Jon Holt
Introduction
In Umezu Kazuo’s masterpiece horror manga My Name is Shingo (Watashi wa Shingo, 1982–1986), the boy Kondō Satoru and the girl Yamamoto Marine explore a bleak near-future Japan, which seems eerily prescient. Factory workers are laid off in favor of robotic production. Families are torn apart because of mechanization in the workplace. Children and adults are mutually alienated from each other, never seeing eye to eye. What is produced in the manga is “Marilyn Monroe,” a friendly metallic automaton with an iconic American face that develops artificial intelligence (consciousness) through the kind interactions with the children. Unfortunately, the more self-aware Monroe grows, the more it wants to physically change the world around it, inadvertently putting those human friends into harm’s way.
Borrowing Natsume Fusanosuke’s formalist manga analysis method of “compression and release,” I will argue that Umezu visualizes bodies’ coming-of-age and additionally how his manga shows bodies, even robotic ones, to be the root of all consciousness. In Umezu’s upside-down and seemingly cruel logic, in order for one to grow mentally, the body must be first subjected to unspeakably horrific trauma. Umezu frames the liminal bodies of the children and robot characters with visual layouts that show their bodies transcending their physicalities; through his panel frames, Umezu shows them manifest consciousness in a way only possible for manga as it is a visual-and-textual artform. Umezu’s drawings and panels create a space where the reader enters into a world of pure and cold materiality but exits with a new kind of ontological awareness of one’s place in Japan. Salvation in this dark manga is only possible if his characters come to grips with the imperfections in their Japanese bodies. Then, by extension, so too will his readers sense their own possible redemption in an otherwise fallen world.
At first glance of Umezu’s visual storytelling, such ontological depths would seem impossible. The purpose of this essay is to argue that Umezu achieves that nonetheless. My Name Is Shingo accomplished something unusual for a manga; that is, through his framing of body parts (rather than faces), Umezu caused the reader to perceive the ontological development of a thinking and feeling being, even though that being happened to be a robot. To this end, I show that a careful analysis of any sophisticated manga will allow us to uncover the basic philosophical position of the narrative. Being a visual text, a manga’s phenomenological perspective must be determined through the way that bodies are depicted and framed. Faces are central, of course, but in Umezu’s works hands and feet often take precedence in demonstrating one’s awareness of oneself and one’s own body. Umezu created a manga with the power to demonstrate how consciousness arises in even the most unlikely of bodies and in the most unlikely of places and he did so through the most unlikely of artforms: horror manga.
The Unbelievable Origins and Direction of My Name Is Shingo
Originally published in Shōgakukan’s Big Comic Spirits (hereafter BCS) and running for four years from 1982 to 1986, My Name Is Shingo was a huge hit for Umezu Kazuo, although by this time he was almost guaranteed to be successful in any storytelling venture.[1] As manga historian Kure Tomofusa writes, Shingo was an “incredible gamble” that Umezu and his BCS editor took. The manga series began in the magazine’s inaugural issue and, in effect, worked as the headliner and magnet to get readers to buy and keep buying BCS. However, because Shōgakukan was only publishing it twice a month, they risked losing their audiences to other rival weekly comics (Kure 2000: 326–327). Despite this real concern, Shingo turned out to be a great success. It was a riveting story, even though no one understood the meaning of the Shingo’s title until at least two years into its run.
