Disappearance Diary
Posted: July 17, 2009 Filed under: Disappearance Diary 7 Comments »Hideo Azuma – Fanfare – 2008 – one-shot
Strangely, I think the last two books I picked up from Fanfare were autobiographical works by famous/notable mangaka unknown in America that related horrible/tragic personal stories in a detached and lighthearted way. Fanfare may actually have a monopoly on this genre, because it seems that no other publisher has released a book that approach anything like Disappearance Diary or Doing Time.
In Doing Time’s case, it was Kazuichi Hanawa’s story of being in prison after being caught with a gun model that was too realistic. Rather than talking about what he did to get there or injustice or the usual prison topics, it is an oddly impersonal account that simply catalogs day-to-day prison life in extreme, extreme detail, down to diagrams of the meals on the plates. Hanawa might not actually be as famous as I think he is, or like to think he is. He’s one of the Garo artists (and a fantastic artist, at that), and I enjoyed his story Mercy Flesh in Comics Underground Japan immensely, but I’m not sure how much of an impact he’s had elsewhere. On the other hand, I know I’ve read at least three different accounts of his legal problems in different books I have, so he must be of some interest.
Hideo Azuma, on the other hand, is the father of lolicon, for better or worse, and Disappearance Diary is a comical, detached story about two different times he snapped under deadline pressure and decided to live as a homeless man for as long as a year, and then later about his recovery from alcoholism. He states right off the bat that the book will have a positive outlook, so he’s going to remove as much of the gloomy stuff from the story as possible. He also does this because he says it’s hard to draw realistically, so this depressing, tragic story is drawn in a comical way that would make it look right at home next to Dilbert.
It’s actually pretty amazing how appealing he makes living homeless seem. He talks about how easy it was for him to get certain types of food certain places, and always makes the decision to show moments of triumph, like the day he found a convenience store that provided him so much food from its trash he was overweight when they finally found him and brought him home. He talks about his daily scavenges for cigarette butts, strange encounters with people and homeless people more crazy or agressive than him, how he hated being called a beggar (he got all his food from the trash, and didn’t beg money from people), and things like what eating radishes did to his digestion. All the stories are kind of funny and happy in their way, and the book is formatted in short chapters so that the day he finds the full bottle of whiskey, how great that is, and how he rations it and enjoys it with a proper meal takes up one short chapter.
The first bout of homelessness ends when he is picked up as a suspect for a crime and someone recognizes his name as a manga artist. The second round goes on until he gets bored of being homeless and is set up in construction/demolition job by a pair of shady brothers. This part of the book was also quite charming, because the shifty brothers and his cranky coworkers make for great gag characters, even if what they were doing wasn’t all that funny in real life.
Strangely, after this there’s a brief segment where he details his career as a manga artist and goes from his beginnings to his periods of semi-popularity and overwork that drove him to flee his career, and then flee it again. Apparently his wife was his only assistant for a long time, and also helped him come up with a lot of ideas and was the one that filed missing persons reports on him and had him committed for his alcoholism. It never mentions anything much about her, but if he stayed married to the same woman throughout his entire life and career, she is truly a saint. He may acknowledge this strain at one point by not detailing their reunion after a disappearance, because “there wasn’t anything funny about it.”
That section reads a little like a deranged, short version of A Drifting Life, except for sci-fi romantic comedy and lolicon instead of gekiga. I laughed really hard at a panel where Azuma and a few other artists rally for the cause of trying to stop the yaoi takeover at comiket with their new (and presumably the first) lolicon book. Also notable is that most of his work was for Akita Shoten, my favorite Japanese publisher, and even more notable is the fact that many of his stories ran in the completely insane Shounen Champion magazine and its spinoffs, perhaps proving that jolly poor taste (which I mean as a compliment) has always been the aim of that publication.
And because he’s writing about the history of manga, even if it’s just a little bit, he talks about how he met with Osamu Tezuka, and we learn that apparently editors were constantly changing Tezuka’s stuff. Which… I mean, I’ve read his stories, and they are quite literally the most rambling and insane stories you can find. What did they look like before the editors got to them?
The final part of the book talks about how he later became an alcoholic, and even this part has a light touch even though there’s nothing funny about it. He talks about how he needed to drink in order to fall asleep, but drinking enough for that left him feeling too sick to drink the next day, and he would start to hallucinate and become suicidal. Eventually he started passing out in random places and was too inebriated to draw, which is when his wife had him committed against his will to a psychiatric hospital, where he recovered. Interestingly, the AA program seems to be about the same in Japan with the same types of practices at the meetings, ways of addressing members, and even the same serenity prayer.
And speaking of rambling and insane, I’m going to go ahead and stop talking now. In short: Disappearance Diary is an extremely interesting book not only because of its story, but because it manages to keep a light touch and a lot of humor in what would otherwise be an incredibly depressing story (for a shocking shot of realism at the end, he states in an interview in the back that during his bouts of homelessness he was so cold he thought he was going to die). It’s an interesting story, but because of its nature a lot of details are left out, and the timeline between episodes isn’t clear. If you think it sounds interesting, you’ll probably like it, but it’s not going to be something that appeals to a casual reader.
