The first story in Susumu Katsumata’s
collection of 10 gekiga, “Mulberries,” begins with a typically
comic situation—an early adolescent boy and girl bicker back and
forth. Within just a few pages, however, the girl has nearly been raped
and the boy has been given relationship advice by a mythical creature,
while Katsumata also pauses to close in on bugs and the silhouettes of
bathers in the distance. These moments don’t climax to any resolution,
however. Instead, these observations of rural life—sharp
contrasts of serenity and cruelty—pull the reader into the book
and set the tone for the remaining stories.
In this collection, the late Katsumata explores his own rather harsh
but somehow still idyllic youth in Japan’s countryside in the years
after World War II. The typically cartoonish characters live out their
dramas among fine etchings of farmlands, mountains surrounded by rain
clouds, and landscapes filled with animal life, reflecting Katsumata’s
upbringing and enlivening the standard manga style. Katsumata even goes
so far as to include a two-panel close-up of a pissing bull, finely
detailed. This moment aside, the landscapes are beautiful to observe,
but they are the backdrop to a rough existence where women are
regularly assaulted (though in the story “Torojiro Kappa,” beatings
serve as part of the woman’s sexual gratification); monks disregard
their religion for drink and lust, as in both “The Dream Spirit” and
“The Sack”; and nature is quick to kill, occasionally with supernatural
means, as in “Kokeshi.”
Katsumata plays with the interaction of nature and society most of
all in the titular story. Here, a young man’s sexual encounters with a
prostitute and, later, a young admirer overlap the ideas of affection
and base sexual desire by projecting these concepts into the setting of
the characters, using the process of sake brewing, snowstorms, and hard
labor to investigate these ideas more fully.
Although life is tough in Katsumata’s world, stories such as “The
Specter,” “Kokeshi,” and “Wild Geese Memorial Service” imagine nature
as a symbol for trying to do more than just survive. With mythical
creatures screaming “perverts!” at townspeople, talking tanuki with
testicles exposed, and obese mountain hags appearing in the snow, the
stories aren’t idealizations of nature simply as an innocent model that
humanity should return to. Instead, Katsumata gives a voice (sometimes
a literal voice) to nature that interacts with modern society and tries
to improve humanity while keeping all its profanities intact.