Talking Tokyo Zombie

Co-editor and translator Ryan Sands and co-editor Colin Turner were kind enough to recently take the time to answer a few questions about Tokyo Zombie. An abrigded version of this interview appears in this month's The Yuuyake Shimbun.

How did Last Gasp discover Tokyo Zombie?

Colin Turner: I had read the first few installments when it appeared in AX magazine in the late 1990s.When I was last in Tokyo, I saw a copy of the graphic novel version and bought it. I read through it and immediately needed to publish it in English.

In simple terms, what was the process like in obtaining the license? Easier, harder than usual? What did the Seirinkogeisha think about this becoming an international title? Did they have any special needs or requirements?

CT: It wasn't difficult to obtain the license. I have known the good folks at Sei

rinkogeisha for almost a decade and have imported their books for many years, which probably helped.  We made a good offer, and Seirinkogeisha accepted after a bit of negotiation. I think they may have been a bit surprised we chose this title over others, but not too surprised. There weren't any special needs. We couldn't get the rights for the original cover image, so we had to make our own. I think our cover is great too. The artist, Hanakuma-san, designed a great logo for us for this project.  It's nice to have that kind of support from the artist.

Were other publishers going after Tokyo Zombie?
CT: I don't know. If they were, they were moving too slow for our licensing jiu-jitsu.

TZ is a clearly an adult title, which fits with Last Gasp's catalog, but was there anything that made you doubt whether or not it was a good idea? (i.e. the heta-uma art-style or penis chomp)?
CT:Yeah, I pretty much doubted it would be a good idea from the start. The art is a bit different from some heta-uma style art.  I usually don't like heta-uma style. But Hanakuma-san's artwork has an intangible comedy to it.  Artwork that makes me laugh by itself is my favorite kind of art. I think anyone with marketing sense would have realized this is a terrible idea.  But I was compelled.  I think I would have started building zombies out of mashed potatoes or something.

So, aside from that, the problem was in the adult content. It is an adult title, but not smut. Unfortunately this country has a dumb way of looking at nudity and we have to classify this as "adults only" even though it's not for the same people who buy Bondage Fairies or A-G Super Erotic Anthology.  

Were there any unique issues or hurdles that you experienced on the way, from discovery to final print?
CT: Not really.  The whole project worked out really well.  Everyone involved was on top of things and great to work with: the licensor, the translator, the designer, the author. Smooth.

How would you describe TZ to a manga fan who had never heard of it?
CT: This manga is great, but it is not at all close to your typical manga. I would classify it as more akin to an independent graphic novel. Yes, the artwork is crude, but it is supposed to be crude.  It's funny, so relax and let go a little bit and enjoy it. I'd probably show them a picture of the little dog to make them laugh.  Or a zombie's head getting kicked off.

Ryan Sands: What kind of manga fan hasn't heard of Tokyo Zombie?

Tokyo Zombie is a short but dense tale of class warfare and friendship, told via wrestlemania theatrics, undead hordes and lovingly-detailed depictions of both jiu-jitsu moves and pig stampedes. It's like nothing else you'll see on the manga shelf, and I mean that as the highest compliment.

From what I have read, it seems like Tokyo Zombie had gotten a very positive reaction from critics. Would you agree?  Will we see more Yusaku Hanakuma titles in the future? 

CT: It has gotten positive reviews all around from critics.  On a few message boards I've seen comments from people who don't "get it" and think it is just poorly drawn. That's okay, I'll give them a second chance.  But, overall, the reaction has been incredible.  It's nice to see I'm not alone. We're looking at Hanakuma-san's other works. They are less narrative and might be more difficult to translate, both literally, and for an English-speaking audience. But we're definitely thinking about it.

RS: Hanakuma has a lot of fans in the cartooning world, including Johnny Ryan and Dash Shaw. While we're waiting on the next Last Gasp Hanakuma manga (hopefully!), it seems like a no-brainer to include a short story of his in any collection of badass contemporary cartooning.

Last Gasp has been expanding into the manga world. Can we expect to see more modern, non-mainstream manga coming from you?
CT: Yes, we've been publishing manga for a number of years, and steadily increasing our output. We'd like to continue releasing a few titles each year. We want to publish all kinds of Japanese comics -- everything from very serious, literary comics, to fluffy fun books, to dark and depraved tales. 

As a comic and manga fan, what do you enjoy reading in your spare time?
CT: I really like sci-fi manga with robots and cyborgs and mecha.  I also love the work of Dan Clowes. I mean, I could run down a whole list of my favorites, but that would be about 1000 words. The most recent books I've enjoyed were some of Jiro Taniguchi's works, some of Guy Delisle's works.  And I've just been re-reading some of the Tintin stories and Akira.  It's fun to go back to the classics.

How did you learn Japanese well enough to become a translator?

RS: My first exposure to Japanese was as a high school exchange student for a three-week trip. I fell for the language and started studying Japanese a local college when I was in high school, and ended up taking another four years  of itand majoring in Ja

panese at Stanford. I was most on top of my game after living in Kyoto & Osaka for 6 months back in 2003, and it's definitely been a challenge to hold on to those skills. It's still a hard slog for me every time, but I love the challenges on both ends of the process--- first at getting a deep comprehension of

 what you're reading, and then later as a writer/editor in English, trying to get a fart joke just right.

Besides Tokyo Zombie, where else can we see your translation work?

