Kamui Den
Sanpei Shirato, writer/artist
Garo Magazine, published by Shogakukan
21 volumes from 1964-1971
Hey, I’ve been meaning to post this on my own blog forever, but now that we have appropriated Sean’s huge market power, it’s time I finally review interesting manga that I come across in my daily life in Japan. These are manga that I’d never heard of before I came across them in a shop or in the trash or something, that I find interesting for whatever reason. First I’ll start you off with a really really good one. Let me tell you about Kamui Den, or Legend of Kamui.
Kamui Den is a totally awesome samurai and ninja fighting comic from the sixties written and drawn by Sanpei Shirato. Wikipedia says that it was the first story serialized in Garo, an influential gekiga magazine that printed more serious “art” manga. I found out about Kamui Den when I saw it on the top shelf of a big used manga store near my house. It was wrapped in plastic so I couldn’t see inside but it was a really fat volume with a nice cover design with just a little bit of drawing on it, and it looked good. Boy, damn, when I opened it up, I knew I made a good choice. The drawings are so amazing, full of life and energy, and drawn really wacky but so well. Basically, everything looks really scratchy and hastily done, but it’s really well-rendered, and also somehow very cartoony. Like, the faces are “iconographic,” and the characters are built with a classical drawing sense, and all that happens within natural and architectural backgrounds that are very loose, but they hold together. This is just masterful.
I can’t even read the manga – though I know there are English editions in the United States, so YOU can go and find this – but you don’t need to read the words to know what’s going on, mostly, and that’s a sign of really good cartooning. The stories are good, too. It’s a really long serial about a ronin, from what I gather, but it seems to be made of smaller story arcs about lots of different people. You know this is fun for him to write, because he tells all kinds of different stories. Check this out – there’s a whole big volume that’s mostly (beautiful drawings of) animals living their lives and having drama in the forest, and then the subplot is what’s happening with the humans in the nearby village, and you see their stories reflect each other – alpha males, theft, war, justice, laws of the jungle and stuff like that. Sometimes, on the other hand, he does a lot of historical writing (with some pretty difficult kanji) about feudal lords and stuff. And a lot in between.
I read online about how the comic is supposed to be political, about how the upper class has always conspired to suppress poor people, or something like that. The message comes through. It’s kind of sad and fatalistic, but at least the book addresses issues of class conflict, which Japanese people are generally very reluctant to discuss openly. This is a country where 90% of people identify themselves as “middle class.” Weird. Sanpei Shirato isn’t someone who would propagate that idea and that makes this book really smart, on top of being really beautiful. This is one of the best manga I’ve ever found, so if you have a chance to buy it, you should!
