“We’ll be needing more from you going forward…”
Monday’s Manga is Susumu Higa’s “Okinawa” Ch. 1 & 2 from Mangasplaining Extra
The Comics Syllabus Substack launches our schedule of reviewing Substack comics. Note that reviews may include spoilers, may involve comics or articles that are behind paid subscriber walls on their respective Substacks, and may speculate (through questions, not insider knowledge) on the future directions of serialized stories.
Even non-paying subscribers can read “Okinawa: Ch 1 Sword of Sand” and the first few pages of Chapter 2, “Sands of the Setting Sun,” by Susumu Higa, from the new “MSX- Mangasplaining Extra” newsletter.
At $5 monthly or $50 yearly, MSX seems like a rewarding Substack for its audience. For a couple years, the Mangasplaining podcast has been a tremendous resource for those of us a little outside the manga market, but curious and just plain hungry for good comics. Deb Aoki, David Brothers, Chip Zdarsky, and Christopher Butcher bring expertise, enthusiasm, and good levity to inform the manga-curious.
As for my manga-curiosity, mileage has varied for me on the most popular manga, but I find myself totally compelled and enamored by Jiro Taniguchi, Naoki Urasawa, Shigeru Mizuki, Akiko Higashimura, Taiyo Matsumoto, and, of course, Kiyohiko Azuma’s “Yotsuba!&”
Just as Mangasplaining the podcast is great for interested newbies like me, so the serialized translating and publishing at MSX seems intriguing as a project to watch. Launching with some Matsumoto and this series, “Okinawa,” by Susumu Higa, indicates to me that we’ll see artful works, rather than the super high profile commercial hits that have already fully crossed over. I like it.
The folks at MSX, Christopher Woodrow-Butcher, translator Jocelyne Allen, letterer Patrick Crotty, and editor Andrew Woodrow-Butcher, will release 2-3 chapters of Higa’s “Okinawa” per month until the whole 14 chapters are released, eventually to be collected for print by Fantagraphics.
So I invite you to read with me! For as long as the series holds my interest (and so far, it’s one of my favorite comics I’ve read on Substack), I’ll review “Okinawa” every couple chapters, maybe roughly monthly, on these Manga Mondays.
In case you’re still on the fence about subscribing to MSX, I’ll discuss in general terms before delving into specifics for also-subscribers.
Encroaching Warfare: Chapter 1: Sword of Sand
From the first pages of “Okinawa,” a slow churn of rhythmic sound effects turn up a metronome of tension. In this case, it’s the “putt putt putt” of a motorized boat full of soldiers, heading toward the Okinawa shore whose clear wide sky and anxious residents greet the ominous coming of warfare.
In tone, I’m immediately reminded of Onward Toward our Noble Deaths (Soin Gyokusai Seyo!) by Shigeru Mizuki in the somber, humane, and terribly inevitable cloud of war. Of course, the key difference in perspective is that Higa takes us over the shoulders of civilians, the old women and retired veterans and children who live on these “outskirts” islands in the path of Japan’s WWII conflicts.
Their traditional ways of life and relationship to their environment, set firmly and identifiably here in Okinawa, are invaded by literal soldier battalions and their training exercises, and figuratively by being redefined as perhaps a vulnerable inroads or strategic asset or likely theater of battle. (I’ve decided to delay reading background on WWII Okinawa outside of the series until we’re further in the story. Advance ask for forgiveness for my misunderstandings and ignorance!)
Higa’s comics employ a wonderfully understated style that lets the place and events, not stylistic histrionics, create the sense of drama. In “Sword of Sand,” children run and laugh, elders knit their brows, and soldiers march confidently with little exaggeration but a ton of impact. This first chapter sets the stage— a phrase I’ll say more about below— for the face-to-face encounters, the opposition of wills, that are the military encroachment on Okinawa’s cultural life.
With the Okinawans, we witness the callous soldiers cutting down sacred trees. Blast fishing generations of a fish nursery. And violently reshaping a careful ecological relationship into a “strategic position,” a battleground. The worry lines around the Okinawans’ eyes, though subtle, are devastating to see.
Perspective
Artistically, there’s a clear importance to landscapes in the story’s themes of military exploitation, the destruction of ecologies and cultures as costs of war.
As I read, I thought about some recent exhibits at the Asian Art Museum that helped me understand differences in Western and Eastern uses of perspective in art. (Again, writing here from my amateur, inch-deep knowledge.) It’s probably an oversimplification to dichotomize this way, since Japanese arts like Ukiyo-e have mixed Eastern and Western ways of utilizing depth, fore/mid/background, and perspective. But the gross generalization, especially as it scans to us non-experts, is that the Renaissance-ish “realistic” use of perspective doesn’t necessarily convey more “truth” than the layering of consciously placed figures with subjectively real relative sizes.
