Reviews

Additional “graphic adaption” for the English-language edition credited to Ami Reuveni, Soni ReGa, Vanesa Coronel & Edu Di Costa. All images read from right to left.

The British/Spanish publishing arrangement Fanfare/Ponent Mon has been translating comics by Jirō Taniguchi for as long as I have been writing about comics, though it’s been slower for all of us in recent years. This book was announced in 2022, shortly after the publishers’ release of Taniguchi’s A Journal of My Father, and its belated arrival feels like a new opportunity to consider the artist from an interesting hinge point in the development of his aesthetic. Earlier publishers had tried to promote Taniguchi in English as a specialist in handsome genre fare — most memorably in VIZ’s 1990 edition of the magisterial crime comic Hotel Harbour View, written by Natsuo Sekigawa — but it is Fanfare/Ponent Mon that is most responsible for promulgating the idea of “Jirō Taniguchi” as a lyricist of place and memory, in line with his formidable reputation in Europe.

The Solitary Gourmet, meanwhile, is not quite either. It might be the most famous of Taniguchi’s titles in Japan, but in this case the comic has comparatively little to do with it. Rather, it is TV Tokyo’s live-action adaptation that has become a fixture in the last decade of Japanese late-night entertainment, having run for 108 episodes from 2012 through 2021, with annual specials continuing to air on New Year’s Eve through the present; there was also a Taiwanese streaming series in 2015, an anime streaming series in 2017-18, and most recently a live-action feature film, which premiered in Japan this past January. I have seen very few of these shows, but their reputation is that of comforting formula: Inogashira, a foreign goods trader, is involved in some aspect of his work, gets hungry, goes to a (real) restaurant and monologues to the viewer about what he is eating, or his surroundings, or another topic, and then he departs. Of the comic’s creative team, it is the writer, Masayuki Kusumi, who is significantly involved in the television series, performing much of the show’s music with his band, The Screen Tones, and appearing in documentary segments further spotlighting the eateries featured in the main program.

Kusumi has had a long and eclectic career in Japanese media. If he is known at all in America, it is probably as writer/director of the 1986 direct-to-VHS horror film He Never Dies, in which an isolated man spontaneously becomes painless and unkillable in the process of attempting suicide, inflicting all manner of damage upon his body, yet ... see title.[1](#easy-footnote-bottom-1-183550 “This film was part of a series of horror videos with the banner title Guinea Pig, emphasizing elaborate makeup and prosthetic gore effects. Two other Guinea Pig entries were written and directed by the manga artist Hideshi Hino, including 1985’s Flower of Flesh and Blood — I will spare you the Disqus login by noting here that the actor Charlie Sheen saw a bootleg copy playing at a party and believed it to be a real document of serial murder, prompting an amusing-in-retrospect investigation into the diabolical tape’s origins — and 1988’s Mermaid in a Manhole, a potential best-ever translation of a cartoonist’s general aesthetic to live-action cinema.”) But Kusumi has also been involved in food-related comics since 1981, having debuted in Garo with a short story titled “Yakō,” drawn by Haruki Izumi,[2](#easy-footnote-bottom-2-183550 “Specifically, Kusumi and Izumi worked under the joint pseudonym “Masayuki Izumi,” as if one person. This would not be the last pen name employed by Kusumi, who sometimes renders his familial name as “Qusumi,” as it appears in the copyright notice for this book. “) about a cliché hardboiled tough guy in a trench coat fussing over the order in which he should eat the components of his box lunch. A later Izumi collaboration, Dandori-kun (1990-91), a comedy about a severely meticulous and orderly man, received a live-action adaptation in 1992; echoes of these protagonists, participants in a society that holds them necessarily at some remove, might be detected in Inogashira, the Solitary Gourmet.

An extraordinary horizontal white panel slams the brakes on Inogashira’s narration, denying gluttonous readers full access to the protagonist’s feelings on romantic love. While it is perilous to credit any aspect of a comic’s visual narration to one person on a creative team, the withholding of a character’s thoughts, even as they are ostensibly “sharing” them, is characteristic of Taniguchi’s solo work, and thus reads as an intervention vis-à-vis Kusumi’s scenario.

