Conjoined by Hand: Aesthetic Materiality in Kouno Fumiyo's Manga <em>In This Corner of the World</em>

Abstract

Conjoined by HandAesthetic Materiality in Kouno Fumiyo’s Manga In This Corner of the World Jaqueline Berndt (bio) In recent years, content-driven, or representational, readings of anime and manga have been increasingly countered by mediatic approaches, but the main focus has been mainly on the materiality of platforms and institutions rather than that of signifiers and artifacts that afford certain mediations in the first place. Kouno Fumiyo’s In This Corner of the World (Kono sekai no katasumi ni) provides an excellent case to explore manga’s aesthetic materiality, last but not least because of its congenial adaptation to the animated movie of the same name directed by Katabuchi Sunao (Studio MAPPA, 2016).1 This movie attests to what John Guillory has pointed out in a different context, namely, that “[r]emediation makes the medium as such visible.”2 Consequently, it is used below as a foil to highlight how Kouno’s manga conjoins different materialities in a medium-specific way resting on the drawn line, print on paper, and the serial format of the narrative. This article pursues manga mediality from the angle of materiality to approach forms as aesthetic affordances without reiterating a decontextualized formalism modeled on modernist notions of authorship and autonomous art. First, I will try to summarize the story as unimpaired as possible by considerations of medium specificity in order to demonstrate subsequently what attention to aesthetic materiality may lead the reader to see or rather to become: namely, a mature participant. Second, I focus on the precedence of hand-drawing as well as the variety of drawn lines, pointing out that in Kouno’s case aesthetic materiality does not facilitate authorship (evinced by traces of the artist’s hand) or the manga medium as an art form (evinced by modernist self-reflexivity as an attribute of the text itself), but commonality, a distributive agency that involves artist, characters, and readers bridging past and present. Then, I turn to what is more often associated with materiality, namely, the physicality of the publication medium. Instead of paper quality (i.e., the coarse and yellowish printing paper of Japanese editions so difficult to reproduce abroad), I foreground linework, lettering, and paneling as well [End Page 83] as the physical placement of the individual installments within the magazine. I interpret these aspects as nonverbal statements about genre conventions and also correlate them with the theme of marginality touched upon already in the work’s title. As a whole, I hope to demonstrate that the focus on manga materiality in the broad sense (that is, including a non-representationalist attention to forms of representation, mediation, distribution, and perception) allows for critical readings of popular fiction that acknowledge its inclusive potential. In the course of the discussion, I refer time and again to aspects that distinguish In This Corner of the World from conventional manga as represented by the global bestsellers. Characteristic of Kouno’s work is a conjoining of not only actors and times but also dispositions: it keeps with mangaesque conventions and twists them concurrently, occupying a third space between major franchise-prone productions and highly authorial expressions. While such a disposition applies to a significant number of Japanese graphic narratives—stretching from Tezuka Osamu and Ikeda Riyoko to Taniguchi Jirô, Asano Inio, and Kyô Machiko—it still easily escapes European or North American comics studies insofar as they are inclined to neatly sort between “graphic novels” as serious personal and political narratives on the one hand, and “comics and manga” as industrial, coded, and serial B-literature on the other hand.3 Against this backdrop it raises wrong expectations to call manga like Kouno’s “alternative,” even if they appear slightly deviant within the mediascape that is locally and globally associated with Japan. A Hand’s Tale Kouno’s graphic narrative was serialized in the biweekly magazine Manga Action from January 2007 to January 2009. Whereas the Japanese book edition falls into three volumes, the translated English edition crams the whole 430 pages into one unwieldy volume to accommodate a type of consumption that rests less on serialization than in Japan.4 In line with the structure of the original magazine series, the book edition...