Issue #349: Authors Keeping Secrets from Themselves
It should be obvious at this point that I am in a period of experimentation with my header images. Previously, I used a template Erin made for me in Google Slides. It’s the template I’ve used for 248 issues. That’s almost five years of Paradox Newsletter. I, obviously, thought it was good. But it’s had its ups and downs:
It had plenty of downsides. It was only as good as the images I could come up with to fill the empty space. And if my title was too long, I had to use a slightly revised template with another text box. Of course, it was fun the one time I broke the formula and had my friend Spencer make a header image different from the template:
But recently, there were a few changes. First, I changed the layout for the Substack’s landing page and it made all my old header images look like shit. Second, I got feedback, from Erin, who made the template, that the template sucks. So, since #345, I’ve been changing it up:
These headers have solved for two problems. They look better in the current home page layout and they eliminate the redundant issue number and title that appears right under the issue number and title in the email headline or top of the post. But honestly, coming up with these and editing them is hard work. Might have to try to come up with a new template.
Unknown Outcomes in Serial Storytelling: Tenkaichi: Nihon Saikyō Bugeisha Katteisen
Over the past week, I’ve been reading a manga with a very long title: Tenkaichi: Nihon Saikyō Bugeisha Katteisen (2021). It’s a descriptive title, meaning literally Tenkaichi: Japan’s Strongest Martial Artist Championship. Written by Yōsuke Nakamura and illustrated by Kyōtarō Azuma, it’s very good. It is an ingenious premise, taking place in an alternate history Japan. Instead of Oda Nobunaga killed at Honnō-ji in 1582, the manga takes place in 1600 at the end of Nobunaga’s rule as Shogun.
Nobunaga sets the Shogun’s seat as a prize of a martial arts tournament. The daimyo who fields a challenger that can be crowned the strongest in all Japan will also rule the country. All of the usual suspects are here: Miyamoto Musashi, Honda Tadakatsu, Sasaki Kojiro, Hattori Hanzo, Fuma Kotaro, and Yagyu Munenori. There are some deeper cuts too, like Toda Seigen, Kamiizumi Ise-No-Kami, Hayashizaki Jinsuke, and Ito Ittosai. Each bears at least a passing resemblance to their historical counterparts, but they are distorted from fact twice over; once because of the layer of badassifying varnish required for a martial arts manga version of a historical figure and once because, according to the plot, the violence of the Sengoku period ended in 1582 and not 1600. Tadakatsu’s combat prowess is dampened by 18 years of revelry, Musashi never departed on his training journey, Kotaro is a random member of the Fuma clan who succeeded the more familiar Kotaro.
Not all tournament manga are created equal. Tenkaichi is in a crowded genre, and its premise is similar to works like Shigurui (2003) and Kengan Ashura (2012). But the first clue that Nakamura’s manga is special is what it is able to accomplish with character backstories. Often, the digression from the fight to recount the combatant’s training or tragic history or impetus to fight can be painful — though Record of Ragnarok (2017) recently did a pretty good job handling this problem. But, so far, I’ve been on the edge of my seat learning about the fictionalized Miyamoto, Toda Seigen, Fuma Kotaro, and Yagyu Munenori. The flashbacks are compelling and have weight. The things that brought each character to the battlefield are clever variations on the historical figure’s recorded background.
Nakamura takes a particular approach that he discusses in Tenkaichi’s fourth volume. It’s typical for manga authors to include cartoon vignettes that recount their creative process, but Tenkaichi’s are the most interesting I’ve ever read. Nakamura writes:
I felt that if you only have one protagonist in a fighting manga, people will read the fights thinking “they’re going to win anyway, right?”. [sic]
So I thought I’d try to write all the characters in Tenkaichi as if they were the protagonists. I hope you enjoy it.
In fact, Nakamura and his collaborators go a step further to write their manga with a different approach to other, similar works:
I might get scolded for telling you this but… [sic] before a battle begins in Tenkaichi, it hasn’t been decided who will win …
So how does it work? How is victory or defeat decided? I’ll tell you.
There’s a meeting before the match
There, we discuss the personalities, abilities, backgrounds, etc. of the contestants based on the materials provided by Kazunobu Goto, a collaborator.Start of the match
When the battle begins, they come up with ideas to showcase “this martial artist is strong like this”. [sic] If it looks good, I ask them to include it in the chapter as much as possible.Win/loss decision
It’s usually decided at the meeting that takes place 1 or 2 chapters before the end of the fight. We take into consideration the previous draft, the unpublished manuscript, and the potential trump cards of each fighter. Then, the winner and loser are chosen.Since we all love battle manga, the winners are decided by a consensus between Nakamaru Sensei, Azuma Sensei, and me, Yamanaka.
“Let’s have this one win to betray the reader’s expectations” and “this one is the secret protagonist so they’ll win.” There is no such speculation.
It is just as simple as the one who gets the most overall votes between us, the 3 battle manga fans, wins.
I guess we could say the same earnest fight as in the martial arts tournament is happening within the framework of the manga…
Tenkaichi doesn’t have a designated protagonist. In Tenkaichi, everyone is a central character. Enemies, allies, there are no sides.
That’s why… [sic] the manga is completely free of narrative tropes such as the “justice prevails” and “the promise of the story”. [sic]
A battle tournament in which not even the creators can predict the outcome.
