Manga Friday: ‘Red Snow’ by Susumu Katsumata
Red Snow
By Susumu Katsumata
Drawn & Quarterly, October
2009, $24.95
From a Western perspective, it
would be understandable to assume “gekiga” meant “short, depressing Japanese comics
stories,” even if that’s not the most accurate definition. (Gekiga can also be long depressing Japanese comics stories, of course.) And, since
the current exemplar of gekiga for those of us in the English-speaking world is
Yoshihiro Tatsumi, there’s a sense that those short, depressing stories need to
be set in the modern world, that gekiga
is a literature of urban ennui and the
dislocations of modern capitalism.
But gekiga is wider than that; Katsumata is another one of its
masters, and his collection Red Snow is
filled entirely with stories of a rural, pre-war Japan – but one as filled with
bitter unhappiness and struggle as any badly-thrown-up Tokyo apartment building
of the ‘60s. His rural landscapes have nothing of nostalgia about them; these
are insular, stifling, dull little farming communities, full of equally dull
and small-minded people, out in the middle of nowhere.
A few of these stories have
supernatural elements, but the only creatures that appear are kappa – mischievous water spirits that fill the
role of leprechauns or pixies in Japanese folklore, and were thought of as
being equally as common and prosaic. The fantasy in Red Snow isn’t numinous or uplifting – it’s just yet
another annoyance in a small village full of them, just one more damn thing to
have to deal with. Kappa are no worse than the rich guy in town who thinks he
has the right to seduce any woman around – who’s also called “kappa.”
Katsumata’s stories are earthy, encompassing
the sound of a monk killing his fleas and the violent battles of young kids
over minor, pointless thing. They’re similarly clear-eyed about sex, which
rarely works out well for the women in these villages, with their extremely
limited choices. If they’re not old women shattered by being raped as a young
bride (as in “Cricket Hill”), they’re prostitutes, or unmarried women getting
older but still trying to preserve their virtue, or middle-aged wives beaten by
drunken husbands. (They do occasionally get some fun in – as in “The Sack,”
when they trade a monk around town for favors, keeping him tied up in a sack
when he’s not performing.)
The men are physically stronger,
and have a bit more control over their lives, but they still don’t have a lot
of hope – they’re farmers or small shopkeepers, doing the same hard work over
and over again until they die. Katsumata shows many scenes of men making
charcoal, or sake, or carving wood – their work might not be all of their
lives, and might not be the part of their lives that they prefer, but it’s
ubiquitous and never-ending.
That covers sex and death – Red
Snow also touches on the third major theme
of rural life: drunkenness. There’s the husband who has to get drunk to have
sex with his wife – but who always gets angry and starts beating her first.
There’s the sake workers in the title
story, obsessed with sex even though one of the overseers insists they must
remain celibate while preparing the fermentation broth – and the girl who
cajoles one of them into stealing half-fermented sake yeast for her.
Katsumata doesn’t flinch from
showing rural life in its nastiness and ugliness, but he doesn’t revel in it,
either – these aren’t cautionary tales, or sensational ones, but matter-of-fact
stories of regular people leading regular lives. They’re all just trying to get
by, to have a little happiness in their lives – just like the rest of us. Most
manga stories would romanticize this setting, either making it a pre-industrial
paradise or a hell populated by every supernatural creature the manga-ka ever heard of. But Katsumata take a middle path – these lives
are not easy, but they’re recognizable normal human lives, in real village with
solidity and depth. And the stories in Red Snow may well be the closest any of us will ever come to living
in a society like this. I’m certainly happy I don’t live in villages like these, but I’m also happy that Red
Snow gave me a window into this
now-vanished world.
Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly
twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book
Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He’s been reading comics
for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal, mostly
book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.
Publishers who would like to submit books
for review should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Andrew
Wheeler directly at acwheele (at) optonline (dot) net.
