Umezu Kazuo: JapaneseOverturesto Madness and Death
by Ng Suat Tong
In Inventing Leonarda, Renaissance expert A Richard Turner recounts the tale of biographer Luigi Lanzi, who in 1782 chanced upon a Flemish painting of the Medusa in the Uffizi gallery in Florence, and connected it with Vasari'sdescription of a simllar daY-mci painting which once hung in the Palazzo ddla Signoria. According to Turner, the attribution was "an instant success• leading to the "inventi~n o_fa new, [modern] Leonardo by the nud-nmeteenth century.• Of this attribution Shelley wrote:"lts horror and its beauty divine," in his poem "On the Medusa of Leonardo da Y-mciin the Florentine Gallery."
Yearslater, critics would come to describe works with a similar combination of terror :ind ~uty. as co~tituting part of the "horrific sublime. Yet tune would show the attribution of the Medusa head to Leonardo to be fallacious; an important lesson for connoisseurs who would allow their intellects to be overtak~n by clouds of nostalgia and mere reputatton.
!his is a lesson we might apply to the co_m,cs~o~ror genre. To understand the perce1_vedl!m1ts of horror (and, in particular, childrens horr?r) in comics, one need only look at a selecnon of EC horror titles.
_Revered, yet laboring under the constraints of the short attention-spans and cxpectauons of both readers and authorities EC horror titles would appear to be mo~ often recommended than actually read Reading through the EC horror and "sus~ pense" anthologies, we are continually faced with the distressing poverty and shallowness of ~e verbose scripts; the sheer abjectness of which contrast so markedly with the richness o_fthe accompanying imagery. Too many ston~ are excuses for the next horror cum shot while others seem conservative in their focus on retribution. We should not denigrate the line by claiming more for them than is necessary, nor should we excuse their shortcomings by way of their antiquity and the fact that they were meant for children. Yet stared simply, they are not among the best comics horror stories everwritten.
Then what are? Some of the works mentioned in discussions on these matters include
Gaiman and Dringenberg's Sandman #6, Moore and Campbell's From Hell, Burns' BlackHok and various tales from the Stephen Bissette-edited Taboo anthology. Still, it is richly apparent chat Wercham, the Kefauver hearings and the Comics Code have resulted in an American horror comics marker so diluted it has prevenred extended exploration of themes and resulted primarily in rushed, tepid works.
The Japanese horror manga market allows us a glimpse of what mighr have been, had American horror comics not been castrated at adolescence: not an overflowing abundance of high art, but a mature and unapologetically commercialized genre of comics. In Japan, horror manga, as a form of enrcrtainmcnr, has been found co be particularly suited to the castes of young girls. As such, ic is not uncommon to find horror artists such as lnuki Kanako, the so-called Queen of Horror, drawing disquieting stories abouc inquiring young children, or Ito Junji (whose delicate lines grace works such as Tomieand Uzumak1)lodged intelligently in the "female" section of your average manga store. There are others, far too many co name. Yet towering over all of these, and co whom every successful Japanese horror artist hence has been compared, is Umezu Kazuo.
It is a rare thing co find an artist whose works bring one to a new understanding of the limits of comics. The manga of Umezu Kazuo are important because they represent a high watermark. The attentive comics reader will find in them a level ofinsighc and instinct chat forever links an author with a genre or type of comic. In America, we have Kum.man and his great contributions co war and satire, Kirby and superheroes, Barks and children's comics, men who were ac once consummate professionals and unassuming artists. In horror, few have come close co Umezu Kazuo
Umczu Kazuo was born in 1936 in Wakayama, Japan. Producing his first work in 1955 (Mori no Kyouda1),he is sometimes mentioned in rhe same breath as Tczuka and
is perhaps besr known among regular Japanese folk for his humorous manga, Makoto-Chan.
The point of divergence from average horror manga lies in Umczu's mastery of horror and suspense, terms I use with qualifiers, for it is Umczu's unflinching portrayals of human ugliness which are of prime interest. Produced for the most pan for Japanese school children and teenagers, his comics seem paradigms of what such comics should be - violent, vile and educational. They have scarred a whole generation of Japanese children and references to these works can be found cropping up in a slew of Japanese popular culture artifacts decades after publication.
Ac every turn, Umczu demonstrates an understanding of the fiendish undercurrents chat can plague a child's mind and rhe perversions that these minds can engage in. Umezu doesn't fulfill the expectations of children; he expands and challenges them.
