Entry tags:

a: minekura kazuya, manga

[Manga] Openings: Kazuya Minekura, Saiyuki (3/3)
[Part 1] [Part 2]


I am tired of calling the other guy "the other guy," so I am just going to call him Hakkai, even though that's not his name at this point in time. I could make a good argument, actually, that he doesn't have a name just now, even though he almost certainly thinks he still does--but you don't need to know that for the discussion of these two pages, so let's leave that aside. "Hakkai" is how he was introduced back in Volume 1, and "Hakkai" is what I'll use.

Now that we've settled that pressing matter, let's talk about art. Click on a picture to go to a larger version of it.

Saiyuki V.5, pp.16-17

Space

The immediately striking thing about these two pages is how few and how big the panels are--they've only got four panels each, unless you want to call the words between panels on p.16 a borderless panel. Most pages have 5-6 panels; p. 12 also has only four, but there are a few reasons it didn't have the same feeling of roominess or of close attention, focus, as the pages we're looking at right now, for a couple of reasons:

1. 12.3 takes up half the page, although it's positioned in a way to obscure this, slightly--so although there's one very large panel, the others are small to make up for it. This doesn't quite explain everything, though, because p. 17 has nearly the same layout, yet the feel of the two pages is very different:
   
   

   p. 17	p. 12

   
   
   
2. The difference is that p. 12's panels are crowded with both detail and people. There's a close-up shot of the cluttered table, and two panels of people with three or four people in them--even if only one of those people is important enough for his face to be seen. By contrast, most of the panels in pp.16-17 have only one person in them, and most of them are close-up shots instead of the medium-view shots that characterize p. 12.
   

This change is doing a few different things:

1. First, 12.1-16.2 give us a progressively closer and more intimate view of Gojyo--we start with the externals and an overview (12.3), proceed through the first-person narration of the next three pages, and conclude with a close-up reaction shot (16.2) and more internal monologue.
   
   
2. It's signalling a shift in the kind of scene being shown. Previously, we saw public scenes and private ones; now we're going to see intimate conversations, scenes whose importance lies in the interactions of these two people--which is why we're going to see more of their faces than anything else.
   

Open eyes

In my last post, I discussed the slowed-down passage of time over the past couple of pages--and time is still moving pretty slowly here. The first two panels on p. 16 clearly take place the instant after the panel on p. 15 and echo their construction and content.

Remember when I said to keep paying attention to eyes? Now the first person besides Gojyo to get a panel to himself is the first person besides Gojyo whose eyes we see. He's got a face. He's important. And we're seeing him from a more level perspective, he's horizontal in respect to Gojyo now rather than being in the head-down diagonal from p. 15--the more we (Gojyo) see him, the stronger his position becomes.

And we see Gojyo's shocked response. This is the first time we've seen Gojyo full-face rather than in profile since p. 12--and on p. 12 we weren't nearly so close in. Note that his eyes are looking slightly down, so we're sure what he's looking at, but that he's facing straight ahead, his head unbowed--this, like the positioning of Hakkai's panel opposite him, sets them on an equal plane despite the physical setup. And it emphasizes the shift from earlier in the scene when Gojyo was thinking, "I guess it works if I don't look anyone in the eye." He's looking someone in the eye now--and someone's looking back. The scanlation has "I thought he laughed when he looked at me" and Tokyopop has "He looked at me ... and smiled, I think," but either way, it seems pretty clear that even in the original the phrasing is emphasizing the importance of the look--and that Hakkai, on the ground, for that second is the person with the power in this personal interaction--the person whose gaze is the determining one. (And this is going to be picked up later on, when Gojyo feels their connection is confirmed because Hakkai sees the same thing when he looks at Gojyo that Gojyo sees when he looks at himself--hair and eyes the color of blood.)

Even if you came in at Volume 5 and didn't know that three years later these two would be so totally married best friends, I think you'd get that this is a really important encounter by now.

Hidden

Hakkai has one eye obscured by bandage and hair, partly to fool us into thinking that we know why he'll be wearing a monocle in Volume 1, but also for symbolic reasons: one of his eyes is obscured because he's obscuring himself. This is different from the eyes we didn't see for the people at the tavern in pp.12-13, as is the fact that he doesn't tell Gojyo his name here or in the subsequent scene. The others' eyes and names were obscured because the people were unimportant; Hakkai's are obscured because he's hiding things.

