Three months ago, Bubbles Zine published Beautiful Monster, a suite of early stores by gruesome titan Maruo Suehiro, selected from his first three Japanese collections (1982-83) by the translator Ryan Holmberg. Now comes another Holmberg project, from Breakdown Press: the first-ever English volume of short stories by Hanawa Kazuichi, a fellow traveler of Maruo's in antique sex & violence — though Hanawa has been at it for nearly a decade longer, having debuted in the inescapable Garo in 1971. He has not had a book translated to English since Fanfare/Ponent Mon’s 2006 release of Doing Time, a memoir of the artist’s three-year incarceration in the 1990s for possession of illegally modified model firearms. In Japan, that title was an important early success for the alternative manga publisher Seirinkogeisha, formed by departed staff from Garo publisher Seirindō in 1997; Doing Time was serialized in their house anthology AX from its first issue in 1998, and, per company founder Tetsuka Noriko, its collected edition saved the publisher from financial disaster. It is no surprise a book like that would have made its way over here 20 years ago; memoirs from foreign lands fit well the "graphic novel" boom, which publishers like Fanfare, Drawn & Quarterly, PictureBox, etc. were eager to reconcile with the explosion of interest in translated manga.
But even before that, there had been glimpses of the earlier Hanawa. Some of you might have encountered him and Maruo for the first time in the same place: the 1996 anthology Comics Underground Japan, which the editor and translator Kevin Quigley put together for Blast Books with the help of Garo editor Shiratori Chikao. As there was not much of a "graphic novel" market at that time, the point of reference for Garo was American underground and alternative comics. Certainly one can imagine Slow Death running something like Maruo's "Planet of the Jap," a grimly sarcastic what-if-Japan-won-WWII portrait of martial dominance, sturdily drawn in heavy chiaroscuro and dotted with phallic jokes and ironic cultural references; on one page Japan's military heroes teem over a collapsed Statue of Liberty a la Planet of the Apes, while on another a patriotic ditty credited to the Ministry of Education is displayed over a scene of soldiers gang raping a white mother, then picking up her young son and performing a professional wrestling giant swing until his head explodes against a wall. The story ends with an executioner beheading Douglas MacArthur while ejaculating uncontrollably in his pants. Few forgot the name of Maruo after that.
On the other hand, I don't think I was alone in not knowing quite what to make at the time of Hanawa's entry, "Mercy Flesh," which was similarly explicit but to almost meditative ends. That story concerned a young girl, or a small woman — a cartoon figure, at least — kept as a servant in a country pen where Buddhas are held as livestock, eating and shitting like pigs. Considerable space in the story is devoted to the upkeep of the Buddhas, though the girl is eventually embroiled in a scheme by her master, egged on by a traveling pilgrim, to capture a truly fine Buddha through mystic strategy. The girl has her whole body painted in ink sutras, and she is kept in a cage as a pitiful object to attract the Buddha's mercy. A glorious ball of light approaches, but the spirit does not become trapped in the cage; rather, the cage is obliterated. It is unclear if the girl is freed or killed. Suspecting the pilgrim is actually the Buddha, the master draws a blade and cuts the pilgrim’s head off. But as you might suspect, killing the Buddha in the road merely dispels one's preconceptions. "Whaa?" the master remarks. "Oh well, my mistake."
Red Night offers little in the way of further explanation, but its excerpt of the early Hanawa is far more generous. The book appears to be a straightforward translation of a 2013 story collection from Seirinkogeisha, expanding on a 1985 collection of the same name, featuring 16 short comics dating from 1971 through 1986.1 Of the 16 stories, 11 were first published in Garo, 2 in the gonzo arts periodical Pelican Club, and 3 in various erotic magazines. This spread of venues brings to mind Holmberg's characterization of Hanawa's work in the exhibition catalog Garo Manga: The First Decade, 1964-1973 (The Center for Book Arts, 2010) as something of a last stop on the line in Garo's trajectory from a children's magazine of leftist instruction to a venue for depoliticized, often fetishistic aesthetics: "Appropriation of pre-surrender children's literature and visual culture had become standard fare within the Japanese artistic counterculture. ... But in Hanawa's case this entailed maximalizing that archive's erotics of violence to produce stories of human degradation so extreme and arbitrary that appropriation no longer serves any discernible political purpose." Or, as Holmberg later re-states: "From the appropriation of imperial culture to the critique of military nationalism, the concerns of earlier Garo manga are clearly at play in Hanawa's work, but now to the ends of sadomasochistic pornography."
