A Zoo in Winter [Anglais] [Relié]

Although I love his work, I don't know much about the person that is Jiro Taniguchi. I don't know how much of "A Zoo in Winter", a story of a young manga artist finding his inspiration, is autobiographical, semi-autobiographical, or just plain fiction. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. Because true or not, "A Zoo in Winter" (a direct translation of the Japanese title "Fuyu no Dobutsuen"), is an fantastic, touching comic book.

The story begins in 1966, with a young man named Hamaguchi working for a small fabric wholesaler. Hamaguchi has dreams of being a designer, but all he gets is grunt work. After the boss's daughter uses him as a cover for her elopement, Hamaguchi leaves Kyoto for Tokyo, and a job as an assistant to a popular manga artist. An assistant's life is also grunt work, coloring in whites and blacks, doing background detail and toner, but Hamaguchi finds himself drawn into the lifestyle. Like all of the assistants, Hamaguchi has aspirations of publishing his own comic, but with his uneventful life, he finds he has nothing to write about. He can drawn beautifully, but he has no experience. An artist named Kikuchi decides to show Hamaguchi the dark side of life, saying "You need to experience a whole load of stuff to write powerful manga," but it isn't until Hamaguchi meets Mariko that he finally gets his inspiration. Mariko is sick and physically weak, but her enthusiasm and love are exactly what Hamaguchi needed.

Taniguchi is one of the most versatile artists I know. He can create ultra-masculine, adrenaline surging works like "The Summit of the Gods" and "The Ice Wanderer", and then with the same hand produce sensitive and romantic works like "A Distant Neighborhood". If there is a common thread to his writing it is that his stories are all firmly about human beings. Whether scaling a mountain or overcoming their own emotional captivity, Taniguchi's characters are fully-realized and emotionally connected.

"A Zoo in Winter" falls firmly in the "sensitive and romantic" camp. Whether Hamaguchi is a personal avatar or not, he represents the fear of reaching out for a dream with full knowledge that the end result is most likely failure. While at the fabric factory, he has no initiative of his own, and his life is directed by those around him. When circumstances land him in Tokyo working as a manga assistant, his first impulse is to just fall into a comfortable zone, without taking risks or following his own dreams. He watches others reach out and fail, before understanding that it is the trying, not the succeeding, that is important. And especially with Mariko, whose poor health almost guarantees a bitter ending to their romance, Hamaguchi refuses to give up, taking what time he has with her.

His art, of course, is phenomenal. Taniguchi has a distinct, realistic style that is still recognizable as "manga." He forgoes any impressionism, and creates ridiculously detailed backgrounds for his characters to move in. There is a reason why Taniguchi is a multiple-Eisner award nominee.

At 231 pages, "A Zoo in Winter" is long enough to tell a complete story, but still leave us hanging on the final page wanting more. The ballad of Hamaguchi and Mariko doesn't quite finish, and it is up to the reader to speculate on whether their ending is happy or melancholy. On the final page Hamaguchi musses that it would be nice if real life were as easy to plot out and conclude as a manga, but that real life is more complicated. I wonder if that is the message Taniguchi wanted to send as well.

I didn't realize how deeply I'd been sucked into A Zoo in Winter until it was over. When I turned the final page I felt like I'd awaken from a deep, deep dream. It's about so many things... the feelings of early adulthood, artistic inspiration and drive, the founding days of manga, dreams realized, dreams deferred, but at it's heart, its a beautiful, beautiful love song.

I ordered this book on a whim and didn't even realize that it was by the same creator as A Distant Neighborhood - another story well worth checking out.

I don't know much about A Zoo in Winter's publisher, Ponent Mon S.L, but they treat the story with a lot of respect. It has a nice, large size, a firm, hard cover, sturdy paper, and smooth binding. I've not read the original in Japanese, but the translator did an excellent job making the dialogue flow. Nothing felt stilted.

It's a shame that Jiro Taniguchi isn't well known in the states. His work has a timeless quality and is easily accessible; you don't have to be a hard core manga fan to enjoy it. Strongly recommended.

It's easy to get lost in the city when it's depicted by Jiro Taniguchi. He captures streets and buildings, and especially neon lights, with such style and depth that it often feels as though you are standing with the characters in A Zoo in Winter, his memoirs about young adulthood in 1960s Japan. Even more captivating to me are some of the interior images. Most notable is a panel at the top of page 61 of the book, where our protagonist finds himself in the deserted studio of the manga offices he's gotten a job in. It looks so amazingly lifelike--right down to boxes shoved under desks--that you get an immediate sense of how affecting this time was to him. It's just one panel--and it's probably a minor panel, at that--but it perfectly captures the sheer depth of the artist's vision here. It's beautiful, as are so many panels throughout the book.

A Zoo in Winter details the artist as a young man, and in the book he's known as Hamaguchi. Hamaguchi begins work at a textile manufacturer when he's just barely an adult, and he's fairly soon tasked with chaperoning the boss's daughter (who refuses to stop seeing the man she truly loves, despite being forced into an arranged marriage). Hamaguchi tries to keep tabs on her, but she's too smart for him...or maybe, as we learn later, she has the benefit of love on her side, something that makes her craftier and more cunning than Hamaguchi could ever expect.

Hamaguchi later comes to work for a manga company, and here we see his spark and his creativity come to life. Throughout the book, we see slow, gradual developments in Hamaguchi's character, and we see how he begins his own emergence as a manga creator. Later, when he begins to fall in love, we see the book come full circle, and what had seemed like a series of small, slice-of-life tales reveals itself to be a well-plotted, carefully orchestrated memoir. The writing is every bit as subtle and nuanced as the art is bold and invigorating. This is a truly masterful book, a wonderful journey through the past, and a warm, loving book about the author's life and career.

-- John Hogan