Umczu's most famous children's horror work (though it might just as easily be labeled science ficcion/fancasy) is probably The FwatingClassroom(1972-74; othe.rwise known as The Drifting Classroom).The subject of ac least two lackluster movie adaptations, this is the story of an elementary school boy named Shou Takarnatsu, who is trans• ported, together with his entire school, into a barren wastcland theexact nature of which is only revealed later in the series (they have in fact been launched into the future). What follows is a series of atrocities in which the entire school of children is decimated as they form tribal factions, search for food and water and wage war against a group of evolved insecc-like creatures. The most desperate deeds arc committed against their own and, Shou, whose moral instincts approach those of a saint, has to contend with murderous adult schoolteachers, an outbreak of the plague, bigoted classmates and domineering female students (who just happen to be larger and stronger than the males presumably because of early puberty). It's Lordof the Flus on amphetamines.
TheFwatingClassroombrings the realities and metaphorical aspects of childhood into sharp focus by means of an isolating plot device which can be found in novels like
It's Lord of the Flies on amphetamines.
Camus' The PI.Jgueor Saramago's Blindness. It is invigorating children's adventure mixed with the odd hard lesson. It is also potentially injurious to the minds of I 4-year-olds and makes the periodic grumblings about "unsuitable" toys like DeathRowMarv almost laughable. The children of The Fwating Classroom do not simply die, they suffer and die horribly. Plague victims are mercilessly ostracized and forced co die alone or killed outright. Rarely have children been so brucally apprised of the nature of death. Needless to say, most parents would probably find a year's subscript.ion to Playboya more suitable gift for their children. It is chis unflinching honesty which makes Umezu's work so essential.
More problematic from an aesthetic point of view are the quirky B-movie aspecrs of the plot Umczu obviously revels in. The science in his stories is often inexact and the environmental issues expressed, while unique for their time, simply have noc held up over the years. Some cynical adults will no doubt cringe at the idea thar Shou's "girlfriend" is physically handicapped, though chis is never made an issue of by Umezu. Similar outcry may be expressed at the fact thar, as in much of children's literature, it is the weak and inrclligent who are constantly preyed upon (or, in this case, occasionally driven to megalomania). Umezu uses these individuals as points of identification and ic is Shou and his group of moderate friends who do nor lose their honor in the cales' dlnouemmt. In shore, formula and cliche are inherent in chis series.
Yet despite its faults, The Fwating Classroomremains a comic so highly evolved chat it may cake a few more decades before anything similar is produced in the West. While Umezu believes (for the most part) in the "triumph of good," he has no compunction about informing his young reaaers about the hard facts of life. As such, Shou never does return co earth to apologize to his mother who he argues with so bitterly ac the start of the story. While Umezu offers his readers some hope that Yu-Kun (Shou's pre-school friend who is returned to the present time at the end of the story) will be able to alter the future hence reversing the deaths of a multirude of unfortunate schoolchildren, the author himself is of the opinion this will in fact not cake place. He states no less in the afterword to the republished Fwaring Clarsroom. It would, he writes, mean a wasted journey for Shou and his friends. The child who picks up The Fwating Classroomleaves with an understanding of death, evil and the true meaning of friendship and this is perhaps its best recommendation.
Top, Umezu Kaz.uo's Baptism.
A work that fies more traditionally into the mold of children's comics is Umezu's My Name is Shingo(1982-86), a romantic fancasy about the all-consuming love between a boy and a girl, and the strange produce of this love, their "child," Shingo, a robot that began life as a robotic arm in a factory. Shingo procures its designation from a combination of its creators' (the young lovers) names and is a sort of Frankenstein's monster in search of its parents. Seeking co unite them in their moment of separation, it srumbles through the great sea of humanity with an ill-equipped understanding of the frailties of the human body (in one sequence it kills a boy by holding him under water for coo long) or the moral dimensions of murder and love. The logic occasionally follows an insane path best compared with Chester Brown's Ed the Happy Clown, with the requisite bare dialogue and blood and guts as punctuation: a sequence starting with an airplane crash into a chicken farm leads co a series of bizarre deaths. One of the most evocative things about My Name is Shingo are the surreal chapter illustrations which only bear a tangential relation co the actual plot. Children masked in paper bags wandering an apocalyptic landscape, exploring chicken farms for some unearthly reason or collecting strange foods from a conveyor belt to name but a few of these peculiar images. Ac ocher times, however, Umezu descends into plainly ridiculous, ill-informed displays of gratuitous violence such as a score invasion by a group of British punks bent on destroying Japanese goods. This is exactly the kind of imagery that leads Western critics co label certain manga creators as racist, closeted individuals. In chis case, the ignorance of Umezu is impossible to defend, the caricatures here having as much merit as Ebonyof The Spirit or the bedazzled natives of some of Barks's adventures.