Holmberg does not pen a new essay for this book, but his remarks from 15 years ago are mirrored in a 1977 essay by the Japanese avant-gardist and occasional manga artist Akasegawa Genpei (carried over and translated from the 2013 Seirinkogeisha edition). Akasegawa, however, means to congratulate Hanawa for producing comics that are of absolutely no use to any political party. To the Neo-Dadaist, Hanawa's work embodies absolute anti-authoritarianism because it rejects all accrual of political power, "shaped out of the negative powder of daydreams which were crushed and carefully preserved by the hands of a man who has never been duped by the culture and education fed to him since he was a small child" — resulting in a state Akasegawa calls "anarchist masochism."2
It's very tempting to theorize some throughline for Hanawa's work in this manner, because the work changes quite a lot over the years covered by Red Night — everything from the artist's narrative aims to the basic state of his drawing.
The stories in the book are not presented in chronological order. Nonetheless, to my eye they flow together in thematic passages. While the categories below are strictly of my own invention, I think they may help to describe how this book, while comprised of pieces that vary in quality, forms an interesting account of a restless artist's development.
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The first six stories in Red Night were published between 1972 and 1974. The first words of the first story, 1972's eponymous "Red Night," declare it a "so-called 'vulgar manga,'" which can be taken in several ways. Most obviously, it refers to the action of the story itself, which finds a samurai "ecstatically polishing his sword" before slaking the instrument's thirst in a variety of nocturnal encounters. Of course, I refer to the many legends of cursed swords that rouse a killing frenzy in the user, but you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise, as the protagonist's murderous exhibitionism stokes the estrangement of his wife, who disguises herself as a ninja and provokes her husband into a graveyard rendezvous. Believing his wife dead by his hand, the samurai launches into fabulous seppuku, blood oozing in long rivulets, sticking and smearing everywhere — the scene climaxing with the man fellating his own wicked blade.
Then the wife stands up, having protected herself with hidden chainmail. She is delighted that her stupid husband is dead and that she is free of her shameful association with him. This is another way the manga is vulgar. A kabuki play like Sakuratsuba Urami no Samezaya, for example, might depict the samurai-turned-merchant Hachirōbei murdering his wife in error, thinking her unfaithful; it is revealed, however, that she had only taken up with a wealthy man to earn the money needed so that Hachirōbei might recover a treasured lost sword. Hanawa's depiction is a bit closer to another historical vision of Furuteya Hachirōbei: the bloody muzan-e of 19th century woodblock print master Yoshitoshi, similarly set in a graveyard and suggestive in the placement of sword and mouth. Famously violent images such as these were paid homage by Hanawa and Maruo in a 1988 joint illustration book, Bloody Ukiyo-e in 1866 & 1988, but here in 1972 Hanawa denies us the catharsis of double suicide or the revelation of any good motive on the woman's part; she is a dokufu, a "poison woman," a femme fatale, as are many women in Red Night.
Neither is Hanawa's art specifically reminiscent of the dawn of the Meiji period, when the last of the woodblock masters reigned. His characters here are instead rendered with a razor-edged ovoid glamor often compared to the pen-and-ink art of Itō Hikozō, an illustrator popular in early 20th=century Japanese newspapers and children's magazines. Itō was a fervent nationalist, so roused by the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 that he painted a portrait of the mythic Emperor Jimmu with his own blood; Hanawa, in contrast, embraces nonsense along with the erotic and the grotesque. Another story, 1974's "Homecoming," finds a long-suffering wife caring for a grievously injured military husband — you might recall a similar scenario from the 1929 Edogawa Ranpo story "The Caterpillar" (or Maruo's 2009 manga adaptation, or Wakamatsu Kōji's 2010 film), where much emphasis is put on the perversity of the woman's suffering. Hanawa's story goes in a different direction, asking: what if she just fucked off? What if she didn't care? Who fucking cares?! Her husband is just a head in a jar, pissing from a hole in the bottom. Who cares?
