I have barely been able to connect with novels these past ten or so years, and the last living writer I respected, Cormac McCarthy, has been not alive for a while. Most of this half of the world seems to have lost their collective (and collectivist) minds, so when I want to experience a good story, I have to look to the Orient, past the reds. I’ve enjoyed plenty of South Korean stuff, but I’m mostly into Japanese. I’m always on the lookout for the next mind-blowing, perhaps even life-changing manga, but I seem to have run through the vast majority of the quality ones.

A couple of days ago, I thought again about Minoru Furuya, who earned the rare merit of being my favorite manga author. From time to time I look him up hoping that he has finally begun working on a new series, but unfortunately, the guy seems to have retired; his last work was the bizarre Gereksiz, from back in 2015-2016.

I suspect that most manga fans don’t know about Furuya. I’ve yet to talk to anyone who has read any of his works. But I get Furuya’s mind, to the extent that I’m fairly certain he also has OCD: his characters regularly fall into patterns of obsessiveness, and deal with intrusive thoughts and images that they sometimes act upon. The protagonist of his Ciguatera comes to mind, with his spirals of preoccupations in his bedroom, trying to bury his face in a pillow to keep himself from falling further. The protagonist of Himizu, perhaps his overall darkest story, feared being assailed by demons lurking at the corners of his mind, eager to break in. Both very common experiences for OCD sufferers.

Sadly, I’ve read virtually everything of value that Furuya put out. He started with an extremely amateurish series about a high-school ping-pong club (or something like that), a comedy that reminded me of the kind of material I created in middle school. I’ll probably revisit it at some point, but it’s early-nineties carefreeness. He followed up with Boku to Issho (link for my review), another comedy about a bunch of fellows living in poverty who hope to survive while keeping their sanity and dignity intact.

In the 2000s, he went straight from a slapstick comedy to his darkest tale: Himizu. With this one, he introduced the pattern for all the protagonists to come: outcasts with very little going for them, usually burdened by mental issues, who seem mostly pushed around by life. Good stuff sometimes happens to them (regularly, this involves dating someone above their league), but they usually pay for it with chaos and occasional brutality. His are the kinds of stories that go from mundane relationship issues to someone having his ears cut off while tied up in a shack. There’s the sense that life is extremely perilous, and that at any point it will force you to struggle through horror whether or not you’re ready for it, and if you survive it, you may not get any lessons out of it other than “life goes on.”

After Himizu came Ciguatera, generally considered his best. I came across that one plenty of times over the years in lists of best manga ever, but I ignored it because I thought it was a sports manga of sorts, centered on biking. But the bikes ended up being a symbol of a better, brighter future that could carry the protagonists away from their shitty circumstances. Ciguatera is a sort of a Bildunsroman in which the protagonist, a below-average dude with no talents to speak of, intends to figure out how to measure up to the girl he loves, hoping to become a dude worthy of respect. This one had likely the most realistic of Furuya’s endings, to which I have returned repeatedly in my mind.

Then came Wanitokagegisu and Himeanole. Both feature working-class protagonists stuck in dead-end jobs, who feel that life is passing them by, who can’t figure out how to improve their circumstances or even become interested by anything, and who are sure they’ll die alone. From that perspective, these last four series are very masculine stories. In both tales, the protagonists get involved in other people’s troubles, which lead them further and further into chaos and brutality. Both also feature the protagonists getting girlfriends way out of their league, which brings joy but also the sense of constantly having to measure up lest they look elsewhere. Both series feature horrific violence. Himeanole wasn’t even licensed in English, and fans have only translated up to chapter eight of about sixty-five. I only know of the full contents of that series, to the extent that an adaptation allows, because they made a movie out of it, which I watched last night.

His last serious story, and my favorite of his, was Saltiness (first review, second review), about a clearly autistic dude who realizes that his beloved sister will remain unmarried because she has to take care of his crazy ass, so he leaves for Tokyo to become independent, even though he’s thoroughly incapable of dealing with life. Saltiness is very hard for me to explain, but it feels like Furuya managed to create a parable with it for dealing with the nonsense of life, and finding one’s place in it despite being ill-suited.

Sadly, Saltiness seemed to have been his main send-off. His final work was the extremely bizarre Gereksiz, which starts with the bizarre premise of a solitary middle-aged man dragging his female coworker to show her the woman that he’s infatuated with, only for them to realize that he’s the only one who can see the woman. The story gets far stranger from there. It’s a great read, although it felt anticlimactic compared with Furuya’s previous works.

Given that these days I consider Furuya to be my favorite manga author, one would suppose that my favorite manga would be one of his, but that’s not the case. My favorite manga, which is among my five favorite fictional experiences in no particular order, is Inio Asano’s Oyasumi Punpun. That one has never stopped haunting me. It feels like Asano was trying to exorcise something out of himself through making that story. Unfortunately, after it ended in 2013 or so, Asano never even came close to achieving those heights again. An idealist, as evidenced by his earlier works, he seems to have expected it to change the world as well as himself, only for Asano to wake up ten years older having resolved fuck all. He wrote a semi-autobiographical series afterwards, titled Downfall, that showed how despondent and bitter he ended up after finishing his masterpiece.

Anyway, I suppose that’s all I wanted to say. Not sure why I even wrote this, but I did, so there.