and cops are self-centered and self-serving to the max. In fact, Tokunan's 'chill-out period' is also an abyss, dark and deep.

Warped manga from a warping mind

Tokunan's later style had a strongly warped quality when he tried depicting his characters' inner worlds. But even his youth manga phase shares some points in common with the later Tokunan.

'Loitering Along' (Michikusa, in Teen Ager #15) is the story of a factory worker and a crossword puzzle. During a spell in hospital, the factory hand figured out the answers to a crossword puzzle, won the prize money and is now living off the proceeds. His ex-boss and coworkers are horrified by his slide into idleness and crossword otakuism. They decide to put him to rights and back to work. The strategy is to shame him back to the assembly line. The tactic is equally Japanese: everybody at the small-scale plant pulls together and keeps the place going, without replacing their absent colleague with a new recruit. (This behavior may seem bizarre from a western viewpoint. But, for example, a typical strike tactic in Japan during the 60s was for workers to lock their bosses out of the plant and then produce more without them. The mortified management were then putty in their hands.)

Even against this background, 'Loitering Along' rings untrue, and it's not just the idea of living off crossword-puzzle prize money. In one episode, the hero 'forgets' the answers to a puzzle because he's distracted by the jazz floating in from next door. In another, he barges into a bookstore, demanding to know if any magazines have printed his name in the 'list of finalists' for another crossword puzzle. These creepy scenes all feature the kind of skewed psychological-action drawings that show up in his later work.

Another workingman takes center stage in 'A Bare Face in the Rain' (Ame no Naka no Sugao, Teen Ager #19). His realm of endeavor is a surrealistic toy workshop, depicted pretty much along the same lines as the clockmaker's in Tokunan's meisterwerk 'The Human Clock'. Anyway, the goings-on in this toy workshop don't stay very cuddly very long. Before you know it, the hero's caught in a web of illegal gun manufacture and drug-selling. Again, the psychological inserts have the same twisted quality as we see later on in the artist's career.

The masterpieces

A few years later, Tokunan Seiichirō brought out his masterpieces 'The Human Clock' and 'The Cat's Mourning Clothes'

'The Cat's Mourning Clothes' goes as follows. The hero is a high school student with the very odd name of Yubi Chizuo ('Finger Mapguy'). He lives in a cheap boarding house with a scummy river oozing by in front of it. The locals use the river as a handy place to get rid of their trash. Flies result. In abundance. The infestation gives Yubi Chizuo no end of trouble. One evening, a particularly large specimen buzzes up in front of Chizuo, and addresses him in fluent Japanese. Understandably shocked, our hero swats the six-legged prodigy flat on the spot. End of story? Not a chance. Chizuo finds himself haunted by the Ghost of the Talking Fly. And then he realizes that a mysterious black cat has started tailing him everywhere he goes...

A Buddhist nun called Kiriko moves into the room next door. That doesn't stop the Ghost of the Talking Fly (who lives in the wall between them) snoring all night and keeping Chizuo awake. And Kiriko may not be all she seems, either. Every night, the nun sneaks off somewhere into the darkness...

But the day comes when the Talking Fly takes its leave in a trail of ectoplasm, leaving Chizuo free to live life as a normal kid once more. The relief is short-lived, however. Pretty soon, the mysterious black cat is back on the scene - and somehow it's gotten itself injured. The thing is, the next time he sees Kiriko the nun, she's sporting the same injury. Chizuo decides to investigate her next nighttime foray...

Shocking sights are seen. There is blood, and the sucking of blood from live human flesh. Kiriko is of the Undead, a vampire. Enough is enough. Chizuo gets in touch with his landlord. But the neighboring room is empty, the landlord tells him, and has been for ages... And then. The ghostly Fly returns, transporting Chizuo in a flash into another dimension of spacetime!

Chizuo comes round to the landlord's voice telling him it's all been a dream. The madness is over. Except, Chizuo still has a nagging curiosity about the 'empty' neighboring room. So one day, he takes a peek. The vampire Kiriko is there. She shows herself to Chizuo in her true form, and then disappears -

And there you have it. Except that now the scene shifts to Chizuo's high school. It's a few days later, in Science class. For whatever reason, today's class is a study trip...to the morgue. And Chizuo's the only kid who's turned up for class today. He goes in. The vampire Kiriko appears before him. With her is the Ghost of the Talking Fly - her father, as it turns out, and a victim of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Kiriko and the mysterious cat are one - she took feline shape when she was stalking Chizuo.

