Hirayasumi

Shinzo Keigo is one of the most interesting and talented manga artists of the last decade. Is this a bold statement? Just read the first pages of Tokyo Alien Bros, and I’m sure we will all agree that we are dealing with a brilliant mind that has no fear of looking at today’s world with sharp eyes, to describe it with disenchantment, and smart irony. His manga stories can find comparison to the works of other contemporaries working in other mediums, such as novelist Murakami Haruki or director Hirokazu Kore-eda; the first for a mutual love of magic realism and the latter for a great devotion in depicting human relationships inside dysfunctional families and in a society that is always on the verge of emotional collapse.

 

The most recent work by Shinzo Keigo is the series Hirayasumi, beginning serialization in 2021 on the pages of the magazine Weekly Big Comic Spirits by Japanese publisher Shogakukan, and is now translated in English by Viz.

In Hirayasumi the story revolves around Hiroto, a 29 years old freeter - a word that in Japan defines young people who do not study and do not engage a steady job, in order to live more freely with more spare time for themselves. Hiroto lives in Tokyo with a elderly woman who suddenly dies at the beginning of the story, leaving her home to him, whereupon, Hiroto’s younger cousin, 18-year old Natsumi, moves in as well, coming to Tokyo to study at the Academy of Fine Arts.

 

The two slowly become attached to each other, developing a relationship not easy at all to describe; she could be like a little sister to him, but there is more to it than that. Hiroto’s inability to build his own role in the society in which he lives, his state of constant fluctuation in life, make him ineligible for any definition other a social pariah in a world strongly based on competitiveness. He truly lacks the persona and gravitas to be a father figure to her, nor a big-brother-like one. His apathy in life plays a big role in the story, and the girl clearly comes into his world shaking it up and turning it upside down.

 

What comes after this incipit is a series a brief everyday life events where the two gradually establish a strong connection. Hiroto sees Natsumi making mistakes, struggling to adapt to her new life in the big city, trying to grow up into an independent young woman, he always silently steps up to help her. She was raised in a small town, and evidently too shy for the big city, has difficulty establishing connections and making friends. The topos of the country youth coming to the big city is frequent in Japanese manga and anime, as famously shown in Isao Takahata’s anime, Omohide Poro Poro.

Strangely, while Hiroto sees himself growing out of touch with the world around him (still morning for the loss of the old landlady, seeing old friends grow apart as they become parents), on the other hand he is doing his best to push her into having a social life and adapt at the new school. From Natsumi’s perspective this is a coming of age story, she is portrayed as naïve (maybe even too naïve for a realistic portrayal of a modern person), who learns about about the real world and the big city in a trial and error path. From the young man's perspective, it seems like his own coming of age path has never arrived. Narratively speaking, he finds himself in an uncommon position. Hiroto is the the main character here, but at the same time his approach to life is so passive that, from a distance, he can be merely considered as a narrative device. His life seems to never bloom, the life he has chosen never fully finds meaning except when he can be useful to Natsumi’s growth. Hiroto's little knowledge and experience of life has little meaning to him, while to Natsumi, he is a saviour. 

Shinzo sings the blues of a generation, the story of two simple lives, with all the insecurities, the little joys and misfortunes, the daily conquests and disappointments. The series’ chapters give a glimpse into what life actually is in Japan for the twenty something generation with small details and ordinary life scenes, like an instance where a stranger offers a bottle of water to a drunken Natsumi sitting on train station platform (apparently a common kind practice to have with drunk people). Shinzo has an ability to investigate and expose the inner mind and soul of the characters, one piece at a time, helped by an external narrative voice that gives the whole thing a nostalgic and realistic touch. The soft line of Shinzo’s art, the prevalence of white spaces over a solid use of the ink, makes the scenery dazzling, as if coming out of a dream or a distant memory.

 

Insecurity and alienation from life (subtle, and at the same time more real here in Hirayasumi than in Tokyo Alien Bros) are at the center of Shinzo's mangas. Swinging into the lives of Shinzo's characters is such a bittersweet, fascinating and cruel experience. They are real and yet so elusive and intangible, just like Shinzo's art, with its lines so thin, often barely visible. Sometimes it looks like he is telling the stories of two ghosts (or outer world’s creatures, aliens again, just like in Tokyo Alien Bros) who have infiltrated our planet, or are trapped here. Yet those little fragile individuals are so ordinary and genuine.

In all of his stories, Shinzo walks a thin line between realism and a foggy representation of the real world. Nevertheless, what Shinzo’s characters go through in their life is so credible. Shinzo is able to faithfully describe what it really means to be a twenty-something today, without a clear perspective of the future, without hopes for a better or stable future, and without much expectations at all. Someone who is in his forties like me would say, "isn't that what we all went trough at that age?" But no, apparently things went south for Gen Z, a pretty common and serious condition in Japan, where the freeter term was coined, and hikikomori, as well, a worrisome plight spreading in the rest of the first-world. The lack of faith in the future that effects Gen Zs is what Shinzo Keigo shows in his comics, without the pretentiousness of giving a lesson to that generation or explaining other people’s reality to older readers.

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