Jason Thompson's House of 1000 Manga - Walking Man

Episode LXXXIX: The Walking Man

"What was it that made it so peaceful? Time goes by very slowly, like the river…a brief interlude in daily life, where nothing is pressing."

Since it's the holidays and everyone is taking it easy (at least I am, and I hope you're able to), it seems like a good time to talk about a manga in which nothing happens. The Walking Man, by Jiro Taniguchi, is less a story manga than a form of virtual reality. It's like a diary in manga form; it's like a sandbox video game where you lose track of the plot and just end up looking at the scenery, and that's fine. Really, though, it's not "like" anything except wandering around in the world, lying in the grass, climbing a tree or walking down an undiscovered street. "If you like to go on walks, this is the manga for you" doesn't make for great back-cover copy, but it's a pretty accurate description, only it doesn't capture why it's one of my favorites.

Jiro Taniguchi draws a bit like

The main character, essentially a stand-in for the reader, is a salaryman who lives with his wife. We never find our their names, occupations, or ages, and it isn't important. When the book begins, they have just moved into a new house in a new neighborhood, and the man is getting to know the place. In short chapters of about 8 pages each, he wanders here and there, usually alone, sometimes with his wife. (They seem to have a good relationship.) While he's riding the bus, he spots a hill in the distance down a side street, so he gets off the bus and goes on a detour to climb it. We see the world as he sees it, stopping to glance at the details: an unusual design on a manhole, a strange bird taking flight, a vase of flowers at the site of a traffic accident by the roadside. There is almost no dialogue. Very rarely, he meets people on his walks: a birdwatcher, a fisherman, an old lady. Occasionally, he has little challenges, or he gets just a little naughty on his explorations: he sneaks around people's backyards while a woman looks at him suspiciously from an upstairs balcony, he runs up ten flights of steps to a rooftop just to see the sun rise, and he can't resist sneaking over the chain link fence to swim in the neighborhood swimming pool at night after it's closed. In another chapter, he builds a replacement for a fallen birdhouse, and in another chapter, they adopt a Stray Dog.

The unnamed town is a suburban in-between place with no big landmarks but lots of little ones, the kind of place that might have been an empty field fifty years ago, and where there's still a bit of nature in every grassy patch and creek and tree. Most manga seem to just take places in genero-Tokyo if they take place in the real world at all (maybe their editors actually prefer them to use generic settings, the generic riverbank, the generic school, the generic beach resort etc., so no readers will get confused or alienated by local details), but The Walking Man seems to take place in the kind of neighborhood where Japanese manga readers might actually live. Entire chapters are built out of little changes to the environment: in one chapter, a storm comes through and transforms the neighborhood, leaving behind puddles of water, streams in the gutters, fallen branches and leaves. In another chapter, the main character walks at night, observing how the darkness and streetlights change everything. In still another chapter, he accidentally breaks his glasses, so he sees everything as a blur, until he puts on the broken glasses and sees dozens of reflections in the cracked lens. Each chapter is a virtuoso display of drawing, with Taniguchi challenging himself to capture new aspects of the real world with pen lines in black and white.

Taniguchi's finely detailed art is influenced by European comics, and European artists like him too. He worked with famous French artist Maison Ikkoku. Taniguchi shares some of the same European influences as Katsuhiro Ōtomo, but unlike Otomo, Taniguchi doesn't make the scale of his stories bigger and bigger, showing more and more exploding skyscrapers until the reader gets crushed by the weight of the drama and the screentone. Instead, Taniguchi focuses inward, as if using a magnifying glass. He makes his manga out of delicate observation of the world around him, the same way The Walking Man finds a shell in his backyard and examines it closely, or the birdwatcher in chapter 1 watches the birds.

The Walking Man was translated by moe girl. (And also, he gets naked on three pages when he goes skinny-dipping—but don't worry, there's zero sexuality in this manga. I'd loan it to a 10-year-old.) I've rarely felt that a book more closely captured a sense of place and a feeling, and even when it's winter and it's rainy and gray or snowing outside, The Walking Man on my bookshelf feels like a little bit of warmth and calm in the storm.