We discovered Yukichi Yamamatsu’s work quite by chance, in Tokyo. We were walking along the publishing area of Tokyo, called Jimbucho, where the biggest manga publishing companies have their offices. We saw Shueisha and Shogakukan’s (two of the biggest manga publishers) buildings, and I couldn’t imagine that a comics company can have a skyscraper as its headquarters!!
Among them are nestled hundreds more smaller companies. On one of the window displays we noticed a book which had a Ganesha on its cover. That was curious! So we decided to go in and ask the publishers. They told us about the author, Yukichi Yamamatsu, who had gone to India with a quixotic mission to sell manga out there. His adventures included trying to start a manga school, and making udon (a japanese noodle) on the roadside in the dirtiest of slums near Patel Nagar. But his biggest enterprise was to get a manga translated in Hindi (he was insistant that it shouldn’t be in English) and try and sell them. The comic he chose was a late 60s work by Hiroshi Hirata, who specialized in samurai manga, called ‘Chidaruma Kempo’. He got a Japanese woman named Yoshio Takakura, who was studying Hindi at JNU to translate, got hundred copies printed, and took them to bookshops. They wouldn’t keep them, so he took them to the streets. He said he sold some. However, the book has the dubious distinction of being the first manga to be translated in Hindi, unless ‘Barefoot Gen’ was too (I am not sure). The Hindi in the book is very strange because of a novice translation, but it only adds to the charm. After he got back to Japan, he wrote a book length manga about his experiences trying to sell manga in India. He called it ‘Crazy guy goes to India’. To me, its the BEST comic I’ve seen with Indian characters, apart from Orijit Sen’s ‘River of Stories’. It is humourous, not ‘touristy’ at all, and its everyday Delhi characters ring true. Even though I cannot read Japanese, I could more or less follow the sequence of events. This is a comic that MUST be translated in English and released in India.
We met Yukichi after we got back from Tokyo. He was living in a ghetto in Patel Nagar in Delhi, amidst all the dirt and pollution. He was working on a new comic, this time an original Hindi short story called 'Cycle Rickshaw Waale Ki Dukaan'. A very kind and helpful Japanese woman named Mayumi Ishikawa, who was also doing Hindi MA in JNU, did the translation and played interpreter for us when we spoke to Yukichi. The book took some time to get printed, and overall, it was a vastly improved effort from the first one. Funnily, we received some copies of the 30 page comic while we were Japan. A Japanese mangaka giving us a Hindi manga in Japan! Strange! He graciously allowed us to upload 'Cycle Rickshaw Waale Ki Dukaan' on the net.
I thought such an effort by a manga author says something about how the Japanese view the art of comics. It is seen right from the beginning as ’self-expression’ of a kind, author-driven, and completely in the service of the story. They seem to prefer a certain economy. They prefer simple iconography to indicate feelings. And they don’t place a huge importance on being able to draw ‘well’ in the western sense. Rather, the more simply you can convey the idea and the story, the better. The important thing for them is to practice how to use the page, as in panel divisions and creating the impressions of sound and motion. The key thing in manga is the relevant use of icons for every feeling that you want to convey. It is no surprise that manga in general has a much less word count than western comics.
So…we hope ‘Crazy guy goes to India’ gets translated in English.
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