Tiger director Tsubota Yoshifumi is eager to see how Rotterdam audiences will respond to Miyoko, his film about cult manga artist Abe Shinichi. By Ben Walters
The full Japanese title of Tsubota Yoshifumi's Tiger contender, Miyoko Asagaya Kibun, is the same as that of the manga comic with which the film's real-life subject, Abe Shinichi, made his name in 1971. Beginning with a sequence in which the panels of the low-key story about everyday love and ennui come to life, Tsubota's film is a portrait of the period during which Abe achieved success before struggles with obsessive behaviour and mental illness – sometimes depicted through fantasy effects – hampered his creativity.
Although Tsubota is too young to recall the time himself, he could still draw on personal experience. “I was born in 1975, so it was hard to recreate the atmosphere of the time when Abe was most active, as I didn't breathe the air of that time,” he says. “But my own parents were manga writers from the same generation, so I grew up seeing the lifestyle and knowing the work.”
At the same time, says Tsubota – who has made four shorts and written novels as well as working in advertising and production design – he could draw on the universality of the artistic experience. “My previous work includes personal, experimental films that mix reality and fiction, so I could relate to how Abe used his personal life in his work.”
Abe's work began appearing in the magazine Garo in the early 1970s. “It wasn't commercial manga, it was more expressive,” Tsubota explains. “It was peculiar for being so personal, almost in the same realm as 'I novels' [an often-dark Japanese genre of literary self-examination]. So it's very close to art.”
Although Miyoko Asagaya Kibun is still feted among devotees, it remains relatively unfamiliar to the Japanese mainstream. “This particular manga is famous within a subculture. It's not Pokemon; plenty of people don't know it.” Indeed, one of Tsubota's motivations in making the film was to increase awareness of Abe's work, both domestically and internationally. “I'm looking forward to seeing what the response of a foreign audience is,” he says of the film's presence at Rotterdam. “Reactions might be different to those in Japan. It's like I've thrown a stone in a pond and now the ripples are reaching Europe.”
More about Miyoko here.