RS:The first translation I ever did was a final project for a graduate seminar on Japanese translation--  I translated Edogawa Rampo's 1925 short story, "The Death of a Sleepwalker". My translation is embarrassingly bad, but undertaking and completing it was a good exercise. 

A few years back, I did some translations of gag strips by Yoshida Sensha and Koji Aiahra, as a lark and mostly for my own practice,. With my best friend Evan Hayden (who did the lettering and book production for Tokyo Zombie) we also did a few fan translations of short, likely unlicensable comics by Suehiro Maruo that received a good reception online. We stopped those after a while, but the strips did serve as great practice and hopefully turned some English-speaking folks on to cartoonists they'd never hear about otherwise. 

[Be sure to check out Ryan and Evan's blog at Same Hat! Same Hat!]

How did you get attached to Last Gasp and the Tokyo Zombie project?

RS: I got to know Colin and the Last Gasp folks over the course of a year, as we ran into each other and commiserated on the floor of publishing trade shows (which are utterly exhausting and soul-sucking, by the way). I'd been a fan of Last Gasp's books for a really long time and had heard through the grapevine that they were interested in publishing more manga in the near future. Colin and I shared a friendship with Anne from Vertical and a love of sick and twisted horror manga, so we became fast friends. It was happenstance that Colin had recently acquired the rights to Tokyo Zombie and Evan and I were looking for an indie manga project to work on. Perfect.

Tokyo Zombie is a violent and adult manga. It is also a black comedy and has some social commentary. How did this influence the way you approached this as a translation?

RS: Tokyo Zombie is at its heart a buddy comedy, albeit with ample bits of severed limbs and bare boobs thrown in there. It was actually quite freeing to know early on that (despite the book being more like gag manga than Gantz), Tokyo Zombie would have to be marketed as ADULTS ONLY in the U.S. because of a few specific scenes. 

Those few bits of sex and nudity made the book 18+, but that gave me the freedom to make jokes in the book as funny as they should be, and not worry about swearing or dumbing things down. People sometimes say that Japanese doesn't really  have swear words, but for Hanakuma's characters the appropriate response to a zombie biting your dick off is really "HOLY FUCKING SHIT!" and not simply "OH GOODNESS!". It was fun to be able to take the text and jokes all the way there.

What were the most difficult hurdles in approaching a title like Tokyo Zombie?

RS: Yusaku Hanakuma is a really savvy writer, and his art and text serve each other so well to effortlessly tell this ridiculous and strange tale; The act of translating the concepts and details of the story for English-audiences was fairly easy. The two hard parts were getting the jiu-jitsu terms right and nailing down certain sounds effects. I'd be sitting at my desk working and be constantly peppering my GF with questions like, "What's the sound of a severed head getting skewered by a tree branch? It's sorta like a wet THOCK sounds, right?" 

How long did the translation take?

RS: I worked on the translation during evenings and weekends for about three to four months. That said, after finishing each chapter (and again many times during the final stretch with the book), I'd put my editor hat on just tear my translation and writing to pieces. There were lots and lots of revisions along the way. All-in-all, Evan and I worked on the project for about six months.

What do you think when you hold the final product in your hands?

RS: It's fucking awesome! I'm so pleased that English-readers can now get a piece of the Hanakuma action, and the price is right. That said, I've literally read the goddamn book dozens and dozens and dozens of times, so now that it's out I'm already itching to move on to another project.

Any future projects you can talk about yet?

RS: Nothing I can talk about yet. Colin and I share short list of manga creators and specific titles that we believe must someday see the light of day in English, for the sake of humanity and all that is good in the world. 

In all seriousness, it was absolutely lovely working with every single person on Tokyo Zombie, and I'd jump at the chance to do another book for Last Gasp. I also have a bunch of weird ideas for short projects and creators I want to push, in the rare case that MOME or VICE or maybe the New York Times Magazine's Funny Pages want to feature weirdo, grotesque indie manga.

As a comic and manga fan, what do you enjoy reading in your spare time?

RS: I try my damnedest to read a little of everything, but rely heavily on my writer GF for fiction recommendations. If we're limiting it to comics, my bread and butter will always be horror and indie manga. On my recent trip to Japan I bought up about $200 worth of every new Seirinkogeisha and EnterBrain I could get my hands on--- I'm still working through that stack! Cool books on my table in front of me right now are: One More Cup of Coffee by Naoto Yamakawa, Justice Corps by Yuka Goto and A Life by Fukumitsu Shigeyuki. All are awesome in their own ways.

I try to stay knee-deep in contemporary cartoonists working right now. On the indie comics front, I'm dying to read the first UNLOVABLE collection by Esther Pearl Watson and anxious to see the next volume of Kazimir Strzepek's The Mourning Star. If I had to bet though, I think the best new comic of the year will be the first issue of Hellen Jo's debut book from Sparkplug, Jin & Jam #1. 

Also, oh yeah! Soon, PictureBox will be releasing the first big book of Takashi Nemoto in English, followed by Travel by Yokoyama and, from what I heard, a possible Yoshikazu Ebisu book next year  With those, and other books coming in 2009 from Last Gasp, Fantagraphics and D&Q, (and muthafuckin' PLUTO & 20TH CENTURY BOYS coming out from Viz), it's a really exciting time to be a manga fan.

(Photographs provided by R.S. and used with permission.)