There is little doubt that My Name is Shingo is an important work from the perspective of the Umezu enthusiast but an objective assessment would suggest it is an uneven one. While the tensions are as rich as ever, its eccentricities stop short of absolute brilliance. There are finer works in his oeuvre co recommend him to the new reader with a Western bias. One such work is his collection of stories entitled Orochi(serialized 1969-70), in which Umezu draws precipitously close to the line which divides children's and adult fiction. A magnificent example of chis can be found in the penultimate story of chis collection, "War.,, "War" is a shore story that probably hardly deserves mentioning as far as Umezu readers are concerned, but bears closer examination because of the superficial similarities in the basic concepts addressed by chis series and the EC line. Orochi (an archaic Japanese word for "snake") is the name of an immortal girl who watches and engages with humanity as her interest is piqued, hibernating every hundred years to regain her strength. In Japanese legend, the Yamata no Orochi is the name of the eight-headed serpent, slain by Susano-o in order to save Princess Kushinada (as most recently depicted in UsagiYojimbo).
On a fundamencal level, she is a narrative device to allow the author access co varying perspectives and sudden alterations in face.
The protagonist of"War" is a boy named Tadashi Okabe, an elementary school student who takes pride in the humanitarian works carried out by his father. This family harmony is suddenly disrupted by a crippled man determined to apprise him of another side co his father.Thus begins a story chat addresses the politics of starvation and cannibalism.
With the seed of suspicion implanted by chis stranger (a wartime compatriot of his father's) Tadashi begins co display increasing cynicism towards his father, questioning his every action. Confronted by the unspoken accusations of his son, Tadashi's father begins co experience harrowing dreams of his service during the war. In a recurring nightmare, he returns to the island of Guadalcanal where the Japanese are fighting a losing battle against the Americans. Bedraggled and starving, Tadashi's father is met with the exquisite logic that dictates that you have to consume a dead companion's flesh. As the Japanese lossesmount, a dying soldier shares his fear of death and begsto be left alone by his fellow soldiers because of his fear of being eaten by chem. He is, after all, one of the few who has not died of disease hue of the natural causes of war and starvation. In dying, he makes a pronouncement, almost a curse, that all who take it upon themselves to ear human flesh cease co exist as humans and become animals; a term which his fellow soldiers have used, up until that point, only for white foreigners. When he expires, his companions sic in blank-faced anticipation, reminding themselves every now and again chat the flesh is becoming cold. Soon they resolve to feed but Tadashi's father resists. There is an extended sequence in which a senior compatriot coaxes him into consuming human flesh; sweetening the pill by chanting to him as you would a child, mesmerizing him with longed-for falsehoods about the exact origins of the meat. There are reasons for chis man's act of "kindness." As he explains later to Tadashi's confused father, it is all he can do to keep from losing his sanity and becoming an animal. By keeping at least one of his friends alive, the youngest and most innocent, he preserves his own humanity. These maddening thoughts, coupled with the unexpected news that an escape route has been found off
the island, lead him to tear off his friend's hand in a fir of psychosis and self-preservation, presumably to use as food for his journey co the croop transports off Guadalcanal.
This calculated ace of barbarism is the keystone of Umezu's story. Tadashi's father commits a lifetime of good co escape and atone for a single moment of pure animalistic selfishness. Towards the close of the story, Tadashi's father decides to bring him on a trip to a mountain he used to climb in his youth; a mountain so treacherous it would defeat the most seasoned of mountaineers, co say nothing of a young boy. To call into question the "realism" of the entire sequence is co misunderstand this melding of life and fantasy. It is pure metaphor. As it happens, a near-fatal slip leavesTadashi dangling in the air at the end of a rope connected to his father. By hanging on, he is being as selfish as his own father was during the war. He becomes disgusted with himself and pulls out his penknife so chat he can allow himself to fall to his death for co persist in hanging on (and thus endangering his father) would be the act of an animal. He is stopped by his father who calls to him from a ledge above, reasoning with him in tones which mirror his own passionate struggle during the war. This is how the story ends, with Tadashi hanging and waiting for a decision; waiting for death; images flooding into his brain of a stray cat, flattened under the tires of a car, which his father chose co bury earlier in the story, becoming as it were a symbol for a hidden past as the words, "Bury it, bury it," echo in his mind.
