Interview by Chikao Shiratori

An interview with Super-Conscious Manga Artist Usamaru Furuya
by Chikao Shiratori
English translation by Andy Nakatani

Published along Short Cuts

This conversation took place on January 26, 2000 in a restaurant near Usamaru Furuya's residence in Tokyo's Suginami District. The meeting provided a reunion between Furuya and the editor who in many ways discovered him, Chikao Shiratori. It was in the pages of the legendary avant-garde manga magazine Garo, then under Shiratori's editorship, that Furuya made his debut with the innovative gag manga, Palepoli. Palepoli made Furuya famous; English translations of parts of it have appeared in the “Crazy” issue of Tokion, Japan Edge, and Secret Comics Japan.

Chikao Shiratori: After making your debut in Garo, which in a certain sense was a peculiar magazine, you began drawing Short Cuts for a very major magazine, Young Sunday, which is published by Shogakukan. Let's begin our discussion from that point.

Usamaru Furuya: Yes, I'd like to discuss the circumstances of manga in Japan. At the same time, I'd also like to make this discussion as accessible as possible to an American audience. Garo really focused on the personality of the artist. In other words, they emphasized letting artists create whatever they wanted to create. On the down side, you didn't get paid. Those were the merits and demerits of Garo. With a major Japanese manga magazine, where magazines are a business, the artist doesn't create by himself. You work together with your editor. At first, this put me at something of a loss.

CS: When I was your editor at Garo, I used to make comments on your finished work, like, “You should do this,” or “Next time, you should head in this direction.” But I never told you specifically “draw this” before you actually started drawing. I guess you can't really say such things if you aren't paying for the work. [laughs] You don't get a break with the major magazines. They start rejecting things even when you're just doing rough sketches.

UF: Right, they don't just accept or reject what you draw. Your editor feels that you're creating in cooperation with him. He'll force you to make slight changes in this direction or... With Short Cuts, I originally intended to create a manga in the vein of Palepoli, but with a lighter touch. Inevitably, though, black humor came up, or the subject matter was discriminatory or touched on religion. These kind of elements were cut at the stage of the rough sketches. When it came time to actually draw it, they weren't even considered.

CS: That can be frustrating.

UF: It is frustrating. On the other hand, I also admire people who can persevere through such situations. Business-minded manga artists have their special strengths, and I find that strength incredible. I think that those who hold into their integrity while still remaining business-minded are “stronger” that those that draw whatever they like. You have to be able to create things that will be accepted without weakening you own integrity, or you won't be able to survive in the Japanese manga industry. You have to gradually create more and more of what you want without giving in to such pressures. That's why I think that you have to first put your efforts into getting recognized.

CS: I think that's the major stumbling block for people coming from Garo. Or rather, it's a step they have to overcome.

UF: Yes, because Garo is almost exactly the same as a dojinshi [note: self-published comic].

CS: A dojinshi with a magazine code [laughs].

UF: I used to do “serious” art, and manga was just an extension of that. I never really set out to become a manga artist. That's why being published by a commercial magazine was a decisive step in my becoming a manga artist. I think I'm very different from artists who, from the very beginning, set out to become manga artist for one of the commercial magazines. That's why I don't know how to work with people. For example, if I'd been an assistant, I'd have learned how to deal with people, and how much pay people for specific types of work. But I don't know any of that, and I can't hire assistants. And so my rate of production doesn't grow.

CS: I see. To be successful with a commercial magazine, you have to get serialized and draw a great number of pages. In other words, the work has to be mass-producted, requiring numerous assistants. In your case, you complete each and every one of all your works by yourself. In terms of art, your work is really on target, or rather, the work is really all you own. It's only incidental that your art takes the form of manga.

UF: Yes.

CS: That's why you're different from those who set out to become manga artist specifically for commercial magazines. Right now, manga are a huge industry in Japan. There are even schools to train people to become manga artist. Instead of cultivating artistic styles, those schools instruct people to follow the system of the commercial magazines and the system of the manga industry.

