FEATURE| "River's Edge" special interview Manga artist Yoshitomo Yoshimoto talks about the 90's, Kyoko Okazaki and Kenji Ozawa . Includes illustrations newly drawn by Yoshimoto Yoshitomo .
River's Edge" special interview Manga artist Yoshitomo Yoshimoto talks about the 90s , Kyoko Okazaki and Kenji Ozawa. Includes illustrations newly drawn by Yoshimoto Yoshitomo .
Kyoko Okazaki's manga "River's Edge," which was first published 24 years ago in 1994, has been adapted into a film starring Fumi Nikaido and Ryo Yoshizawa, both born in 1994, and with music written by Kenji Ozawa, a close friend of Kyoko Okazaki. We asked manga artist Yoshimoto Yoshitomo, who was in a car accident in 1996 and is still recuperating, about the 90s, Kyoko Okazaki, and Kenji Ozawa, who ran the same era as the original author, Kyoko Okazaki, who was in a car accident in 1996. . The interview will be presented along with illustrations newly drawn by Yoshimoto Yoshitomo.
Yoshimoto and Yoshitomo Born in 1964, he made his debut in 1985 when his four-panel comic "Nikkan Yoshiaki Yoshimoto" was selected for the 1st Asuka Manga School, and in 1986, he worked as an assistant for Kyoko Okazaki's "Second Virgin". Since the publication of the full-length works "Let's Go Bugeicho" and "Tokyo Defense Forces," he has published many highly finished short stories, including "Blue Car. The Blue Car," and "TheBlue carThe "I'm not a fan of2005indicates such things as location of person or thing, location of short-term action, etc.Hiroshi OkuharaBy the director.making screen versionIn 2010, he adapted Yu Nagashima's novel "Chewing While Chewing" into a manga (included in "Yu Nagashima Manga-ka Keikaku"), and in 2017, his wife, filmmaker Kayo Nakamura, directed "Green Music" (starring Nijiro Murakami, Yuki Kudo, and Joe Odagiri), in which he collaborated on the screenplay.Official SiteVideo clips are now available at .
Introduction The river flows near the mouth of the river. It is wide, slow, sluggish, and smelly. Rivers are originally used in stories as symbols of time and history, carrying the hope that they will eventually flow to the sea, but the river in "River's Edge" stands before the characters as a symbol of "stagnation" that never leads to anywhere. The young people who have been chosen to live by the side of the river, where everything stagnates, accumulates, and emits a stench, are like the river, unable to flow anywhere, unable to feel alive, but still wandering around with their raw energy stored up. There is no straightforward rebellion against adults or society, nor are there any role models to emulate. Their eyes look as if they have given up on something, but they also have the fear that a sudden impulse may cause their raw energy to erupt. . "Bad things" are steadily happening under the surface. Haruna Wakakusa, Ichiro Yamada, Kannonzaki, Kozue Yoshikawa, Rumi Koyama, and Kanna Tajima attend the same high school. Each of them is having an unfulfilling time, which is depicted by the packets of milk that appear in the play. The carton of milk that Kanonzaki, who torments Yamada relentlessly, takes out of the refrigerator in her parents' empty house is empty. Koyama Rumi, a bitch who has no qualms about dating, has no milk to drink herself because her older sister monopolizes it. Ichiro Yamada, who is bullied, is affectionate enough to share milk with Haruna Wakakusa and a stray cat, but he is never satisfied with his own milk. Model Kozue Yoshikawa pours all kinds of food into her stomach with milk and vomits before it is nourished. No one has access to milk, the symbol of life, but this does not make them unhappy. Those who try to reach out from the stagnant place survive. UFOs that never appear even if you call them , ghosts full of rumors. The stagnant river and sky that Kyoko Okazaki depicted 24 years ago have emerged in 2018 with Fumi Nikaido as the orbiter and the fresh bodies of young actors such as Ryo Yoshizawa, Hiiragi Uesugi, Sumire, Shiori Doi, and Aoi Morikawa.
What the film "River's Edge" tells us .
What did you frankly think of the film version of River's Edge?
YoshimotoI had the impression that the film was made pretty much as it was based on the original story. When I watch a movie, not only this movie, I want to see some kind of visual leap, and I believe that is what makes a movie special, but I felt that such a leap was not there. For example, I was expecting a long shot at the end, or an aerial shot, or some other visual leap that a manga could not make, but I felt that the Kenji Ozawa song at the end of the film did all the work for me.
Director Isao Yukisada purposely used a standard screen size (1 x 1.33) in his film adaptation of "River's Edge" because he wanted to create a sense of the stagnation of the times, and also because he wanted to show each character in the center of the screen as if they were panels in a comic book.
