I Really Should Read This 22: Ping Pong Volume One, by Taiyo Matsumoto

Ping Pong Volume One, by Taiyo Matsumoto

1996, English Edition 2020

I consider myself a fan of Taiyo Matsumoto's work, that I've read in English. I have Tekkonkinkreet, Sunny, and Cats of the Louvre. I'm not always taken by the story of these books, but I love the atmosphere and emotion of it. His work has an alien quality that I need to appreciate in a different way from conventional comics or manga. 

The cover of the book isn't very good; this is a better taste of the book

But I was hesitant to get Ping Pong. It's older work of his, done in the sports genre, which was made into a movie and into anime. Without reading it, I just assumed it was more conventional manga made before he became THE Taiyo Matsumoto. And maybe it is more conventional in some ways, but I loved reading every page of this book.

Ping Pong Vol. One 

I'm no judge of the genre of sports manga. As someone who has never watched or played sports, my main experience of them is their use in movies and TV. I was worried about what I would latch onto when I couldn't care who won a match. Ping Pong doesn't seem to care that much about it either. Certainly, it features table tennis matches, but when the tournament comes up, it skips a lot of them too. It puts more focus on the first round of matches than on the final.

Instead, the book focuses on the egos of the players involved. How they feel about winning and why is more important than the games themselves. The book covers the table tennis teams between high schools in a smaller city in Japan, and many players have relationships stretching beyond their extra-curricular team. Only one player, a Chinese transfer student Wenge, is disconnected, but even he has a connection of sorts in that he relies on being better than the Japanese to sustain his ego. Every kid in the tournament calls him "China" to exacerbate that status.

That line on the ball as it impacts against the paddle is exquisite

Matsumoto is a poetic artist. Where a lot of manga is mechanically precise in its illustrations, Matsumoto has what I'd call an "artistic line." He lets the pages breathe. The only perfect lines seem to be in the ping pong balls themselves, which are smooth circles. He also practices extreme perspective throughout. Not Jack Kirby style, but I think Kirby would like what he does here.

The book is worth buying just for the scenery

And of course, he draws the hell out of the table tennis matches. It helps that Matsumoto isn't an artist intent of copying his own work and repeating faces and scenes. Every picture seems new, no matter how repetitive the content is. The art breathes, there doesn't seem to be a better word to express it.

The little nibs on the paddle create a texture on his finger. There's so much love in every image

In the writing too, there is poetry. I don't want to belabor it too much because it may not stand up to deep analysis, but Matsumoto works in ideas that color the overall work. The main two characters are Hoshino and Tsukimoto. Hoshino goes by the nickname of Peco, which is Japanese slang for hungry (ペコペコ). He is an aggressive player and wants to be the best, but he's just as happy goofing off. Tsukimoto goes by the ironic nickname Smile, because he never smiles. He is the best player, but has no hunger to win. He seems to play to be closer to his friend Peco. At the same time, the kanji for their names use 星 and 月, star/hoshi and moon/tsuki. Those are not uncommon last names in Japan, but it seemed too cute to be coincidence. As I read, I saw star and moon motifs used in the book, including a pattern in inner cover, so yeah, they are a hungry star and the unsmiling moon.

And I love how Matsumoto gives players gestures. Smile is constantly pushing his glasses up. It's a choice to have him adjusting himself. 

There are probably 100 pictures of him doing this in the book. Note the moon on his shirt

The closest thing to an antagonist in the book are the students at the Kaio/Neptune school, and their star players, Demon and Dragon, but they are students who want to win more than real villain characters. 

Again, I don't want to belabor the metaphor too much, because these are all human characters. Perhaps Matsumoto uses these grand ideas (star/moon/Neptune/China) to root his characters before he gets to work fleshing them out 

Peco gets a little fat

This is the first half of the complete series (and I love manga like this that clocks in at 1000 pages). I don't know what resolution will come of it. In the first half, no real problem has arisen. Smile is the best player, but has little ambition to win. Maybe he will want to win, but I suspect not.