While the identity of the eponymous watashi (“I”) of Watashi wa Shingo (“I Am Shingo”) remained a mystery, Umezu focused the first third of his story on the life of the sixth-grader Satoru. This initial arc follows the humdrum days of Satoru and his middle-class family with a solid mother and hard-working father. They are a typically average Japanese family for the 1980s. However, their lives take a sudden turn when Satoru’s father’s workplace, a parts manufacturer, begins to use two automated robots to help speed up production. Within a few days, the robots (Vivian) Lee and (Marilyn) Monroe quickly prove to the factory owner that he need to only rely on the automatons to meet his production quotas. Their naming by the factory owner, which seems like an afterthought, is nonetheless sardonic. The darkly humorous joke of these blocky robots being marginally humanized by being dressed up with life-size cardboard images of America’s cinematic sweethearts seems to be lost on all the Japanese characters. Not the sharpest tools in the shed, those workers soon are all laid off except Satoru’s father, who is tasked with robot maintenance. This gives Satoru special access to the robots and a computer that can be used to “teach” Monroe and Lee sight- and sound-recognition to improve their manufacturing capability. But Satoru instead uses the computer to communicate with the more receptive one of the two robots, Monroe, who gradually learns to recognize Satoru’s face and form. In doing so, this robot becomes conscious of itself in relation to the Other: the young human friend.
All while this is happening, Satoru makes another good friend at a nearby school, this time a girl named Marine.[2] Marine has a Japanese mother and British father, and, unfortunately, her parents have decided that they will soon relocate England, though before that happens, she accompanies Satoru to the factory. Marine too learns how to communicate with Monroe and gets the robot to recognize her.
The early part of this series spends a great amount of time developing and depicting relationships between boy and girl and between Monroe and Satoru. Satoru, albeit a child, becomes a mature, conscious individual through his relationship with his Other, Marine. Sadly, it becomes increasingly more difficult for the children to see each other, let alone for them to visit Monroe. Their impending separations cause all three to take rash actions. Monroe senses the children’s youthful excitement and heightened emotions. This causes the robot to develop a need for the children, its own Other, as well as a human-like consciousness.
In a typical Umezu twist, though, the seemingly kind robot makes a series of violent and dangerous moves that endangers the lives of Satoru and Marine, while trying to help them maintain their love for each other. The saga of their love stretches across the entire span of the manga, even as the setting shifts between Japan and England. However, their love story reaches a crescendo around one-third into the series when Satoru and Marine act on their belief that the only way to make their love real is to dramatically and publicly take a leap of faith.
High Points, Near Climaxes, and Ungrounded Feet
In one of the series’ high points, Monroe instructs the children to leap off the top of the Tokyo Tower, explaining that this is the only way they can “marry” and “have children.” For the robot, a leap of faith from a 333-meter height will allow the three to remain as the “family” of three, with Monroe as the couple’s child. Satoru and Marine trust Monroe so strongly that they do not realize that they are being urged to commit suicide. Umezu never pulls any punches in his works; even his cutest and most innocent characters can be brutally massacred or be made to inflict unspeakable, ugly violence on others.
These two sixth-graders, united in their precocious love for each other, make a self-assertion of their identity as they leap off the tip of the Tokyo Tower. This act is called their “leap over” (tobi-utsuri) in this manga and this is the youths’ leap of faith that will enable them to become “married” and earn the right to keep their “family” together. In this scene, Umezu illustrates the youths’ self-realizations, not through their words or faces, but through their feet. Through repeated, minimal panels, he marks their existential lift-off by only showing their two sets of feet and their launching point, a school backpack to provide an extra footing. Thus, in Umezu manga, the body is the site through which a person manifests authentic self-awareness and identity; only if the body puts thought into action, will the Self become real (Figure 1).
In terms of its impact in the history of manga, Shingo very much reflects the current fads as well as the future of mature comic-book storytelling. Kure placed this work squarely as an archetype in the “fifth period” of Japanese manga history he theorized. The “fifth period” corresponds to the years from 1979 to 1986, when the multiple magazines containing Young in the title (albeit for adult men) and four-panel comics took the industry’s centerstage. Shingo arrived at a time when school-age love comedies were at their zenith, and although Shingo features the youthful romance of two elementary school-aged kids, theirs was a sprawling drama that surprised its audience in the way it connected their love to unsavory elements of an advanced and scientific civilization such as Japan’s (Kure 1997: 196–197). Whereas Shōgakukan’s BCS and Shūeisha’s Young Jump had their target audiences in men in their post-high-school years, their competitor Young Magazine of Kōdansha generally targeted a slightly younger audience (Kure 1997: 197). Given this fact, it is even more remarkable that BCS would feature Shingo with six-graders as its protagonists, which underscores Umezu’s unusual ability to make such compelling heroes out of children even for adult audiences.