YoshimotoAh, that makes sense. I'm a manga person, so I really want to see expressions that are unique to film, but on the other hand, if someone from the film world wanted to make the screen look like a manga, I can understand that. I've been saying since that time that I didn't like "River's Edge" among Kyoko Okazaki's works. Chihuahua-chan," which was drawn after that, was very good, and I think that rather represented the atmosphere of the time better, and I thought the work "Forest," which she started drawing after that and left unfinished, was really amazing.
Compared to those, "River's Edge" seemed to be more of a brainstorm than a theme that came from within. At that time, in terms of music, as symbolized by grunge/alterna groups such as Sonic Youth, bleakness was seen as fashionable or intellectual. At that time, a popular phrase among artists was "we are dead while we live," and I hated that. I saw "River's Edge" as an extension of that, and felt a kind of snobbism toward death and corpses. I guess I was bothered by the position of the dead body, looking down on it objectively from above. . I felt this even more so when I saw the movie version. . I felt that Japan today is not the same as this corpse itself. . I felt that this is not the time to be looking at it objectively.
. that they see the corpse as a foreign object outside of themselves, at a distance.
YoshimotoI felt like a snob looking at it that way.
In the early 90's, there was a movement to talk about dead bodies in the context of art, and I can certainly see something similar to that.
YoshimotoLike John Zorn's jacket (John Zorn's unit, Painkiller's "Virgin's Guts," 1991). When I reread the manga "River's Edge" at my current age, I don't feel like I don't like it like I used to, though I can read it with a sense of "this is one of the passing things for Kyoko Okazaki".
That's how much time has passed , he said.
YoshimotoThat's what I mean. The mood at the time was certainly bleak, and there were certainly things around that were killing me, and I even tried to draw them in my own cartoons, but I have sealed those areas off as permanent now. So I drew a manga called "Blue Car" in 1995 as an antithesis to "River's Edge" .
We'll talk more about "Blue Car," which is your masterpiece at the moment, later, but I'd like to talk a little more about "River's Edge." Immediately after seeing the preview, you said that the film was "like a showcase for actors.
Yoshimoto. yes. . I think all the young actors embodied the image of the original work. . Because, after all, a film is only as good as its actors. Also, as the editor who attended the meeting said, Fumi Nikaido gives a sense of being the leader of the cast.
A sense of chairmanship (laughs). It is true that I had the impression that the surrounding actors were pulled along by Nikaido-san's enthusiasm.
YoshimotoI think that's possible. My wife (filmmaker Kayo Nakamura) is making a film, and I sometimes participate in the film as a script collaborator, so I have seen the process of making a film in many ways, but when one strong actor joins, the others are pulled along. There is definitely a synergistic effect.
. It would also create a sense of rivalry among the actors. In that sense, the standard-size angle of view may have helped to avoid extraneous elements and to make the expressions and appearances of the actors in the center of the picture more vivid and memorable. Also, the film version doesn't have the same smell as in 1993, does it? I wondered if that was done on purpose to make it more universal.
YoshimotoIf I wanted to give the film a strong flavor of that time, I would have sprinkled more symbols of that time all over the screen, but I didn't make it that way. But I didn't make it that way. Until about halfway through the film, I couldn't tell if I was setting the film in the present or in 1993. . I realized, "Oh, it's set in '93," because the cell phone didn't come up. . I would be very interested to see what high school students of the same generation as these characters would think if they saw it now.
. I guess the method was to extract only the core of the story without daring to cover all the symbols and gadgets of the time. . and as a result, it worked.
YoshimotoYeah, I think it worked out well in terms of not failing. I don't know if that's the right answer .
Was there a possibility of failing if you tried too hard to create the atmosphere of the time?
YoshimotoI think that risk was a big one, and I think it was made in a way that didn't take that risk and didn't break the bank. I like films that fail, though, so I was a little disappointed in that respect.
When you say a movie that will break the bank, for example?
YoshimotoI like Bo Wiederberg, who directed "Detective Martin Beck." . . I'd rather see a film that ruins what has been built up at the end.
Generally speaking, though, those types of films are not very popular.
YoshimotoIndeed (laughs).
Kenji Ozawa and Kyoko Okazaki.
How did you hear the lyrics of "Arpeggio (surely the end of the magic tunnel)," a song written by Kenji Ozawa for the film, which were not about the story of "River's Edge" itself, but about Kyoko Okazaki and Kenji Ozawa in the 90s, as if it were a letter written from a current perspective?