UF: Right, and, with Palepoli, I employed a meta-structure which doesn't exist in the existing grammar of manga. I also used minimalist, four-panel format. I used the term “minimalist” in the artistic sense of the word – I'm thinking of Donald Judd's work, which is just boxes lined up next to each other. Four-panel manga seem to me an appropriate analog to artistic minimalism. Postmodernism was a popular concept when I was in college. With postmodern architecture, disjunctive styles – rococo, gothic, and modern architecture - were used with one another. With Palepoli, I wanted to do a parody of manga. So I wasn't really interested with typical aspects of manga, such as “telling a good story”. Rather, I turned my artistic interests toward creating manga.

CS: Yes, that's why you're.. calculating may be the wrong term, but you have specific and logical reasons for everything you do.

UF: Right. To a certain extent, I can now enjoy typical aspects in the process of creating manga, like making up the story, but in the past I had to search to create manga. “Why draw manga?” Well, everyone draws manga when they're in elementary school. [laughs] But for someone like me, who, at the age of 24 hadn't draw a manga since graduating from college, a specific reason was necessary. My background in art was the only place I could find a basis for drawing manga. That's why I could only work in the four-panel format. Even if I'd wanted to do narrative manga, I wouldn't know how to lay out the panels.

CS: And you just didn't have the desire to do typical narrative manga.

UF: Yes.

CS: So when you sought out an artistic style within yourself, you decided to go with manga?

UF: Yes, it was the best... ummmm..

CS: It wasn't necessary for you to follow the “typical manga route”. Often, a kid who's a little bit better at drawing than those around him, at some point, decides he wants to be a manga artist. He'll start studying drawing and maybe even enroll in a manga correspondence school. Nowadays, he can even attend a regular school for manga. That's the typical route to becoming a manga artist.

UF: Actually, I did do that. [laughs] When I was in elementary school, I was really serious about becoming a manga artist. I'd create stories in the Osamu Tezuka style. I enrolled in the Osamu Tezuka Manga Correspondence School. I'd work hard, send my drawings in, and they'd get returned with corrections. Also, from late elementary school until about my second year in junior high school, I used to submit to the portrait section in Shonen Gaho. The level of art was extremely high there, and many people who published their art there, went on to become famous manga artist, including Kentaro Miura [creator of Berserk] and Katsuki Tanaka. Submitting to that section really taught me a great deal, and allowed me to polish my craft with sense of rivalry.

CS: It sound like you were a right and proper manga kid. If you'd kept going, you'd have been en route to the major manga magazines.

UF: I guess you're right. [laugh] However, when I was in high school, I developed something of a rebellious attitude and started getting interested in underground subcultures and things like that. I started going to underground movies and plays. When I was in my junior year of high school, I thought oil painting was the best way for me to express myself. That's how I ended up studying oil painting.

CS: So even then you felt the need to express yourself.

UF: It's just that my method of expression was always changing. It was oil painting until I entered college. But when I stated studying art in college, I switched to drama. After that, I worked with sculpture. I also studied butoh dance. I was in a dance group called Karasu, directed by Saburo Teshigawa. At the same time, I was also in a group that even some Americans may have heard of, Sankaijuku, studying under Semimaru. So I went in the direction of expression through body movements. After that I also studied under Tetsuro Fukuhara. I kept doing this until I was about 24. at the same time, I was also creating sculptures. With dance, though, I began to feel that somehow I wasn't able to express what I wanted. What I wanted to do couldn't be expresses through a medium as vague as dance. I felt I needed to do something more... ummm.. in the present. In order to express yourself through body movement, you have to separate yourself from the present, and only then can you begin to express yourself. That's what I'd been doing. I had to distance myself from this world, and only then could I begin to dance.