Another aspect of Shingo as a forerunner in the industry is its sheer scope, painting a what-if scenario about the future of Japan, where there is rampant anti-Asian and Japan-bashing hate; where Japan’s industrialization becomes increasingly mechanized; where families become more and more broken and dysfunctional; and, where the individual struggles to make meaning out of life. Natsume Fusanosuke suggests that BCS succeeded because of the pioneering concept of its editor-in-chief, Konishi Yōnosuke, to create “for manga a new realm of the quasi-novel (a bridge between mass-media and pure literature novels)” (Natsume 2018: 78 [Natsume 2021: web]).
Even though its protagonists are two children and a bulky robot, Shingo is a very sophisticated narrative which treads even into the realm of philosophy, rephrasing its own form of Descartes’ cogito, “I think, therefore I am,” into something more personal: “I think, therefore I am Shingo.” With this context of the history of the manga medium in mind, it is therefore not that surprising that Umezu could conceive of and produce a manga with school-age characters that could open up ontological questions. Although the children’s leap into the unknown cannot be the climax of this multivolume series, this early episode previews the possibilities of self-realization for character types normally thought to be too immature or unequipped to do so.
Reading Monroe’s Cogito Moment in Umezu’s Compressed and Released Frames
The visual design and layouts in this manga are quite advanced and certainly indicate a kind of peak in Umezu’s career, which began in the 1950s. Umezu tends to pack his page with six to eight panels, almost forming a tight nine-panel “grid,” employed by his American contemporary, Steve Ditko, known for Amazing Spider-Man (1962–1966) and Doctor Strange (1961–1965) (Wolk 2009: 239). Furthermore, Umezu often employs simple layouts with iterative panels that repeat the same image only to show seconds passing by in the flow of time in “moment-to-moment” panel transitions.
Named by comics theorist Scott McCloud in his seminal study, Understanding Comics (1993), “moment-to-moment” or “type one” sequences usually do very little to help the narrative, as the duration of the depicted time is too short to push the plot forward. Instead, one would expect a truly dynamic artist to use other, more sophisticated panel-transition types to take advantage of the comics’ ability to engage the reader imagination. McCloud defines comics as “closure.” According to him, when “comics panels fracture both time and space,” it is closure that “allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality.” To McCloud, “comics is closure” (McCloud 1993: 67).
However, Umezu uses such minimal “moment-to-moment” sequences for maximum dramatic effect. There is something so beautiful, so calculated, so horrific in these snapshots in Shingo. And his panel sequences are best understood not only as “type one” but also as “type-five” or “aspect-to-aspect” panel transition type that emphasizes mood or feeling over plot (79). Such momentary and moody panel sequences are skillfully employed by Umezu to show the awakening of a new kind of conscious subject. Put it another way, Shingo depicts ontology emerging on the page for the reader to see. Batman, with only its whams! and pows!, seems pitiful by comparison.
If one were to use McCloud’s categories to analyze Umezu’s techniques to bring ontology to the comics page, one must acknowledge their potential problems in relation to manga and I have done so elsewhere (Holt 2022: 50–51). Because McCloud heavily emphasizes sequentiality of panels, often in two-panel sets, some argue that such an approach does not apply to manga, as they function within grander single-page or even double-page layouts. Umezu specialist Takahashi Akihiko in his Umezu Kazuo-ron (Theory of Umezu Kazuo, 2015) does so, but then tries to compensate for McCloud’s failings by creating his own special category of panel transitions. In order to better explain Umezu’s art, Takahashi demands a “seventh” type of panel transition, the “iterative” (hanpuku), on top of McCloud’s six transition categories.[3] Too slow or too subjective to match McCloud’s “moment-to-moment” panel sequences, Umezu’s “iterative” panels depict, according to Takahashi, “time that functions as a kind of moment-to-moment type but cannot be considered action-to-action as these images feature instead a kind of nuance and mentality” (Takahashi 2015: 243). In other words, Umezu repeats panels to build psychological tension and force the reader into the mind of the character. For Takahashi, the “pure nuance” seen in the “iterative” type can be viewed as what McCloud calls “moment-to-moment,” which requires “very little closure” but fails to show things “happening in concise, efficient ways” (McCloud 1993: 76). However, I have questioned Takahashi’s need to create additional categories (Holt 2019: web), and I further suggested a radical re-application of McCloud’s “six types” to allow for a more fluid and productive parsing of manga panels (Holt 2022: 51).