The back cover of the Fanfare/Ponent Mon edition declares: “Like an exquisite meal, this book should be savored over and over again.” I would add that the book is best consumed in small portions. The series had two distinct iterations, both of which are collected in this hardcover: a 1994-96 run in PANJA, a short-lived monthly spin-off of SPA!, which is a weekly general interest magazine published by Fusosha, the publishing arm of Fuji TV; and a very irregular 2009-2015 run in SPA! itself. The comic was conceived by Kusumi and Fusosha editorial for the launch of PANJA, and its format reflects its origins — every episode is a uniform eight pages, self-contained so that you can start on any given chapter and get the gist of the entire series. This is a professional, commercial feature, completely at ease with the state of comics as an integrated part of the Japanese media landscape, wherein “comics for adults” often function on a similar level of depth and sophistication to a recurring “personality” column or travel writing, or (most pertinently here) episodes of a high-concept television series.

The unique element, then, is Taniguchi, who was paired with Kusumi by Fusosha’s editors. At that time, early in the 1990s, Taniguchi had just completed something of an artistic transition. His earlier work, since his 1970 debut, frequently addressed crime, mystery and sport scenarios, drawn with a heavily realistic, cinematic flair. However, beginning in 1987, Taniguchi and the aforementioned Natsuo Sekigawa made a significant shift in emphasis with The Times of Botchan, a literary panorama of Meiji-era politics and culture, rich in witty character drawing and scrupulous period detail, which continued until 1996. While this was happening, Taniguchi became newly prominent for contemplative, slice-of-life solo comics rendered with crystalline precision, particularly the 1990-91 series The Walking Man and a hugely acclaimed 1991 pet ownership-themed short story, Raising a Dog. Works in this vein travelled well in French translation, and before long the artist was collaborating with the likes of Moebius as a cartooning citizen of the world, the former solitudes of manga and bandes dessinées wedded in a manner profitable to all.

Not just for its historical position, The Solitary Gourmet can be read as a drawing together of both sides of Taniguchi’s career. Inogashira’s narration and his lonely, searching nature is not unlike that of a noir protagonist, albeit one of an especially mild sensibility — much like the various narrators from Hotel Harbour View, or the protagonist of Benkei in New York, a series of short crime comics Taniguchi drew for the writer Jinpachi Mōri during the serialization of The Solitary Gourmet. At the same time, Inogashira’s means of navigating life is more in line with the slightly dreamy protagonists of The Walking Man or A Journal of My Father, the latter also serialized in 1994,[3](#easy-footnote-bottom-3-183550 “Attentive readers may be wondering how Taniguchi is working on The Solitary Gourmet, The Times of Botchan, Benkei in New York and A Journal of My Father all at the same time in 1994. While these are mostly “irregular” series he does not literally have piled on his desk all at once — and, of course, my intent is not to impugn the extraordinary particularity of Taniguchi’s art — it hopefully goes without saying that Taniguchi is running an art studio, and that all non-biographical references to “Jirō Taniguchi” in this article incorporate his various studio assistants, none of whom are credited in the present volume. The prominent illustrator Tadahiro Uesugi, for example, was a Taniguchi assistant who contributed to The Walking Man, and may have still been around for some of this.“) and the visual emphasis of the series is on finely rendered, authentic Japanese locales, vividly drawn foodstuffs, and a myriad of bodily postures and facial expressions amidst everyday encounters, which is the substance of the later Taniguchi.[4](#easy-footnote-bottom-4-183550 “Further information on Taniguchi’s evolution can be found in two articles by Natsume Fusanosuke, who is not only a renowned manga theorist and longtime admirer of Taniguchi, but the grandson of Natsume Sōseki, author of Botchan itself.”)

Inogashira visits a raucous takoyaki tent in Osaka and immediately feels weird. Note again the occasional use of wordless panels to emphasize the protagonist’s remoteness.

But even moreso than the episodic likes of Benkei or The Walking Man, this is not a series that is “supposed” to be read all at once, because it is designed to be informative as well as repetitive and predictable. To an extent, the English edition leans into this; each chapter is prefaced by a list of specialized culinary terms used in the eight pages to follow, so that the reader only needs to flip back a few pages to appreciate the difference between maguro and otoro without the need for checking a long glossary at the end. Yet some interest might also be coaxed from counterproductively wolfing the book down. While every chapter invariably transitions from Inogashira doing his everyday job to Inogashira eating something and telling us about it, a biographical sketch slowly emerges from the accrual of small incidents.