YoshimotoI read the lyrics immediately when they were first published, and I thought they were good. The phrase "like children going through the forest" appears in the lyrics, and I thought it reminded me of Okazaki-san's unfinished "The Forest" and that he was trying to depict the continuation of that work. The movie was fixed in the year 93, but I think that Kenji Ozawa's song also expressed his feelings about the year 93.
Back in the 90's, what did you think of Kenji Ozawa?
YoshimotoMy wife loved Flipper's Guitar, and I also liked them in the later years and listened to them a lot. . When Kenji Ozawa went solo, I read the lyrics on the back cover of his first single ("Weather Reading") at a CD store and thought, "This is good," so I bought it immediately. . I also went with my wife to the Hibiya Nohe concert held when he went solo. At that time, Kenji Ozawa was not yet called Ozaken, and the audience was cheering "Ozawa-kun" or something like that, but I remember Kami saying beside me, "If Kenji Otsuki is Oken, then Kenji Ozawa is Ozaken. At that concert, Kenji Ozawa's guitar sounded distorted like Neil Young, and it was very good. From then on, I always liked and listened to Kenji Ozawa's music.
You met Kyoko Okazaki-san much earlier, right?
YoshimotoMid 80's . I debuted as a manga artist in Kadokawa Shoten's Monthly Asuka magazine, and at that time Okazaki-san's first book, Virgin, had already been published, which I thought was great. It just so happened that Okazaki-san was also drawing a short story in the same magazine, and the editor asked me if I would like to meet him. I was asked by the editor, "Would you like to meet him? He asked me to come and help him out a bit, and I went to Okazaki-san's workplace and started helping him out in about 1986.
Where was Okazaki-san living at that time?
YoshimotoMy parents' house in Shimokitazawa . . It was right around the time I moved from my parents' house in Yokosuka to Koenji.
By the way, what kind of music was playing in your workplace, Mr. Okazaki?
YoshimotoIt was the heyday of New Wave, so Mr. Okazaki was listening to Young Marble Giants, pop groups, etc. . And then there were the Rough Trade women's groups....
Slits and all that.
YoshimotoYes, that area was played a lot. The first Eurythmics album ("In The Garden") was playing a lot, too. The world was in the heyday of New Wave, but I was starting to get a little bored and was listening to 60's music and American rock. Okazaki-san said, "Yoshitomo-kun, bring me a tape of your favorite songs," and when I brought Cheap Trick, I remember him saying, "I don't like American rock music. That was the exact opposite of what Okazaki-san's tastes were at the time.
Did you also talk about comics?
YoshimotoAt the time, the other assistants who came to help us were also like the children of cartoonists, so we talked about cartoons all the time. We would read the newest thing as soon as it came out, and we would be the first to check out the newcomers.
Did you and Mr. Okazaki have a sense of being allies, or perhaps running side by side in the same era?
YoshimotoYes, we are going in different directions, but our roots are quite similar. Our influences are very similar, and we are the same age. I learned a lot while helping Okazaki-san with his manga.
Which areas did you learn about?
YoshimotoMaybe this is not a good word, but I think it is the way to cut corners. I was influenced by Katsuhiro Otomo, and I tend to draw a lot, but when I was helping Mr. Okazaki, I realized that it is easier to see what should be drawn roughly and what should be left out.
. "The Blue Car" and "Lovely."
In Yoshimoto's "Blue Car," Kenji Ozawa's "Lovely" plays in the car on the highway, making the high school girl in the car say, "Stop, I feel nauseous. . What was in your mind when you drew that?
YoshimotoAt the time I drew it in 1995, Kenji Ozawa was being hyped by the public, and there was an atmosphere of "tonal pressure," or the feeling that you had to like him, and I wanted to take some offense to that. I was drawing as if I was competing with them, and in order to be on an equal footing with them, I felt like I had to go out on a limb. I did it because I had confidence in my work. I thought that there were probably many people who were annoyed with Kenji Ozawa, and I didn't trust the people who were now raising him up, thinking that they would suddenly flip out anyway.
He said that he liked Kenji Ozawa's music and listened to it, but he was annoyed by the way it was being promoted and the atmosphere in which he was not allowed to criticize it.
YoshimotoYes, that's right. I think there were a lot of people who thought I didn't like Kenji Ozawa because of lines like that in "Blue Car," but it was the complete opposite. I wanted to make something strong out of it. This work itself was very much influenced by the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, and my consciousness changed considerably at that time. I think it started a little before the earthquake. I had a feeling that something was going to change from the fashionable "we are dead while we are alive" mentality before 1995, which I mentioned earlier, and this was very much connected to the new techno trend in music, in my mind. . Thanks to techno, I had a liberating feeling that something was going to change in my experience. It was the exact opposite of being fashionable, like going to a club in loungewear, dancing, and going home, but there was a sense of, "That's nice, that's punk," and there was a sense of something being opened up. Then the earthquake happened, and I thought, "This is a terrible thing.
