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Since childhood, mangaka Natsume Ono harbored a deep fascination for Italy and other foreign destinations. She began drawing comics about them as a self-publishing dojinshi artist and eventually had the opportunity to visit the Italian peninsula in 2001. After nearly a year, Ono returned to Japan to start the web-comic La Quinta Camera. Her work was quickly noticed by the manga industry which lead to her start as a professional mangaka. Since her debut, Ono’s follow-up Ristorante Paradiso was a huge success spawning both a sequel and an anime adaptation.
GR: Critics often talk about the complexity in your narrative and your mature writing perspective. Some attribute it to your late start as a mangaka. Do you think starting your career at a later age affected the way you approach your stories and characters?
Natsume Ono: I’ve actually been drawing manga for a while. What’s considered my debut happened after I developed my writing style. So, I’ve been writing a little bit longer than is generally acknowledged.
GR: You were about twenty-six when you started drawing the web comic La Quinta Camera. When did you decide to pursue manga as a profession?
NO: So, I have been drawing manga as a hobby for a few years. I took a break from work to visit Italy for ten months to study Italian. When I returned, I found myself out of work. For nearly a year, I just continued drawing manga. I thought to myself, “This is what I’m doing anyway; I should try to do this professionally.” That was the first time I decided that I want to be a professional mangaka.
GR: You’ve mentioned that you studied abroad in Italy. How old were you?
NO: I was twenty-four/twenty-five. It was 2001-2002. Nine years ago.
GR: Did you travel all along the peninsula or did you stay in a particular city such as Florence, Rome, or Venice?
NO: I was in Bologna. Looking back I wish I visited other cities, but I was just in one city at that time. [laughs]
GR: A major theme in many of your works [such as Not Simple and Ristorante Paradiso] is the concept of travel. Can you discuss the way you use travel as literary technique in your work?
NO: This doesn’t answer the question directly, but I don’t really think about the “why”. So, I’ve never really thought about travelling or what it represents. Because to me, the character just starts moving. Then I look back and think what that might have meant for the characters to have done that. But there isn’t really a purpose when they start moving.
GR: Is it related to the Japanese concept of jibun sagashi no tabi (“a journey of self-discovery”)?
NO: I never tried to impose my personality in any of my books. It is precisely why I’m careful to keep myself out of it, so that common traits are developed which maybe represent something deeper inside of me. But none of it is done consciously. [laughs]
GR: More specifically in the manga Ristorante Paradiso and La Quinta Camera, I’ve noticed you frequently use Italy as the setting. What is it about Italy that inspires you?
NO: I have already been using Italy as a stage for my writing before actually going there. It’s really based on a childhood admiration of Italian culture. There certainly were Italian sports on television, and I loved the food. As a child, I kind of liked Italy and started drawing comics about it. Then I decided that I wanted to keep using Italy as the setting, but wanted to see it before trying it again. That’s why I actually went there so that it would make sense [in my work].
The White House visits don’t get old. What you see and experience gets more refined and detailed. It’s akin to visiting a museum’s permanent exhibit again and again. That’s what I came away with after my second visit to the most famous house in the world. The security is still at least 4 id stops including a metal detector, the joining rooms are vibrantly color themed, and the classic antiques fit like an Architectural Digest spread.
May was API Heritage Month, and I thought it was funny that Barack Obama blamed the “new zodiac” making it ok that The White House was celebrating it a month later. I doubt he needed his speech writer for us, since everything was quick and casual, yet he was charismatic in front of the dozens of black wearing, black hair sporting Asians with iPhones and cameras snapping and recording.
Blog post from my visit March 2009.
This visit was different from my last, since instead of an announcement, this was a celebration. The wine, champagne, and soda flowed with the assorted Asian hors d’oeuvres. The best morsel of edibles? Undoubtedly, the sashimi on a skewer. After that, it was dessert, the mini halo halo. I’m not quite sure exactly what the month long celebration is all about since there are unlimited aspects of humans that you can celebrate, but I’ll make the call and say it’s, achievements, effort, and endeavors. From the other side of the “fence” some of you are scratching your heads about this, but being Asian has perks and the month long celebration is one of them.