Most evidently, Inogashira is not a “trained” gourmet, as is the case in series like Oishinbo, the very popular culinary comic that saw a few volumes translated by VIZ back in 2009 and 2010. That series exemplified the transformation of cooking manga from its 1970s origins in chefs, bakers, etc., challenging the world in a manner akin to sports manga to a consumer-focused model, in which journalists, salarymen, gourmands expound on the values of fine cuisine. This paralleled a wider gurume boom in Japanese consumer society: a pursuit of fine things encouraged by the bubble economy. But that bubble had popped by ’94, and Inogashira betrays no specialized insight into food. Rather, it is implied from the repetition of the chapters that he has developed a sophisticated palate simply because he does not cook on his own — he eats out for seemingly every meal, all of the time.

From there, other suggestions are made. He appears to live in his office, which implies some frugality; he often quotes the prices of his meals, delighting in a good deal. But in one chapter I did the math and caught him dropping the equivalent of $27.00 USD on breakfast in 1990s dollars; the man’s got some money. Inogashira’s job as a foreign goods trader has doubtlessly been conceived as a means of getting him to visit new locales each chapter, but he does not appear to have any employees, nor does he have a wife or children. Years ago, he dated a very successful and prominent woman, but that relationship collapsed due to his unwillingness to change anything in his life for her. In fact, every time Inogashira mentions some intimate relationship with a woman (which is not often), we are immediately informed that it did not last, presumably for the same reasons. He expresses discomfort around young people, and mild annoyance at the organic farming activism of boomer hippies, but he never voices political views. He practiced martial arts for years in his youth, but gave it up. He is a teetotaler, for reasons that go unexplained. Among the most consistent throughlines in the book is how much booze Japanese people drink, in virtually every social situation.

Inogashira is not social. I am tempted to say an American would call him “unambitious,” but no: he reminds me very much of the entrepreneurs a little older than my father I used to work for in the suburbs of the east coast, who started doing one thing in their 20s and kept doing it for all their lives. It is very hard to do one thing for your whole life now, including in Japan, though some I’m sure still adhere to the dogged values of consistency and service that Inogashira embodies. If he is not quite “like” the presumed reader of general interest magazines in the 1990s, the qualities of him are surely meant to resonate with everyday company professionals expected to work a great deal for without much of a home life, who are a little lonely. Confronted with an especially rude and nasty restauranteur, Inogashira declares: “When I eat, I have to be free, without anyone impeding me. And — how should I put it? — I need to have salvation. To eat alone, in silence, in abundance.” The comic not only espouses the values of the gourmet, but the grace of solitude.

Inogashira winds up getting into a physical fight with the guy and stumbling away, upset with himself, because this is sensible escapism.

TOP: Page from Ch. 2, published 1994. BOTTOM: Page from Ch. 25, published 2012. Taniguchi’s approach is compositionally similar, but a misty quality is noticeable in the newer art, as is the elongation of our man’s face.

I have been describing a lot of plot incidents which may be attributed to Kusumi, but know that Taniguchi is key to the sense of observation prevalent in the book. In his solo comics, I have found this artist sometimes cloying in the sentimental melancholy he dapples over his terrains of memory — A Journal of My Father, A Zoo in Winter and A Distant Neighborhood are all a little like that. But The Walking Man is a small masterpiece, because Taniguchi restricts the dialogue to incidental chatter while the extreme clarity of the drawing gives the impression of an impossible hyper-attentiveness: every moment of experience, no matter the banality, prized over the specifics of interaction, which is a vision of “realistic” comics as a complete reversal of reality. Although there is much more text, this same hyper-attentive quality presides over The Solitary Gourmet, so that the protagonist “reads” as uncannily observant from the perspective of the art, in way that adds a ellipses to all of his dialogue. It is not just the fact that Taniguchi has backgrounds in most panels and draws the cartoon figures with a degree of anatomical verisimilitude; in all of these often very dense images, I did not once find myself at a loss as where to look, or confused or overwhelmed by detail, but I also don’t come away with the impression of airless “craft” from Taniguchi. Instead, the severe accessibility of his pages serves what I see as the observational mission of his work, be it alone or in collaboration.