My favorite part in the whole book is a coach speaking to a student who has lost and will no longer be able to compete in high school table tennis tournaments. The player tells the coach he feels like a pathetic loser. The coach laughs, and tells him as a friend, not a coach, "you're life's just started. You've just arrived at the starting line." For all the emotion these players are putting into this game, it'll end up only being a footnote in their lives.

I Really Should Read This 18: Uzumaki, by Junji Ito

Uzumaki, by Junji Ito

late 1990s, Deluxe English Edition 2010

Junji Ito is probably my last major manga blind spot. There are roughly infinity manga books out there, but I've made an effort to try out most creators who resonated strongly with English audiences. When I first saw his name popping up, he was labeled a 'master of horror,' a genre I'm not into. But like all genre works, the best of it rises up above the genre, so I've taken the plunge into the world of Junji Ito. Is Uzumaki his best? I have no clue, I just know that my friend shrugged off the book I was originally about to get as "not his best," so here's hoping this is good representation of his work. 

(I want to say that the fact that it's released in a deluxe edition would hopefully mean it's a better book, but that doesn't actually mean anything these days, other than the publisher wants to charge you more for it.) 

When the light hits the cover just right...

The book gets a gorgeous hardcover treatment. The paper is manga newsprint, so up front, I loved the production values. And it's quite a tome at over 600 pages. 

Uzumaki is the story of Kirie Goshima, a high school girl living in the seaside community of Kurouzu-cho. The town, as the back cover states, is contaminated with spirals. The first half of the book are the stories surrounding the death or disappearances of townsfolk, all related to spirals. Characters are obsessed with spirals, haunted by spirals, turned into spirals. Spirals.

Foreshadowing: the book is comically unsubtle

It took a while for me to clue in: this is not a horror book, this is a horror/comedy. Much like the old EC Tales From the Crypt might scare a kid, for an adult reader, it's just so over the top that it never really sinks in that this might be really happening. Kirie watches as the most crazy stuff happens, and then just goes to school the next day like it was nothing at all. Comedic horror is a genre of horror, and one I used to enjoy, it just wasn't what I expected before reading. 

These things happen

When her two Romeo-and-Juliet-style-forbidden-romance classmates run away from their parents and finally coil themselves up like giant snakes and crawl away entwined into the sea, you'd think there'd be some investigation. When a slow classmate just turns into a giant snail and slugs his way up the school walls, you'd think class might get canceled. But life goes on in the small seaside town of Kurouzu-cho. Perhaps the town founders made a mistake in naming the town "Black Spiral" (黒渦).

This sort of thing happens too

Once you understand that crazy stuff is going to keep happening, and everybody in the town is only going to shrug it off (except Kirie's boyfriend Shuichi, who knows the spiral is going to destroy everything), it's a fun book. Not scary, but fun. Ito tries to surpass himself chapter by chapter on just how weird the town can get. Blood-sucking pregnant women, with placenta that grows mushrooms. A flaming lighthouse. Tornado riding youth gangs. Houses so stuffed with people that they become clumps. When it finally gets to the end, he takes it as far as he could have and the town becomes a spiral. Does any of it make any sense? No, none of it. No more than a mummy's curse or a werewolf does. He just creates his own nonsense mythology, which holds up under its own logic.

Spiral hair battle

I'm a little surprised this resonated so well in the West. Japanese stories don't always resolve like Western ones. Sometimes they don't resolve at all, they simply end. But probably the sheer weirdness of Ito's ideas make up for whatever foreignness one could feel from the story construction.

Too many people is a safety hazard

The art is great. Sometimes, he draws people standing in a static way, with Kirie and Shuichi making the same facial expression from the same angle throughout the book, but overall, his art is imaginative, the backgrounds give a sense of place, and he draws dozens of things which nobody has ever drawn before. Repeatedly, I found myself muttering, "What...?" as I read at the audacity of the images he creates. The line work is gentle though. He draws each strand of Kirie's hair. This is not brash, loud art. Ito keeps most of the book quite restrained, letting his 'loud' images have much more impact.

Ito can be really delicate with his art

I read this quickly over a few days and really enjoyed it, but I probably won't buy another of his books soon or become a completist collector. As cool as it was, the characters were just ciphers for the story. I don't need a library of this sort of book. But I get why people love Ito's work and I'm glad I read it.