You haven’t heard of him at all because his work is released into an airtight publishing bubble, yet no one in that bubble knows quite what to do with a capital-A Author of genuine literary art.

The problem is that Asano has gotten locked now into this awkward, liminal place. Outside of comic book circles its author might as well not exist. Girl is one of the smartest and most moving books about being young that I’ve ever read but, like all of Asano’s work, it has never been seriously reviewed. “Maybe Keisuke wants something more than a kiss from the fair Koume… And this will all transpire before high school exams!” One can’t really blame the librarians for the miscategorisation, since Vertical Inc.’s own blurb for Girl is laughable: I discovered Asano’s work myself entirely by accident, when his short book A Girl on the Shore-a shatteringly sad, smart, erotic story about young lust-was on display one day on the bottom shelf of the Comics section in Glasgow’s biggest library, sandwiched inappropriately between The Unending Adventures of X-Men and an illustrated children’s book about warrior mice. The fact that I can predict with some certainty that you-you, a sophisticated reader of world literature in translation-have very probably never heard of the mangaka Inio Asano or his masterpiece Goodnight Punpun is symptomatic of Western literary culture’s own manga problem. The stark division between Japan’s popular culture and its national literature is thrown into especially sharp focus by the ways in which Japanese books are translated, marketed, and managed for the English-speaking West. Though there are, of course, exceptions, such as Haruki Murakami, whose work blends the high- and low-brow and has achieved a similar success in the West, he is something of the exception that proves the rule: “accused at home of being neither truly Japanese nor truly literary” (Harding). Indeed, according to Alex Kerr, this is precisely why manga has been so successful: because it is the only art form that can “do justice to the more bizarre extremes of modern Japan.” The major works in the Japanese canon tend to have little of the large, diverse casts, the dramatic romance, or the technological sublime that characterises Japan’s best works of popular fiction.

As manga (Japanese comics) exploded across the post-war landscape in a burst of ebullience and colour, writers of a more sophisticated literature have, as a rule, favoured introspection, understatement, and a distinctly unAmerican unshowiness.

This sharp division would characterise the literary arts in Japan for the following century. Squaring up to the headache on the horizon, they began instead to cultivate what Buruma calls a quiet “air of nihilism.” satellite of the United States” (Christopher Harding, Japan Story). Japan’s “intellectuals,” on the other, were “disdainful” of this ingratiation, which would see them become “a mere cultural. G.I.’s through the ruins of their old cities and “pan-pan girls” (prostitutes) “dressed in cheap approximations of American fashions” were the early “pioneers of American commercial culture.” On the one hand, gum-hungry children trailing U.S. In the aftermath of the war, explains Buruma, the country stood at the brink of the great 20 th century dilemma: just how modern, how American, was it to become? Why is Goodnight Punpun a masterpiece? In I nventing Japan, Ian Buruma describes the moment after Japan’s surrender in 1945 when these long-standing divisions in Japanese cultural life opened wide.

Goodnight punpun manga