So is Gojyo, of course, but Gojyo is hiding things in plain sight, like his "dyed" hair. It's worth noting that one of Gojyo's eyes is blacked out in 16.2--mirroring Hakkai's.

Change in perspective

Gojyo's thoughts signal the end of the scene and the shift in point-of-view; the next scene will start out from Hakkai's perspective. The sound effects on either side of Gojyo's words are the sound of falling rain, carrying over information from the previous panels, and also, along with Gojyo's words, creating the sense of the scene ending with sound after the visuals have ended but before their impression has faded away. It's a very cinematic effect--sound continuing after the picture has faded to black. Or brightened to white, as the case may be.

Confirming the shift in perspective, we see Hakkai's eyes opening in 16.3. Hakkai's upside-down eyes, which is one of our clues to the shift in perspective--this is the kind of image that indicates we're getting an expressionist view of the character's state of mind, which is clearly disoriented, and it's also easing us through the change by providing visual continuity as a mirror-image of Hakkai's face in 16.1. The other hint of scene change is the bandage -- clearly enough time has passed for someone to have cleaned him up and bandaged him.

16.4 pulls back as Hakkai becomes aware of his surroundings--and the vertiginous effect of the view from above and the placement of Hakkai's head at the bottom of the frame aren't accidental. Note that we see him in five panels over these two pages--and every single one has him facing in a different direction or being seen from a different angle. His world's askew and he's trying to get the information to put it back into order. He doesn't know where he is; he's disoriented--although the fact that he's not quite as upside-down in 16.4 as he was in 16.3 indicates that he's getting his bearings, as does the fact that we (and he) can see his surroundings in the later panel.

By 17.1, he's even right side up for a moment, able to take stock of the room in 17.2. We know that he doesn't panic when presented with a strange place--and we know he expects to be in hell.

(Side note: The word the scanlators translated as "mediocre" has been different in all four translations I've seen. Tokyopop has it as "anti-climactic" and Gojyo responding, "Who're you calling anti-climactic?", I guess because the next panel and the part on p. 20 where Gojyo tells Hakkai that picking him up was the first and only time he was going to carry a man to his bed just weren't enough innuendo for them.)

Personal space

So we have another weird angle, an abrupt and startling appearance--Gojyo is direct and confrontational and in Hakkai's personal space. (And also, arguably, flirting. Because Minekura is generous with her subtext.) Gojyo's challenge is clearly not a real threat--you could read it as playful or as male status games or as a combination of the two--but part of it is also regaining some of the power or balance he'd lost in the encounter in 16.1-2. To go back to a recurring theme--part of what's discomfiting about this is Gojyo's position, but part of it is just the stare, made uncomfortable by the light above and by the impossibility of escaping it--and Hakkai stares back, eyes very wide. He's much more startled than he was by waking up in a strange place or in Hell, even if not quite as startled as Gojyo was when the dying man met his eyes and laughed.

Maybe one of you can think of something intelligent to say about the way the panels are lit in 16.1-2 and 17.3-4; I'm kind of stuck on "It's pretty."


Postscript

So I was seized by this mad impulse to keep going--there are three more pages in this scene! There are later Gojyo-Hakkai scenes which provide useful to comparisons to these!--but I'm not sure how much I really have left to say. I'll just mention a few things that struck me:

1. In the following pages, and for most of the next to Gojyo-Hakkai scenes, every time we see Hakkai, he's looking down. Head bowed, avoiding Gojyo's gaze, self-effacement or guilt or some combination of the two--not really a feeling of exposure, I think, because the two of them get along like gangbusters. When Hakkai does look up and face forward--when we finally get a direct look at his face rather than his profile, and when he's also looking straight ahead rather than down--it's very significant. It's also significant when he looks up. Frankly, you don't want Hakkai on his knees. You really don't. You're not going to like what he does next.
   
   
2. There are a lot of panels that set Hakkai and Gojyo up as reflections of each other. Facing each other, facing away, either way they're deliberately paralleled--precisely, of course, in the way they're mirror-images in the storyline, the way they see themselves in each other.
   
   
3. The change of scene mid-p.20 is signalled by: (a) a slightly larger horizontal gutter between the last panel of one scene and the first panel of the other than the gutter between the two panels in the same scene; (b) the first panel of the new scene bleeding off the right edge of the page, in contrast to the panels of the previous scene, which have considerable a considerable margin; (c) birdseye landscape/building view.
   

If curiosity about what those pages look like or what it signifies when Hakkai looks straight out makes you buy Saiyuki, hey, I'm perfectly okay with that.



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