Given that a McCloudian analysis is not enough to ascertain the mood of ontological self-awakening, an alternative approach pioneered by Natsume Fusanosuke should be utilized to elucidate the epiphanic moments in Shingo. Natsume, who developed “manga expression theory” with others in the 1990s, offers an additional way to understand how manga is created and how it can be read. In the most important chapter of his Manga wa naze omoshiroinoka (Why manga is so interesting, 1997), Natsume describes how manga artists during the 1960s would “compress” (asshuku) and then “release” (kaihō) the panels, often stretching them horizontally, vertically, or both. This process of shrinking the panels creates an effect of psychological closeness to the subject in the panel. As the camera zooms in and we get closer to the character’s face or eyes, we often feel tension in this claustrophobic zone.
In a key scene (Figure 2) in Shingo, where Monroe develops consciousness, Umezu repeats and compresses the first panel eight times, driving the reader closer to the “psychology” of the robot. The sequence of repeated panels that focus on the robot’s manipulator hand is very important, as the body of this mechanical being, particularly its grasper, reveals its thought. Through the repeated and static images, Umezu gives life to both heavy robotic arm and cold
mechanical pincer. As the panels condense and speed up, the reader senses that Monroe’s mechanical parts are becoming self-aware. In Umezu manga, agency is first and foremost self-awareness of one’s own body, as seen in the previous example of the children with their feet conveying their choice to leap over into adulthood. By repeating and focusing more intensely on the robot’s body, Umezu’s panels force the reader to understand that the narration that accompanies these static images is the emancipated mind of Monroe.
According to Natsume, if the successive frames condense on the shapes therein, they force the reader to attune psychologically to those bodies inside them. As panels compress down the page, there is a sense of weight associated with these tight frames. We also will tend to read such compressions very fast and thus they can increase reading tempo.
Usually, after compressing panels in the top and middle of the page, an artist will release the bottom panel with at least a horizontal stretch (Figures 3 and 4). This panel will thus open up, release the tension, and provide the reader time to linger and take in things a bit more “objectively.” From Figure 2, one must assume Umezu will release after his tight nine-panel compressed sequence, and indeed he does with Panel A on the following page (Figure 5). In other words, we get closer to and deeper into Monroe’s mind. That alone makes us uncomfortable, but the sequence also overwhelms the reader with its speed. What will be the release of this monstrous merger with a mechanical mind? The answer is given on the following page’s larger release panel.
Natsume writes that when such releases follow a well-planned series of compressions, manga gets so interesting (1997: 147). A skilled manga artist can set up a good tempo of compressed, smaller panels and then, the reader’s field of vision will vastly open up on both the right and left sides as the frame stretches horizontally. The reader cannot help but feel a sudden openness or liberation. Additionally, if in that larger panel “the character in the panel is drawn small, [it further] accentuates that horizontal sense of release” (Natsume 2021: web).
