Kyoko Okazaki
Kyoko Okazaki is a Tokyo born mangaka who was a leading figure in Japanese women’s comics during the 80s and 90s. Starting publishing in men’s erotic magazines, moving to girl’s fashion magazines and then to comic magazines aimed at adult women her work goes beyond what was usually expected from manga aimed at the different female demographics. Even now what are considered to be some of the more transgressive works are actually just rehashes of the fantasy gender bending that Tezuka did in the Fifties with Princess Knight.
Instead she reminds me a lot of Bret Easton Ellis presenting a deeply cynical worldview displaying the comedy, tragedy and the absurd of a society where capitalism runs rampant, where bodies are objectified and commodified, where gender roles are forcefully prescribed and consumerism is more or less a force of nature that rips the agency out everyone’s lives. But it’s not a young person’s cynicism, smugly presenting known problems while distancing from them; rather it is a self-defense mechanism used to protect whatever passion and innocence remains.
The very first thing that attracted me to her work is her style. It is a lot more attuned to my western sensibilities. She has a iconicity both to the characters and the environments. The economy of it all makes it seem a lot more authorial to me (even though she had some assistants, for example the also great Moyoco Anno). I usually find the common approach in manga of having cartoonish characters and realistic background distracting. This style lets her characters be sexual without uncomfortably objectifying them and also, if the story needs, objectifying them while draining all the sexuality from them.
I think that Pink is considered the work that started her “mature” period. The main character is Yumi a young woman who during the day works as an office lady and in order to keep up with her outrageous spending habits also works as a prostitute by night. And to feed her pet crocodile. At some point she starts going out and having somewhat of a romantic relationship with her adoptive mother’s younger lover, an aspiring novelist.
River’s Edge takes place in a school and is more of an ensemble manga. The characters are stereotypical (you have the bullied gay guy and the bully, bully’s girlfriend and his secret lover who is one of the girlfriend’s best friends the bulimic high-school student that also works as a fotomodel) but through the relationships they develop and the things they get to know each other they become something more. A handful of characters become a synecdochic representation of a whole generation growing up during great economic and social changes. And even though the characters are not complex, they feel authentic and the social tapestry woven with them is one of the more realistic portrayals of teenagedom I’ve seen.
Helter Skelter is when she ended her “mature” period because of a car accident that left her for a long period of time unable to work. Taking the peripheral intrusions into the fashion industry from River’s Edge here she explores it full-on through Ririko, the top fotomodel in Tokyo who attained her success by subjecting herself to extensive and even illegal cosmetic surgery, performing sexual favors and other such activities.
She is translated a bit more in French than in English. Vertical needs to get going because she is a valuable author that need more recognition.
