Thanks NetGalley and Viz Media for this arc!

4/5 stars

I enjoyed this second volume of Tokyo These Days, however I would've liked to see more about Shiozawa. It was nice seeing the other characters lives and how and what they're up to though. A middle aged slice of life manga, very good and melancholy which I'm really digging. I'm looking forward to the rest of this series

The life of an artist is a lonely one. To make a work of art requires hours of solitude, a commitment of countless days and hours in pursuit of growth and the ineffable perfection. The life of a comic book artist is all of that with none of the potential for riches or recognition or notoriety. It is a pursuit of a passion, an interior desire to put your imagination onto the page. It is an act of vulnerability with little chance of reward. In the US, comic creators, even the most influential, are more often than not denied rights to many of their creations, resigned to a life without retirement or financial security. Most live freelance gig to freelance gig. Creating comics is a pursuit of passion, not economic security.

The life of a mangaka (the Japanese term for a creator of manga, usually written/drawn by a single creative with a few often uncredited assistants) has its own hardships, many that would be familiar to American creators. Those hardships are compounded by grueling deadlines and workloads.

Tokyo These Days by Taiyō Matsumoto follows Shiozawa, a former manga editor, tired of the grueling enterprise of a large publisher. In the first volume, he retires and sets out to create his own manga with hopes to recruit a dream team of writers and artists that he sees unique potential in—outsiders and elders who have resigned themselves to obscurity or who have lost their passion. Volume 2 pulls back from Shiozawa to focus more on the larger cast, the artists and editors, as they grapple with their relationships to their work and their art.

Matsumoto’s depiction of the artistic life is one of compromise and loss. To be successful in your art is to lose the soul of the art. The passion must be replaced with pragmatism. Chosaku, an artist nearing his final days of producing manga, spends his life grappling with it—finding professional success and a measure of personal comfort but at the expense of personal relationships. He is able to find some joy in his work, even while admitting his heart is no longer in it, but is unwilling to join Shiozawa and risk the economic insecurity. Aoki, an up and coming talent, a brilliant artist and storyteller who struggles with depression and insecurity, fights against the prospect of popularity and the compromises he will have to make to remain marketable. A middle-aged woman rejects Shiozawa’s offer to join him because she long ago gave up the idea of manga as anything but a business. 

Matsumoto makes us care about these characters by inviting us into the mundanity of their pursuits and their personal lives. The artwork drives home the isolation of the manga artist. It is a work of extremes. Wide, silent shots and full-page city landscapes contrast cramped and meticulously detailed publishing offices that create a pulsing physical noise. Individuals are lost in either a sea of bodies in closed office spaces that pen in creativity, or lost and lonely in towering cityscapes. The death of the artists’ love for their work is subsumed by the realities of capital.

There is very little that is remarkable in the world Matsumoto draws. But there is a surreal feeling nonetheless. Shiozawa speaks to and understands the language of birds, it is the only thing out of the ordinary. But Matsumoto’s style is curious. It is heavy on detail with thoroughly rendered backgrounds and detail throughout the page but characters who are rendered flat with simplified lines. The towering buildings of Tokyo bend as if captured by a fish-eye lens. The world is dreamlike in its expansiveness.

That dreamlike sensibility is another contrast among the many that define Tokyo These Days. Shiozawa is dreaming big, risking his retirement on a dream that a manga that pursues art for the sake of art can be successful even as it bucks the trends of commerce. But Matsumoto doesn’t make it easy for him, and we see plenty of barriers and fellow creators who resist his naive dream of artistic purity. He might succeed—but we have no reason to believe it is inevitable. The realities of commerce, the very reality of Tokyo these days, are set against him. Taiyō Matsumoto dares us to dream, but does not hide the harsh truth that dreams are not guaranteed—and even if achieved are no guarantee of fulfillment.

Ok...this was...a disappointment to me. In comparison to the first volume, this didn't have the same feel to it. It felt more depressing, less hopeful than the first one did. When I finished reading the first volume, I felt uplifted. At the end of this one, I felt depleted and confused. Hoping the next volume would be going in a positive direction, but fearful it would keep going in a downward direction.

Don't get me wrong, I want to read the next one to find out in which direction it goes, but if it continues to spiral, I will stop there I think.

The characters all feel real, so I want them to do well and succeed. Seeing them hurt and struggling hurt me. So I guess you could say this is very well written, but it leaves the reader anxious. This reader at least.

3, I am cautiously optimistic about the next volume, stars.

My thanks to NetGalley and VIZ Media LLC for an eARC of this book to read and review.

Tokyo These Days focuses more on Shiozawa's peers than Shiozawa himself in volume 2. This is not a bad thing, I think it's getting its legs as a slice of life type of read for adults featuring adults and the only magical realism is that they're all working in the manga publishing industry.

I think I am done with this series. It's trying too hard to be deep, but to me, I just find it boring. The art is really pretty, but not as unique as it thinks it is.

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for the review.