CS: Ummm.. I see [laughs]

UF: Yes. [laughs] So instead, I wanted to be face-to-face with reality and express myself. Even with a good film or a good painting, you're not directly connected. Neither are you directly connected through sculpture or body-movement expression. Even if you find a particular scene interesting, it doesn't directly come alive through dance. Even in everyday life,. If you saw beautiful scenery, even if those images got stored up as feelings, they can't come alive in your movements. These things built up as frustrations inside myself. With sculpture, I used to do abstract three-dimensional figures. With abstract figures you have to rid yourself of all your skill and – how do I put this? - you have to have a “dialogue with the object”, a “dialogue between yourself and the materials.” The more you put your own artificiality into the object, the more that object loses the substance of that object. When it come to a dialogue with an object, what matters is how much of your own individuality you can extinguish. It was at that point that I began to think that this method of expression wasn't quite suited to me.

CS: So when it comes to expression, you're saying that you made a shift from the abstract towards the concrete, from circuitous inference towards more direct methods.

UF: Yes.

CS: It seems that for the regular world of art (this my not include modern art), the opposite is true. The trend is to begin from the representational and to move to the abstract. I feel that would be more typical.

UF: Yes, I went the opposite route. All those things that I couldn't express through abstract methods were building up inside of me. Also you could say that I was slow in discovering what my talents were.

CS: Yes, you could say that.

UF: I'd thought that the ability of expression lay in the ambiguity of the abstract. But lately I've come to feel that ambiguity can't be expressed to people, and I want all of what I do to be understood by people. With dance or sculpture, the audience perceives part of that the artist attempts to express, but some parts of what the creator want to express ore perceived in different ways, depending on different individuals. This ambiguity might be one of the positive aspects of art, but in process of creation I couldn't help thinking, how can I express my thoughts directly as they are? What I put out doesn't get perceived as it is. One method would be, say, with a sculpture hanging on a wall, to hang the piece so that the line of any observer is the same. This would result in the same angle of perception by everyone. But, put into practice, everyone still perceived the piece in different ways. That's way, even with manga, I don't really like abstract conclusions. I like to decide on a specific conclusion and have everyone understand that ending. And this is how things are done in the manga industry. Nobody goes through these complications. From the beginning, they try to create easily understandable and interesting stories with proper conclusions. Doing things this way is normal.

CS: Yes, that's true.

UF: And it's only been about one year since I've reached this state of mind.

CS: It really does seem that you're going in the opposite direction of most people.

UF: That's why people who started out with the major magazine, as they get older, get more conceptually abstract ideas, and become more like painters. People who used to draw hero stories now draw mandala-type drawings. [laughs]

CS: Like Eight Man's creator, Jiro Kuwata. That's why I believe that the existence of people such as yourself isn't only interesting but also vital for the manga industry.

UF: Well, Palepoli wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't been doing dance. But if I spent the time I was dancing working on the manga, it would have been a much better manga. [laugh]

CS: Commercial magazines are supposed to have easy-to-understand stories. Stories that are difficult to understand are cut at level of the planning and rough-sketch stages. They'll tell you to make the story easier to understand. That's why it seems the you've reached the place you were “supposed” to reach although you tool a rather circuitous route.

UF: Yes, that's why now.... ummmm.. Well, I don't like it when I'm told to do more drawings that show revealing panty shots. [laughs] But when I'm told to do something that makes sense, I'm very happy to accommodate and make the story more appealing. I sort of feeling that I've finally come to start creating manga. Because what I was doing wasn't really manga.

CS: So you're no longer feeling out of place in the field of commercial manga? Or rather, that's just what you'll go with from now on?

UF: Yes. A lot of time's passed since I did Palepoli, and I'm probably no longer capable of creating that kind of work. Palepoli was the results of me putting restrictions on myself. It was a kind of justification to allow myself to draw manga. Now that I've entered the manga industry, though, I can draw relatively freely and putting restrictions on myself has become increasingly difficult. Now I want to create more entertaining types of worlds, like creating a Hollywood movie. I want to establish characters, properly establish the setting, complete the story in one or two volumes for a rewarding read.