Foreign manga fans are always praising manga's scope as compared with that of American comics stuck in a narrow superhero groove. What those fans mainly buy, however, are science-fiction, fantasy and sex, in various combinations, targeted at the younger end of the male demographic. No wonder the first manga magazine to be published regularly in English is Shonen Jump, whose core readers in Japan are preteen boys.
Meanwhile, Yoshiharu Tsuge -- who occupies somewhat the same cultural niche in Japan that Robert Crumb does in the United States -- remains all but untranslated into English. This is sad, but in commercial publishing terms, understandable. Tsuge's work, which often concerns the wanderings of struggling artist types in the stranger reaches of Japan, would probably baffle and bore the boy fans who are into cool mecha and voluptuous babes. In Japan, however, his comics have achieved classic status since he began publishing in Garo magazine in 1965. Several have been made into films and Tsuge himself appeared as a character in Jun Ichikawa's "Tokiwaso no Seishun (Tokiwa: The Manga Apartment)."
The latest director to explore Tsuge's world is Nobuhiro Yamashita with "Realism no Yado (Ramblers)." A selection of the 2003 Toronto Film Festival, "Realism no Yado" is less a Tsuge homage than Yamashita's own contemporary interpretation of his work. Tsuge's world may resemble the Japan of his own youth (he was born in Tokyo in 1937), but with its preference for odd backwaters and its flashes of surrealism, it has a timeless, dreamlike quality. Also, it is no easier in 2003 for unknown filmmakers -- the job description of Yamashita's two protagonists -- than it was for unknown manga artists in the 1960s, especially if they lack anything resembling ambition or the simplest of survival skills.
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