The Strange Everyday Worlds of Manga Creator Inio Asano

That’s quite a carte blanche, coming from the creator of so many complex and sometimes enigmatic manga. Asano’s first works to appear in English were the one-volume solanin and the two-volume What a Wonderful World!, both of which earned critical praise for their portrayal of disaffected urban youths wavering between their dreams and the demands of adult life.

His next book in English, Nijigahara Holograph, is a more difficult read: a psychological horror story told in an elliptical style, it portrays a small town filled with brutality and heartbreak, all drawn with an impeccably clear line. Because of the shifting timelines and points of view, it’s the sort of book that rewards repeated reading.

He followed this up with A Girl on the Shore, another single-volume story, this one about two dissatisfied teenagers who find solace with one another.

Asano’s current series, Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction, follows a group of high school students doing their high school student things—playing video games, texting, annoying their parents, hatching conspiracy theories—against the backdrop of an alien invasion of Tokyo that was halted three years previously. The invaders inflicted heavy casualties, but since their attack was stopped, the huge ship has simply been floating over the city, looking ominous.

Since we were at TCAF, we took Asano up on his offer, and asked him to tell us about his stories, and his approach to creating manga.

How did you come to be a manga creator? Was it something you wanted to do as a child or did you come to it as an adult?
When I was in high school I wasn’t actually very good at school itself, like studying and things like that, but I was always good at drawing, ever since I was a little kid, so I was thinking “Is there a job where I can use this thing that I am good at and also make some money pretty quick?” I ended up deciding to take my manga into a magazine and I just had good luck at the same time, and they published my manga.

What manga did you read as a child?
When I was really little, that was the peak of the [Shonen Jump] period, so you know, stuff like Dragon Ball, I just loved that stuff, and I read that all the time. By the time I was around 10, I guess, I moved away from reading that kind of boys’ magazines. I wanted to read more adult kind of things.

Around that time, I started reading Utsurun Desu, by Sensha Yoshida. It’s sort of a gag manga, sort of depicting some surrealist stuff, and I was really attracted to that, so I started copying that style and making manga like that.

When I was doing What a Wonderful World!, I was so brand new to the industry at that time [that] I wasn’t writing any kind of long form stories. I was always doing these short stories, and I wanted to have a short story collection put out, but my editors were like, “There’s no way that’s going to sell. You can’t sell a short story collection like that.” So I thought maybe if I linked them, to make it look like they are all kind of the same story, I could sneak it past my editors [and] they would publish the book for me. That was my aim there.

Actually, the reason I used the convenience store clerk was because when I was writing this it was back when the internet wasn’t a thing yet, and I had to choose characters from this tiny world that I lived in, and I basically just lived in this orbit between the convenience store and my house, so I kind of was, “I’ll use this clerk.”

That’s something I was thinking about as I was reading your work, that it’s such a small world.
For the background too, all those scenes are little pieces of the world around where I am living and in my life. Keeping the story smaller, I have to bring a bigger richness to it, more of a feeling of life, a sense of “lived-in,” is kind of all I felt I could really get in there.

Back then, basically all the characters had the same kind of concerns. They all had this anxiety, reflecting on it now, they all had this job they wanted to do, or there was work that they wanted to do, and whether they could do that or not was the source of their anxiety. It seems like there was just that one style of storytelling that I was doing: “Can they have that proper work life or not?” That’s what I reflect on now.

Do you still want to do gag manga?
Actually, I really do want to do that kind of gag manga, but the 4-koma [four-panel manga] that I like to do, I don’t think it’s something the market is really looking for right now. My main focus is that I want to do manga that is going to sell. I want to write manga that people will read. So I want to take the gags I want to write—I’m thinking how I can write manga or draw manga that will reach as many readers as possible.

In terms of the story, at the beginning I leave it pretty open as an entry point for the readers, I leave it kind of wide to invite them in, but as the story goes on I start writing more to my own tastes and what I want to write. I don’t care if the readers end up hating me at that point. But in the beginning I try to leave that opening for them.

What does it look like when you make a story that you think will be more popular, and how does it change when it becomes more like you?
Of course, in the beginning there are lots of readers, and then they slowly start to drop off as I go my own way with this, which to me means they lose their affection for me, so to speak. They become anti-Asano in a way. Their numbers grow, and these people who hate my manga and hate me, they increase and increase, so I kind of go along with the idea I’m making enemies as I go.

Especially lately—10 years ago you didn’t see this so much—I think among young people now there is happy ending syndrome, where that’s all they want, that’s all they will accept is a happy ending. There’s just no way for them with my manga. They are not going to get anywhere. I feel like I can’t do anything but write not-for-them.

In Goodnight Punpun, you draw Punpun and his family as little cartoony shapes, the supporting characters in a more normal manga style, and many of the incidental characters, like the teachers in Punpun’s school, as hyper-detailed and grotesque. Why did you choose to depict the minor characters this way?
I guess basically because you have the simplicity of Punpun and those characters, and then you have the regular manga characters, I think it was illustrative to have them in contrast with each other, but with the minor characters, it seemed like anything goes in this situation, so I think that became a way for me to release stress.