In "War," Umezu puts aside his counterculture idiosyncrasies to cell a story burning with truth and emotion. This story conveys magnificently the strength and idealism of childhood, the crushing realization of severe parental fallibility and the unbearable weight of mere humanity. Umezu has displayed the unrestrained playfulness and leaps of logic currently found in the Japanese undergrounds or the works of Panter or Beyer on many occasions but this story presents a typically fine example of his starkly lit quietness capped off by an ending which overwhelms the heart and mind.
As Frederik Schodt indicates in Manga! Manga!,chis was an era of increasing violence in Japanese comics and he specifically points cowards the title Ashura by Akiyama Joji (1970-71) as an example of cannibalism in manga. It is a theme which Umezu would
return to towards the closing chapters of The Pleating Classroomwhen Shou's best friend, Otomo, exhorcs his tribe of followers to engage in this survival tactic. In comparison, Umezu's story in Orochi is almost restrained. There are hardly three panels containing scenes of men consuming flesh directly from the bone. The horror of cannibalism is of incidental importance to the true "moral" of this plot, a story about the divide between beasts and humans and the nature of redemption. le stubbornly resists easy answers when there are no good ones co choose from.
The other volumes in the Orochi sequence will also be of interest to a Western audience. There are stories of teen idols jostling for position in a sea of corruption, an emotional tale of lost childhood and others about the misery of neglect and parental expectations. This lase point is considered in "Blood," a near-melodrama about two sisters, charted in a continuous series of full-page panels at the beginning of the novel, becomes twisted into a dtnouement of disharmony and decay. The ending is nothing short of Grand Guignol, symbolism and torrid confession meshing into one, a slaughtering of naivete fully in keeping with Umezu's morbid fascination with the uansitory nature of all human innocence.
This is a recurring theme throughout his works: a child's unblemished face torn off by a machine in Shingo, Tadashi's all-too-cute sister's face burnt irreuievably by a grenade blast in "War," a grotesque child riding his uicycle on and off a murdered child's head and the hapless Izumi (from The Left Hand of God, The Right Hand of the Dtvil, 1986-89) subjected to inhuman cruelty and suffering for no good reason.
This work engages on both a psychological level and one of base disgust. The protagonist of The Left Hand of God is an elementary school student called Sou, who wakes up one night with the terrible image of a pair of scissors sprouting through his sister lzumi's eyes. Lacer that night, one of lzumi's classmates comes around to inform them of the unexpected death of one of the local schoolteachersin a flash flood. Izumi needs no encouragement to join the group of girls on their nighttime visit to the disaster area where they find an underground cellar unearthed by the floodwaters. There they find the rusty scissors that give the first chapter of this sixvolume series its title, an event that unleashes
the unsatiated demons of years past. The Left Hand of God is full of hidden menace punctuated by in-your-face horror imagery. The name "Izumi" (meaning "spring") must be a form of black humor on Umezu's part, for a series of objects and substances issue forth from her orifices throughout the book; everything from mud to skeletal corpses to Sou himself. She is a portal between the netherworld, the underground cellar, and the shaky reality of the upper ground; a channel for tainted purity and loathsome revenge.
The second chapter of The Left Hand of God delves deeper into repugnant imagery, this time with a greater albeit tenuous link to reality. During a class, Sou is creating pretend demons out of erasers, using a pencil to dig holes into them to create eyes. After school, the children begin to discuss the kindly nature of their teacher, a matter which is disputed by one of Sou's friends who tells them that he has heard that the personality of a person is only revealed in death. This means that they will have to kill their teacher in order to discover her uue nature. This is exactly what they do, hatching il plan in which she will fall to her death, a plan which through a trick of fate proves all too effective, leaving her choking to death on a rppe meant to trip her over the edge of a cliff. The sequence is done with Umezu's usdaJ demonic flair, the teacher suuggling as she chokes to death, the regretful children uying to free her only to send her crashing to the ground and the chilling, though obviously unsurprising, discovery that she has not changed an iota in death.
