A Distant Neighborhood

AUTHOR: Taniguchi, Jiro

ARTIST: Jiro Taniguchi (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Shogakukan (Japanese); Fanfare/Ponent Mon (English)

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION:Haruka na Machi e, 1998 (English translation, 2009)

Publication History

Jiro Taniguchi was born in Tottori Prefecture and grew up in Kurayoshi, where A Distant Neighborhood is set. In the early 1990’s, Taniguchi decided he wanted to draw something other than action manga and created Aruku hito (1992; The Walking Man, 2004), a work presenting the simple explorations and observations of a man as he strolls through his neighborhood. One publisher, Shogakukan, suggested he create more works in this slice-of-life style. Taniguchi followed this work with Inu wo kau (1992; raising a dog), a collection of five short stories about his recently deceased dog. After publishing Inu wo kau, Taniguchi wondered if he could write similar stories about families. He toyed with an idea he believes everyone has considered at some point: returning to the past to revisit friends and family while retaining one’s present memories. Taniguchi noted that he wrote A Distant Neighborhood to experience what might happen if he actually did return to the past.

The work was published as Haruka na Machi e by Shogakukan in September of 1998. It was translated and published in France by Casterman in 2002, as Quartier lointain; in Italy by Coconino in 2002 and 2003, as In una lontan città; in Spain by Ponent Mon in 2003, as Barrio lejano; in Germany by Carlsen in 2007, as Vertraute Fremde; and in the United States by Fanfare/Ponent Mon in June and October of 2009.

Plot

A hungover forty-eight-year-old Hiroshi Nakahara boards the wrong train at the Kyoto train station after a brief business trip. Instead of returning home, Hiroshi takes an express train to his boyhood hometown, Kurayoshi. While on the train, his thoughts turn to his mother, Kazue, as he realizes he is the same age as she was when she died. In Kurayoshi, Hiroshi has two hours before the next train leaves, so he decides to explore the town. He quickly discovers how much of his past has been swallowed by the present, as his old home is unrecognizable. He then walks to the Genzen Temple’s cemetery to pay respect to his mother. While praying at his mother’s headstone, he is mysteriously transported into the past and transformed into his fourteen-year-old self. This transformation is preceded by a butterfly floating across several panels, symbolically representing the metamorphosis that takes place.

Confused by the transformation and believing he must be dreaming, Hiroshi returns to his boyhood home, discovering his mother, father, sister, and grandmother as they were when he was a teenager. Hiroshi is deeply moved as he experiences his own past. Slowly, he embraces his transformation: He excels in school; reestablishes his friendship with Daisuke Shimada, who dreams of becoming a writer and to whom Hiroshi admits to being a forty-eight-year-old man; and develops a friendship with the beautiful Tomoko Nagase, to whom he had been too shy to speak during his first turn as a junior high school student.

Hiroshi realizes that he has returned to the year in which his father, Yoshio, abandoned the family. Never having understood why his father disappeared, Hiroshi decides to prevent his father from leaving. He begins to probe his family’s past by asking his grandmother about his mother’s first husband, Shinichi Kotani. He learns that Shinichi and his father both served in an artillery regiment in India during World War II and that Shinichi was killed in action while crossing the Manipur River. Yoshio survived the war and returned the ashes of his fallen friend to the Kotani family. Yoshio’s plan had been to return the ashes and then move away from his home district, hoping to close the door on his past and find some sense of personal freedom. Instead, he felt bound to care for Kazue, who was left alone and was slowly ostracized by the Kotani family. When Kazue became pregnant, Yoshio married her and opened his own tailor shop. Hiroshi’s family seems happy, as his friend Shimada repeatedly reminds him, but Yoshio feels trapped by his circumstances, believing his life has always been directed by others.

On the night of Yoshio’s disappearance, Hiroshi confronts his father at the train station. Yoshio acknowledges his selfishness in abandoning his family but argues that he must leave if he is ever to find his real self. Upon returning home, Hiroshi tells his mother that his father has left. She acknowledges her role in forcing him to stay and expresses surprise that he had persevered so long.

Through this experience, Hiroshi realizes that he is much like his father in that he has been attempting to separate himself from his responsibilities toward his wife and two daughters. Hiroshi becomes drunk and passes out, and when he awakens, he is back at the Genzen Temple. The butterfly motif appears again, and he reverts to the present as a forty-eight-year-old man, arriving just moments after he had left. He goes home to his wife and daughters with a fuller understanding of the consequences of selfish acts and of his importance to his family. Hiroshi questions whether his experience had been only a dream when his wife hands him a package from the famous author Daisaburo Horie, his childhood friend Daisuke Shimada. The package contains Shimada’s latest book: A Distant Neighborhood.

Characters

• Hiroshi Nakahara is a life-weary forty-eight-year-old father of two. He seeks a way to escape the drudgery of his family life and considers leaving his wife and daughters. He is mysteriously transported thirty-four years into the past and is transformed into his fourteen-year-old self. Reliving his father’s abandonment of his family changes his perspective on his own family relationships.

• Yoshio Nakahara is Hiroshi’s father, who marries Kazue out of a sense of obligation and eventually abandons her and his children in search of personal fulfillment and freedom.

• Kazue Nakahara is Hiroshi’s long-suffering mother, who blames herself for holding Yoshio back from his dreams. She dies at forty-eight from acute cardiac arrest, eight years after her husband abandons her and her children.

• Kyoko Nakahara is Hiroshi’s high-spirited younger sister, who has many short-lived passions and dreams. As an adult, she marries at twenty and becomes a housewife, eventually having three children.

• Grandma is Kazue’s mother, who is sickly and weak and relies heavily on Kazue and Yoshio. She informs Hiroshi of his family’s past.

• Yuko is Hiroshi’s long-suffering wife.