What unifies these stories is Hanawa's irreverence: to patriotic and salutary illustrations for young people; to classics of Japanese literature and theater, even those ostensibly populist in aim; to ideals of loyalty, family, dignity, love. Even to storytelling expectations: 1973's "The Cat and the Stairs" seems like it is going to be a ghost story about a cat haunting a nun, but Hanawa simply pulls the plug after five pages with a Japanese-language pun that Holmberg is forced to explain in a note on the bottom of the final page. Incidentally, the translator was not speaking in metaphor when comparing Hanawa's Garo work to pornography; another two stories are quite similar, one from Garo and the other from SM Select, a bondage-themed sex magazine with pictorial features of women tied up in ropes with very fancy knots, where Hanawa was a regular contributor of illustrations. The SM Select story, 1972's "Heinous Beast," finds a nasty lady trying to marry her way into an eccentric elderly animal collector's family fortune through his deranged son; after suffering a close encounter with the old man's pet snake, our heroine discovers the son is actually a masked gorilla, and is duly dragged off to their wedding night. From Garo, 1973's "The Horrible Cockroach Boy" tells a similar story with some genders swapped, as a young man falls into the clutches of his bitter aunt and a maladroit cousin whose jealousy and isolation has transformed him into a mutant cockroach; the tale ends with the boy forced to become the bugman's personal slut.
But before we file these pieces away as simple bratty sensation, it is worth noting that Hanawa, who had some experience in amateur moviemaking, spent a portion of this same period working with the iconoclastic theater and cinema director Terayama Shūji on his 1974 film Pastoral: To Die in the Country. Terayama had engaged Garo contributor Hayashi Seiichi on his prior feature, 1971's Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets, and seemed to truly value the input of cartoonists; Hanawa's name appears fifth on Pastoral's staff roll. He contributed visual designs, most evidently in the film's promotional poster and various banners hanging on a circus tent set in the film, but Terayama also had him sketch out the general appearance of characters who appear in film's 'pastoral' sequences (a few can be glimpsed here); if you have seen the film, you know that some of it depicts the "real" life of a filmmaker based on Terayama, who is making a movie inspired by his countryside childhood, while some of it is comprised of scenes from that film-within-the-film, which the Terayama character physically enters in a futile effort to better his present by adjusting the past through art. It might therefore be argued that Hanawa's sense of artifice, his sensational version of bygone times, is the first layer of remove from Terayama's memories, so that Hanawa is almost a character in the film — and that Terayama was among the first to locate the heart of Hanawa's work in the agrarian surreal: the interplay of provincial realism and gruesome, hermetic folklore.
This is just what Hanawa would pursue later.
The next six stories in Red Night span 15 years, and all of them depict troubled rural families. Immediately we hit the best thing in the book, 1984's "Kura, Karmic Devil Bitch," a hell-for-leather tour of village life dominated by the all-consuming pressure to produce a male heir. Terrifying Kura marries into a farm family in the hills of Saitama and violates countless taboos to little consequence. Everybody prays for a boy to be born, and anything in the service of that goal can be excused. When Kura bears a girl, it is expelled from her body into a mulberry field like a toxic mass; the woman cuts the umbilical cord with the same sickle she has just used to kill a serpent. A bad omen, a bad result — Kura splashes her mother-in-law's face with boiling water for making her work while pregnant and clubs her father-in-law, a priest. She does not care about the newborn child, who is neglected and abused, but she will not stand for holy admonitions. Another baby is stillborn: worthless. "Who needs this stupid sack of flesh?!" she growls, flinging the tiny corpse over her shoulder. A bleak irony emerges. Girls are so undesirable as to provoke disgust, but Kura's lunacy assures her a place of absolute deference in the home, her "fool, trash, moron" husband locked in karmic bondage.
From its position in the book, we can observe this later story's connection to Hanawa's early '70s work: it is a thorough undermining of Japanese cultural heritage, with a prominent role played by a devious woman. But now he is not addressing artistic or popular culture, but village culture, religious culture. His character art by this time has adopted more 'realistic' proportions, faces round, lines thicker; there is a commitment to verisimilitude, planting the action in plausible, specific settings. At certain points Hanawa inserts photographs into the story; the village he depicts is a real place, and his characters are real people — this is where he lives. In Comics Underground Japan, Kevin Quigley recites a key episode from the Hanawa Kazuichi story: following his early successes in Garo, Hanawa's mother died, prompting him to move back to Saitama Prefecture, scaling back his involvement in comics in favor of Buddhist study, philosophical reading and farm labor. The gaps in time in this book imply some re-thinking of his approach.
