Antonio Hermosin Gandul
Tokyo, Feb 11 (EFE).- The legacy of Jiro Taniguchi, known as “the poet of manga” and as the most European of Japanese comic cartoonists, is more alive than ever with successful adaptations to the small and big screen , five years following his death.
Taniguchi passed away on February 11, 2017 at the age of 69. He left behind a dazzling production for the variety of genres covered following having reached the peak of his career with growing legions of readers both in his native country and in the rest of the world and having also achieved countless awards.
Famous in the West above all for introspective and nostalgic works such as “Distant Neighborhood” or “My Father’s Almanac”, the Japanese mangaka began his career drawing humanized animals and tough guys inspired by American film noir, and also dared with comics science fiction, samurai or gastronomic.
The television adaptation in 2012 of “The lonely gourmet”, the story of a commercial that goes through restaurants in Tokyo and other cities in Japan in search of their most popular dishes, catapulted his name to the general public, following having been for decades a cult author for comic lovers.
This 2022, another animated film adaptation of his work “The Summit of the Gods”, directed by Patrick Imbert, has been awarded a Lumière Award in France, and is also nominated for the César and Annie Awards, following having premiered in the Cannes Film Festival last year.
A VERSATILE BRUSH
“I’m very interested in everything and I don’t want to be pigeonholed into a single category. Deep in my heart, I intend to express anything through manga,” Taniguchi said in an interview with the “The Man Who Draws” exhibition. , organized in Tokyo on the occasion of the anniversary of his death.
The exhibition, which can be visited until the end of the month at the Setagaya Literature Museum, brings together some 300 original drawings and vignettes by the cartoonist, as well as various editions of his works and other pieces that illustrate his half-century of artistic career.
Born in Tottori (western Japan), Taniguchi began his career as a cartoonist in his twenties and as an assistant to the mangaka Kyuta Ishikawa, known for his works on animals and with whom he learned to give prominence and expressiveness to the wild dogs, ants or hawks that appeared in his later works.
In the 1970s and 1980s, he honed his realistic style and cinematic outlook by drawing inspiration from American comics and Golden Age films, and began to win over Japanese youth audiences with “Trouble is my business” or ” Knuckle Wars”.
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In 1987 he undertook the most ambitious project of his career until then, “The Botchan Age” where he portrayed the writer Soseki Natsume and other prominent literary, political and social figures of the Meiji historical period (1868-1912), and who became published serialized for nine years.
DRAW TO COUNT
Having already gained publishing recognition in Japan, Taniguchi unleashed his creativity in the 1990s, drawing stories of dying dogs (“Inu wo kau”/ “Caring for a Dog”), men who simply walk through their neighborhood (“The walker”) or calm family dramas that seemed to be taken from Yasujiro Ozu’s cinema.
In addition to dealing with unusual topics in Japanese manga with an unprecedented level of detail and realism, Taniguchi distilled during the maturity of his career his mastery to evoke emotions and narrate stories without resorting to text, as can be seen in the dozens of pages with hardly any “The Walker” or “Furari” sandwiches.
“Drawing is always linked to telling. When I travel, I don’t draw (what I see), I just take notes and take photos. I only draw when I make manga. For me, drawing is only to express stories,” said the author.
Titles such as “Distant Neighborhood”, the surreal journey back in time of a “salaryman” (Japanese office worker) translated into more than a dozen languages and also made into a film in 2010, earned him various awards in Europe and shot up his price among publishers outside of Japan.
Taniguchi was always surprised to be more valued as an artist outside his country, something that, on the other hand, fits with his style and career as a cartoonist, who also drinks from the Franco-Belgian “bande dessinée” and authors such as François Schuiten or Moebius and that becomes more present in his late production.
The cartoonist consolidated his free style and dared with even more lyrical works in the last decade of his career, in which he collaborated with Moebius himself (“Icarus”) and published “The Guardians of the Louvre” following a stay at the Parisian museum .
Taniguchi dedicated the last two years of his life, when he was already suffering from an illness, to “The Ancient Forest”, a full color and landscape format work that he left unfinished and was published posthumously at the end of 2017, in the which, he said, he wanted to recreate landscapes that express his emotions. EFE
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