Manga no Michi - Rumiko Takahashi Profile

Translated by: Harley Acres
Portions of this article previously appeared in Shonen Sunday 1988 Vol. 4-5 and Shonen Sunday Graphic Special Urusei Yatsura The Final Act Boy Meets Girl.

Rumiko Takahashi is from Niigata prefecture.
Born October 10, 1957.
Blood Type A.

While attending Japan Women's University (日本女子大学/Nihon Joshi Daigaku), she studied at Kazuo Koike’s Gekiga Sonjuku. ^[1] She made her debut with Katte na Yatsura in 1978 and won honorable mention for the 2nd Shogakukan Newcomers Manga Award (第2回小学館新人コミック大賞). Urusei Yatsura began running serially the same year. Since then has done Maison Ikkoku, and currently Ranma 1/2 is running serially.

Because I enjoy creating my manga, I find them quite interesting. If the manga artist isn’t having fun, I don’t think they can draw interesting manga. Manga are really enjoyable. Both my hobby and my job are manga. Of course the creative process is fun, but truthfully, all the way through to where the book is finished and I pick it up and read it myself, it’s all enjoyable. It does have its hardships, but even those are enjoyable in their own way. The more you draw the more difficult it becomes. It’s also interesting that there is no end where you can say “this is good enough.”

I’m able to make a living just creating my beloved manga, so I’m really glad that I was able to become a manga artist.

When I was a child I didn’t like being active. I was un-athletic and I was an introverted child who didn’t like it when someone suggested playing outside during the cold winter (laughs). The only playing I did was drawing pictures, and I would often draw likenesses of friends or my teachers in the margins of my notebook.

I created my first story manga in my second year of high school, and I submitted it to Shonen Magazine. At the time I was a fan of Ikegami-sensei, so I copied his tough/macho style and drew a slapstick gag manga (laughs). ^[2] It was a slapstick “sword-rattler in which everyone was attacked with biological weapons, and under the setting that no one would die in mediocrity, students and salarymen dueled each other with swords. ^[3]

But even talking about it this way, I can’t describe the story clearly, in other words, it wasn’t coherent. Something that you can’t describe in a word is no good. I now truly believe that a story that you can’t neatly sum up by saying this happened and then that happened, is really the pits. Of course, the story wasn’t accepted. At the time it was a shock…

The reason why I submitted the story to a shonen (boys) manga magazine is because I had an intense desire to create shonen manga. I think it was because the manga I grew up reading. I had faithfully read Shonen Sunday from the time I was in about first grade. I really got into Otoko do-Aho Koshien. Also, it’s like I was almost in love with the main characters in Ashita no Joe (Shonen Magazine) and Judo Icchokusen (Shonen King). ^[4]

Maybe the intrinsic nature of manga is something that you can enjoy by getting into the characters. Like “(the charater) Hoshi Ittetsu in Kyokjin no Hoshi is great!” (laughs). ^[5] It makes me really happy too when I got fan letters saying things like “I just love Lum.” This is the greatest happiness for an author.

My first submission flopped, and I pretty much gave up on my dream of becoming a pro. I thought I would just live a simple life as an office lady or something in Niigata. But, my parents said, “A lazy person like you must learn the difficulty of living alone. Go to Tokyo for university!” and so I wound up going to Tokyo.

At the university, through entering the Manken (Manga Kenkyu-kai) my circle of manga-writing friends quickly grew. ^[6] This was a tremendous stimulus. After entering Manken I learned for the first time how to create a decent manga. Unitl that time, I had been putting things down on paper just as they came to my head. But (I realized that) that wouldn’t do. First off, you give careful thought to the story line. You have to draw the characters like the hero, who you want to stand out, close up in the foreground... these are pretty basic things.

The only way to study manga is to draw a lot, but the important thing is to draw a lot of what you want to draw, and be sure to show it to other people and ask for their opinion. In other words, you have to research “how to get things across to other people." No matter how interesting something may be, if other people don’t understand it, there’s no point. I think the essence of entertainment is being easy to understand.

Thinking about it now, the lectures at Gekiga Sonjuku were all about very advanced things. Character development, for example. I didn’t really understand it, but in a word, it was dramatization to make the central character stand out. This is difficult for me even now that I’ve become a pro. It’s not interesting to have a character appear in a pretentious manner. You have to present an episode where the character shows his true nature from the beginning.

In the first chapter of Urusei Yatsura I tried to start with “Ataru Moroboshi is a guy with bad luck.” But doing it that way, it always turned out as an objective portrayal, and it didn’t grab the reader. After redrawing it several times, I began it with a tight close-up of Ataru being slapped by Shinobu. For the first time, Ataru’s character was established.

In the first installment of Maison Ikkoku it was like I was just showing their faces, so I unexpectedly had a little trouble there, but then Ranma 1/2 was another tough one. This guy Ranma appears in a very pretentious manner. “This won’t do, this won’t do” (I said), and redrew it over and over until finally I thought of an opening scene with him running for his life chased by a panda and I thought, “Okay, this is it!”