A few days later, the corpse of a high school kid is discovered. It looked like he'd died in an accident, but nobody cared in particular...

When I talk about 'warped manga from a warping mind', I'm thinking about this kind of incoherent story. 'The Human Clock' is a lot simpler to explain. The hero is Yubi Chizuo again. He's a student like before, but this time round he's a dropout. He stays in his house, which is a family shop selling watches and clocks. He gazes and gazes at the clocks. Little by little, he turns into a clock. That is the entire story. It reminds me of Kafka's Metamorphosis.

'The Cat's Mourning Clothes' and 'The Human Clock' both crashed and burned on publication. Outsider Art a la Tokunan was nowhere on anybody's radar screen at the time. This was true even for intellectuals - let alone the blue-collar readers that formed the backbone of the kashihon pulp mag market. Tokunan's work was condemned out of hand for shoddy lines, go-nowhere plots, and all-round weirdity.

But the artist had to eat. So he had to keep going.

Last work

And in order to keep body and soul together, Tokunan undertook one last group of works - a set of historical dramas about the big-name samurai commanders from Japan's Warring States period, around the 1500s. Biographical manga like Tokugawa Ieyasu and Oda Nobunaga followed the various twists and turns of these military superstars' paths to the top. These historical dramas had something of the sinuous 'Tokunan touch' evident from his debut work 'The Samurai Who Cut Through Shadows' through 'The Human Clock' and 'The Cat's Mourning Clothes'. But at times somehow I get the sense that I'm looking at a different style entirely.

The sloppiest-drawn by far of these manga is Tokunan's very last work, 'One-eyed Hero Masamune' (Dokuganryū Masamune). The plot sticks to the historical facts, following the warlord Date Masamune's life from infancy to his teenage years, but again in a very lackadaisical way, leaving out lots of important factors (like Masamune's relationship with his mother and brother. It wasn't great - Mum tried to kill Masamune, and Masamune organized a hit on his brother. He commented later that this was okay, because they could "always get along in the next life".) Also, this version just relates the bare bones of some historically important happenings (like his father's death, and Masamune's dealings with the superstar samurai Toyotomi Hideyoshi). Why? Because Tokunan didn't really care about the times or the people he was drawing.

His research was sketchy, and his battle scenes are blurred. Every page of 'One-eyed Hero Masamune' is a direct message to the reader from the artist, saying 'No, I really don't give a shit'. What stands out above all in this manga are his scratchy lines, as they wobble aimlessly across the page. Terrible stuff. The end of a genius. An empty well. A river run dry.

Goodbye and fuck you very much, everybody...

'One-eyed Hero Masamune' ends with a scene of peasant uprising engineered by Masamune against Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the warlord who unified all Japan (before losing the jackpot permanently to Tokugawa Ieyasu & Family). The final picture shows a group of scabrous yokels carrying crude flags reading 'Revolt!' and 'Toyotomi's a Wanker'.

This final flag of protest - 'Wanker(s)!' - was really directed at a different target - but who? The readers who refused to get what Tokunan was doing? Or the publishers who chained him to a desk on starvation wages? I don't know. I kind of think that Tokunan was flipping the bird at both of them, and the whole world to boot. And that's exactly why he dropped out of the manga scene the moment he finished this story. He headed back to his hometown telling people "I'm going to sell watches for a living". And he didn't keep in touch after that.

So 'One-eyed Hero Masamune' stands as a solitary farewell finger, resentfully raised in the face of a cold, cruel world.

Ishihara Gōjin

Imagine Norman Rockwell drawing a manga series...about a gay love affair between Abraham Lincoln and a lean-hipped, square-jawed cowboy. That's pretty much what Ishihara ("Japan's Norman Rockwell") Gōjin created with Yagyū Jūbē, published in 1967 in the mass-circulation weekly Shūkan Sankei. The president is, of course, a shogun - Tokugawa Iemitsu to be precise; and the cowboy is the samurai Yagyū Jūbē. This swashbuckling period drama is one of Ishihara's very few gekiga, and it displays in full his uniquely subtle artistic touch. The question is - how was an artist with such a polished style able to produce work at the frantic rate the weeklies demanded?

I think one reason is that Ishihara the artist was steeled in the white-hot conditions of immediate-postwar pulp mags - kasutori zasshi. ('Kasutori' was a rotgut saké brewed from dregs and drunk by the defeated Japanese. 'Kasutori zasshi' were the lurid magazines they enjoyed during the same period.)