A manga that “doesn’t have a designated protagonist” is a lofty goal, but Tenkaichi has potentially succeeded in realizing it thus far. The narrative seems to show some favoritism toward a few key characters, but perhaps the debates about who would win or lose their fights were brief and unanimous. At the very least, the approach the trio of mangaka take is more than a gimmick. Before this section outlining the process on deciding who wins the matches, I read the fight between Fuma Kotaro and Toda Seigen. More than any other in the manga so far, I was convinced it was “anybody’s game.” Regardless as to whether the manga’s fights are decided in advance, it may be harder still to convince the audience they aren’t, and Kotaro vs. Seigen did just that.
Often, works of serial fiction are criticized for “not having a plan,” with the audience’s implicit demand being that a story will end in a way that makes everything leading up to that ending matter. With Tenkaichi, though, Nakamura does the opposite — he abdicates a responsibility the audience foists on serial storytellers to know what will happen. Indeed, what the audience expects from a “battle manga” might be quite different from a “mystery box show” like Lost (2004) or From (2022). Instead, they might prefer that the battles not be telegraphed or “spoiled” by symbolism, narrative inertia, or because a character is necessary to resolve a subsequent plot point. The position of imperilment without guarantee that Nakamura puts his characters in evokes the tension a work can generate by killing off characters that appear to be central or have, at least, gotten a lot of “screen time.”
Unless Nakamura and company release their process notes and document their actual votes, we’ll never know if this is their real approach or just a creative conceit meant to generate suspense. But the effect is the same regardless, both the manga and the creators send the same message that anyone can die. There’s no “plot armor” in Tenkaichi.
Tenkaichi sells the life and death quality of its duels without its writer and artists having to explain their method. But their self-awareness about audience expectations and what makes or breaks martial arts manga — and even any kind of fiction where combat is the focus — is one of the ways Tenkaichi is more sophisticated than it first appears. The manga’s narrator regularly references the ways Tenkaichi’s story diverges from “our time” or “history as we know it” [emphasis added].
The manga assumes a reader who lives in the real world, and incorporates that world into the fiction as a discursive, but narratively irrelevant, frame to a story that is not that different from any other historical fiction manga that is “history as we know it,” at least in terms of major historical events.
Even though the characters in Tenkaichi have materially different backstories compared to the versions of them that are documented in history books, each of these characters have any number of fictionalizations — based on their “real” historical backstories — that serve as the bedrock for these adaptations. Much of these characters “real” histories are apocryphal. Some, like Fuma, don’t even have documented identities and are known only by a formal title. What Tenkaichi revises is not history, but myth. These myths are found in history, but their figuration is concretized by decades of appearances in historical fictions and outright fantasies.
Neither the resemblances to or differences from “persons living or dead” are coincidental in Tenkaichi. But this is a text where intention enters the work at different stages. The mythic version of historical figures are created as entities to resolve a conflict among the three creators, a conflict about who should win or lose the duels that are the substance of the manga’s story. The aim of the characters’ depiction is not to “give away” how long they’ll survive the death matches for the Shogun’s seat. The outcome of the fights, whether tense or lopsided, is a secret the mangaka strive to keep even from themselves.
Weekly Reading List
https://theconversation.com/the-1960s-jazz-tribute-to-malcolm-x-that-profoundly-expressed-the-black-condition-88731 — Not a recent publication, but I revisited Leon Thomas’s “Malcolm’s Gone” recently and enjoyed Michael Shakib Bahtch’s reading of the piece as a companion.
In Bong Joon-Ho’s acceptance speech, being awarded the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for Parasite (2019), he remarks “Once you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” This sentiment is a resonant one, following other champions of subtitled (non-English language) films like Martin Scorsese. Though Cole Haddon’s title is a bit exaggerated, he writes about a 1993 letter to the editor from Scorsese wrote in response to a critique of Federico Fellini and other foreign filmmakers as difficult to understand.
Scorsese references a Budweiser commercial, which is somehow worse than how Scorsese recounts it:
Scorsese’s excoriation of the New York Times is premised on two ideas. The most important one is disputing that non-U.S. films are difficult to understand. He ends his letter aligning differences in artistic expression to other forms of cultural difference, suggesting they only appear complex or unusual relative to a U.S. norm.
The other element in his letter suggests, even if great works of art are difficult, they are worth the effort to come to grips with. To that end, he aligns Fellini with James Joyce, Ingmar Bergman, and John Cage.
Subtitle-phobia remains pervasive among the U.S. film going populous, but fortunately those with a taste for subtitled films — or films in their native tongue — are turning out in large enough numbers to keep AMC screening the latest in Korean, Hong Kong, Indian, and sometimes even Japanese film.
The broader U.S. appreciation to “foreign” film as such may have increased, but “difficult” work in any language invites dismissal or ridicule. Scorsese and Joon-Ho, mercifully, are exemplary contributors to the fight against cultural chauvinism and anti-intellectualism.
A collaboration album between Tokyo Japan’s LiFE and Richmond, Virginia, USA’s Destruct. Pretty good. LiFE is one of my favorite bands of all time and Destruct has been a band I have really enjoyed recently. They’re both firing on all cylinders here.
Until next time.