You always hear that in Japan, comics are sold everywhere, are widely read by just about everybody regardless of age or gender, cover every subject imaginable and, as a medium, are regarded as more akin to film or television.
And yet when you go to the big box bookstores and peruse the shelves groaning with translated manga, the vast majority of the books fall into some easily defined genre—horror, romance, comedy, sci-fi, competition, fantasy, period pieces and combinations of the same. And, if I may unfairly generalize for a moment, who is it that’s sitting in the aisles reading them? For the most part, it’s kids, young people and the same folks who read American comics and young adult fiction.
Where are all the housewives, the middle-aged and the senior readers? When are we going to start translating some of the manga targeted at an audience beyond the sci-fi-romantic-comedy-action crowd?
This fall, apparently.
Yen Press, a new player in the translated-manga field, has released the first collected volume of Keiko Tobe’s popular, award-winning series Hikari To Tomoni, with a second collection planned for spring.
Retitled With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child, Tobe’s story is a big one. This first volume is 530 pages long, and in Japan 10 volumes have been published thus far. But then, the subject matter is big, too. On the first page, we’re introduced to the young Azuma family: hard-working salaryman Masato, young mother Sachiko and newborn Hikaru.
By Page 3, things start to get really hard for them. Hikaru is autistic, but it takes a while for the diagnosis, and in the meantime, his constant crying drives a wedge between the formerly happy couple; his aversion to her drives Sachiko to despair; and their relatives and neighbors think she’s a bad mother because her son’s behavior seems so poor.
Thus begins the Azuma family’s journey to learn all about autism firsthand, a journey readers follow from a much more comfortable remove.
There’s an undeniable soapiness to Tobe’s storytelling, furthered by the serial nature of the story (it was originally published in pieces in a magazine, so, like soap operas, it’s episodic), and many of the characters are one-dimensional, cast as either good or bad, with the bad usually becoming good once they learn more about autism. Even our stars are kind of hard to know, with Hikaru unreadable and Sachiko suffering like a saint.
The educational aspirations of the book aren’t disguised at all, as the book ends with testimonials of parents of autistic children, and there are parenting tips throughout, and they’re pretty successful. I’ve learned more about autism from this comic than I have anywhere else.
If there’s a strong medicinal quality to the story, Tobe includes a great deal of sugar to help it go down easy—the drama is powerfully affecting, and it would take a hard, hard heart not to worry about and feel for Sachiko and Hikaru as they face challenge after challenge, from the little snubs they face to the life-threatening predicaments.