Several days after the earthquake, I was shocked to see a double-page spread in the newspaper listing the dead. The names were written in such a tight row that they all looked like corpses. The image was so powerful that I realized that this was not the time to be talking about "dead while living.
YoshimotoWhen I was drawing "The Blue Car," I thought about putting that list of names as it was, but I thought it would be effective because it was shown in a newspaper spread, and if I showed it in a work, it would end up halfway through, and I thought it was not that kind of technique, that I needed to go down to a deeper level. In the end, I didn't use that list, but in my own image, that list is behind the story. The Blue Car" is a story about driving on a highway, but the highway is also the artery or blood vessel of Japan, and I depicted it in the image of a mountain of dead bodies lying on the other side of that soundproof wall. The realization that we are living in a situation where just a little shaking on the palm of your hand will result in a pile of corpses began to grow stronger around that time, and it seems to have continued all this time.
When "The Blue Car" was made into a movie, I thought it was something else because it did not have the element of an earthquake in it at all. . I had no choice but to tell them to do it on their own without reading any of the script. . Later, I wondered if I should have said so, but then I might not have been able to make it. Actually, I heard that when they were making a film of "Blue Car," they first went to Isao Yukisada, but he turned them down, saying, "This can't be made into a movie. . I think that decision may have been correct in a sense.
The Blue Car" is the antithesis of "River's Edge" in some respects, but now, when talking about the 90s, "River's Edge" is valued and "The Blue Car" is out of print. . I guess that is the present, the "90s of today.
For me, the big change in the mid-90s was brought about by techno, but even that area is rarely talked about nowadays. As a movement that involved the whole world, it must have been similar to punk/new wave, but when people talk about it now, they are talking about individual artists. . I feel that this is the "convenient 90s" of today.
For me, there is a clear distinction between the 90's up to 1994 and the late 90's and the 95's. In the late 90's, for me, Morning Musume and Ringo Shiina were symbolic. I didn't really get into any of them, but from that point on, the indigenous, rural, and Yankee-like atmosphere began to prevail. Japan was turning inward more and more, and the book-off thing was spreading. Even in Kichijoji, where I live, there was still a cultural smell until the mid-1990s, but since the late 1990s, the book-off thing has been spreading and becoming more and more homogenized, which is how I feel today.
I see . Watching the movie "River's Edge," Kanna Tajima, who is like an incarnation of Olive Girl, dies along with 93 years, and Rumi Koyama, who looks like a gal, survives no matter how many times she is almost killed. I thought that the fact that the olive girl dies and the gal survives was a foreshadowing of the times that followed. Kanna Tajima made a silent phone call from a pay phone, but she herself would literally go up in flames, even though today it would be possible to make a flame war on the Internet. So, Kanna Tajima is at Magazine House as a ghost. That's why "Olive" sometimes comes back to life!
Yoshimoto(Chuckles) The violence in Mr. Okazaki was already there when he made his debut. I felt that the violence in "River's Edge" was something he had thought up in his head, so I asked him, "Isn't your violence in a different place? Isn't it more amazing?" . I was thinking.
I think the unfinished "The Forest" is a real masterpiece, but that one doesn't show the violence in a straightforward manner. In the first episode of "The Forest," the brutality is told entirely in a single scarf. It was worn by a man who was killing people in Vietnam, and that's all there is to it. The drawings are getting really good, and I think they went through various processes and reached a bit of an amazing point, so, umm ... it's a real shame. I have the feeling that they really want us to read into it and make a film, but it is a very difficult task, and I think it is a challenge that is left to us.
I think that various artists will take up the challenge of what Mr. Okazaki has proposed in the unfinished "Forest" at their own venues.
YoshimotoIn terms of Kyoko Okazaki's visualization, I personally would like to see "Tokyo Girls Bravo" or "Second Virginity" made into a TV drama. Well, you may be thinking, who would watch it now, but I would.
Toward a new work.
In terms of taking on the continuation of "Mori," I understand that Yoshimoto-san is also preparing a new work.