As one turns the page, the initial panel opens up putting Monroe in the larger space of the factory setting (Figure 5). The final predicate from the extended monologue is the verb iimasu (“they say”). There is closure. The Marilyn Monroe cut-out, of which the face has been partially burned from an earlier accident, is now more visible. We are invited to linger over this larger liberated panel and see it more objectively. Monroe is the machine and the machine bears part of Marilyn Monroe’s vivacious sexuality (if somewhat maimed). All is dark and bright, but nothing is truly clear. This release allows the reader time to rest, to reflect, to think. In fact, that is exactly what Monroe is doing, pausing on the predicate that marks her (yes, her) story as belonging to another. To be sure, this is a moment of existential crisis, even if a bulky robot is having it.
Usually, manga artists will compress on a human character’s face, sometimes drawing up against the eyes or the ears, to approximate our journey to the mind of the character. For Monroe, Umezu does draw us closer to the sham face of Marilyn Monroe, but he also brings us closer to machine parts on the factory belt. Monroe’s “mind” consists of these machine parts, which are extensions of herself. Her “body” and narration fuse in these tightly compressed panels. She is aware. Her “body” shows it. Natsume’s logic of classic manga composition makes it clear how this extended sequence of consciousness and awakening can be understood in the context of these other dreary scenes of a factory floor devoid of any human actor. The title of this work is My Name Is Shingo, but the identity of Shingo has not been revealed. Instead, we know only that the machine has begun to think: My Name Is Monroe might have been a better title at this point.
The scene on these two pages—a mere two out of the seven-hundred pages at this point—demonstrates the motto of the series: “Miracles can happen to anyone once, but when it does happen, nobody notices.” The miracle is Monroe’s obtaining her consciousness through her manipulation of her body. In Figure 2, Umezu slowly spreads out her narrative over eight visually similar panels: “With me then putting together the motor, I first time I felt myself being conscious, so … they say [to iimasu]” (Umezu 2000: 67–68). All the panels in this sequence are drawn in a very Umezu-esque style. The scratched out circular marks form a frame within the panel (koma) frame, one that Umezu typically uses for a kind of spyglass refocusing on a character, a technique borrowed from his work in girls’ manga.[4] This sketchy, wavy, and unstable spyglassing of Monroe could be one of two things: 1) someone is watching another person; or 2) it refers to someone (usually the depicted subject) thinking about themselves. When Monroe says to iimasu (“they say”) as the final predicate of her sentence in Figure 5, we know that she is speaking to the reader from a distant, later point in time. Yet her view of her self-origin is hearsay and therefore mediated by another. If being is always mediated by another, who mediates the manga? Are we the “nobody,” an equally disembodied non-self that notices the miracle of this nobody robot’s awakening?
Release from Visual and Verbal Frames
In Kyōfu eno shōtai (Invitation to Fear, 1996) a collection of essays where Umezu reflects on his works, he looks back on the creation of Shingo, commenting upon the narrative style he chose for this series. Umezu wanted some unknown, unseen force seeing the action and its seeing to be felt. “I settled on the narration style,” he writes, “because I wanted it to feel like the persons themselves were seeing themselves” (Umezu 1996: 61). This is precisely why Monroe is depicted in those spyglass circle frames within the square border frames. She is seeing her body become “herself.” The typical manga square frame panel is the mediation of the Other, whereas the visual frame functions as the verbal frame “they say.” Both the visual and verbal frames determine narratives, which will be beyond the control of the characters within the visual or verbal predicate. However, Monroe is capable of owning her body; she is capable of resistance against this universal, human, totalizing manga force, the frame (koma), as her body is not completely declared by the invisible human narrator.
This may be one of the reasons why Shingo is so compelling and so horrific. Umezu insinuates to the reader that they do not have full control. By taking ownership of her narrative, Monroe is intimating that she is becoming more and more like her reader, the nobody. The ultimate horror in this manga sinks into the reader once they identify themselves with Monroe, the unattractive and murderous robot protagonist. The interaction between the depicted and the onlooker becomes complicitous. Monroe’s consciousness can only be fully realized by the reader injecting themselves into the body of this thinking robot, no matter how ugly, scary, or seemingly inhuman she is.
Judith Butler in Gender Trouble writes of the hard binary between mind and body, but also of the twisted ontological prerogative of the Subject (usually male) mind to even escape the Otherness of the body (and the Feminine).