After deciding on a memorable way for the characters to appear, the next thing to do is to use the names over and over. The character says his own name. The surrounding characters keep referring to him by name, like “That’s so-and-so.” Maybe you can say that when the readers remember the characters’ names, they are for the first time, truly developed. This is the sort of thing that Koike-sensei had lectured on at Gekiga Sonjuku. But at the time I didn’t really understand it, and only now am I saying “Oh, so that’s what he meant.” (laughs).

At Gekiga Sonjuku, when Koike-sensei was kind enough to look at one of my short stories, he said “I think you can turn pro.’ What a change that was. I got so excited and ran around to all my friends spouting “It’s my debut!” (laughs). But reality was not so indulgent, and I couldn’t seem to make my debut.

Feeling embarrassed, during the spring break in my sophomore year of college I sent something called Katte na Yatsura, which was like a prototype of Urusei Yatsura, to the Shogakukan Shogakukan Newcomers Manga Contest.

It placed in the contest and was to be debuted in Shonen Sunday. I was so happy, really. ^[7]

The issue that carried it was put on sale in June. The weather on the day it hit the newsstands was so-so.

I left my apartment in Nakano early in the morning and bought Shonen Sunday in front of the station. Carrying it under my arm, I went to school, and everyone from Manken had Shonen Sunday. Again, I was so happy I cried.

I also got my first fan letter. Someone whose face I’d never even seen was moved by my manga and sent me a letter. This had quite an effect on me. Once something like that happens, you really can’t quit being a manga artist.

My debut manga got a very good response from readers, and in about a month the word came that I would be “serialized” – it seems like I was very lucky.

Urusei Yatsura was a work in which I pour out things I had wanted to draw since I was a child. “It would be great if I could fly through the sky”... there is a part of me that thinks in an indiscriminate manner. I thought, if you could fly then you wouldn’t be from Earth, you’d be from somewhere else. That bit of imagination lead to the image of Lum and Kaminari-sama. ^[8] Even after making my debut I was something of a smart-aleck kid (laughs), I was convinced there was no way my stories wouldn’t be popular. I had blind faith. Fortunately, it became a hit, though (laughs). And that blind faith is how I’ve managed to go on until now (laughs).

But I think conviction like that is absolutely essential to working as a pro.

There is no pattern to my everyday life, but I usually get up after noon. I usually eat out. I stand in the kitchen and cook a meal maybe once a year.

It’s like I’m married to manga, and manga is all I ever think about. After I’ve talked over a story idea with an editor, for a day or two I sit in front of my desk, spaced out. But inside my head I’m thinking hard about how to draw the story idea we discussed. Then, when I finally begin to actually work, the outline is completed in about half a day.

I’m not satisfied unless I make a complete story outline with drawings. Or rather I should say, I’m afraid to draw any other way. Even after I’ve decided on the basic storyline, I think hard about the opening.

You have to create a scene that will completely draw in the reader from the very first glance, but I always agonize over the proportions of that frame. You can’t have a lot of dialog, the main character has to stand out... at any rate, I struggle with this every time.

From my experience, the quality that a manga artist has to have is, more than anything else, perseverance. Manga begins with sitting in front of your desk and thinking. If you can’t do this then you can’t become a pro.

When I can’t come up with a storyline, I sometimes suffer physically. My stomach aches, my chest feels tight, I break out in a cold sweat... You have to have a body strong enough to throw these things off. ^[9]

It’s okay to aspire to be a manga artist because you can become rich if you make one hit, but it’s harder to continue being a manga artist than to debut as a manga artist. That’s because it takes a tremendous effort to continue creating high-quality stories which your audience will read.

The naming of characters is very important, but it’s sometimes pretty haphazard. Lum is simply named after singer Agnes Lum, and I do things like when I heard that (pitcher) Egawa’s younger brother’s name was Ataru, I decided “Yeah, that’s good!” (laughs). ^[10]

There are also characters who name themselves. Like, "I’m the manager of an apartment with a clock tower, so I’m Kyoko Otonashi." ^[11] I had an unusually hard time with Ranma, but the phrase “kaitouranma wo tatsu” (快刀乱麻を断つ)(something similar to “tackling plenty of tasks diligently/to cut the Gordian knot”) came to mind, and it had a good ring to it, so I decided to go with that.

In eight years I’ve written over 300 chapters for Urusei Yatsura, I took a lot of pains to keep it from getting stuck in a pattern.

There’s a pattern to the gags, and as the series goes on both the readers and I become used to that pattern. When you can tell that here’s where I make them laugh and here’s a good place for the punchline, it doesn’t seem interesting anymore. So after that, you need to make an effort and be persistent in getting away from that pattern. I have to keep on creating situations, like where everyone thinks they are going to laugh, saying “no, you’re going to laugh over here instead.”

Maison Ikkoku was relatively easy to create. That’s because my own personality is in some ways like you added Kyoko and Godai together and divided by two. Sometimes I’m indecisive and sometimes I’m selfish (laughs).