Basically, Ishihara worked his effects in monochrome, by drawing and shading in India ink. He didn't touch screentone. Thinned India ink is an extremely unforgiving medium, and Ishihara's technique called for an astonishing mastery of shading. His monochrome pages are so finely drawn that you sometimes have to remind yourself that they actually are done in black and white. The accuracy and sense of speed in the fight scenes, the startling layouts, and the expert way the graphics get the characters' psychology across - all of these achievements look as fresh on the page as the day they were printed.

The graphic style is a lot like the Taiwanese manga artist Chen Wen's Toshu Eiyūden　(Heroes of East Zhu Dynasty). The book version was brought out by Jitsugyō no Nihonsha.

A subtle eroticism

Yagyū Jūbē is a mangaization of the TV movie, and it was produced as a tie-in with the TV series. So it goes without saying that there's not a great deal of gore or graphic sex on the page. The real-life powerplays of the historical period were extremely complex and delicate. Ishihara's fictional characters march into the action waving "Look Mom I'm in a Period Drama!" signs and hurl themselves into every nook and cranny of the times that were. They meet everybody. They're in on everything. I'd be astonished at Ishihara's nerve if I could stop laughing long enough.

In other ways, the storyline resembles the TV drama series Mitō Kōmon. This famous hardy perennial was shot over hundreds of episodes from 1969 to 1997. Plot: a disguised elderly relative of the shogun called Mitō Kōmon wanders with his sidekicks into some district to right wrongs and do good. Oppressed but virtuous locals help him without knowing who he is. Corrupt and lecherous local officials take him and his merry men on in a massive swordfight (no visible blood or injuries) after the second commercial break. His right-hand sidekick produces Mitō Kōmon's kick-ass-status shogunate seal. Everybody kneels and grovels energetically. Villainous officials are scolded, bound and carted off for punishment. Virtuous locals are rewarded. Smiles, corny joke, and roll credits. Mitō Kōmon never changes.

In Ishihara's story, the retired Jūbē heads off around Japan accompanied by Tanaka Kunie (a movie star) and his doppelganger, the pickpocket Sankurou. They expose corrupt officials and crooked merchants alike, and cut them down with Yagyū Shinkage Style swordplay. It's the same story in each episode.

So far so...Mitō Kōmon. But. Looking frame by frame at Ishihara's dense India ink illustrations, you notice that he has crafted all his main characters - men and women - as alluring, seductive presences on the page. Each and every one of them wafts across the paper trailing an extraordinary aura of eroticism. Especially their eyes. They all have the slightly vacant, drifting quality know as nagashime - 'flowing eyes'. It gives them a phantasmal, decadent sensuality. It's entirely foreign to Mitō Kōmon or anything like it.

Thighs! Loincloths! Guys in the tub...

And there's another thing about Jūbē that goes beyond just plain old sexy. Sure, there are set pieces like where the naked group of nubiles sharing Jūbē's bathtub get attacked by an assassin. Or where another naked beauty is drawn dangling from the ceiling in an S&M scene. But the really charged scenes are homoerotic drawings of pretty, nameless young samurai who just happen to crop up in the story.

There's the scene where the hero get water-tortured while disguised in a manservant's costume, with the standard white hotpants revealing a lot of thigh. His interrogator, a cherubic young samurai, makes do with a loincloth and nothing else. There's the pirate scene where the young samurai is trussed up and stabbed in the throat. And plenty of guys in hot tubs. It's not laid on with a trowel, but there's a definite appeal towards the gay readership and readers who like gay themes. In a sense, 'Japan's Norman Rockwell' was doing extremely radical work by getting material this gay on the pages of Shūkan Sankei in the late 60s.

In an even more striking episode, Jūbē sneaks into the warehouse of an Osaka merchant and stumbles across a vast throng of deformed freaks hiding out there. They look like something out of an old bestiary from the time of the shoguns. But there's nothing pathetic or miserable about Ishihara's rendering of these semi-humans. Though drawn from his imagination, they're weirdly full of life and liveliness.

At the time he did Yagyū Jūbē, Ishihara Gōjin was the renowned creator of wholesome illustrations for girls' and tweenies' magazines. What was really going through his mind?