In the philosophical tradition that begins with Plato and continues through Descartes, Husserl, and Sartre…the mind not only subjugates the body, but occasionally entertains the fantasy of fleeing its embodiment altogether (1990:17).
In the scene presented above, Monroe understands that one can never obtain the subject position, especially if one is a woman or a minority, because ontology has been and always will be essentially a part of the regime of the phallocentric signifying economy. The sentence-final “they say” that marks Monroe’s speech could be interpreted as a way to draw attention to the hegemonic forces that seemingly shape our world—it cannot be sheer chance that the factory owner donned the robot with a cardboard cut-out of America’s cinematic sweetheart and sexpot. Butler writes, “Paradoxically, the reconceptualization of identity as an effect, that is, produced or generated, opens up possibilities of ‘agency’ that are insidiously foreclosed by positions that take identity categories as foundational and fixed” (Butler 1990:201). Therefore, she suggests a strategy of “repetition” as a part of “critical task” to challenge gender norms, categories of constructed identity, and the trap of ontology. Framing and reframing these repetitive sequences, Umezu has Monroe “locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions,” and “affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them” (Butler 1990:201).
Figure 6 shows the robot actively dispensing with the gender identity given to her. Monroe disposes of the bulky cardboard cutout in the tight sewer tunnel either as an act of survival or as a preliminary act of self-redefinition. Notice how the act itself is punctuated with meaning onomatopoeia baki (snap!) and basha! (splash!) all in compressed panels that then release into a newly liberated being.
As the reader transitions from the last panel of the right-side page (Figure 6) to the first panel of the left-side page (Figure 7), they will notice that the picture is repeated except for the addition of the thought bubble of the robot, “I am Shingo,” to the latter. This Shingo, we will learn, is entirely self-titled, generated from the synthesis of his first two human contacts: Marin 真鈴 and Satoru 悟. The two-character names Shingo 真悟 consists of shin, which is the Sinitic reading of the first character of Marin’s name, and go, the Sinitic reading of the character for Satoru. Importantly, Shingo is a common Japanese name for boys. One could argue this is a kind of a Butlerian Japanese robot doing his own kind of “gender trouble” to synthesize his new being. Shingo resists those hegemonic forces of the phallocentric signifying economy by reconstructing his gender from the pieces available to him in the sewers of underground Tokyo.
It is possible to consider that Umezu’s character enacts its own kind of “gender trouble” to disrupt norms or to at least question the naturalization of sex, bodies, and humanity. In Umezu’s manga, there is always the question of what it means to be a Japanese person, such as “Are there categories of Japaneseness that are naturalized?” and “Who is allowed to be Japanese and who is not?” Along these lines, we may ask, “Can Monroe, a factory automaton that was made in Japan but has an American face, be Japanese?” and “What is required of Monroe to become Japanese?” Because “there is no possibility of agency or reality outside of discursive practices that give those terms [of gender] the intelligibility that they have,” according to Butler, the task now becomes “to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself” (1990: 203).
Empathetic Release or Repetition of the Status Quo?
Thus far, we have explored the phenomenon of the repeated panel in Shingo, which creates questions, fear, or discomfort about our assumptions of the body—anyone with a body can also have consciousness. For the final part of this paper, I will discuss how a connection with the body of the Other could generate either community-building acts of empathy or on the contrary something quite the opposite.
There is “the danger of empathy becoming a condescending reaction” and a “means to reinforce the dominant position and even superiority of the privileged,” as Eszter Szép summarizes in her Comics and the Body (2020:15). Szép argues that the very nature of the materiality of comics can generate empathy or a shared sense of vulnerability between the reader and the artist (she uses the term “drawer”). Vulnerability, she notes, “allows for an ethical encounter with the Other” and this encounter can “also happen via the way embodied practices around comics allow performing vulnerability” (2020: 9). Drawing on the concept of the vulnerability of “shared precariousness” from Butler’s Precarious Life (2004), Szép posits that comics “can be the site of ethical encounters” because they “can articulate the primary experience of vulnerability by the very lines by which it was drawn” (2020: 22).