Umezu plays to a child's worst nightmares throughout the series. He presents us with the neighbor as bloodthirsty succubus in "The Spider Queen's Tongue" and in "The Black Piccure Book," a degenerate portrayal of childhood suspicion. In the latter tale, a crippled girl spends her evenings listening to her father's self-illustrated fairy tales, created especiallyfor her benefit; the catch here being that these are overexuberant tales of how he has engaged in various aces of murder he expects her to enjoy. These include stories of how he killed a girl one night for the crime of picking up an old doll or was constrained to decapitate a pair of children. As his Byzantine machinations become revealed to the girl, her own life cums into a sort of twisted fairy tale as her father strips her and attempts to boil and eat her later in the book. Madness, evil and retribution all brought together by an exquisite understanding of the comics form spread over 200 pages.
When critics comment on the crudity of Umezu's art, they don't simply mean the guttural nature of his violence but also the stark, flat, simplicity of his drawings, a style which is only occasionally leavened by more detailed establishing panels. His contorted and exaggerated figures are spread across the panels in tableau, a presentation which lies in marked contrast to the well-proportioned women he used to draw in his earlier days working in traditional shojo manga.
Yet, the longevity of Umezu's comics is not solely attributable to these stylistic
aspects. Rather, the reader is less concerned about the depictions of cannibalism than the baseinstincts of the children and men who engage in it, less about the unspeakable aces of depravity of his children than the intense suffering of the young perpetrators which would force them into such aces.
It is hard to think of a Western artist who best matches the mange air which surrounds a work by Umezu Kazuo. Perhaps Umezu is best seen in the light of someone like the outsider artist, Henry Darger, not with regards the pattern of their lives but with respect to the eccentricities of their highly personalized works concerning children full of a fragile strength and promise; a bizarre yet heartfelt sweetness mixed with explosions of carnage. Like Dargcr, Umezu's art conforms to a personalized crudity which is at once its greatest strength and its most acute weakness as far its commercial viability in the West is concerned. A reader approaching these books for the first time should nor expect the sexualviolence or visual polish and sophistication found in the works of Suehiro Maruo (represented in the West by Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show and Tht Laughing Vampire) or Hideshi Hino (Heli Baby, Panorama of He/tJ. While many of Umezu's stories do thrive on an element of visual horror and explicit violence, this is not the sole basis of their canonization in rnanga culture, a fact which seems to have been lost on many of his film adaptors. Of considerably greater interest arc his exquisite pacing, his narrative style which is possessedof the immediacy of a campfire tale and the devious juxtaposition of plot elements. All this and much more contribute to an atmosphere soldy and unmistakably within Umezu's province. It may be (as has been mentioned in relation to other Western classics) that the singularity of a great work of comics is best gauged by its resistance to all forms of adaptation.
It would be a mistake to believe that the purely artistic possibilities of rnanga are lost on 'a veteran artist like Umezu. He makes this point himself in a translated interview from 1995 in TokyoRockin' magazine (partially edited for grammar and spelling):
"I really don't like the fact that "comics" are treated as vulgar stuff. People should broaden the scope of their ideas that comics can do really great things. If not, it won't form a flow that makes it happen. I think this whole earth is losing many things because of this. It's like we are ruining the possibilities of comics ourselves."
With regard to the place of his works in the hearcs of the Japanese populace, Umezu can rest assured. There are many noteworthyworks I have failed to mention for reasons of space: a rather strange adaptation of Ultraman, The Cat-Eyed Kid and the surreal Fourteen, works which represent a mere fraction of this prolific artist's oeuvre.
Lesscertain, however, is the ability of this kind of work to appeal to a child brought up on a diet of American cartoons and comics. This is in itself may be a moot point since it is likely that the publication of any of Umezu's horror stories would necessarily be
restricted to a mature audience in the West. Without the tongue-in-cheek tone of the early EC stories or the semi-educational, playful tones of a Struwwelpeter,these stories would probably be indefensible in a court of law as children's literature and it is likely that it will be some time before this master's concoctions will begin co enrich the language and nightmares of English comics readers. This isn't so much a Western failing as an international one. The recent re-publication of Baptism in Hong Kong has produced the incongruous element of a book published by a primary school imprint sporting a cover flap warning retailers not to seU the book to anyone under 18. Which leaves one with the small matter of teUing this to all the teenagers buying the books.
The comics of Umezu Kazuo represent a return co the morbid fairy tales of the early nineteenth century. While there are socializing aspects to his works, they are first and foremost about the education of the imagination. They are about communication at its most basic seductive level, written in a language chat is both occult and primitive. There is much to learn from these works and even more to savor. Umezu Kazuo is a conjurer who leads to the heart of the beast, allowing us co discover that it is merely chat of a child.I!)