Applause for Alive GN

Unlike many gekiga manga that focus on topics and themes of autobiography, politics, history, or outre absurdism, author Taguchi Hajime’s independent manga Alive focuses on the melancholy existentialism of the human condition. Hajime’s stories vary in character and focus, from fantasy to tragedy to even occasional comedy. Focal characters range from children to high school girls to middle-aged working men. But the unifying theme among all of the Alive short stories is a fundamental wariness and weariness of the multitude of small disappointments, rejections, and failures of life that chip away at our self-confidence and happiness. Yet each short tale also contains a glimmer of hope, a ray of light within the dark clouds that encourages the manga’s protagonists to persevere. Sometimes the silver lining is ironically mundane; at times it’s even phantasmagorical, serving to underscore the simple and even foolish but effective motivations that we look toward to provide the emotional strength to go on living.

The hefty 284 page print edition of Alive collects all 19 short stories originally serialized in GEN Manga issues 5-16, with the odd exception that the graphic novel edition of the story “Wall” omits the story title that originally appeared in GEN Manga issue 14. The omission actually strengthens the story by leaving just a little bit more to the reader’s interpretative intuition. Hajime’s visual art has a rough, uneven design far removed from the stylized beauty of mainstream shounen & shoujo manga. The rough, almost dumpy art excellently reinforces the manga’s theme that life is warty and broken, and even the most attractive people have their own anxieties and regrets. Several of the stories contain non-explicit nudity and/or moderately graphic sex. Adult language is rare but does occasionally appear in the smooth, natural-sounding English translation. Sound effects appear infrequently and are retained in Japanese without translation. Rare instances of Japanese text are captioned with English translation.

Within the large American scope of translated manga, gekiga, adult-oriented, manga and independent manga are a rarity. Taguchi Hajime’s Alive is an exceptional offering in the regard that not only is it indie adult-drama manga, it’s also excellent reading: thought-provoking, haunting, and memorable. Alive is a series of short tales that remind us that alienation, sadness, aimlessness, loneliness, and anxiety are feelings that all humans suffer, and it’s exactly these pains that define us and give us the strength to persevere, not for anyone else’s sake but for our own. Alive is not a celebration of life; it’s an affirmation of life, that life is tough and sad and lonely, but experiencing and surviving these pains is what makes us “alive.” GEN Manga’s collected edition of Alive is not a book for superficial readers interested in cliché and style more than substance. But readers that want to be moved by manga, readers that want greater depth, emotion, and substance from their manga should definitely pick up and appreciate Alive.