Honestly like I said before, I put all these kinds of hints and foreshadowing dropped throughout. I thought [with] the grotesque minor characters maybe readers would end up wondering “Is this foreshadowing of something else?” But there is absolutely no meaning to it all, and you can see that once you get to the end of the book. Once you get through the foreshadowing stuff, it actually gets much more serious in terms of the drawing.

With Punpun and his family, occasionally, when something gets very intense, you show a part of the cartoony characters in a more realistic way. Why did you do that?
At first making Punpun that simple style, there was a conceptual element to it, but as the story went on, he’s so simple that there were many things I couldn’t express using that simple form—emotions and things like that. If you look at Punpun from above, he is just a circle. So bit by bit I started incorporating these more realistic elements to have that expressive ability, until towards the end, Punpun almost has a real body, basically. With something like a hug, when it’s just Punpun and these simple little stick arms, it loses some of the effectiveness, it loses some of that tension. So along the way I started incorporating some of that realism.

But you know, there’s that reason of course, but with Punpun also in terms of the story there’s meaning to the realistic elements as well. In the beginning of the story he is a child, but as he goes on, bit by bit, he discovers his true self, his own identity, and what he is, and who he is. And that’s the story—that’s the basis of the story. I think in terms of expressing that as well, bringing those realistic elements into it, matches up. I feel like I really succeeded with that there.

One of my favorite things is when he’s a pyramid—a tetrahedron—and his mind is blown, a little tetrahedron piece comes out.
Actually, when I drew that my editor was sighing and rolling his eyes. It’s sort of like we were playing chicken—how far am I going to be allowed to go with this?

Punpun doesn’t speak directly—everything he says is in text boxes, not word balloons, and sometimes the characters seem to be having a monologue rather than talking to him. He also tends to think things rather than say them out loud. Why did you choose this mode of communication for him?
With word balloons it has kind of a distancing effect. So if I take those out I have this monologue almost, but really, it’s like you have the readers, it’s the voice in their heart, the voice in their mind talking to them. So it becomes a conversation between the reader and the character almost. It was that sort of device.

When I was a kid, I watched the movie Independence Day. Seeing that movie made me hate Hollywood, because I was looking at the protagonist [and thinking] “I’m not that guy. I’m not that guy over there. I’m the guy on the edge of the screen, dying.” Those people all have their stories, they have lives that they live, and that’s where my interest lies, so that’s the kind of story I’m trying to write.

Your work often has a strong sense of place. I feel like you pay a lot of attention to light, the way the sun filters through curtains in the morning or the way a street looks at night. I know you work from photographs, but how is this a part of your creative process and why is it important to you?
I do process things digitally now, so things like screen tone and stuff like that, it’s really shortened the process, it’s a lot easier to do that, so I have some extra resources so to speak when I’m working on my manga. So I take those extra resources, that extra time, and turn it to, you know, “Can’t we make the expression of light more of a focus in manga?” so I sort of turned my focus to that. I always write my stories already having already decided where the sun is in any particular scene. That’s an element that’s decided, and then I do the story. With light, the way you express the light, you can show the time of day or the season, all these different things can be expressed, and you don’t need to explain all those extra details with words.

Especially when I was working on Punpun, that was something that I was extremely aware of, I had in my mind all the time the expression of light, or the expression of the seasons or the weather, this was something I was taking full advantage of digital processing to use, and I was really making the most of working with digital as I was trying to express all kinds of weather and light and things like that. So I would do the middle of summer, or this huge downpour, or a snowstorm or a typhoon, I feel I was so thorough with that and delved so deeply into that that I don’t really need to go too much further, so there isn’t as much of that in Dededede.

Do you take your own photos, do you stage them, or do you use photos that you have found?
Before, I used to do the storyboard stage and then I would go and take the pictures as I needed them, but to make that work I have to go and take them as I’m finishing the storyboards. If I’m working on something that I am going to be drawing a year from now or six months from now, now I just go to the place I need and I just take tons and tons of photos and have them all at the ready.

As the years go by, going out and leaving the house is such a hassle, so gradually the range of photos that I have taken have gotten smaller and smaller and smaller until basically if you focus in my manga and looked, you could find my house because I only take pictures near my house. In fact, my latest manga actually uses pictures taken from my house and of my house.

There are so many messy rooms in your manga!
Yes actually, my apartment is messy too, but I would find a friend who had the messiest apartment possible and go take a picture of their place. A neat room, a tidy room, I can draw that without a picture. It’s that that everything everywhere kind of feeling. I can’t imagine that myself. It’s always going to be a little bit fake, so to get that sense of reality taking pictures of messy rooms is going to be the best.

See all releases from Inio Asano.