Kawasumi Ako lives a mediocre existence working in a video rental store (i.e., a dead industry) as a full-time part-time clerk (i.e., a minimum existence). She is thirty years old (i.e, over the hill apparently for women in Japan). And although she is unmarried (i.e., fairly common these days in Japan), she does have a boyfriend, but he is pretty much unconcerned about Ako and their relationship. Probably worst of all for her is that Ako realizes she has no social media presence, something her much more successful former classmates have in spades. One magical night Ako collapses in the bushes of an urban planter; she glimpses from ground level a skateboarder sail over her, mere feet from her face. The high-flying rider is named Momo: she’s a woman. Momo, we later learn, is a dead ringer for Ako’s old classmate Asuka (a big actress who goes by the name of Rinko), upon whom Ako may have had a crush. Momo and her rad friends disappear from Ako’s sight after being chased off by a beat cop, but the wheels start to turn in Ako’s brain. Like any normal person, Ako starts to stalk Momo online, as well as by showing up at the same places, hoping to talk to her new hero. When she cannot make this connection, Ako—at age thirty— decides to learn skateboarding on her own. Thus begins Maki Hirochi’s Sketchy.
Sketchy was initially serialized in Monthly Young Magazine (Gekkan yangu magajin in 2019) before moving to the Weekly YM venue. Kodansha first published its tankobon paperback (which matches the English translation volume) on December 12, 2019. Maki Hirochi had by this time already gained attention for her stylish Is Kichijōji the Only Place to Live? (Kodansha, 2015-2018; published in English only in digital format), which was already adapted for live-action television during the middle of that series’ run. To this reviewer’s eye, her characters have the bright-eyed look and compelling appeal of a Higashimura Akiko manga, but Maki Hirochi’s art is far more stylish. I could never imagine anyone wearing clothes like the characters from Higashimura’s manga—but Hirochi’s dresses her characters in outfits that real people would actually wear. She also has action sequences that pop visually—as opposed to the comic and stagey setups seen in Higashimura’s manga, as exemplified in Princess Jellyfish.
Like Higashimura’s manga, in Sketchy age matters a lot. If you are not Japanese (or if you do not assiduously read the various New York Times articles about sexless Japanese couples and unmarried and unbabied adults) you might not pick up on how much age matters for this manga. As an early thirty-something (in Japanese called ara-sā or aroundo sātyī), as an around-thirty woman in Japan, as a manga character in those categories, Ako is basically due for a mid-life crisis. 1 Given the huge industry of shōjo (girls’) and josei (womens’) manga in Japan, it’s unsurprising to have a character like Ako who is getting older but still wondering what kind of woman she is. This existential angst drives our protagonist, as well as her sisters-in-arms companions, into skateboarding. The direction Sketchy’s characters take, to drive away the blues of their lovelorn and mind-numbingly boring work lives, is refreshing. The ways that Ako and her friends discover skateboarding as a life choice are drawn by Hirochi in such plausible, imaginative, and visually exciting ways. The art often goes wide and off the walls to showcase their skateboarding epiphanies. Although Ako’s first catching sight of Momo in mid-jump is a stunning two-page spread (Figure 1), I personally think her younger sidekick Shiho has the better wake-up call (Figures 2, 3, and 4). Having been belittled and shamed by her family and boyfriend for her failure to pursue a real job (she’s Ako’s co-worker at the video store), Shiho-chan is depicted across four marvelously expansive and wisely quiet pages to show how “so freakin’ cool” skateboarding is. For her, Hirochi depicts in subtle, moment-to-moment transitions a nearly fetal Shii-chan surrounded by a white womb of boards, wheels, and women on boards with wheels. Natsume Fusanosuke terms these seemingly boring repetitive panel transitions “events” (jiken), 2 because even though a manga artist may repeat a panel with little variation other than a zoom-in or zoom-out, what seems static and unexciting is actually very exciting and pivotal when handled like this by a skilled pro.> “So freakin’ cool,” Shii-chan says about her newfound love. I was saying the same thing to myself as I was reading how Hirochi ends this chapter in Sketchy.
