Foof! What a book. I read all night and finished it at 5 am. Even so I was much less dogged than the writer — a middle-aged Japanese mangaka (graphic book artist/author) who decided to go to India in 2002 to give this country its first ever manga. This is his story, told as a graphic book.
Poor Yukichi Yamamatsu. Any-body with any common sense at all would not have done it his way. First, he had never been outside Japan before. Second, he knew neither English nor Hindi. Third, his research seems to have been dreadfully poor (for instance, someone at the Indian embassy in Tokyo told him that there were no comics in India, and he believed them). Fourth, he landed in Delhi, surely not the most welcoming city in the country. Fifth, he came with the Japanese originals (expecting to find a literary translator to turn them into Hindi for Rs 300). Sixth, he thought it would be a breeze.
Really, poor guy. He thought, “Soon I’ll be rich! It’s a sure thing!” What third-world comics virgin could resist manga in Hindi, right?
Well, just about everything that can go wrong, does. He can’t find his way round the airport on arrival, he finds himself in a cheap hotel much further from the airport than promised, he can’t eat the food (too spicy), or walk down the street without stepping in a cowpat, he gets passed around by greedy “guides” and autowalas, it takes him a whole day to buy a pair of sandals, when the hotel raises the room rate he hopes to find a salubrious apartment for Rs 4,000 a month…
So far so ordinary, you think: stupid foreigner guy. But Yamamatsu is no tourist. He is single-minded about translating, printing and selling India's first manga, for which honour he has chosen Hiroshi Hirata's Chi Daruma Kenpo (“Bloody Swordplay”). He lacks a portion of his colon (cancer operation), so his bowel movements are unpredictable, and you know what Indian public toilets are like. He does not know his way around. He has never bargained. He is on a tight budget. His doggedness and goal-focus, admirably, carry him through all these obstacles — every one of which, toilet trouble not excluded, is drawn and told in amusing detail — and, what's even more admirable, he seems to hold no grudges.
Weeks go by without a translator, let alone a satisfying meal. With phrase-book Hindi and some shouting he finds himself a cheap but hardly private room in a lower middle-class home. A moody young man in the building serves as his letterer, to put the translated Hindi words into the manga’s speech balloons, and as his translator when Yamamatsu scouts for typesetters and printers. Delay piles on delay, mishap on publishing mishap. The right paper is too expensive, fonts get mixed up, colours go missing, oily smudges proliferate.
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Indians in these drawings often look angry and appear to be shouting. The mangaka illustrates his incomprehension by showing Hindi words as little geometric symbols. But the settings, whether streetside, indoors, in a marketplace or a small businessman’s office-workshop, are closely observed and credible. One doesn’t feel the sting of an outsider’s summary judgement. Except in one instance, of which more below.
To replenish scarce funds as he waits for the printing, Yamamatsu tries out small money-making schemes, such as manga drawing classes (no-one comes) and making and selling little tin attachments for tearing Sellotape without using teeth or scissors (he shifts only a few, at Rs 10 each). Of course, Yamamatsu understands the market not at all. For instance, he goes to middle and lower middle-class markets, where shoppers are not looking for Sellotape solutions or manga classes. Biggest mistake of all, he chooses to make his manga in Hindi, when he should have realised that English was a likelier bet.
Nor, he finds when the book is finally done, does anyone want to buy it, even at Rs 45. He really tries to sell it, setting up stalls on the street, sharing space with other vendors, shilling for the crowd, hawking it in small bookshops. Nothing seems to work. And now, in a moment of dejection, his most damning judgement: “Aren’t Indian people interested in anything? What’s going through their minds?”
And still Yamamatsu plugs on. Hardly any copies are sold by the time his effortful six months in India are up and he’s on the plane back to Japan — but not to worry, a sequel is on its way.
This manga did well in Japanese when published in 2008. The translator, Kumar Sivasubramanian, has done a spectacularly good job.
STUPID GUY GOES TO INDIA
Author: Yukichi Yamamatsu
Translator: Kumar Sivasubramanian
Publisher: Blaft/Westland
Pages: 230
Price: Rs 395