The White House invite. I photoshopped some of it, since who knows if those digits are ok in the wrong hands.
Visiting paintings are part of the entire experience – just like going to a museum. Paintings can be like old friends. I like this one of Abe. I did shake Barack Obama’s hand again. He has a good grip and his hand is cool in temperature. This was actually nothing compared to the announcement of the Afghanistan troop withdrawal he made just a couple of hours later from same location we were in.
the sun rises in the Onagawa
I’ve just returned from another expedition to the disaster-stricken Tōhoku coast and wanted to fill you in on this latest trip. (GR has published earlier reports for anyone interested!) This is the seventh time I’ve made the Tōhoku run since the March 11th quake and, as with previous excursions, I return to Tokyo depleted but also moved and humbled by the experience.
My mission this time was to load up my brother-in-law Kazu’s kebab-mobile in Onagawa and rendezvous in Kesennuma with Eiko Mizuno Gray and the Rainbow Cinema team, a motley crew of volunteers screening films (generously provided by Warners, Fox, Toho, Asmik, and other distributors) for quake survivors in the various shelters up north. The idea was for Kazu and me to provide free fresh kebab and ice cream to viewers during the breaks, while Eiko and her crew would keep the audience stoked during the screenings with their two popcorn machines (salt and caramel, respectively).
Onagawa, my in-laws’ home town was also hit hard by the quake and tsunami, with well over a thousand residents confirmed dead, several hundred still missing, and, according to a recent tally, about 1,200 living in shelters or temporary housing. So the morning before our deployment I had a walk around Onagawa, to see what progress had been made since my last visit a month ago. The whole port area is enveloped in a haze of fishy-smelling dust, but, to be honest, I couldn’t see much clear evidence of improvement. Yes, cranes are demolishing and clearing non-stop, and convoys of trucks haul debris to sorted piles (mountains, really); paths have been cut into the wreckage around the port, and many of the lightweight items (cars, refrigerators, bicycles, propane tanks) seem to have been gathered up. Nonetheless, the clean-up still appears quite superficial, just peeling away at the skin of an onion. A big-ass onion. Enough said.
flag waving in Onagawa
This current trip comes on the heels of a very belated two-weeks of chilling out at my parents’ home in Hermosa Beach (my first visit to the U.S. in well over a year). And what a strange contrast: The coastal villages I drove through on my way up to the far north of Miyagi Prefecture were once not so different from some SoCal beach towns; and yet to look at them now, you’d never know it.
Shizugawa 3/14/2011
I was meaning to take the inland route all the way up to Kesennuma, but a wrong turn off the Sanriku Expressway took us straight into downtown hell, ground zero of the tsunami. Shizugawa, Minami Sanrikucho, Koganezawa, and many other little towns that line this particular stretch of Route 45, grew up around river deltas and estuaries, their common geographical feature being a mountain-fed river spilling into the ocean at the mouth of a valley. Seeing the now-familiar pattern of destruction repeated in each of these depopulated port villages, one imagines a wall of black water roaring up the mouth of the valley, erasing everything in it’s path. Imagine turning a corner to see that coming at you! You actually can’t even see the ocean from many of the spots the tsunami hit.
I’d been to Shizugawa and Minami Sanrikucho in the first days following the quake, had stood at the back of the valley looking down on the tsunami’s aftermath, still steaming fresh; impossible to forget the sight of a classroom full of children pried from the wreckage and placed in boxes (boxes for heads, boxes for torsos, hands, etc.). Even now, over a hundred days since the tsunami, the record of what happened is unmistakable. Debris in every possible configuration fills low-lying spots, and the tsunami waterline is in plain sight everywhere one looks. The transition between Unharmed and Obliterated is absurdly drastic. (It was, in fact, quite maddening to contemplate what a difference just a couple meters of elevation might have made at many locations.)
still searching for bodies in Shizugawa