If only such bold visual stylizations came more frequently. Instead, Hirochi falls back hard on the trope of the failed ara-sā thirty-something woman. Shiho is not yet on the edge of this demographic, but Ako, and the later character Takehana, fit that curve. The desperation of this yet-to-be-housewife was covered much more effectively, both imaginatively and humorously, by, again, the great Higashimura Akiko. Within her masterpiece, Tokyo Tarareba Girls 3 In her “what-if” (tara-reba) manga, Higashimura puts her thirty-three-year-old women through the paces, forcing them to realize their dissatisfaction with the single life comes from their own shōjo-manga hang-ups and fantasies about landing the perfect man. Higashimura is a master of interrogating social norms with over-the-top comedy, usually in the form of bold visual chaos. She loves her characters as if they were her own children and wants them to find a perfect world where they can accept imperfections. An even earlier manga than both Sketchy and Tokyo Tarareba Girls that tackles the suffocating lives of theoretically-past-their-prime women is Anno Moyoco’s Happy Mania (Happī mania, 1996-2001), perhaps her greatest work (and still somehow out of print in English from its original Tokyopop release back in 2003). Like Hirochi’s Ako, Anno’s Shigeta Kayoko seems incomplete without the right man. However, Kayoko is a much stronger and more compelling protagonist than Ako in Sketchy. Manically determined to find true happiness through romance, Kayoko engages in crazy, dizzying schemes that now would seem to us now as inappropriate and stalker-y. Happy Mania 4 deftly balances between josei manga and gag manga. It’s a genius work. In Hirochi’s Sketchy, Ako, on the other hand, simply falls on her literal butt as she quietly tries to navigate how to live as a woman in contemporary Japan. On a scale of truly sensitive and thoughtful josei manga that cares about the condition of today’s woman in Japan, there is Happy Mania, then Tokyo Tarareba Girls, and somewhere down the list is Sketchy. Looking at it that way, Sketchy is derivative. And yet, there is more to Sketchy. After all, it is first and foremost a skateboarding manga. 5 Unlike Attack on Titan, Sketchy can actually teach the reader how to do something useful and fun, like skateboarding. Such knowledge or skill-based manga are quite ubiquitous in Japan, even though they may not be translated into other languages for Western audiences. Think about Taniguchi Jirō’s Solitary Gourmet (authored by Kusumi Masayuki), which has been overdue for its English translation release, which has had a huge following in Japan with numerous reprintings and a television show adaptation. (Kaiyodo even produces an action figure of the titular character. I admit to owning one.) In Gourmet, when it comes to the skill at visually depicting both the qualities of Japanese food and the gusto Japanese take in savoring food, Taniguchi is pretty much second to none. In a discussion of his talent as an artist, critic Natsume Fusanosuke once claimed that Taniguchi’s drawing of a mame-kan (black sweet bean) confectionary was a work of art unto itself. Hirochi is not the Taniguchi of skateboarding
manga, but she is good. Her slow walkthrough of Ako’s learning how to properly get on a skateboard and start to move is masterful (Figure 4). Even an old fart like this reviewer could see himself trying it out at least once. (Although I will probably wait for volume two of Sketchy to get more tips, you know, just in case there is, ahh, more I should learn, first. Can’t be too careful, after all, I’m “around fifty” [ara fifu]). Other great examples of Japanese know-how manga are Kazuto Tatsuta’s ICHI-F (Kodansha, 2014-5 [2017]), which is a monster of a book that shows how temp workers were brought in to clean up the leaked radioactive material at the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactor after the March 11, 2011 triple disaster. ICHI-F, which reads more like a journalistic gekiga, is far more hardcore than Sketchy is at showing procedural details; even so, I loved Hirochi’s pacing and imaginative framing of the panels of skateboard instruction. I could easily see a young person (or someone young at heart) reading this book and wanting to go try out this crazy stuff. Had Sketchy put all of its chips down on skateboarding how-know, like a Solitary Skateboarder, I think I would have been sold on it. However, Hirochi makes the reader (and herself) wade through a lot of tedious depictions of the humdrum lives of her protagonists. The leaps in skateboard excitement come few and far between.