• Akiko is Hiroshi’s adult daughter, who wants to move into her own apartment but is afraid to ask her father.

• Ayako is Hiroshi’s younger daughter, who is unafraid to speak her mind and observes that her father is an alcoholic.

• Tomoko Nagase is one of Hiroshi’s schoolmates, to whom Hirsohi was afraid to speak during his junior high school years. She is the most beautiful girl in school. She and Hiroshi develop an innocent romance, briefly fulfilling his desire to leave behind his own family relationships.

• Daisuke Shimada is Hiroshi’s childhood friend. In adulthood, he becomes the famous author Daisaburo Horie.

• Takashi Hamada is Hiroshi’s childhood friend. He enjoys drawing, and in adulthood, he becomes the famous manga artist Ryu Hamada.

• Masao Harada is Hiroshi’s childhood friend, whose family owns Harada Motors. He dies in a motorcycle accident when he is in tenth grade.

• Shinichi Kotani is Kazue’s first husband, who is killed during World War II.

• Tamiko Osawa is Yoshio’s childhood friend, whom he visits in the hospital. Hiroshi briefly thinks that she is his father’s mistress.

Artistic Style

Taniguchi’s art presents highly detailed and realistic drawings, echoing the fact that the narrative is rooted in the real world despite its time-travel device. With the exception of close-up images of characters, most panels in the work include an abundance of detail. For example, when Hiroshi first steps into the genkan (the traditional Japanese entryway) of his family’s house, one panel depicts his father’s work table with its boxes of supplies, spools of thread, and swatches of cloth. Also depicted in this single panel are the room’s tatami mats, shoji screens, small rug, extension cords, ceiling tiles, and fluorescent lights. In the background are a bicycle, a two-tiered table with books stacked on the lower tier, two chairs, an open closet with boxes stacked halfway to the ceiling, a calendar, and a poster. The characters, however, are drawn simply and iconically. The elongated legs, oversized eyes, and pointy chins of many manga characters are absent and are replaced by simple, well-proportioned faces and bodies.

Taniguchi divides each panel with clearly defined gutters; only rarely do images violate these distinctions, as when a butterfly floats over the gutters during Hiroshi’s metamorphosis and when inlaid panels are used to depict the transformed Hiroshi running home. The number of panels per page varies from as many as eight to as few as one. Single, full-page panels are used to introduce each chapter but are also occasionally used to emphasize significant moments in the narrative, such as Hiroshi’s transformation and his bewilderment at returning to his past.

Themes

Taniguchi’s work mixes traditional Japanese aesthetic values with a number of prominent themes. Hiroshi’s transformation suggests the Japanese aesthetic of yugen (mysteriousness, ambiguity), as the means of his transformation remain hidden. The butterfly floating over the gutters and a full-page image of the moon are the only hints Taniguchi provides. The butterfly likely suggests metamorphosis but also may symbolize the souls of the living and the dead. The full moon indicates the passage of time, change, death, and rebirth. The mechanism for this change, however, remains veiled.

Taniguchi also displays the pleasure Hiroshi takes in the movement of the clouds, his love of natural beauty, his valuing of his younger body, and his deeply emotional response to being in the presence of his family, all of which reflect a sense of mono no aware (the pathos of things). These deep feelings toward the ordinary express the work’s thematic concerns with such elements.

The work suggests the theme of mujo (impermanence) as Taniguchi reflects on the fleeting nature of happiness, the frailty of human beauty, and the perishability of human relationships. All of these elements take on greater value because of their impermanence, giving the work a tone of nostalgic melancholy. A Distant Neighborhood additionally suggests many other themes, including the inability to escape one’s fate, the consequences of selfish choices, the effects of parental abandonment, the cycle of abandonment, the possibility of choosing to break such cycles, the human cost of war, patriarchal and matriarchal patterns in Japanese society, the costs of obligation, the difficulty of being free from one’s obligations, and the relationship between parent and child.

Impact

Taniguchi has been associated with what Frédéric Boilet has labeled “nouvelle manga,” which has involved a conscious attempt by Japanese mangaka and French-Belgian comics creators to learn from one another and to develop both manga and bandes dessinées that cross international boundaries. In this respect, Taniguchi has been successful—A Distant Neighborhood has been translated into multiple languages and has received both international acclaim and international awards. While Taniguchi’s work has been well-received in Japan, his work may have a stronger reputation internationally.

Taniguchi’s work has helped to expose the fact that realistic narratives dealing with everyday life in Japan do exist in manga. Though the work presents a pervasive Japanese aesthetic sense, it remains accessible to non-Japanese readers and provides insight into Taniguchi’s view of Japanese culture and family dynamics. Some reviewers have mistaken the traditional aesthetic values at play in the work for tearful sentimentality; however, most readers seem to perceive a deeper sincerity underlying the work.

Films

Quartier lointain. Directed by Sam Garbarski. Entre Chien et Loup, 2010. This film adaptation stars Pascal Greggory as the adult Thomas Verniaz and Léo Legrand as the adolescent Verniaz. It transports the narrative from Japan to Europe. The basic structure of the original narrative remains, but changes have been made to the protagonist’s age and several other elements. Taniguchi makes a cameo appearance as a passenger on the train.

Further Reading

Boilet, Frédéric, ed. Japan as Viewed by Seventeen Creators (2005).

Taniguchi, Jiro. The Walking Man (2004).

Bibliography

Taniguchi, Jiro. “Taniguchi Jiro.” In Manga: Masters of the Art, edited by Timothy Lehmann. Scranton, Pa.: Collins Design, 2005.

Vollmar, Rob. “Frédéric Boilet and the Nouvelle Manga Revolution.” World Literature Today 81, no. 2 (March/April, 2007): 34-41.