YoshimotoThere you go (laughs). I've been struggling with a full-length work for about ten years now, though. I have some names that I have completed during that time, but as to why I have not been able to draw and publish them, well, there are many reasons. In my mind, manga is about the present, and in a sense, it is journalism, so I have always thought that I had to depict the present. That's exactly how I felt about "Blue Car," but nowadays, fantasy and such are more accepted by the public. In fact, they sell better that way. Also, since 3.11, it has been especially noticeable that we are constantly confronted with the question of which side of the ideological spectrum we are on, black or white, right or left, which makes it very difficult to draw. For example, just by mentioning a scene of hate speech, the editorial staff's faces would cloud over. Even if I just describe the facts, without affirming or denying them, the editorial board will reject it.
And if you replace that kind of detail with something else, it instantly becomes abstract.
YoshimotoI had an idea for a certain feature film, and I wanted to draw it so badly, but my editor told me that he didn't know, and that reality was moving too fast, so if I didn't draw it soon, it would feel a bit old as a story. While I continued to struggle with that kind of conflict, at some point I started thinking that I should draw something that I simply love. Specifically, I wondered if I could convey the impact of the punk/new wave of 1978 and 1979 by describing that period in detail and conveying the elation of that time as it was then to the present. I have finally narrowed it down to that, and I think it is the only way to do it now. I have finally come to a decision. I decided to stop painting "now" for a while.
However, the story is ready, but I started to notice about a year ago that I was getting tired of myself in my painting. It's not as if I should force myself to change my painting style, I think it would be a more natural change, but in that case, in my case, I just wait, and that's how more and more time goes by (laughs). (Laughs.) They say that if you are not constantly painting, your painting ability will deteriorate, but a painting is a direct reflection of your feelings, and if you don't keep your feelings fresh at all times, you will end up with a dead painting. I think it is important to keep my mind fresh. Recently, I have been thinking, "What is a fresh picture for me?" I have been reading old manga and trying to imitate what I like to draw.
Where exactly is the picture?
Yoshimoto. like shoujo manga from the late 70's. Natsuno Kiyohara's "Hanaoka-chan no Natsuyasumi" ("Hanaoka-chan's Summer Vacation") . It's very specific (laughs). (Laughs.) I like her drawings. I want to draw pictures like that. But I can't do it. He is too good, that man.
. and also inspired by foreign animation.
YoshimotoYes, last year I had the opportunity to see various foreign animations, most notably Tom Moore's "Song of the Sea" and "The Secret of Brendan and Kells". The impact was so great that I went on to acquire "Long Way North," which has never been shown in Japan, and it was also wonderful. . All of them were influenced by the old Toei Movie, but the characters were drawn with very simplified lines, and the perspective was unique.
In terms of the transition of my paintings, there was a big change around the beginning of the 1990s, when my painting style changed drastically. I became aware of the weight of a person at a certain moment, and I began to express the weight of a person by paying attention to the way the person's center of gravity is always somewhere in the picture. By depicting weight, the flow of time can be controlled. I think I have reached a point where I can express a certain kind of atmosphere by doing so, and that way of painting has always been my base, but I think that is a kind of realism, and I think that now I probably want to move away from that.
How can lightness be expressed at a distance from the reality of gravity?
YoshimotoYes . . but I'm still not satisfied with it myself, and I haven't reached the stage where I can show it to others. I think there are hints of this in "Hanaoka-chan's Summer Vacation" and Tom Moore's animations, but I haven't been able to present them as my own yet. It's a bit frustrating, isn't it? I think it's something like lightness and lightness, but I can't quite get there.
Aside from the feature film, the story of the Japanese boys who were baptized into the punk / new wave in the late 70's that you mentioned earlier sounds very interesting.
Yoshimoto. It's a theme that I would enjoy drawing on. . Nowadays, used records are selling well, and many young people are interested in the New Wave. In today's manga world, it is often said that short stories are not necessary, but I want to pursue the possibilities of short stories, and I think readers are too accustomed to long stories, so I think it will look fresh to them. I have always believed that there is potential in things that have been neglected or abandoned, and that there is a vein of ore in them, so I think there is great potential in short stories now.
However, I wonder if people are looking for something new and fresh. In other words, I am skeptical because I feel that it is enough to have something that everyone can get excited about and that everyone is familiar with, not something new. Well, I'm just saying, don't be lazy and go ahead and draw it (laughs).
I think it is possible to portray the punk/new wave movement in Japan in a manga like Mike Mills' autobiographical film "20 Century Woman" that was released last year.
YoshimotoAh, that movie was exactly about the year 79. The main character, a boy, was the same age as me. When I saw that movie, I thought that it was not necessarily a faithful recreation of that time, and that there was no way Americans could have dressed so fashionably in 1979 (laughs). . But I thought it was okay, and I think the movie is a hint.
I would love to read that at any cost! As for us, we'll just have to wait and see , but we're looking forward to it with long necks!
