Gekiga, Canetti, and the New Mundane

“Any character that looks identical throughout my work is, of course, different in each story”
- Yoshihiro Tatsumi in conversation with Adrian Tomine for the article Abandon The Old In Tokyo

My initial instinct was to write comparing Tatsumi with Bukowski; how Tokyo’s artful misogynist co-exists so well with Los Angeles’s, and maybe how their particular brand of intimate revulsion and confusion paired with pulp tropes can offer some explanations. But there was a really interesting in-class discussion of a panel on pg. 44 which stuck with me, and which I didn’t feel I could jump into at the time. Pivoting from Bukowski, I want to instead place Tatsumi alongside Elias Canetti.

Although a Nobel Laureate, Canetti’s contribution to world literature has faded since his death (compared with other luminaries). He was a Jew who’d fled Germanic lands during WWII but felt always at home in the German tongue – part of his brilliance, it’s been argued to me, is his mastery of that rich cultural heritage as it responded to its total defeat and the horror of its brutality. Tatsumi strikes me as similar: a man working within the milieu of an Axis power after the war, responding to the continued march of modernity and the repopulation of rebuilt cities. Gekiga was born out of the desire for a more “serious” or dramatic picture of this new world, that rendered it ‘mundane’ and new Real with a darkness to it (image and story).

As we discussed page 44’s depiction of the crowd and of traffic, the class conclusion or consensus was that he wanted to show that mundanity, that everyday. But the panels continue from directly from cacophony and tangle of machines to the first panel on page 45, where amongst the crowd Tatsumi’s character is said to be “in no position to complain”. There is definitely an element of the mundane in this, but one very much of the new, post-war mundane, of the rituals and repetitions of the society Tatsumi was exposing, the courses of life of that then’s now. Canetti’s most celebrated work in his lifetime was Crowds & Power, which made his legacy internationally and was widely praised. It was a study as much of what was as what remained: the crowded mass of people, and their willingness to be sheparded, shaped, and ruled by the powerful. Early on into that work he observes:

“As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch. Ideally, all are equal there; no distinctions count. Not even that of sex. The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body… nothing has been announced, nothing is expected. Suddenly everywhere is black with people and more come streaming from all sides as though streets had only one direction. Most of them do not know what has happened and, if questioned, have no answer; but they hurry to be there where most other people are. There is a determination in their movement, which is quite different from the expression of ordinary curiosity. It seems as though the movement of some of them transmits itself to the others. But that is not all; they have a goal which is there before they can find words for it.” (pg 15-16, Crowds & Power)

Of the gekiga I’ve read, there is the constant theme of the man among the throng. Tatsumi writes different men with the same face. Distinctions in the drama of this darker realism collapse into each other. As the reader, confronted with the offensive, we, like the character on page 45, are “in no position to complain”. I venture that Tatsumi was drawn to his sordid subjects in part because that is part of the reality he was showing.

Around the time he was writing Crowds & Power, Canetti was keeping a journal. The year it published in German, he wrote:

“Whatever this crowded world had no room for, I made a place for within myself. And so now I feel as broad as the world…but having attained this goal, I recognize my own futility.

The things one depends on in the course of life are grotesque, and it is hard to see how one can guard against them without models.

Telling stories to anyone who will hear them as stories, who doesn’t know you, who doesn’t expect literature [that’s a nice life]” (pg 26, Notes from Hampstead: The Writer's Notes: 1954-1971)

These are three connected, disjointed thoughts, but I’ve always taken it as Elias in reflection finding crisis, realizing he is drawn to what is debased in the world because it requires by its existence (and our curiosity) cataloguing. Looking away doesn’t make what is ugly disappear, spatial impermanence can only ever be a toddler’s paradise. But similarly, the urge in literature to aestheticize and intellectualize presents its own dangers. Tatsumi was writing in a paraliterature (comics) for a different audience (world-hungry teens and adults, seeking sense-making not whimsy in a rapidly changing era). I think what draws contemporary critical approval and his audience from back then was his willingness to show both the grotesque and repetitious crowd, and the characters’ same-faced powerlessness within it, while telling a story to those who didn’t know him or expect literature, but were willing to hear, a making room for what experiences (problematic or just new mundane) were crowded out by those with loftier or more fanciful ambitions.