week three: gekiga

This week, we read Cigarette Girl by Masahiko Matsumoto. It's drawn not necessarily in the style of gekiga - the style is really simplistic and cartoony - but the themes are surprisingly mature. Gekiga is a style of manga meant for a mature audience and drawn more realistically to lend itself to that serious vibe. When David defined the term of gekiga, the first things I thought of were seinen and josei manga, or manga aimed at older men and women. The typical style of the 60's gekiga reminded me of the 1988 film Akira, a landmark Japanese adult animation film.

The same with Ayako from the first week of reading, Cigarette Girl sort of threw me in a loop. What I expected from the art was NOT what I got from the thematic elements. I think the one about the woman getting the abortion made me the most sad, because of how... realistic it was. The poor girl was essentially tricked into sleeping with her boyfriend, who leaves her because she's pregnant, and her new husband is a cruel drunk. The art style somehow makes it worse, because of the simplistic expressions used in the manga panels, it's almost like the lack of big enough emotion or more emotional dialogue doesn't give it the gravity that it needs.

We also read a chapter of Abandon the Old in Tokyo, which was another anti-familial piety (I feel like that's going to be a theme in this class) manga. The main character essentially leaves his mother to die and goes off with his girlfriend, but she ends up reminding him of his mother and goes back to see her, but she's dead. The last page of the manga is about him carrying his dead mother as someone comments what a devoted son he is, which is hilariously ironic.

I stand by the belief that it's important to depict these sorts of traumatic familial elements in Asian media, because of how much familial piety is valued. I grew up, my parents grew up, my parents' parents grew up absorbing how important family is and to respect your elders, even to the point of respecting them while they're getting beaten and abused. It's a very twisted mindset to hold family as sacred and incapable of making mistakes, while putting up with their abusive behavior.