Odd Erotic Pleasures 2

When I was a kid, I always preferred hardcover books to paperback. I felt that only in the wide pages and large typeface of the hardcover did the text have room to move and breathe and be read to best advantage. Books make me see pictures, and the hardcover pictures were always large-screen panoramic ones. Paperbacks just felt too confining: small typeface on small pages. They cramped the story and turned my mental pictures into bitsy little illos. Later, when I started to tackle 19th century behemoths like The Three Musketeers and Les Miserables, I had a slight change of heart. Somehow 700 pages is less daunting in paperback than in a door-stopper hardcover. And reading, say, a detective story in hardcover reveals too many flaws in the work, like a made for tv movie seen on the big screen. To every genre its own format, obviously, but I like my literature big.

When my reading went from English kids' books to Japanese comics, the prejudice intensified. How not, when the comics *were* pictures already? Within days of being infected by the Papuwa virus I'd tracked down the tankoubon (the paperback issue) and started working my way through them. But when I found the ongoing episodes in the gekkan manga (monthly magazine) Gangan, then I was in heaven. Those large pages, those large pictures, that large and easily-read typeface (especially the easily-read typeface, when you're squinting at half-familiar kanji)-- that was what I wanted my manga to look like. To this day I have a romantic and nostalgic reaction to the Japanese monthly 'phonebooks' with their coloured covers garish with kanji and their pastel newsprint pages where This Month's Episode is blurrily printed in whatever the ink colour of the month is. ("Oh god, not pink this time!!") Now that I'm back home I get my manga fixes in tankoubon, and it feels just a bit unsatisfactory. They're small, concentrated, and pack several months' dosage into one volume. It's a rational and economic way to read, I agree, but-- Doing it episode by episode is just so-- different.

I admit, imprinting comes into it. Papuwa was my first addiction to a running series, and as addictions go it was baaaad. The monthly installment of my manga fix took on obsessive, one might say fetishistic, overtones. My life revolved around the 12th of every month when each installment appeared, and my desperation when the 12th was a national holiday that shoved the publishing date to the 13th, and my joy when it was a Sunday that brought it forward to the 11th, are among my most embarrassing Tokyo memories. Just buying the phonebook was a pleasure and a relief- hefting its solid weight off the shelf and knowing that yes, this month the miracle had happened again: I finally had another episode of my maddening series right here in my hands. Within those gaudy covers was a world of bliss unimaginable, and who knew what weirdness and plot twists, and maybe, finally, this month a few answers to my insistent gnawing speculation.

Of course I didn't read it right away. I take my pleasures more seriously than that. The magazine sat in my knapsack as I went from class to class around Tokyo, heavy and bulky in its brown-paper bag. I'd touch it when I pulled out my lesson plans and teaching aids and think tenderly 'Later.' I used to try little masochistic tricks to postpone the moment of reading so that the wait between fixes would be shorter. 'Just a page. I'll just read the very beginning and then I'll stop.' 'It's over there in its bag but I'm not going to read it today. I'll read it tomorrow.' That's a personal kink, of course. A certain Bananafish junkie who shall remain nameless located the one store in Tokyo that was open in the late evening, after the delivery guys had dropped off the Bessatsu Comics due to go on sale bright and early next morning. She'd show up at ten p.m. on the 13th and prise a copy from the owner, which she then read standing in the street. She did this every month for several years, which is understandable, but still something of a record. My thinking was that as soon as I'd read this month's episode and digested it, I'd be back to counting the days and weeks until next month's fix, grimly shinbou-ing (= patience /endurance exercised for brief excruciating periods) through twenty-eight miserable days of Still Not Knowing.

You have to understand that Papuwa is as much a murder mystery, full of dark hints about the past and deep family secrets, as it is a shounen gag manga. My seething frustration was fixated as much on what had happened as on what would. Against the backdrop of the monthly wait for the next installment there were all the other waits: waiting to find out who killed Jan; waiting to find out how Luzar died; waiting to find out what Harlem was going to do to Servis when they at last remet. The djkas spent the interim periods concocting their own answers to all this, and I'd read those and concoct my own. But there was still an unsatisfied feverish restlessness to the exercise. This was an explanation but it wasn't the explanation. That had to wait till the mangaka got around to telling us, and she took her own sweet time doing it. I can still recall the vast relief one cold sunny morning in January 1995 when I finally got the answer to the puzzle first posed on a grey afternoon in November 1993. Only fifteen months to wait for that one. I mean, not bad.

And, not to be unpleasant about it, the Papuwa mangaka is a woman best described as ijiwarui: mean to her fans. Disappointing fannish expectations, cutting favourite characters down to size, taking prolonged vacations, dropping series in mid-story: she does all of these. (She also reads djs, so she knows what direction the fans want the manga to go in. Then she goes the other way.) There was a certain trepidation in reading later episodes, a shrinking sense of 'What's she going to pull this time?' The only time I've ever seen a djka have a major tantrum-throwing snit, publicly and in print, was over a (really basic and asinine) new plot wrinkle in Papuwa.

For the impatient and those with weak nerves, this woman's series are best read in tankoubon, when all the rollercoaster thrills of a monthly reading are over and you don't have time to build up huge expectations that get blown away a few pages later. And of course I was much more rational about reading Basara, my other running series. For one thing, I wasn't besotted with half the Basara characters, only one. Something of the "700 page behemoth" mindset came into it too. I wandered into the series when it had reached vol 12 or so of the tankoubon, so I had a pretty solid read ahead of me to find out The Story Up Till Now. Somehow I wouldn't have wanted to do all that in phonebook format. But if Basara was a calmer experience, it lacked that passionate masochistic intensity that was my involvement with the other series. Basara was a wife, always patiently and placidly there on time; Papuwa was my mistress, and one just never knew if she'd show up or not.

When I think of high moments in Tokyo, I have to include the wonderful, hideous hell on earth of Waiting for Papuwa. It was like being fifteen years old and in love, before one's love affairs become rational social exercises. The highs, the lows, the joys, the woes... But of course that's all behind me now. You only get one first love. Not for me the fretful wait through two months to find out what will happen in the next episode of, let's say, Rika. No more the sense of relief when the heavy bulk of BeBoy Gold comes thumping through the door. No sense of anticipation or evil foreboding as I hold it in my hands, checking the cover to see if there's even a Rika episode in this month's edition. No world of bliss unimaginable, and who knows what weirdness and plot twists, and maybe, finally, this month a few answers to my insistent gnawing speculation. None of that. Well, not much of that. Well, I mean- Obviously, once a masochist, always a masochist. No more waiting for Papuwa. Now I wait for Rika.

(Parenthetically, I have to add that I'd much rather read Rika in tankoubon. A completed tankoubon, for choice. There's just too many mysteries and ambiguities in Rika, and for once the large-page format works against understanding. I don't know what it is, but I find it hard to keep track of who's said what when I'm reading the magazine. It's as though the mind won't process detailed information from a large pictorial source. Papuwa had a phrase here, an expression there, in amongst the jokes: perfectly handleable. In Rika everything everyone says is charged with meaning and everything may be important to understanding what's happened. In the tankoubon I can flip back to what So-and-so says back there that seems to shed some light on what's going on up here. It makes the clues much more digestible.)