The next two stories show another different Hanawa: his earliest work in professional comics, published in 1971 and 1972. Only three months separate the latter of these stories from "Red Night," and I have to presume the drawing was done earlier, because Hanawa's transformation otherwise seems miraculous, impossible. The artist of these stories is a student of the '60s Garo, exhibiting a heterogeneous graphic sensibility, juxtaposing varieties of character drawing — from squat, blobby children to gurning adult caricatures — against realistic, perhaps photo-referenced settings in striking and narratively disruptive compositions. Tsuge Yoshiharu casts a heavy shadow here, though Hanawa's subject matter is tightly focused on a child's observations of family. "Hellion" depicts a bad little boy's relationship with his mother, which both is and is not changed by a trip to a sadistic acupuncturist. "Cocoon" features another boy in diabolical conflict with his taskmaster grandmother and her affection for silkworms; the lumpen cartooning and squirmy horror genre setup recalls the work of a Hanawa contemporary, Hino Hideshi, another gross shit icon.
Yet both of these stories share the same familial obsessions as the later "Kura," establishing a continuity of Hanawa's interests. By the time we hit the two-part "Jar Baby," which ran in the aforementioned Pelican Club, his posture has become nearly essayistic. Part One relates a friendly old folk tale of an aged couple who cannot conceive, but miraculously find a baby in a jar floating down the river. Hooray! Part Two then reveals the story behind the story, which opens on a devilish bitch character not unlike Kura remarking, "the residents of this region in west Saitama are hopelessly stupid and unclean." Moreover, they attribute magical powers to the higher classes, boiling the used sandals of ladies from Kyoto into broth sipped by the daughters of provincial magistrates to encourage health and beauty. When the narrator's lover is maimed as the result of a foot-licking scandal, she dedicates herself to finding a man of higher station to give her a son of proper breeding - but her boredom and neglect leads to the baby in the jar, who grows to be a bad little boy indeed.
These documentary-like stories do not build to definitive endings; they conclude abruptly, as if Hanawa stops drawing once he has said what he needs. Quigley, writing in the '90s, claims that Hanawa "begins a manga without any preconceived plan as to the direction his story will take ... holding the theme and plot together with only his enormous powers of concentration." I've never heard this repeated anywhere else, and I am not sure where Quigley got his information. Did Shiratori, the Garo editor tell him? It probably wasn't the artist himself. Quigley relates a story from another editor, Yaku Hiroshi, who regarded Hanawa as "a nervous man, whose whose morbid fear of meeting people bordered on paranoia"; Hanawa supposedly confided to Yaku that if his neighbors found out he drew manga, they would stone him. This could be a self-deprecating joke from a cartoonist whose protagonists refer to the people of that area as "absolute and utter trash," but in a story like 1983's "How Not to Become a Cat," the bad family theme adopts a stance of avoidance, befitting the man Yaku describes. Very delicately drawn, lovely, the story concerns a woman, fed a lotus seed by a bodhisattva, attempting to project herself beyond the veil of this world to contact her dead mother; but she is foiled by the relentless terrestrial grieving of her father, to tragicomic ends.
I find myself wanting to call these horror comics. There is a salesman in the back of my head rattling its valise of earthly desires to get me to use this language, because horror manga is prominent enough right now that one can bootstrap older works into the general discussion with that framing. The comics are gory, mean, exciting — it fits. But there is a coloration to Hanawa's work that resists categorization, a sensation Red Night evokes without spelling out what it is or how it works. There remains a rare mystery.
The next two stories are erotic works, both published in Erotopia DX, which was an offshoot of the trailblazing Manga Erotopia; the most cultured among you will recognize that immediately as the home of Maeda Toshio's Urotsukidōji ("Legend of the Overfiend"), another distant star in the constellation of ill repute. These stories are both from 1981: "The Woman of the House" is a bawdy irreligious tale of a type familiar to every culture, about a man who pretends to be a god to trick a credulous woman into sex; "The Priceless Jewel" expands a ghost story from the millennium-old Konjaku Monogatari to tell of a man's adventure with a pair of lascivious women, which transforms into a very '80s blend of yōkai tale and UFO Forteana. These are both different from and similar to the other stories in Red Night.
They are different in that they are very "together," with rising and falling action, carefully developed characters and tidy endings. Hanawa's character art has already completed its transition to roundness by this time, but there is an unusual amount of attention paid to body language and facial expressions, with pages sometimes breaking down into small boxes that fixate on one part of a character as they gesture or emote. Was this Hanawa's strategy to create a sexy atmosphere by emphasizing the body? Did Erotopia have especially strict editors looming over his manuscript? Or was this a natural consequence of Hanawa's evolution?
