Adventures in Picture Reading 3: The How and Why Of It

by Nora

Had a conversation, recently, with a friend and longtime anime fan who was surprised to discover that my Japanese is rudimentary at best. She was surprised because a whole bookcase in my apartment is dedicated to manga and doujinshi, and it's stacked three high and two deep on some shelves. "Why the heck do you buy so much of this stuff when you can't read most of it?" she asked. Why didn't I, like most Japanese-challenged American fans, stick to translated anime and commercial manga imports? Herein lies my answer, using my latest acquisition to illustrate.

Most of the manga I own are written in simple Japanese---no dialects, not a lot of obscure kanji, expository artwork and layout. This is because I tend to buy stuff that's actually within my ability---meaning it'll only take me a few weeks rather than a few months to figure out what's going on. Every so often, however, I run across something so intriguing that I just have to take a chance on it, even if it's beyond my limited skills. That's what happened when I saw the cover of Youto Chinkonka (Tokyo Requiem).

I recognized the artwork immediately. Anyone who's gotten hold of a copy of Reijin in the last few years would know the work of Kasai Ayumi, the artist who draws such distinctive and beautiful cover art for the magazine. This wasn't a Take Shoubo/Reijin manga or novel, however, but a tankoubon published by Asuka DX, which immediately told me that it was shoujo and probably not boys' love. Interesting, I thought. How does an artist go from drawing covers for one of the steamiest 'zines out there, to vanilla shoujo? (Money, no doubt, but I digress...) And how can an artist who employs so much detail, computer coloring, and symbolism in big elaborate panoramic cover drawings handle the time-pressures of a serialized manga? In black and white, no less? Would her work in Tokyo Requiem have the same high standard as her Reijin art? Could it? And who were the three hot guys on the cover?

The last question almost decided me, but several warning signs gave me pause. First, the title on the cover was an unrecognizable jumble of stylized kanji, with no helpful little furigana (although there was an English version of the title alongside the kanji). That implied there was no furigana within---and which would mean years, instead of months, for me to figure out what was going on. Next, there was a teeny little box full of kanji under the title---a subtitle, I guessed, even more unreadable than the main title. More of a bad thing. Most damning of all was the fact that the volume number was given in some unrecognizable character that might have been Chinese numbering; I was forced to ask the storekeeper which volume on the shelf was #1. I've seen this on manga before, and I've always read it as an instant none-too-subtle hint from the author---a polite and oblique way of saying, "This volume deals with culture-specific subject matter depicted in an archaic or complex manner, and if you're going to try it, gaijin, you'd better have more than that crappy little kanji dictionary on hand to help you out."

In the end, curiosity outweighed nervousness, and I bought the book. Next came the hard part---figuring out what it was about. After years of doing this, I've learned to do some advance scouting before I dive right in, so I spent a while trying to figure out the basics. I got help right on the first page---furigana! I took this as an encouraging sign. Since the title had already been helpfully translated by the author, I started work on the subtitle, hoping it would tell me something about the story beforehand. Hit a snag almost immediately---the subtitle, on the cover, was written traditional-style, up-down and right to left. This is basic stuff, but sometimes it takes me a while to yank my brain out of English mode, so after about twenty minutes I finally realized "gaikenmato" isn't a word and read it properly as Tokyo Majin Gakuen Kenpuuchou Gaiden. Tokyo I knew. "Majin" was easy---as a recovering Dragonball addict, I knew that meant "demon person", or just demon. "Gakuen" was easy too, after years of CLAMP fandom: campus. "Gaiden" was familiar to me only because of my misspent youth in video game arcades playing Ninja Gaiden, but I had no idea what it meant. Checked the dictionary: biography, anecdote, or foreign telegram. I decided that "story" was close enough, because otherwise it would've meant I'd spent a good chunk of my childhood playing Ninja Telegram.

"Kenpuuchou" gave me a bit of trouble. I recognized the first kanji, which was the same as the name-kanji of the title character in Rurouni Kenshin, but I couldn't find it in my kanji dictionary. Then "chou" gave me a clue; I've seen it applied to the names of places in Yami no Matsuei (and who says you can't learn anything from comic books?), as a kind of suffix. So I thought Kenpuu might be a place-name.