With Ranma 1/2, I had been thinking about the idea of a man who turned into a woman from some time before. So the idea of Ranma going from being a man to a woman and back came smoothly. But the triggers of hot and cold water were harder to come up with. In order to make Ranma recognizable at a glance whether as a man or a woman when I was designing the characters, the idea of a pigtail came up. The clothing that would go well with a pigtail, that would be Chinese-style, so then he probably uses martial arts... that’s how he took shape.

Once the serialization was started, I couldn’t quite understand the feelings of the girl named Akane, who was the heroine. She was hard to draw. I realized that the reason for this seemed to be in her hairstyle, so it was “Eeh, cut it off!” and I lopped off Akane’s hair. With that, I was finally satisfied.

I think that happiness is important, I definitely want to keep on creating manga that leave a good feeling after you read them. I want to keep making happy endings. I want all my readers to accept my stories smoothly without thinking about anything. If they can enjoy reading them with an “Ah ha ha,” then I’m really happy. No matter what you say, manga are the greatest amusement in the world (laughs).

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Footnotes

• [1] Gekiga Sonjuku was a manga "cram school" where Kazuo Koike, the writer of such iconic manga as Lone Wolf and Cub, Crying Freeman and Lady Snowblood helped train a number of manga luminaries before their debuts. Besides Rumiko Takahashi, other Gekiga Sonjuku alumnai include Tetsuo Hara (Fist of the North Star), Yuji Hori (Dragon Quest), Hideyuki Kikuchi (Vampire Hunter D), Keisuke Itagaki (Grappler Baki) and Marley Caribu (Old Boy).
• [2] As an artist that is so quintessentially associated with Shonen Sunday it is hard to imagine Takahashi potentially publishing in Shonen Magazine. However at the time her favorite manga arist, Ryoichi Ikegami (池上遼一), was publishing Hitoribocchi no Rin (ひとりぼっちのリン) from 1972-1973 in Shonen Magazine. She mentions this in "Ryoichi Ikegami Book Interview with Rumiko Takahashi", "Examinging the Source of Masterpieces! Rumiko Takahashi's History", and "Toriyama/Takahashi Interview".
• [3] Other than the plot described here it is unknown what this story was or if it was a reworking of her Star of Empty Trash story. She discusses this story again in her long interview but says she is too embarrassed to give the title (though she remembers the title).
• [4] Otoko do-Aho Koshien (男どアホウ甲子園) by Shinji Mizushima (水島新司) is one of many famous baseball manga from Mizushima. His others include Dokaben (ドカベン) and Abusan (あぶさん). Takahashi has long expressed her love of Tetsuya Chiba's Ashita no Joe (あしたのジョー). She wrote an autobiographical manga about getting to meet Chiba. We've written an article and video project about Tetsuya Chiba's long career and his Takahashi's admiration for him. Judo Icchokusen (柔道一直線) by Ikki Kajiwara (梶原一騎) and Shinji Mizushima (永島慎二) is about a young boy learning judo to avenge his father who lost in the Olympics and passed away soon after.
• [5] Kyojin no Hoshi (巨人の星/Star of the Giants) is another manga written by Ikki Kajiwara and illustrated by Noboru Kawasaki (川崎のぼる). It was the inspiration for Takahashi's dojinshi Star of Empty Trash and the characters inspired Urusei Yatsura's Tobimaro Mizunokoji.
• [6] Takahashi founded the manga club at Japan Women's University (日本女子大学/Nihon Joshi Daigaku).
• [7] Takahashi won honorable mention for the 2nd Shogakukan Newcomers Manga Award (第2回小学館新人コミック大賞) in the shonen category. The way the Newcomer Manga Award is structured is there is a single winner and then two to three honorable mentions that are unranked. In 1978 the winner in the shonen category was Yoshimi Yoshimaro (吉見嘉麿) for D-1 which was published in Shonen Sunday 1978 Vol. 26. The other honorable mentions in addition to Rumiko Takahashi were Masao Kunitoshi (国俊昌生) for The Memoirs of Dr. Watson (ワトソン博士回顧録) which was published in Shonen Sunday 1978 Vol. 27 and Hiroaki Oka (岡広秋) for Confrontation on the Snowy Mountains (雪山の対決) which was published in a special edition of Shonen Sunday (週刊少年サンデー増刊号). Oka would also publish later under the name Jun Hayami (早見純). Other winners in various Newcomers categories include Gosho Aoyama, Koji Kumeta, Yuu Watase, Kazuhiko Shimamoto, Naoki Urasawa, Kazuhiro Fujita and Ryoji Minagawa, Yellow Tanabe and Takashi Iwashige.
• [8] Kaminari (雷) is the Japanese god of thunder and lightning.
• [9] Takahashi had been through some very serious health concerns at the time and had to have an appendectomy in 1988. She was interviewed from her hospital room which you can read here.
• [10] Agnes Lum is an American model and singer who became popular in Japan in the late 1970s.
• [11] Kyoko's last name, Otonashi (音無), means "soundless" which is a reference to the broken clock at Ikkoku-kan and the fact that her room has no number on it unlike the other residents'.

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