Sons of Loki

So I was thinking: what good manga have I been reading?

I always thought manga would be a great way to study Japanese: unlike novels you’ve got pictures to help you, and it teaches you real-world, colloquial speech rather than textbook phonyism. (If you’re looking for a good textbook that teaches with manga, I strongly recommend Japanese the Manga Way.)

But when I got here, I found it didn’t really help. People told me to read this, and read that, and I picked up a issue or two of Shonen Jump!, but none of it really engaged me. Was manga not the solution after all? Was I doomed to poring through textbooks to learn?

Not so! My mistake was simple: I was reading the manga people told me to read, not the manga I wanted to read. Ironically, the manga that turned it all around was one my friend Darlo recommended to me.
Yotsuba&! (2003-present) (よつばと！, “Yotsuba and…!”) is a slice of life, the daily adventures of a small girl, her adoptive father, “uncle” Jumbo, the family next door, and … that’s about it.

Only it’s a remarkably good manga to start learning Japanese with. The language is simple, everyday and colloquial; because Yotsuba is a pre-schooler, she doesn’t use kanji, she uses simple grammar constructions, and like any small child is always asking questions and stating the obvious. “What’s that?” “What does “global warming” mean?” “It’s a car!” “Wow! Fish!” So throughout the story, you have explanations of words like “air conditioning” and naming of animals and things and people, all for the benefit of Yotsuba but also benefiting Japanese learners. It’s perfect.

But most importantly, it’s a damn fine manga. It’s sweet and sad and funny all at the same time. The author, Kiyohiko Azuma, showed a remarkable knack for making everyday things seem incredibly poignant and moving in his previous work Azumanga Daioh, and he continues this in Yotsuba. She’s incredibly cute and lovely, but there’s always this bittersweet sense of childhood running through his work; a sense of transcendental, transient beauty that can’t last forever, so be sure to enjoy it when it comes.

Planetes (1994-2004) (プラネテス, from Ancient Greek ΠΛΑΝΗΤΕΣ “wanderers”) I’ve already written about, but it deserves repeating. I heard about it because of the fact that it was a rigorously researched, scientifically accurate portrayal of life in space, and when I finally found a copy of the first volume I wasn’t disappointed.

It’s beautifully drawn; Makoto Yukimura captures the emptiness and loneliness of tiny human figures hanging in the void of space, and the ship interiors are amazingly intricate. The cast are a ragtag, international band of astronauts all suitably messed up with their own secrets and reasons for doing the dull, hazardous job of Earth-orbit space debris clean-up, and there’s a cool Firefly-like vibe going on of all these different personalities coming together. It’s tough reading; with no furigana and complex kanji, it’s full of technical terms about air pressure and orbital mechanics, and it’s all stuff you certainly won’t learn in class, but that’s exactly why you should read it.

Kachō Shima Kōsaku (1983-1992) (課長島耕作 “Section Chief Kōsaku Shima”) is actually the first in a long-running series that charts the career of salaryman Kosaku Shima from humble section chief at Hatsushiba Electric to boss of the company. (I believe it’s one of the manga in Japanese the Manga Way).
I kind of wanted to buy it half as an ironic joke – I mean, a manga about a salaryman? What’s the plot: one day he falls over on the train when commuting? Takeshi from Accounting keeps drinking all the coffee? – but I found the first volume of Young Shima Kosaku (which is in fact a prequel that began in 2001) and it’s actually, in a surreally dull way, very fun. Shima is a salaryman with a heart of gold; he bumbles around being berated by his superiors but having his ass saved by their superiors, who presumably see something in young Shima-kun. He speaks up about one of Hatsushiba’s stores dumping old TVs in the river! He feels bad about letting down old people! He nearly has an affair with the boss’s mistress! (And when I say nearly, I mean he takes her home when she gets drunk, she comes on to him, and Shima is already half out of the door in panic when he runs into his boss coming home, makes his excuses and escapes. So, ‘nearly has an affair’ in a uniquely lame way.)
But I like it. I like Shima-kun, he who cannot get anything right. The language used is more immediately useful than Planetes‘s, obviously, and it’s a fascinating look into the hidden world of the salaryman and Japan’s social norms.
Look at him. Look how happy he seems. He’s actually jumping for joy at the possibility of working in a small cubicle for the entirety of the rest of his life! It’s hilarious and terribly sad at the same time, like when a clown dies.

Me, I ain’t goin’ anywhere
Just sit and watch the sun come up
I like it here — Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Albert Goes West”

How to explain the subtle beauty of staring out of one’s window at the crystal white towers of downtown Fuchu-shi against the distant mounds of the Kanto Mountains some twenty-five kilometres away? The heady joy of seeing the buildings of the police academy lit up in sunset orange as a lone baseball pitcher stands in the middle of the sports field, the glory of the eastern sky glowing behind him?

I’m feeling so bipolar with Japanese. I wake up in the morning and struggle through the lessons and barely understand anything and think “oh god why am I even bothering with this I feel absolutely nothing for this language”. But I was talking to George on Facebook, and he basically said that the key is to find out what you enjoy about learning this language, because the second Japanese becomes a chore all is lost. And Rob echoed that the other night, when we went for gyoza with visiting-from-the-UK Emily in Shinjuku, especially when he said “I want Matt to get good at Japanese!” That touched me. That made me want to ganbarimasu.

I do want to get good at Japanese. It’s just I’m in a hard stage. Textbooks can’t really teach me much, but I am nowhere near good enough to read novels or anything like that, and conversation – well, it’s surprisingly difficult to actually speak Japanese here. Conversations with shop staff – even if they don’t immediately speak to you in English – are necessarily limited. Today I cashed a traveller’s cheque at MUFJ in Musashisakai, but I fumbled my opening line of 両替をしたいんですが and dropped back to English. I’m not sure I have the confidence to really speak Japanese as much as I should, because I don’t know the words, but the best way to learn words is by conversation, and so you get a catch-22 that has left me in these doldrums of Japanese study.

That kind of leaves manga, but again it takes a lot of effort to read at my stage. Still, it is perhaps the best way to learn, being real Japanese spoken in half-familiar situations, and you can take it at your own pace. People have recommended stuff to me – I have Naruto, One-Piece, and something called Hell Teacher Nūbē – but I’ve been trying to find a copy of a manga I barely know anything about called Planetes, which I heard about on this website dedicated to ultra-realistic space-based science fiction. This piqued my interest, and today I found a copy and started reading the first few pages. I was surprised to find that even though I didn’t understand half of it, I wanted to read on. The art is pretty, and the writing intrigues me. This is good.