Tokyo Is My Garden
Script by Benoit Peeters and Frederic Boilet
Art by Frederic Boilet
Fanfare/Ponent Mon, $18.99
Christopher Butcher mentioned recently that he really enjoyed this book, but he didn’t elaborate, so I figured I would.
Tokyo Is My Garden is two love stories in one: it’s the story of a man and a woman who meet and fall in love, but it’s also the tale of a man who has fallen in love with Japan—and may have to leave.
The main character is David Martin, a French man who was sent to Japan to promote a brand of cognac but instead has been slowly going native: He works at the Tokyo fish market, navigates the subway system with ease, and studies kanji in his spare time. He even takes earthquakes in stride, and his Mahjong skills are the envy of the locals.
As the story opens, things are looking pretty bad for David: His girlfriend throws him out and his French boss faxes that he is coming to Tokyo to discuss how the cognac thing is going. This fills David with dread, because he hasn’t sold a single bottle. A co-worker from the fish market sends David to two parties where he can peddle his wares, but he gets so drunk that on his way to the second one, he leaves his sample bottle of cognac on the subway.
An unobservant person might think the story really gets going at the second party, where David meets Kimie, a Japanese woman, and they fall in love, just like that. In fact, the romance at the center of this book is one of its least satisfying elements, as there is no obvious chemistry, no push and pull, just two people enjoying themselves. They eat some ramen, they go on picnics, they put on kimonos and watch the summer fireworks. It’s pretty, but there’s not much conflict or struggle, other than David’s anxiety about his job.
(An observant person, who pays attention to the title pages of the chapters, will see that the story really started with the lost bottle.)
Things get more interesting when David’s boss, Mr. Heurault, arrives. Boilet and Peeters do a nice job of quickly sketching his personality: Heuralt is an idealist who isn’t quite as staid as he first appears. His idealized image of Japan comes from classic films, and he is surprised and horrified by the realities of modern Japan, but he also sees David’s deep affection for the place. Still, business is business, and Heurault reluctantly tells David he will have to cut him loose—which means David will lose his visa. A violent storm clinches Heurault’s desire to get out of Japan, and he decides to leave rather abruptly.
At this point, Boilet and Peeters deftly twist together a number of narrative threads that have been running through the book to confect a satisfying surprise ending. David and Kimie’s romance, Mr. Heurault’s faded desires, the lost bottle of cognac, all come together in a neat little package. It’s all rather improbable, but enjoyable nonetheless.
For a fairly short book (152 pages), Tokyo Is My Garden devotes an awful lot of space to things that don’t move the story much. There’s little depth or tension to David and Kimie’s relationship, for instance; once in a while you think something dramatic is going to happen and then… usually they just make love again. And there’s a scene at the French embassy that seems to serve little purpose other than to depict the French as racist clods (although the authors may have intended to draw a contrast with the more refined Heurault, who makes his appearance a few pages later). On the other hand, it’s fun to watch David take Heurault to see the sights—bars, a calligraphy exhibit, even a naughty video game—and it’s clear that Boilet had fun drawing those scenes.
While the story arc is gentle, to say the least, the authors weave a number of unifying threads through the story: The kanji that David is studying, his inane parodies of “My Way,” even his glasses, which people keep telling him are ugly. And there are a lot of symmetries and concordances in this book: David, who is French, loves Japanese culture, while Kimie, a Japanese woman, works for a French designer. Heuralt’s love of Japanese cinema is mirrored by Kimie’s mother’s love of French cinema. David wows the ladies with his Mahjong skills at a party and later gets a cartoon woman to doff her top in a computer Mahjohng game. And so on.
Boilet’s depictions of Tokyo are interesting and complicated and really convey a sense of place: The chaotic pre-dawn fish market, a nearly empty train on a Sunday morning. And if you squint, the characters look good too; he has a good sense of form and gesture, and the faces are distinct and expressive. The biggest problem with the art, actually, is Boilet’s penchant for using black blobs to indicate shadows and contours in the characters’ faces, which makes everyone look like they are breaking out with the plague. The toning, done by Jiro Taniguchi, helps reduce the impact, but it’s still distracting.
Although it does have a plot, Tokyo Is My Garden is best enjoyed as a slice-of-life manga, a loving meditation on the joys of young love in an exciting, complex city. It does not offer high drama or nonstop action; the story is simple but told with wit and elegance. In the end, it’s a love letter to Tokyo, written by someone who loves the city’s flaws as much as its beauty.
(This review is based on an untoned digital copy provided by the publisher.)
Brigid, thanks for sharing your thoughs. My own personal gripe about the art is that it just doesn’t mesh – there’s a lot of great individual images but they really don’t work together as a comic.
(Oh, and while we’re at it, thanks for the link a few weeks ago!)
Brigid,
“Tokyo is my garden” is the second book by Boilet to deal with Japan. It was started during his second long stay in Japan, and it shows — in fact, I think the book reveals more about Boilet’s own aspirations at the time, than about Japan itself. In this regards, I definitely prefer his later works, such as “Yukiko’s spinach”, which present a more faithful depiction of how things are.
Because “Tokyo is my garden” is in fact very caricatural in its premise, which makes it highly unrealistic: the main character has been in Japan for only two years, yet his knowledge of the place, language and culture seem to surpass that of the locals. He masters kanji, wins at Mah-Jongg, works at Tsukiji and has many Japanese friends to boot.
Anyone who has spent some time in Japan is very aware that all of the above is very unlikely, however gifted the person can be. Moreover, the kind of integration within the Japanese social life that David has achieved is very hard to come by, even with a mastery of the language. People often stop at the surface, and are not very curious beyond exploring their own mirror-image in the eyes of a foreigner.
Which brings me back to my interpretation of what transpires from “Tokyo is my garden” — the fact that it is a story that embodies a lot of the aspirations of Boilet himself at the time (even if, contrary to his later works, the main character doesn’t have his own features).
I think this is the main theme of this book, even if the ones you’ve pointed out (the ill-fitting feeling among other expatriates, the reciprocate fascination) are indeed present and will become recurring features of his works.
Furthermore, there is always a strange dynamic at work in Boilet’s approach to the medium, where the intimate becomes fiction and fiction becomes intimate. In “Yukiko’s spinach”, for instance, he has turned to video to capture the images that he uses afterwards in his stories.
Which means that Boilet sets off to writing autofiction (or fictionnal stories with himself as the main character), then acts it out with his models and friends to be able to write it down.
This strange meshing of autobiography and fiction has been present in his works from the start (his second book, “36 15 Alexia”, tells of his own online relationship with the Alexia of the title), and is still very relevant, considering that Boilet’s current significant other, Aurelia Aurita, has put out two books that relate in a very graphic and impudic way the passion of their relationship.
Xavier,
That’s an interesting point. The theme is so integral to the book that it’s hard to separate from everything else.
I have a personal reaction to it as well, having lived abroad myself—most recently in France and Swizerland. After several stays, I spoke decent French, could get anywhere by public transit, sent my kids to the local schools and read the local papers—I even understood some of the jokes—but I was always a foreigner. I can understand the desire to engage so deeply with another culture, but I always shied away from it myself—I was afraid I would come off as pretentious. David’s act is much harder to pull off in real life than in fiction.
I was also a bit disappointed with Boilet. The later books are way too artyfarty, too “french” in their sublime pretentiousness. Love Hotel now looks too 70s and rather ugly in the end. It somehow worked better in A Suivre. But is there any comic that really is multicultural and truely multilingual the way Love Hotel and the others are? My knowledge of Japanese is still very basic, but the japanese sentences simply feel right and the calligraphy in the later books is beautiful.