That leads me to my favorite kind of manga – manga about Japanese daily life (seikatsu) – and what Sketchy should excel at, but doesn’t. In “Daily life” comics, you just read people eating, riding the train, or reading manga themselves. Sketchy has the potential to be a great seikatsu skateboarding manga. For me, a great manga will combine the nitty-gritty of Japanese seikatsu-lived life with some larger ambition from the artist all the while making the nitty gritty as interesting as the work’s larger ambition. A bad manga depicts the humdrum as boring but it also makes it boring for the reader, the artist teasing the reader, making one so desperate and hungry for some larger shift in the characters’ lives. Compare Tagame Gengoroh and Hirochi on this point: Tagame Gengoroh, in his My Brother’s Husband (2014 [2017]), weaved back and forth Japanese daily life aspects while navigating his main character away from his homophobia to his eventual acceptance of his gay brother-in-law. Tagame transforms episodes about bathing, about sleeping arrangements, about walks around the local park, into larger mediations about being comfortable around people with whom you thought you never could be comfortable. My Brother’s Husband ultimately is a manga about being comfortable in Japan. In Sketchy, Hirochi shows how three working women discover skateboarding as a means to transcend the tedium of their jobs and social lives. In the hands of a great artist, the boredom of a character’s daily life, no matter how tedious, is never boring. In Sketchy, the details of the failed lives of these young women are pretty monotonous. It is no wonder they find religion and come to worship at the altar of Skateboarding- Sketchy does feel a little preachy about its sport. Hirochi is champing at the bit to show just how awesome skateboarding is, so she spends endless pages bashing non-skateboarding life for being so lame. On one hand, that is understandable: it is a set-up but, it’s a lame way to go about it. After putting down Sketchy, I doubt most readers will be able to recall, a day later, most of what has transpired across the 200 pages, outside of the skateboarding scenes. And that’s a shame, because Hirochi can do good “boring” seikatsu if she wants to.
Little moments in Sketchy do remain with me, as I tend to overvalue seikatsu daily life in manga. Reading Sketchy, I wished Hirochi did not waste good opportunities to make little daily-life gems within her character backstories. Often the cliches about Japanese society just run on and on. Yet, there are extraordinary flashes of seikatsu artistry: The scene in which Skateboarder #2, Shiho-chan, punishes her boyfriend on a hot day by plopping a cold soda bottle on his naked thigh is memorable, establishing her sharp and amusing character in two effective panels. Hirochi masterfully uses a two-page spread of Ako having a double-vision (mitate) moment flashing back to once seeing cherry blossoms get blown and caught up in a friend’s hair, all while she is buried in the shrubs and blossoms of her present, a forced conceit handled with skillful and graceful repetition. Once floored by a cherry-blossom beauty, Ako now is similarly floored by the first cool skateboarder she has ever laid eyes on (Figure 6). In a short stack of quiet panels, Hirochi presents to us Ako: a thoroughly modern Japanese woman, through repetitive and minimal panel sequences that are nonetheless very efficient and “event”-ful.
Running throughout Sketchy are a number of manga threads that even Western audiences have seen before. As a sports manga, with an emphasis on learning how to perform the sport, Sketchy is quite good: even a klutz (like this author) could imagine how to get on a board and start to roll down the street. There is much joy in Hirochi’s depictions of Skating 101 know-how. Another thread is the plight of around-30 “lame and loser” women who have either let themselves be passed by in the romance race or somehow disqualified themselves from it. In that sense, Sketchy is yet again far inferior to Higashimura Akiko’s Tokyo Tarareba Girls, as Higashimura questions why such women would be considered losers in the first place. Hirochi does not question this categorization—she just goes with the flow. A final strand of DNA for Sketchy is the seikatsu manga, where the author spends many pages and much time depicting the minutiae of her characters’ lives, but often only to demonstrate just how awful and boring their day-to-day life is: these women need to get to their boards, fast! In that aspect, Sketchy flops. There are moments of superb observations and quiet storytelling, but they don’t seem to excite the author, so they can’t excite the reader, either. Why can’t Sketchy have it all? At the end of the first skateboarding lesson for Ako, the chapter closes with her almost breathless, yet she is able to say, “Still…skateboarding is so much fun.”, an epiphany for her. After reading the first volume of Sketchy, I wished I could have whispered to myself the same thing about this manga.
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