Oba Electroplating Factory

“Only of my self can I speak /

My world is as narrow the ant’s”

• Rachel Bluwstein

There are seven stories in Oba Electroplating Factory, the fourth collection in Drawn and Quarterly’s Yoshiharu Tsuge Library series. Five of these stories are about comic book artists / mangakas in one form or another. Those reading the backmatter commentary by translator and co-editor editor Ryan Holmberg will find an exploration of the I-novel, what people in the English-speaking world call “autofiction”, a form that heavily shaped Tsuge’s creative tendencies at the time. Not that he needed much push, it was quite clear to anyone reading the previous collections (all of which I liked, to various degrees) how much of his work draws not only from his personal experience but also from the image he projected outwards. The ‘sad horny man visiting an inn’ is such a recurring plot element it could be the name of an eventual omnibus. Still, there were limits, there were other types of stories in other types of genres; some of which didn’t include any character that might resemble or relate to the author.

Obe Electroplating Factory continues to walk down the autofiction direction, shedding behind it more and more of the non-Tsuge elements. If one wishes to be kind, one could say that Tsuge is in the process of finding himself, that much of what came before had been excess baggage – Tsuge formed by the whims of the industry, Tsuge formed by the habits of his co-creators (and mentor). This is Tsuge unleashed and unbound. But to what end? Again and again we meet these sad men, none of whom are particularly different from their successors or predecessors, fucking over (metaphorically) the woman they are with while fucking (physically) some other woman (whether she wants to or not).

The big difference is that this time Tsuge doesn’t really bother to pretend his men are unique characters, or even some everyman: they are all himself. Which means they all work in comics. I have a love-hate relationship with ‘comics about comics’; be it Brubaker and Phillips’ Bad Weekend, Ted McKeever’s Pencil Head or Taiyō Matsumoto’s Tokyo These Days. On one hand I find most of these stories enjoyable, they play to one of my main fields of interest after all; just like a naval history buff will get more of a kick reading a Patrick O’Brien novel than the average reader. On the other hand… it’s a bit too easy for me to enjoy such works, such that I’m inherently suspicious of them.

Comics, be it in America, Japan or Europe, is already an industry with its head firmly up its own ass. I guess this is true for every mass medium; but there is a difference between Hollywood talking about making movies (a world involving hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands of people and some of the most recognizable names in the world) and some guy crouching over a table taking pot-shots at someone who snubbed him at a comic con in 1997. It can be, it often is, incredibly petty, in a manner that’s only interesting to people who follow personal drama in old message boards. And the insularity simply feeds into itself, becoming ever more distant from the rest of the world. Tsuge was a creator I considered to be in full dialogue with his environment, his society, his times; yet here he is retreating into his shell.

With all that in consideration, it is no surprise that the two best stories in this collections are the one that have little-to-no connection to the world of comics-making. They are still about Tsuge, but they are divorced from that part of his life. The title story, a short about a child slaving-away in post WWII Japan, reminds me of some of the best stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi.  It’s a story about a world that leaves you no choice, nowhere to go but towards a hell forged specifically for you. There is something almost incidental on the way Tsuge draws the fate of one factory worker, his body ravaged by the impossible conditions. It’s easy to draw pathos out of human misery, a body so frail, twisted horribly, but Tsuge doesn’t labor the point. In pages 35 and 36 the man’s children don’t even seem to care as he wastes away into nothingness. They have already learned to accept death.

Likewise “The Incident”, a story viewed from the side by the Tsuge-surrogate, in which a man locks himself in a car refusing to move much to the discomfort of the neighbors, is closer in spirit to something like “Bartleby, The Scrivener.” Like Melville’s tale, it's about interruption at the natural order of things (as much as running business can be called “natural”) when someone simply stopped doing what is expected of them. There’s no explanation, no possibility of an answer. These two stories are a reminder of the first two collections in the series, in which Tsuge follows his muse (or the instructions of someone in the studio) in all sorts of different directions – the historical fiction of “The Ninjess” or the beautiful-ugly nature world depicted in “The Salamander.” These stories could, and oft did, surprise. In Obe Electroplating Factory one is seldom surprised. It’s all variations on a tune, and a rather limited tune at that.

Still…. this not to say that the current volume is utterly lacking in virtues. Even as his world narrows, Tsuge’s strength as an artist grows. His environments, in particular, are something to see. He never tries to overwhelm you, not with the natural beauty he depicts or with technical mastery; rather his strength is in finding points of interest, a beach at dusk, an old house illuminated by morning rays, a series of cramped buildings (almost rising one on top of the other), and depicting the truth of the thing. I have rarely felt the true sensation of walking through an unfamiliar city street, chancing upon something for the first time even though I am sure I have seen the spot a thousand times, as I have when reading the works of Tsuge.

Despite the inwardness of it all, Tsuge’s stories of the comics industry are interesting (when they are interesting) because they are about “the industry.” Not one of the Tsuge-surrogates depicted here is some beautiful artist yarning under the demands of the cruel market. If manga is presented as a shit industry, than Tsuge draws himself as a fly forever flying around the excrement¹. In that, you start to understand the presence of the “Oba Electroplating Factory” story, the only one showing the artist as a boy engaging in physical labor, in contrast to the rest of the stories of adulthood and more white-collar worries.

What Tsuge depicts here is someone who only seems to have risen above his previous station; in these stories of adulthood he is still very much the same boy working in the death factory ², caught in the wheels of a machine greater than himself. The comics industry is industry first, and when the artist encounters writers' block it's more than a matter of lack of expression, it’s a matter of a household that is more like a business stopping to a screeching hault; but the wheels of the industry cannot be allowed to rest too long.

Tsuge's depictions of the world, be it nature or cityscapes, are a mirror to his depiction of humanity. Something that’s fundamentally broken, but broken in a manner worth examining. It is a shame that an artist so apt to depict the world in its glory, all its horrors, decides to keep looking inside instead.

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