Manga, Sake for the Eyes

New translation of a 1986 text on manga for the magazine Art Press. Thanks to Ryan Waller for suggesting it on Bluesky. The text seems to come from a visit to Japan which, according to Pierre Eugène's map, Serge Daney visited in 1982.

Manga, Sake for the Eyes 

It is impossible to stroll in Japan without catching Japanese people in the act of tachiyomi. “Reading at the shop front” (the meaning of tachiyomi) is common practice, as is reading in the metro (for those not sleeping) or discreetly buying a manga from a vending machine. Those thick illustrated books bursting with colour, thrown away after being leafed through, are an integral part of daily life. One in four Japanese read manga—whether they are men, women, teenagers, seeking sentimentality or perversions innocently presented. You could say that Manga are like “comic books” (the biggest publisher is called Big Comics), but they are more trivial, basic and frantically produced at the rate of 30 million copies a week. They form the graphic landscape of daily life, and since the Japanese economic boom of the sixties, they have sustained the fantasies of every population category, including Japanese people abroad—even in Paris, you can find troves of manga in the Palais-Royal district, always garish, oscillating between shoddiness and refinement.  

On the metro platform 

There are manga genres: noble, popular, coded, exuberant. The world of baseball provides Mizushima Shinji with countless little stories in which athletes are disheveled and turbulent young people winning countless victories against thugs. Samurai stories have inspired Shirato Sampei to create the famous Ninja Handbook (Ninja Bugeichō), worthy of Kurosawa and brought to the screen by Oshima. Humanist and pacifist themes have long inspired Osamu Tezuka, today a real institution, with characters like Atom-boy and Robot-boy that became so successful they were known in America. But manga also function as illustrated sentimental romance novels (for teenage girls, who became avid readers in the seventies), bloody crime novels in black and white, and trivial, burlesque visions of daily life in which Japanese attempt to mock themselves—doing so especially cruelly since they hold the monopoly of this self-derision. Finally, 10% of manga are ero-manga: short sex stories, crude and naive, quickly read and abandoned on the metro platform—“sake for the eyes”. 

Manga are not recent. We know of the great “manga” of the early nineteenth century, which looked more like science manuals or catalogues. In the 1930s there was kamishibai, a paper theatre, with street artists unveiling illustrated epic stories (often with political undertones) for passersby. Kamishibai was killed by television, but it managed to coexist with cinema. The persons showing the drawings occupied the same situation as the benshi, the narrators of silent films. Modern manga were born after the second world war and have kept gaining momentum. After the economic boom, in the no longer famished Japan of the seventies and early eighties, manga reflected the era with kawai (“nice”, “cute”). Much to the chagrin of those like Tezuka, who had made manga a powerful channel of pedagogy and righteousness, today’s manga embrace a mix of mannerist violence and the era’s mushiness and pastel colours.  

No second degree 

Manga gets its strength from its innocence. There is very little “second degree” in these fast series of compulsive drawings. Great narratives, as elsewhere, have made way for monotonous staging of speedy fantasies (victory, fear, terror, rape). Since it’s a pro domo production, minimum precautions are in place, and the gaijin seeking to “connect” with the preconscious of contemporary Japan need only leaf through the thousands of quickly forgotten pages to read all about it. 

A popular art, almost anonymous, manga has its stars and its scribes, its fans (a magazine, Garo, aims to build a scholarly subculture) and its observers (Professor Yoshiya Soeda has already written knowledgeably on the topic). In any event, even stars (like Mizushima) work in studios, on a production line, with an artisanal organisation. The link between the great tradition of drawing and the most talented mangaka is still there. And there’s a real craft of the line, the interlacing, the angle and the detail that still endures with manga. Having survived Japanese cinema, manga have retained from cinema this incredible refinement in the search for frames and angles, sequencing and reframing—closer to the Belgium school than to American cartoons.  

It is of course with erotic manga that this art of the graphic mise-en-scène reaches its highest level of sophistication. A paradoxical sophistication, since the stories of ero-manga are unrestrainedly crude. The body of women becomes the theatre of unlimited settling of scores, ranging from pure and simple sadism to no less pure and simple butchery. Pedophilia, high school girls in panties, urethral eroticism, phallic overestimation, and stupid scatology are from the outset given for what they are. At the same time, the demands from censors are such that artists, who are not allowed to represent genitals, use framing as a real art of hiding—meaning they return it to one of its essential functions. If the laziest artists leave a blank for the unfigurable parts, the more inventive ones restore to “figuration” some of its fundamental ambiguity: that of a defiguration.  

First published in Art Press in December 1986 (issue 109). Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde, volume 3, P.O.L., 2012.