So I now I had a vague handle on the title---Tokyo Requiem: Kenpuu-chou Demon Campus Tale. Or something like that. Next, the authors. Thanks to the furigana, I now knew that the book was illustrated by Kasai Ayumi, but the story had been written by someone named Imai Shiuuhou. Okay, now I was getting somewhere! I hopped on PRISMS, the Ultimate Manga Guide, and did a search for Kasai and Imai. Nothing on either. Undaunted, I then tried Google, attempting several romanizations before blundering onto Kasai-sensei's website. There wasn't much on the site I could read at a glance, but the one tidbit in English was very illuminating: "Based on the Playstation adventure game [of same title] directed by Shuuhou Imai." Fascinating---so this wasn't really a shoujo manga, but actually a media tie-in comic. A quick search of gaming sites led me to one (now defunct) which explained that the game was a kind of "occult mystery dating simulation", in which you the main character, as a student at Majin High School, must discover the truth behind strange incidents in Tokyo, with the help of fellow students. At one point in the game, the (male) main character is able to date another student---male or female. Ooh, fun.

The next Google link led me to what should have been my first stop---Manga Bonbons, that heavenly aid to Japanese-impaired gaijin everywhere. There was no new info about the authors, but Slash-kun's review of volume 2 had something even better: starter hints about the content and characters. Now I know that the most prominent of the hot guys on the cover is probably Kureha Mibu, whom Slash-kun describes as an "evil spirit hunter". The other two characters are probably Senou Jin, a karate expert, and Mikuriya Reiji, a detective. And I got a further warning: "...the story is something of a mystery..." Uh-oh. If a native Japanese couldn't figure it out, did I have any hope of doing so? (On the other hand, now I wouldn't feel so bad if I got it all wrong.) Yet here I ran into another linguistic hurdle. Slash-kun's English is ninety thousand times better than my Japanese, but there's still room for misinterpretation. "Evil spirit hunter" can have two meanings, after all--- that Mibu hunts evil spirits, or that Mibu is evil and hunts spirits. This confusion made it clear that I'd reached the limit of information I could glean from external sources; it was time to actually start reading.

I'll stop here, however, to get back to my original point. As you can see from this example, it takes a great deal of effort for a non-Japanese speaker to read a manga---so much effort that I'm not really surprised so many English-speaking fans choose not to try. On the other hand, look at how much information I found without actually reading the book. I've got a pretty good feel for the basic plot elements of the story, which should involve spiritual detectives, high school students, and mysteries of an occult nature. It was obvious who the focus of the story will be on, just by looking at the cover art: Mibu's placement relative to the other two is rather conspicuous. I can guess, by the fact that a video game director chose to have his/her story illustrated by an acclaimed artist well known in the area of girls' and women's manga, that the story is meant to appeal to the CLAMP crowd, perhaps as a grown-up version of CLAMP Campus Detectives. I even have a sneaking suspicion that the story will contain at least hints of m/m---although that might just be wishful thinking.

Still, even though it was easy to get all this information, it's a lot more work than it would take to read a book in English. So why do I bother? Well, for me it's the challenge. I like languages in general, even though English is the only one I'm fluent in, so it's fun to decipher the mysteries of another one, inasmuch as I can. It's also nice to flex my left brain every once in a while; I may never enjoy math, but a little deductive reasoning can be pleasurable even for us creative types, applied in the right context. Look at it this way: some people love doing crossword puzzles. They can work on 'em for hours and never get bored. I find crosswords unforgivably dull, but it's really just a matter of degree. Maybe instead of "find a three-letter word for canine" I need "decipher a five-character string of kanji on a book full of pretty boys and demons".

Whatever the reason, I don't seem to get this kind of challenge from watching anime---not even raw. The clues are too many and too obvious, in animated material. If I can't figure out what's going on from the action and timing and vocal inflections and background music, then either the director is incompetent, or I'm watching Noh theater. Anime gives me a quick and satisfying thrill, but then it's over. With manga, I could read these books for years and never get bored.

More later on what Tokyo Requiem is actually about; if I like it as much as I think I'm going to, I'll review it here. Probably in a few months, though---maybe sooner if I find a better kanji dictionary.