Somewhere in a box back in Toronto are 14 volumes of the first comic I ever attempted to follow in Japanese.
I discovered it way back when I first visited Japan and picked up a few of the weekly comic magazines I’d heard about. I only looked at the weeklies to see what they were like and to test my extremely limited Japanese reading ability. Shortly thereafter two things happened. One was I realized that I could read very little Japanese and understood even less. The other thing became a little more motivation to rectify that first thing because I got addicted to my first Japanese serial. I don’t know how or why, but I remember getting so addicted that I went on a search for all the back issues and brought them home to Canada with me. I read them many times over trying to understand a little more each time. When I visited Japan again I picked up Young Jump while I was there to see what was happening, and brought home the volumes that had come out since I'd been there last. I just loved this comic and over the couple years I was reading it I noticed improvement in my Japanese as well.
That is until 1997. I went to Japan again in the summer of that year and on my second day there went to a bookstore with a friend to find everything I’d missed. I remember the story being at a critical stage of the protagonist’s battle with a rival gang leader in Osaka (yup, typical boys battle comic, but I liked it!) and I couldn’t to get my hands the latest. There it was in the comics section at Libro in Ikebukuro (which is no longer there) on a big display; volume 14! As I picked it up I remember thinking, "Wow, look at this big display. This comic must be hitting it big. I knew it!"
It was just then that my friend's expression suddenly changed as she picked up one of the books to read something that was written on the cover.
It turned out that the author, Takaki Konari, had passed away suddenly the previous December of a subarachnoid hemorrhage. He was only 36 years old.
The comic was called Teppen, and it was left incomplete at volume 14 with the protagonist schoolboy from Hokkaido, Tetsu Hanabishi, seemingly having just been knocked out by his rival on the streets of Osaka.
Takaki Konari, like his character Tetsu, was from Hokkaido. He debuted in Shonen Jump in 1985 doing the art in for a comic called Mammoth by Buronson (aka Sho Fumimura, author of Fist of the North Star), and he worked on two other titles before starting Teppen in Young Jump.
Someday I'll get back to Toronto, dig Teppen out of storage and read them again. I'm not sure what I'll think of them now that I am fluent in Japanese and nearly as old as the author was when he died. But they say "you never forget your first" and I will never forget Teppen.
Konari may not be the most famous comic artist ever, and his work will never see the light of day in English unless Mammoth gets released, but I remember and I suddenly felt compelled to say a few word about him.
R.I.P. Takaki Konari. I know that Tetsu got up one more time, laid the smackdown on that Osaka punk, and that he made something of himself in the end!
This will be my last blog entry until I get the next part of my Naoki Urasawa interview translation done. I'm putting that work into high gear and expect to have it up in about a week.
Until then…
XML Feeds