Iwa ni Hana

Cover image of the Jan 2010 issue of Comic Beam showing an illustration of "Choukoudou Shujin" by Yamakawa Naohito.

Choukoudou Shujin [澄江堂主人]

News reached me that the manga artist Yamakawa Naohito [山川直人] is launching a new series entitled Choukoudou Shujin [澄江堂主人] on the monthly manga magazine Comic Beam.

When I looked at the illustration on the left, my gut reaction was: “This is just what Chūzenji Akihiko would look like if Yamakawa-sensei were to draw a portrait of him.” Then my second thought was: “Well, since Chūzenji Akihiko was modeled in part after Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, maybe this manga is inspired by Akutagawa after all.” After researching on the internet a bit, it turns out that my gut feeling was right, “Choukoudou Shujin” was indeed one of several literary names by which Akutagawa Ryūnosuke was known.

Details on this manga seem to be scarce at the moment, but I am pleased to see Yamakawa-sensei continuing with his unique trademark medieval-engraving-like drawing style from his previous works such as -

Koohii mou ippai [コーヒーもう一杯]

This is a 5-volume manga series comprised of individual short stories that all have to do with coffee one way or other. Each of them is bittersweet with a philosophical bent. I have always thought this would be the sort of manga that the writer Murakami Haruki [村上春樹]* would have drawn if he were a manga artist. (Or least Murakami in his The Elephant Vanishes phase. I have fallen behind on his more recent works such as 1Q84 but have been told that his artistic/literary style had changed a lot.)

Anyway, my favorite story by far in Koohii mou ippai goes like this:

A man comes home one day and finds the cat he used the keep two years ago waiting for him. The cat has grown up and is apparently running his own successful business. The cat wears a suit and has a handful of employees by his side. They exchange news while drinking coffee, and the cat finally reveals that it has come to watch a movie called Coffee and Cigarette with him. The man is of modest means and has no DVD player, so the cat dispatches one of his underlings to fetch a DVD player at once, and the two of them sit down to watch the movie. During the movie, the man notices that the cat has fallen asleep. The cat apologizes and the man reckons that the cat must be tired from overwork. The man remembers that two years ago, the cat was still only a child, and he wonders what would be the human equivalent of two years in a cat’s life…

I think it is a unique story that illustrates basically the same concept as Shinkai Makoto’s Byousoku 5 Centimeter – that people live and grow at different speeds. On a personal level, it is a theme that I feel more profoundly than anything else. (I often feel like that cat when I meet with people from the past.)

In any case, I recommend Yamakawa-sensei’s works without reserve. Even if you cannot read Japanese, the unique, engraving-like artstyle is a still pleasure to look at. There is always a touch of the fantastical in the artwork, just like the stories themselves. Here are some random pages I scanned after the jump:

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