Of course, this book also covers more than 20 years of time here in our real world, where Jirō Taniguchi once lived. I had to chuckle, flipping between the first chapters and the last — Taniguchi had so completely figured himself out by 1994 that his work from 2015 looks very similar. There is a softer, misty quality to his 21st century pages, however, which I suspect is the result of switching to digital tones; his figure work becomes very slightly looser, with Inogashira stretching a bit into a more oval form, his expressions a little more caricatured, his nose longer — is this the impact of French cartooning?

In truth, the second batch of chapters is not as strong as the first. The 1990s run of the series terminated with *PANJA *itself, but a collected book saw several reprints over the years; the 21st century SPA! run followed one of those editions, and the TV Tokyo series started up in the midst of that. Often it feels like Kusumi is reprising favorite moments from the first run: another flashback to the protagonist’s relationship with a famous woman; another chapter where Inogashira gets into a fight and delivers a Mr. A.-ish declaration of purpose (“...to eat or not is something one decides for oneself. No one else has the right to take that freedom away from you.”). Sometimes Inogashira orders bizarrely enormous amounts of food in the later chapters, presumably to showcase as many meals as possible; episodes end on little summary moments, sometimes quoting from popular films and literature, rather than trailing off as episodes in the 1990s did. One detects a firmer intent to introduce commercial qualities into the series, and while it’s always been a commercial proposition, such expediencies of salability don’t harmonize as well with Taniguchi’s aesthetic, which remains consistent from the start.

Yet the most moving episode is a later one: a 2008 chapter which debuted in a reprint of the collected 1990s episodes as a coda. Inogashira is in the hospital; he’s been injured because he has no employees and has to carry all of his wares himself. He enthuses about the quality of Japanese hospital food; he observes a weak, elderly man in the bed next to his, who must have his food broken up and fed to him. Inogashira will die like this. He doesn’t die in this chapter, no, but the impression given is that one day, this is how he will die: observant, private, thinking about food as the lights go out, doing the same thing, and that’s ok, that’s what life is for some people. But Taniguchi, who died in 2017, is not like the character he draws in this case; he did not devote all of his time to The Solitary Gourmet, even after its rare and terrific success. For all his consistency, he had changed a lot, and there was still more to do.

* * *

1. This film was part of a series of horror videos with the banner title Guinea Pig, emphasizing elaborate makeup and prosthetic gore effects. Two other Guinea Pig entries were written and directed by the manga artist Hideshi Hino, including 1985’s Flower of Flesh and Blood — I will spare you the Disqus login by noting here that the actor Charlie Sheen saw a bootleg copy playing at a party and believed it to be a real document of serial murder, prompting an amusing-in-retrospect investigation into the diabolical tape’s origins — and 1988’s Mermaid in a Manhole, a potential best-ever translation of a cartoonist’s general aesthetic to live-action cinema.
2. Specifically, Kusumi and Izumi worked under the joint pseudonym “Masayuki Izumi,” as if one person. This would not be the last pen name employed by Kusumi, who sometimes renders his familial name as “Qusumi,” as it appears in the copyright notice for this book.
3. Attentive readers may be wondering how Taniguchi is working on The Solitary Gourmet, The Times of Botchan, Benkei in New York and A Journal of My Father all at the same time in 1994. While these are mostly “irregular” series he does not literally have piled on his desk all at once — and, of course, my intent is not to impugn the extraordinary particularity of Taniguchi’s art — it hopefully goes without saying that Taniguchi is running an art studio, and that all non-biographical references to “Jirō Taniguchi” in this article incorporate his various studio assistants, none of whom are credited in the present volume. The prominent illustrator Tadahiro Uesugi, for example, was a Taniguchi assistant who contributed to The Walking Man, and may have still been around for some of this.
4. Further information on Taniguchi’s evolution can be found in two articles by Natsume Fusanosuke, who is not only a renowned manga theorist and longtime admirer of Taniguchi, but the grandson of Natsume Sōseki, author of Botchan itself.