I would have bought this a long time ago (July 2020 to be exact, apparently) when I was in the thick of early over-exitedly ordering Japanese books whenever cool-sounding ones happened to come to my attention (usually from MinovskyArticle tweets at the time). In this case I must have become aware of ねじ式 in the context of like, being a very famous and influential manga in terms of Japanese comics history and contributing to the medium being taken seriously as artistic expression there. And I presumably ordered this because hey – sounds good, sign me up, I’d like to read ねじ式 – this is called ねじ式, so… Nowadays, having more (any) conception of what ねじ式 itself substantively is as a work – i.e., it’s a short story. I maybe wouldn’t have rushed out to buy it in this specific venue and would have read it in some other context (as indeed I have since already done, with that first volume of the modern manga anthology, 現代マンガ選集 表現の冒険). But at the same time, now that I’ve actually gotten around to reading the whole thing, I am glad to have this, because it is a very very cool edition. The 改訂版 aspect is notable – if I remember right this edition specifically is trying to be roughly the closest thing you can get in a modern edition to opening up an old issue of ガロ (where nearly all of these short stories were first published), as I believe it’s the same size and a similar paper quality to those magazines, a hefty manga magazine sized volume of newsprinty material, really taking the presentation of the whole thing to the next level in terms of putting you just that little bit more in the shoes of someone reading these stories in the late 60s, and maybe thereby helping convey the authentic impact that much more too. There’s also extensive endnotes on each story and a chronology, and the whole thing has the vibe as well of the kind of anthology I would pick up at the college bookstore in advance of a course on Tsuge, say. It would presumably be ideal for that kind of use. And it’s just kind of a nice object to have and hold. This was my first significant exposure to Tsuge beyond the title story. ねじ式 itself is so surreal and stylized and oddly entrancing, and the volume opens with that famous story before then reverting to chronological order for the rest of the included selections (if I had my druthers I’d probably move ねじ式 to its place in the chronology instead of the front, but I get why it’s there). And so it’s interesting to then get into the rest of the stories, which are generally a lot more quiet and sedate. I would say the usual mode of the stories here is a literary vignette of sorts where a traveling mangaka wanders into a small mountain town, interacts with the slightly strange locals for a bit, has some kind of feelings, and then it ends. In a good way! Or a slightly poetic short Edo-period yarn. Again, in a good way! Tsuge was an assistant for Shigeru Mizuki somewhere in there, and it feels like it shows (one way or another, I don’t exactly know which direction that influence vector would point per se) in a similar sort of like, detailed photo-referenced evocative backgrounds with simple, highly expressive characters. With sometimes movie-ish lifelike depictions mixed in as well in the more avant garde stories. I really like the atmosphere produced. Tsuge would have been around 30 at the time, (relatively early on in his career I suppose?) and I would say that the perspective of like, a youngish bachelor mangaka in the late 1960s comes through quite strongly. Which I guess is mostly to say that women in the stories often/usually are vectors for odd wistful sexual encounters or wistful aimless attraction in a way that isn’t necessarily my favorite but does feel perhaps familiar/expected from movies of the time with a similar tone. I suppose the only story I’ll specifically call out is the short one about the salamander, just living being a salamander down in a sewer
All in all, I felt an enjoyable and rewarding volume to read a bit more through now and then when I felt like I had enough capacity for something a bit literary-feeling. I have one more collection of Yoshiharu Tsuge works which I’ll probably try to read in succession, then I guess after that work out how / whether I want to attack more of his work now that I have the power to use ebooks.
(I didn’t organically take photos of ねじ式 itself because it’s very famous, but it felt weird to include pictures from the other stories but not it, so here are some famous bits from ねじ式. You might notice these referenced all over the place if you happen to know to notice - particularly the bit with the eyes)