Just trying too hard

These days, Ishihara Gōjin is known as an illustrator for gay mags under the alter ego Hayashi Gekkō. (This separate hat isn't an alias. Multiple artistic names are very common in all Japanese creative circles.) Anyway, back in the 60s, he was all about tweenies and cute drawings as far as the general public was concerned - but sometimes his natural eroticism would just overheat on the page, and he often got editorial advice to tone it down. He also got into hot water illustrating a serialized novel for the well-known suspense writer Edogawa Ranpō (the penname's a homage to Edgar Allen Poe.) Ishihara's illustrations often gave away later parts of the plot, infuriating the writer. The fact is that Ishihara was probably just trying too hard. He labored under an extreme give-it-all-you've-got-and-more mentality.

The paradoxical reason why came out in detail in an interview he did with the magazine QJ. Basically, it all boiled down to his experiences in the war. Coming under friendly fire from his comrades in the Imperial Japanese Army shattered him. (These men were all heavily indoctrinated with the idea that they were to die together in the service of the Emperor.) From there his road led - reasonably enough - to the kind of anarchism where he could proclaim "I don't believe in any form of authority at all". For Ishihara, the logical conclusion of this stance was the primacy of desire - and not just his own. "If it's consistent with my own desires, I'll do whatever it takes to fulfill the desires of other people. And I'll do it by any means necessary."

When you look at it from this angle, Yagyū Jūbē is a mindblowingly radical piece of work. So that's what he was up to, I think -. He was actually using this major, major mass-circulation magazine Shūkan Sankei...There's something wonderfully villainous about it.

I think that Ishihara Gōjin was just one of a whole group of gekiga artists following the same villainous path. They were all WWII veterans, and they all drifted into the manga-ancestral kami shibai scene after the war. Bonten Tarō (see further down) was another of them.

Ishihara Gōjin and Hayashi Gekkō

Ishihara Gōjin was born as Ishihara Toru in Shimane Prefecture in 1923. From childhood, he was earning money drawing caricatures of famous actors. After school, he crossed to Inner Mongolia at the age of eighteen. He trained as a linesman with the local phone company, while odd-jobbing painting scene cards for silent movies. At twenty-one he was drafted; he served in an Army Intelligence. Demobilized in China at the war's end, he spent some time in Shanghai before returning to Japan. First, he painted cinema scene cards in the local town of Matsue. Then he moved to Tokyo in 1948 and went to art school at Nihon University. At the same time, he did illustrations for the pulp magazines known as kasutori zasshi (see above). At this point he discovered Norman Rockwell and turned his attention to doing portraits. After that he worked on many fronts - magazine illustrations, kami shibai and manga.

Ishihara's golden period stretched from the mid-50s to the mid-60s. He did illustrated books with Kawauchi Kohan, illustrated for Edogawa Ranpō, and co-created full-page spreads for Shōnen Magazine with Ohotomo Shoji. As of 1997, he was still actively wearing two hats at the age of 75. As Ishihara Gōjin, he was publishing in magazines like QJ and Sekimatsu Club. As Hayashi Gekkō, he was illustrating serialized gay novels in Sub (one of the famous Gay magazine).

'Old Man Crazy about Drawing'

I think the main reason for the resurgence in interest in Ishihara Gōjin was his re-evaluation by the critic Takekuma Kentarō, who did the interview with him discussed above in issue #1 of QJ. At the same time you have to remember that the Mondo boom was in full swing in the 90s. A lot of people got interested in him again in this atmosphere. I'm thrilled to bits that his densely worked style - completely opposite to the light'n'delicate graphic en vogue in the 80s - garnered attention again in the 90s.

The two finest examples of Ishihara's work in the 90s are probably Nazotoki Bottchan, published in QJ, and his cover illustration for issue #1 of Seikimatsu Club. Nazotoki Bottchan (Botchan: the Mystery Solved) is a series of bold claims about the single most prestigious novel in the canon of modern Japanese literature - Botchan, by Natsume Sōseki. After extensive independent research, Ishihara came to the conclusion that all the major characters are gay, and he backed up his thesis with illustrations. The Seikimatsu Club cover is a trippy multinational group portrait on the theme of the Sharon Tate murder in 1968. Manson shares the spotlight with AUM Shinrikyō's Asahara Shōko, Deguchi Onisaburo, Yahowha13, Anton Ravey, Alistair Crowley and Unarius.

Even now, the dense, extreme graphic style of Yagyū Jūbē is there and in perfect shape. Long ago, Hokusai signed his work as 'An Old Man Crazy about Drawing'. Ishihara Gōjin is cut from the same cloth.