Without discounting Szép’s argument for vulnerability, I shall also emphasize the importance of empathy, as it operates just as well in comics. If handled well, empathy can also help us think how we can honestly face each other in order to make better sense of our world. Leslie Jamison, in The Empathy Exams, similarly defines empathy as a kind of dialogue:
Empathy isn’t just listening; it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you see…Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds (2014: 5).
As Monroe-turned-Shingo schleps his robot-self through the underground sewers to find his old friend Satoru and his new friend Miki, a mysterious being confined in an infant-like body in a playpen, another question emerges. Can and should outcasts like Shingo and Miki ever be human? Apparently, their friendship in mutually shared pain and loneliness is what allows them to be legitimated as human, as seen in a couple of breathtaking sequences from the end of the third story arc known as “Consciousness.”
To discover their true place in the world, Shingo seeks an empathic connection with Miki, a fellow alienated, suffering being, who happens to live in Satoru’s old apartment, directly above Shingo’s sewer location. Importantly, Miki appears only as a disembodied voice. Thus, Shingo and Miki share much in common in how they are visually and verbally depicted in this manga. Seemingly destined to be forever isolated in this story, Shingo finally finds a true Other with whom he can gain real empathy.
In fact, there are many breathtaking and problematic scenes of empathy drawn in the pages of Shingo at this point. One of the queerest and the most exciting is Monroe’s transformation into Shingo. This happens through a series of phone calls and later in-person dialogues with Miki, whose parents moved into Satoru’s apartment after the boy and his family broke up following the Tokyo Tower incident. In yet another series of highly charged, repetitive panels, which depict Miki’s mother’s hand bringing the phone receiver to Miki, Umezu brilliantly visualizes the outcasts’ bond, showing empathy growing with intense focus and magnification on the page—a large release of a double-page spread (Figure 8). Their phone call, the site of their empathetic mutual acknowledgement, demonstrates how empathy, according to Jamison, can be an acknowledgement of a “horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond
what you see.” Unable to see each other, they can only rely on the phone call enabled by the mother. Precisely because they know nothing of each other, they can empathize and share their vulnerabilities. “I am Miki,” she first says. “I am Shingo,” responds he (Umezu 2000:294–295). However, this exchange is fraught with danger, because the terms of their engagement create categories of identity and gender, namely, “I,” “Miki” (a female name), “Shingo” (a male name).
In the next double-page spread (Figure 9), where their long-overdue encounter is depicted, they voice their latest category in chorus: “You too must be human!” Natsume explains the rationale for this double-page spread as their mutual self-discovery and empathy that constructs a very uncomfortable objectivity. In this scene, Shingo, using his self-aware mechanical grasper, penetrates past the protective crib veil into the vulnerable zone of Miki. As an adult-like being trapped in an infant-like body, Miki’s vulnerability is laid bare to the probing Shingo, the male-like actor. In a seemingly unified voice (the word balloons have no arrows to indicate the speakers), they together confirm each other’s humanity. Umezu depicts these epiphanic moments in two two-page spreads, highlighting a sense of something liberated, something objective, and something to linger over (to use Natsume’s terms). Nevertheless, because Miki’s body is subsumed within the frames and only Shingo’s pincer is visualized, priority is given to the male actor. Armed with his new freedom and newly acquired agency, Shingo now repeats an act of alienating the Other, Miki. In doing so, he rejoins the phallocentric signifying economy and announces, “Then, I too am Human!!” in the following page (Umezu 2000:324).
