A Life Formed by Manga: a look at Taiyo Matsumoto’s Tokyo These Day

Taiyo Matsumoto ends each chapter of Tokyo These Days with a full-page image of a Tokyo street— twenty-four such images in total across the three volumes.  There are other drawings of Tokyo in these books, many of them also full-page images but they’re interspersed with the story, part of the ongoing narrative.  These chapter-ending pages act as a punctuation mark— a period, an exclamation point, a question mark, and even sometimes an ellipsis.  They are signifiers from Matsumoto to tell us to pause, to take a moment to reflect on what we’ve just read. 

In manga, there often will be illustrations between chapters.  For instance, Matsumoto’s Teckonkinkreet has a title page for each chapter, practically a cover illustration for each chapter of his story.  In other manga, the creator will use the chapter break page for a drawing, maybe loosely connected to the chapters around it but often just a separation between the chapters to let you know that you’re moving from one chapter to another.  To keep the grammar comparisons going, those other manga’s pages function more like a paragraph break than a punctuation mark.  

In Tokyo These Days, Matsumoto uses solid black pages for the chapter breaks- two pages in between the chapters to control where they end and begin.  They lead you out of the chapter— a strong and definitive fade-to-black approach for each narrative chapter.  These black pages serve as the transition marker from one chapter to another, from one narrative thought to another.  So the drawings of Tokyo that conclude each chapter have another function in this story; they are not there to move us from one part of the story to the next.  They are the punctuation that makes us stop and pause for however long we need to take before we move forward in this story.  

Reading Tokyo These Days, you get to experience that exhilaration of being in this world, the work a relationship (whether personal or professional) takes, and even the pain of closure at the end of that relationship.  It’s this relationship with manga that Matsumoto is trying to work through and it’s not just as an outside observer of it like a reader but as one in those Tokyo trenches, working to keep the dream of manga alive.  These books are a love letter to both manga and Tokyo.  One doesn’t exist without the other.  And if we read into it a bit, Matsumoto can’t or doesn’t want to live without either.

Matsumoto understands the pressure of both forces; the art and the city.  And that is what Tokyo and manga are in Matsumoto’s life- forces. There’s this push-and-pull between the two of them; they’re rivals that complement but also agitate each other.  The story opens with Shiozawa retiring from editing manga in a bit of disgrace. The magazine he poured his heart and soul into was canceled due to low sales after less than two years— a failure in his (and others')  estimation.  When it comes to manga, you can tell in these opening pages that Shiozawa is a lifelong aficionado but he’s questioning himself after this perceived failure.  He quits his job, goes home, and contemplates selling his large manga collection.  His confidence in himself is shaken.  

But he can’t let go of manga as easily as he could leave his job.  Out of this crisis of confidence comes the desire for one last attempt to make the best manga magazine, judged not by its market appeal but by its artistic integrity.  He’s not chasing after what a publisher wants but what he thinks is needed to make a manga magazine that lives up to his high standards. At one point in the story, a one-time peer of Shiozawa’s who has risen higher in the corporate structure describes Shiozawa as “a dyed-in-the-wool manga fan.”  He’s a lifer and an enthusiast.  We see Shiozawa chasing a dream of what a magazine could be, chasing down the artists he admired to get their finest work out of them.  

Shiozawa is a fascinating man to watch in this story. He is Matsumoto’s central character— most of the plot circles around him— but Tokyo These Days isn’t necessarily his story.  Any conflict that he faces is relatively low stakes; he isn’t challenged in any significant way on his journey.  He has this vision and he pursues it, never wavering in his belief in the art or the artists.  We get to witness a manga editor in action and that alone is worth this story, to see a manga purist interact with these artists and with the business to see this behind-the-scenes perspective.  

Through the artists and editors Shiozawa works with, we get a taste of the struggle and cost of manga creation, the pressure of it but also the thrill of it that makes those hard times worth it.  Maybe it’s because an artist like Matsumoto can identify more with the artists that in them we see the cost of this work.  We never really learn much about Shiozawa’s personal life other than he has an apartment and a bird (who seems to talk with him but it’s never really addressed in the story) so he’s more of an anchor point for all of these other characters who struggle with their work, struggle to find fulfillment with it even as they’re compelled to make this their life.  That’s where Tokyo comes into the story.

In the final pages of each chapter, Matsumoto gives these images of Tokyo, often from a distance and always from a bird’s-eye vantage point.  Shiozawa and these artists are mostly based in Tokyo, living in Tokyo, and moving through Tokyo.  The story of manga has to be told from a Tokyo point of view as it’s so unique and cultural. Matsumoto’s drawings tell the stories of these Tokyo streets, apartments, offices, restaurants, and bookstores.  We see batting cages and train stations. In those closing pages of the chapters, Matsumoto expands the story to be so much more about these editors and artists.  As these closing pages are a punctuation point, they’re signaling to the reader to stop for a moment, to reflect on its role in these lives and this business.  

Chosaku, one of the artists, has been in the game a long time, so long that maybe he’s coasting a bit in the latter part of his career; no one but Shiozawa challenges him.  Through these three volumes, Chosaku is just one of the artists we follow and witness their struggles.  He seems like a good guy but his devotion to producing manga has cost him a marriage and he’s trying to be the best father he can be for his daughter.  

One chapter where he takes his daughter to a gallery show of one of her favorite manga creators ends with the two on a commuter train at night, heading home.  Chosaku’s daughter talks about her struggles at school with other girls who were once her friends. She says as long as she has one friend, then she’s okay.  That one friend is Chosaku’s manga character, a baseball player that she always carries a small toy of with her.  It’s a great bonding moment as you realize how manga ties together a father and a daughter in meaningful and unexpected ways.  This is just one example of the types of connections that Matsumoto explores around Tokyo with the many artists that Shiozawa reaches out to.  

The last page of that chapter focusing on Chosaku and his daughter is an almost impossibly dark page, with only a few street lights and the train lights breaking through the darkness.  In the background, you can also see the dim lights of Tokyo breaking through the darkness.  In this chapter, we’ve gone through all of this doubt, pain, reflection, and maybe even some healing as both Chosaku and his daughter fall asleep on the train as it speeds down the tracks.  And then we get to this last page, just showing some light breaking through the darkness.  It’s a comforting image, a period on this thread that Matsumoto has been following trying to figure out just what kind of father and artist Chosaku is.  He’s not the best father but he’s given his daughter something and that has to count for something.  This final page, this final punctuation mark offers a conclusion to those questions and provides a certain amount of peace to be found in the night.  

That’s how these final chapter pages function— bringing the city into the story as a character to comfort, to prod, or to encourage the characters.  In this period of uncertainty for these characters as their art and their lives are challenged, the city is a constant there, never pitted against these people but there to push them and when needed, to comfort them. In Tokyo These Days, Taiyo Matsumoto writes and draws his love letter to Tokyo and to manga.  His work is always full of passion but this one feels more personal, an artist looking back at a lifetime spent drawing and ruminating on what was and what is to come.