Komatopia

In the last two decades Natsume Fusanosuke (incidentally, a descendent of Natsume Soseki, the towering figure of modern Japanese literature) has emerged as a central figure in manga criticism. Aside from his encyclopedic knowledge of manga history and his critical acumen, what distinguishes Natsume from many of his fellow critics and scholars is his background as a professional manga author. While the bulk of his recent output falls squarely within the domain of criticism, his intimate understanding of the craft of manga composition and penmanship served to bring to the field a rich awareness of the medium’s formal and stylistic density. Natsume has also inaugurated the new genre of “manga criticism through manga,” an example of which is translated here.¹

This piece is the first in a series discussing the frames that divide a manga page into discrete elements. (In Japanese these discrete boxes are called koma, which gives the series its name.) The frame is a particularly salient and fertile embodiment of the question of “limit,” and not only in the literal sense that it serves to limit and to organize the shifting scope of visibility in the unfolding of a manga work. More fundamentally, it constitutes the most basic order of manga storytelling, the threshold beneath which the basic coherence and legibility of manga unravels. As such a safeguard of manga’s narrative order, the formal question of the frame also resonates with the thematics of order and disorder, self and other, and humans and nonhumans that preoccupy many of the contributions in this issue. While Natsume is here primarily concerned with the formal and narratological functions of the frame, his experiments toward the end of the piece underscore this underlying unity of formal and ideological orders by destabilizing both, literally in one stroke of the framing pen. This insight opens a fertile avenue to explore the ways form and content intersect in manga. One may begin to wonder, for instance, whether Tezuka Osamu’s persistent plays with the frame have something to do with his no-less-persistent preoccupation with the tenuous line dividing humans and nonhumans. This, of course, is the theme explored in many of the essays included in this volume, especially those by Yomota and Ōtsuka.