“If you think it sounds interesting, you’ll probably like it, but it’s not going to be something that appeals to a casual reader.”
I probably fit in category A.
When I was growing up, I saw a lot of homelessness, and to some extent I take it for granted. On the one hand, this means that I don’t feel as threatened by the homeless as people who had more sheltered existences. On the other hand, that shock motivates some people to do something to help the homeless, and people who did not see homeless people almost every day for much of their lives sometimes display more sympathy and kindness than I do, which makes me feel a little ashamed, but not much. San Francisco has less homeless people now than when I was a child, but coastal California will always have a little more than average because of the weather. I suspect Chicago, particularly in winter, does not have much of a homeless population.
Unfortunately, Chicago has a sizeable homeless population. There are shelters and a lot of services, but there are also a lot of people that live under the overpasses and in the offramp medians and parks and things like that. Surprisingly, winter doesn’t seem to affect most people’s habits, though maybe it should. I’ve had the unfortunate experience of finding someone who had expired in the alley behind our store one year after they had frozen while trying to sleep under a vent from the restaurant next door.
I had sympathy when I moved here, but it only took two or three years for that to disappear. I got sick of being asked (usually aggressively) for money several times a day by the same people every day for years. My sympathy comes from wanting to help someone going through a rough time, but when I see that same person asking for money in the same place every day for three years, it becomes a question of lifestyle choice, as raised in this book. I hate saying that, and my heart really does go out to people who find themselves in absolutely desperate situations like that, but I have to wonder why someone can’t get help over the course of three years. There’s lots of help out there, and as full as some shelters are and as big a problem as homelessness is, it’s hard for me to believe that it would take longer than a year for someone to get their life back in order should they want it that way. But maybe it’s a lot harder than I think to pick yourself up once you’ve fallen.
There’s probably a difference between the homeless and people who beg, and Azuma mentions several times that he’s not a beggar and only wants to live and let live by digging through the trash for his food. It does raise a lot of questions, even with the silly, comedic approach he uses.
That’s horrible.
Here in San Francisco, the reason there are less homeless now (well, it depends on who you talk to, there’s a lot of politics tied up on this) is that the services improved so they were able to help more people find housing, instead of paying homeless directly (which some of them spent on alcohol rather than self-improvement). There are also strict laws here about street begging, so they are generally nice about it. I’ve also seen a lot of homeless in Palo Alto, which is otherwise quite a rich town. I remember there was this guy at the Palo Alto train station who would always ask for money so he could ‘go to work’, and as soon as someone gave him omeny, he’d go away (not on the train). I saw him at a few different times, so I suspect that as soon as a train passed he would come back asking for money to ‘go to work’ again.
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I’m not sure about the laws for street begging here, but if they exist, I think they are mostly not enforced. Unfortunately, I think the police realize it’s mostly a futile effort to push the beggars out of their spots, since they’ll inevitably be back in 20 minutes. There are regulars at all the train stations in the downtown that are always asking for money to get something to eat, frequently while holding cups of Starbucks coffee, so I am always less inclined to donate to their cause. There are also people on the street (usually regulars) that will walk after you and ask you several times for money, usually more and more aggressively, sometimes pointing out any shopping or food items you might be carrying and suggesting you have extra for them, sometimes suggesting you are racist for not giving them money. The worst are the people who solicit cars that are pulled up to lights. There are several intersections and highway exit ramps that have regulars that just walk up and down the line of stopped cars on the driver’s side, in the middle of the street, asking each car for money. I can’t for the life of me figure out why that’s allowed to happen, unless it’s the simple fact that the police don’t want to stop traffic in order to give them a warning they won’t pay attention to. There was also a woman that stood for at least two weeks on a corner in downtown holding a sign that said she didn’t speak English and needed money to get help for her child, and she stood all day with a little girl that looked about 8 years old. I couldn’t figure out how she lasted more than a day without someone calling the police for/on her, to resolve whatever the situation was there.
Beggars are allowed to stay in one spot and beg, but not allowed to follow or harass people, and I think they’re not allowed to walk from car to car stuck in traffic. Occasionally beggars still do this, but usually they abide by the rules. I’m surprised myself. I suspect a lot of the enforcement may come from businesses rather than the police. Also, most of the homeless who live in middle-class neighborhoods, I’ve read, want to get away from crime, so they tend not to be aggressive people in the first place.
It’s true, most of the aggressive beggars are downtown, though the guys that walk from car to car are spread sporadically all over the city. You’re right, though, that a lot of the enforcement for begging comes from the businesses. I’m pretty sure that’s why some of the grocery stores and plazas around the downtown areas here don’t have any beggars.
What you say about the homeless population in some of the other neighborhoods makes sense, though, because there are still a good number of homeless people away from downtown, but not nearly as much begging. I’m guessing that the more dangerous, possibly drug-motivated people stick downtown where there’s more people and more money and probably more connections to get what they want. I know a few neighborhoods away from downtown that have hostels, shelters, and halfway houses and programs, and it always impressed me that there wasn’t a lot of crime or even any sign that such facilities existed where they did. While the begging does harden me to the homeless situation somewhat, I’m glad there are a lot of facilities and programs in place to help where it is needed, and that the help is accepted and used the way it was intended.