As the first narrative arc of the series comes to a close, one must ask if any ontological possibilities remain in Umezu’s story. Does Umezu pose a negative critique of that dominating force, particularly from a Japanese point of view of alterity? On the one hand, peeling off Marilyn Monroe’s cardboard cutout image, Monroe the robot enacts a kind of gender-trouble that destabilizes the self-versus-other binary. Monroe could be said to create “gender trouble” and redefine herself (Monroe) as himself (Shingo). On the other hand, instead of displacing norms, Monroe/Shingo might have reinstated and reinforced those norms. Does Umezu use his manga to further push the agenda of what Butler calls the “phallocentric signifying economy,” seen across cultures that only serve to hide hegemonic forces behind invisible barriers of “naturalization”? By becoming Shingo, the newly-gendered robot might reaffirm an order inherent in heterosexual norms. These norms require compulsory heterosexuality, procreation, and establishing families. These things are required even if the actors only have liminal, undeveloped, mechanical, or even incorporeal bodies. Perhaps the most horrific aspect of Shingo is that even an outsider like Shingo with his non-normative body might reinscribe and reframe the very laws that the children helped the robot to transgress. Such is the terrifying tragedy that Umezu generates in his manga. Japanese can only leap off the Tokyo Tower or dress up as Marilyn Monroe in order to realize one’s own agency in otherwise stultifying social economy.
However, My Name Is Shingo must instead be read as a bold challenge to ontological assumptions about the subject, about gender, and about race. We can never escape those assumptions, but we can deal with them better if we read the spaces between ourselves and others more carefully and skillfully. Perhaps even a murderous robot in Japan can suggest some means of emancipation from gender and cultural norms. There is great irony in Monroe/Shingo’s final enunciation as the page closes down from the previous releases into a smaller one-page compression, fraught with claustrophobic tension as the focus is on the ugly pincer of the robot that exclaims “I too am human!!” (Umezu 2000:324). Gaining his humanity, the once-enlightened Shingo has been reborn as a dangerous and even sad mockery of the human. There can be no redemption for Shingo, because any “human” redemption is fraught with self-contradictions.
The rest of the narrative will follow the separate adventures of Satoru, Marin, and Shingo as they traipse all over Japan and other parts of the world, but they never find true connections like they once did in the Japanese factory. Umezu’s My Name Is Shingo shows that freedom for the self is difficult to hold onto as we enter human (Japanese) society, but perhaps we should remember the original connections we had with others before we matured. Those pre-naturalized and pre-human feelings might afford us a way to hold onto our authentic selves. Umezu visually imagines the selfhood we possess before our bodies are integrated into a larger unified being called human society. It is only when we find others who are similarly displaced, marginalized, and alienated, might we then imagine an escape from of the horrific world that was, for Umezu, Japan in the 1980s.
Notes
[1] The story ran from the April 30, 1982 (inaugural) issue of BCS through September 1, 1986. Only a year into its serialization, Shōgakukan began to publish the collected stories in trade paperback in a ten-volume set from 1983 to 1986. It was reprinted again in a six-volume set in 1996; again, in 2000 in a seven-volume smaller bunko set (the version I will use for this paper). A thicker four-volume set was published in 2003. Its latest version is the 2009, 2010 BCS UP! six-volume series. Full bibliographic details can be found in Takahashi, Umezu Kazuo ron, p. 432. Shingo’s multiple reprintings attests to the great popularity of this series. A recent exhibit of his works from January to March 2022 in Tokyo further speaks to the recognition of Umezu. There, Shingo was greatly featured with a component (“Zoku-Shingo” [Shingo-Continued]) that celebrated the manga’s long life. The exhibit ran from January 28 to March 25, 2022, in Tokyo’s high-end Roppongi Hills at Tokyo City View tower.
[2] Her name in Japanese is Marin and is written in English at one point as “Malin” on a party banner, but the name quite possibly is a pun on the “Marilyn Monroe,” the robot character soon to dominate the story.
[3] McCloud’s “six types” of panel transitions are “moment,” “action,” “subject,” “scene,” “aspect,” and “non-sequitur” (74).
[4] For a full discussion of this special type of panel layout, one that is heavily influenced from his days as a shōjo manga artist, see Holt (2019).
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