Read This: Oishinbo

Over the New Year’s weekend, I plunged into four volumes of Viz’s translations of the Tetsu Kariya/Akira Hanasaki manga Oishinbo—which, rather than run through the 27-years-and-counting storyline, picks out individual chapters and arranges them thematically, with volumes devoted to subjects like Japanese cuisine, fish, sake, and pub food. The effect is somewhat disconcerting, because you’re frequently skipping over huge gaps in the characters’ relationships and struggling to fill in the pieces; imagine watching Happy Days for the first time out of sequence so that sometimes it’s about Richie and his pals, then it’s about Joanie and Chachi, and sometimes Arnold runs the diner and sometimes Al does, and Ted McGinley wanders in and out of view…

Still, this arrangement gets at the real heart of the popularity of Oishinbo, which is its obsession with Japanese food as a matter of honor and national cultural identity. Seriously: Kariya and Hanasaki once spent three chapters on a debate over the propriety of serving raw salmon, and six on every single thing that was wrong with Japan’s sake industry—imagine if Steve Ditko took all the passionate intensity of Mr. A and poured it into a comic book about cooking, and you’ve got a rough idea of what to expect. Speaking of intensity, the one core element of the narrative that does come through in the retelling is the feud between Yamaoka, the protagonist (he’s the one who looks vaguely bored up above), and his father, Kaibara.

Here’s the gist: Kaibara has the most refined palate in Japan, and despises his son for not living up to the standard he trained him from childhood to uphold, even though Yamaoka’s sense of taste outpaces just about anybody else in Japan. So when Yamaoka, a total slacker, manages to land an assignment at a Japanese newspaper to develop a feature on the “Ultimate Menu,” Kaibara goes ballistic and even agrees to create a “Supreme Menu” for a rival paper just to prove his son knows nothing about the culinary arts. Now, there’s basically one Oishinbo story: Yamaoka and his colleague, Kurita (the woman sitting with him above), meet somebody who thinks he’s an expert on food, but he’s so not an expert, and Yamaoka decides to knock the guy down a few pegs, generally by inviting him to eat something which completely blows his mind and makes him cry out at what a sham his life has been for so long.

There is, however, one significant variant to this story, which is that Kaibara somehow enters into the picture and delivers an even better dish which shows up his son completely… and the thing is, as much of an asshole as Kaibara can be (and usually is), he’s almost always right, which makes it even worse for Yamaoka. (It doesn’t help that Yamaoka can, in fact, be an overconfident jerk at times, when he isn’t being incredibly earnest.)

When I first heard about Oishinbo through interviewing Andy Riskin last summer, I just knew this was the manga I wanted to read next. It’s more than lived up to my expectations; the stories are deliriously insane, and the artwork is a fun blend of cartoonish antics and meticulously drawn closeups of food. (There’s even a few recipes in the front of each volume.) Now I want somebody to start translating Ramen Discovery Legend—although that would have to be published in sequence, I think.

9 January 2010 | read this |