Sneeze
Last year’s release of “Mujirushi” was the first new work we had seen from Naoki Urasawa in years. After the writer’s work on “Monster,” “20th Century Boys,” and, to a lesser extent, “Pluto” and “Master Keaton,” I was more than ready to enjoy the hell out of it. Readiness did not equal actuality in this case as while the story wasn’t bad, it had some real issues with its execution that were holding it back. To my surprise, it turned out that this wasn’t the only work from Urasawa that we were due this year and “Sneeze” showed up over a month later. This was an anthology collection of the mangaka’s short works and I was hoping that it would deliver where “Mujirushi” did not.
After reading this, I’m now of the opinion that Urasawa does much better with extended stories than shorter ones.
Things start off on an intriguing note with “Damiyan!” where a man addicted to cellphone gaming introduces them to his titular friend. He doesn’t say anything, but Damiyan has psychic powers that his friend is looking to sell to the Yakuza. Komoto, the leader of the family that was approached, sees this as a way to easily avenge the death of his former patriarch when he finds out that the current clan head was responsible. Things turn out to be a bit more complicated when the day he gets the chance to meet with the clan head also happens to be the day Komoto’s estranged wife will be taking their son to a sports festival.
Urasawa has put weird sci-fi elements like Damiyan’s psychic powers into stories before and come out with winners. So it’s not their presence which distracts from this story. No, it’s the fact that all of the twists the story takes don’t really surprise at all. They basically amount to the kind of double-crossing you’d expect in a mobbed-up tale like this, while its final surprise feels more saccharine than anything else. I liked how the mangaka sold Kenta’s moment of triumph at the end, and the story itself flows together well enough. It’s just that it didn’t feel like it amounted to much in the end.
“Throw Toward the Moon!” is the only story in this volume that has a connection to Urasawa’s frequent collaborator Takashi Nagasaki. He worked with the mangaka on “Pluto” and “”20th Century Boys,” but they only talked in a coffee shop about this one. It involves a kid who has a chance meeting with a psychic who tells him that he’s destined to win the Pulitzer Prize only if he’ll follow some bizarre advice. Flash-forward a few decades later and the kid is now a man who is a disgraced journalist writing obituaries in a third-rate newspaper. It’s there that he gets word that the psychic has predicted his own death and wants the newspaper to print his obituary in advance. While the man is incensed by this news, he starts investigating the psychic’s history and finds a lead on the scoop of a lifetime!
Even if Nagasaki and Urasawa didn’t actually collaborate on this one, you have to wonder if the former’s tangential involvement is the reason this is the best story in this collection. While the plot is basically a series of random coincidences, they’re still bizarre enough that you can’t help but wonder how they’re all going to come together in the end. That this is a short story also means you won’t really have time to think about how they’re going to either. Urasawa also manages to make the psychic’s history affecting while setting up the central mystery at the same time. It’s a neat accomplishment given the space he has to work with.
“The Old Guys” are three two-page stories about the mangaka and friends having some music-related experiences. The first involves going to a bar with a large folk-music karaoke and guitar selection, while the other two describe his experiences seeing Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan in concert, separately. These are some perfectly fine vignettes and I really don’t have anything more to say about them than that.
“Henry and Charles” is the oldest story in this collection as it dates all the way back to 1995. It’s also the biggest outlier in that it’s a full-color story about a couple of mice trying to steal a piece of cake while a cat sleeps on the kitchen floor below them. It’s a madcap funny animal story that feels more “Disney”-esque in its execution than “Looney Tunes.” That’s mainly down to the fact that the two mice bicker in a more relatably human way and the slapstick still feels like it’s part of this reality. This is a decent bit of fluff, overall.
What do legendary Japanese folk singer Kenji Endo, his bandmates, a stripper, a snake, and a stroller have in common? They’re all part of “It’s a Beautiful Day,” a manga about an anecdote Endo told Urasawa when they met one time. Endo unfortunately didn’t live to see this manga, but I think he probably would’ve liked it. I think I would’ve enjoyed this more if I had greater familiarity with the musician and the album in question. It’s still enjoyable enough as it recounts an unlikely bit of synchronicity the musician was lucky enough to experience with his bandmates.
“Musica Nostra” is another series of music-related vignettes, all of which have a unifying theme except for the first. That one’s about Urasawa wondering why male guitarists onstage look like they’re in pain while female guitarists on YouTube look so composed. Go figure. The rest of them involve his trip to L.A. to hang out with a legendary session drummer, attend the Desert Trip concert the night McCartney and Neil Young were headlining, and to meet the former president of Apple Records (the Beatles’ label) Jack Oliver. These shorts were more interesting than the previous ones mainly because they cover more interesting encounters and are more vividly realized by the mangaka. It also helps that Oliver gets the best line in the collection when he offers his response to John Lennon showing him the cover to “Two Virgins” for the first time. No word on whether or not Lennon decked him afterwards.
“Kaiju Kingdom” isn’t the last story in this collection, but it is the last substantial one. Broadly speaking, it’s about why Japan keeps getting wrecked by giant monsters on a regular basis. Specifically, it’s about a kaiju otaku named Pierre who has finally made it to Japan as part of a tourist package centered around these monsters. He gets to see all of the major (destroyed) landmarks, gets harassed by urchins selling (fake) kaiju scales, and even gets to meet one of the scientists who research them. Pierre hopes that she can help answer his burning question: Why do these monsters always come to Japan? While the scientist regards his presence as an annoyance at best, she might actually get a chance to answer his question when another kaiju starts making its way towards Japan.
This is a cute concept, to be sure. The problem is that it sets up too much to unpack in the small space of this story. There’s the exploitation of a nation’s ongoing destruction, the questionable economic necessity of said exploitation, the kids and adults who struggle with living in the wake of said destruction, the actual reasons behind the kaiju’s existence, and I’ll just stop right here. Urasawa touches on all of these and even tries to answer a few to questionable success. I was prepared to write this off as an example of the mangaka biting off more than he could chew… until we get to story’s last four pages and things just go right off the rails. This is in the sense that it gives me cause to ask, “Is this the power of kaiju-based cockblocking?” No, scratch that. I really don’t want to know the answer.
The very last story in this volume is one I’ve actually read before. It was Urasawa’s contribution to the European comics anthology, “The Tipping Point.” “Tanshin Funin/Solo Mission” about a humanoid alien preparing to depart his home and family to take care of some business on The Demonic Death-Death Hell Planet. It feels like a goof on the concept of sentai… and that’s about it. What we get here is basically a seven-page setup for a joke on the final page that happens to be in full color and printed left-to-right. My time away from this story hasn’t really improved my overall opinion of it.
Still, it was fun to learn in Uraswa’s afterword that while he was provided with some guidelines about what his story should be about for “The Tipping Point” he just ignored them all. He talks about all of the stories here and some amusing insights are provided by his words. It’s a nice way to end this generally mediocre collection. I didn’t hate any of the stories here — “Kaiju Kingdom” is more worthy of an eye-roll than actual condemnation — it’s just that most of them either missed the mark or felt unsubstantial. Much as the case was with “Mujirushi,” it’s best to go into this with lowered or no expectations at all.