The similarities between these and other stories in the book are those of theme. As porn, they are not much more explicit than other stories in Red Night - a man getting peed on by a woman would not be unusual in Hanawa's Garo work. And also, while both stories begin as types of male fantasy, by the end the men are dominated by the women. Recall Akasegawa Genpei's term, anarchist masochism. "I'll leave the sexual details of masochism to the specialists," he writes; Erotopia is surely a specialist venue in that regard, but Hanawa's depiction of male submission is less about pleasure taken from a power imbalance than a man's acceptance of his fate. I think it would be a big mistake to say that Hanawa's work is feminist, because while the wicked women of these stories are rarely punished — the only real instance of this occurs in a story for a bondage magazine, where it feels like a genre requirement — they are regarded not with warmth or empathy so much as a terrified admiration, and they are not admired for their capacity to improve society, but in the way one admires a lightning strike.
That is, the psychological point of view is that of one beholding their powerlessness. They are the ineffectual unruly child of "Hellion," the misled samurai of "Red Night," the maimed husband of "Homecoming," the punished sex slave of "The Horrible Cockroach Boy," the puzzled nun of "The Cat and the Stairs," the ill-fated Buddhist of "How Not to Become a Cat," the dead and abandoned and feral, hungry children of "Jar Baby" and "Kura, Karmic Devil Bitch." The irreverence of these stories is not a type of advocacy, it is a means of acceptance. Hanawa is not Sade, he is Justine; and does Justine never smile?3
Red Night concludes with two stories of paranoid protagonists pursued by phantoms. First, there is the most recent piece in the book, 1986's "Shadows of the Heart." By this time, Hanawa's art has become extremely lush with textures: meticulously hatched twigs and grass, infinitesimal strokes forming thatched roofs and stone walls, vegetation often swallowing his characters, which now range from plausibly proportioned figures to the story's blobby girl lead, who looks very much like the girl character from Hanawa's story in Comics Underground Japan. In fact, this character design, adopting different roles, appears in many of Hanawa's works, from folkloric serials for major Japanese publishers to his entry in L'Association's Comix 2000 to his semi-fictional Doing Time follow-up Before the Prison.4 In here, she is much the same character as in "Mercy Flesh": curious but not especially motivated, content to simply get on with her work but helplessly roped into supernational misadventures. Moved to momentarily care for a deformed child that is actually a yōkai, a tengu — a mischievous creature known at different times for guardianship and desirousness — the girl finds herself unable to shake her immortal companion, which seems equally prone to putting her in danger and rescuing her from it.
If we read all of these stories together, as expressions of Hanawa's point of view as an artist from 1971 through 1986, it might be concluded that the recurring girl character, who only appears near the end, is Hanawa's presence in his comics — a floating point of view, an eternal observer who becomes helplessly embroiled in the action. This is complimented by the very last story in Red Night, 1974's "The Neverending Predicament," which adopts one final new form. The story is composed of uniform tiers of four horizontal panels. The art does not depict any character directly, but presents POV images, imagined scenes, off-center glimpses of characters spied from behind, a map, a falling leaf. Dialogue bubbles report from the corners of the image, as if spoken off-frame, while an omniscient narrator tells of a boy who finds a kitten stuck between the spokes of his bicycle. He cannot get the kitten out, but he cannot move the bike without hurting it. He is in the middle of the road. A car is coming. He is stopping traffic. He imagines the motorist is going to get out of his car and beat the shit out of him. He is scared he is going to die. He imagines himself in the future, when this is all over. The motorist begins speaking pleasantly with a passerby, which the boy is certain is a veiled threat to him. The cat is still in the spokes. The boy cannot move it.
When Doing Time was released in English, a common reaction was that Hanawa seemed extraordinarily unbothered to be imprisoned for what many observers felt was an excessive length of time. He is almost giddy on the page in anticipation of simple things like mealtimes, eagerly making note of every dish on the schedule, every article of his prison-issued clothing. Fascinatingly, he does the same thing a few times in Red Night — in the title story, in 1972, he depicts a body writhing in agony on futon, labeling each part of the body and each part of the room as if to count the pain points, a total awareness of everything involved in the body's suffering.
The truth of suffering in Buddhism is that it permeates life on this Earth, and that Earthly desires attach one to the suffering of transience. The "Hanawa Kazuichi" of Doing Time accepts suffering, notes his surroundings, and struggles incessantly with desire, for food, cigarettes — freedom? Maybe these comics are the same. The masochist absorbs every blow. To accept the myriad cruelties depicted in these stories is to render the self worthless, and to be worthless is to have no attachment to the transient world, vivid like only an appalling dream.
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The post Red Night appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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