I’m fascinated and curious about how Higa’s art might recall woodblocks or 18th century prints, which seem to magnify a relationship between human foregrounded figures and a looming, specific environment. The panels above, with a spacious view of the mountain where soldier and civilian leader stand to arbitrate opposing views of the terrain, somehow forefront both the vastness of mountain and oceans AND the audacity and awe of people at the same time.
Face to Face: Chapter 2: Sands of the Setting Sun
Though plenty of panels orient characters at different angles, Higa seems to prefer the straight-on shot of visible faces and bodies, or an assembly or platoon in profile. In the first page I copied above, and both other pages I’ve pasted, the portrait-like positioning of characters, often face-to-face and over one side’s shoulder, underscores a confrontation, a meeting of sides— not at all equivalent in power, but also not void of humanity or history on either side.
Chapter 2 opens again with the rhythmic pulse of a sound effect, but this time, fighter planes and battle are rendered with speed lines, bullet and blast effects, and hatching that makes the warfare decidedly three dimensional and multi-sensory.
Yet by the second page of Chapter 2, the burial rituals after other Okinawans recover bodies, we return again to this front-facing and flattened portraiture:
I don’t think this is just a habit of cartooning. Other panels suggest to me that Higa could make use of more graduated perspective, especially when the emphasis is on a peopled environment:
Instead, I think all this forward-facing, as well as changing up size and proportion (and throwing European rules of perspective to the wind), keep us locked into the story’s interplays of power and will, between the military’s imposition over the community and nature, the people’s conflicted acquiescence or resistance, and the not-easily-conquered land and sea themselves.
Chapter 2 confused me at first, as those similar conflicts and themes as chapter 1 seemed to be playing out, but not with the same characters. Somewhere in MSX’s textual introductions they mention “Okinawa” being two intertwined stories, so I figured out that chapter 2 is introducing us to a different set of military and civilian characters.
Indeed, the troubling and ultimately tragic story in Chapter 2 can stand alone the way Chapter 1 does, presenting those core tensions in its own configuration of contested resources, rights, and roles. Without giving away too much— Chapter 1 was good, but Chapter 2 sold me completely on this book— I just raise these questions that I’ll bring to the upcoming chapters:
Questions for what’s to come:
-Do we revisit these settings, civilians, soldiers? Both chapters end poignantly, with their own version of postscripts of sorts. Were these stories initially serialized under a trial run, so that these had to try to stand alone?
-Are we headed toward the Battle of Okinawa? Or the fallout, the post-WWII ongoing American military presence? Those peaks of conflagration are hinted by the way the two sides, US and Japan, show up in these opening chapters. I wonder how far the historical timeframe of “Okinawa” will stretch, or if we’re going to see a tight few years with plenty of signs of what’s to come?
-The first two chapters give us richly textured depictions of relationships among the Okinawans, between the grandmothers and mayors, between captains and children. As the stories proceed, whatever their direction, how will those dynamics become unsettled, sides taken, parties formed? In other words, how is the fabric of these communities fundamentally upset by war’s presence? Or is the disruption and displacement from the outside so drastic that they sweep those intra-group dynamics and hierarchies up in them?
-MSX’s introduction to “Okinawa” talks about spirituality in “Okinawa,” which seems really apparent and important in these chapters. But I’m not ready to try to grasp or tease those out yet. Not for lack of interest— the opposite, in fact. Themes of life and death, relationship to land, war and peace as moral questions… these are right where I live. So far, the two stories seem to resound with the music of mourning for sacred things killed by war. But what directions, in what angles, under what contradictions, will Higa express this spirituality?
-That same introduction presents Higa as Okinawa’s pre-eminent mangaka. What does Higa’s other work look like? And how does it present other pictures of the island? This story, which clearly centers a moment of contact (or perhaps colonization) between Okinawa and the Japanese mainland (is that the term?), catches Okinawa in a state of change and crisis. Art from a place often should and must capture those moments. But what does showing Okinawa under attack reveal, or what does it obscure?
Thanks for reading. I’m not sure how future reviews in my planned schedule will work with subscriber, supporter, and general public settings. Forgive me for some tinkering and experimentation. And much, much thanks to y’all who have subscribed. And another HUGE thanks for y’all who’ve signed on as paid supporters, letting me know this work has value. It means the world to me.
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