Moresukine is a do-or-dare journal divided by “assignments,” maintained in its eponymous notebook, properly known as the moleskin to anyone actually fluent in English. Really a blog turned into a work of comics, its author Dirk Schwieger, a German living in Tokyo, offered to take on any assignment by his readers, who challenge him to experience everything Japanese from “gender” to “roller coasters.” But if mocking the misappropriation of a European notebook product in its title was going to be any indication, I expected the book to offend me. The book will be published next month by NBM.
I expected Moresukine to detail all sorts of farcical Japanese behavior typical of bar banter—the modern equivalent of a war story. Chapter titles like “Assignment: Telephone Club” (Telephone Clubs are a sort of euphemism for sex clubs) and “Assignment: Fugu” (Fugu being a deadly fish edible only under expert knivesmanship) make Japan-apologists like me skeptical, as I can’t imagine reporting on false challenges would provide anything but a mockery of them. I thought, “Here we go. Another ‘look at this backward country’ paean to all its Euro-American counterparts. I bet he’ll still sleep with a hooker after all’s said and done.”
But I was proven wrong. He did not sleep with any hookers. Or at least as far as I could tell. At times Moresukine is certainly humorous, and even mocking. “Assignment: Para Para” (wherein Shwieger examines Japanese synchronized hip-hop dancing), makes the funny scenes in Lost in Translation look like a bad episode of Full House. But Moresukine is by and large a work of populist anthropology. Neither proscribed to the tourist monuments nor opposed to trying them out, Shwieger represents a new kind of visitor—someone who makes an act of observation to get as close to whatever the real Tokyo might be.
But as if the blog/book platform, reader-generated content (Moresukine’s epilogue is actually a set of comics-responses from other artists who’ve been challenged by Shwieger to interact with a Japanese and draw to tell it), and the moleskin journal format weren’t enough marketing trends to light up all of Madison Avenue, the actual draftsmanship of this concept-graphic novel might be the best thing about it. “Assignment: Pod Hotel” alone captures in drawing, all the absurdity, profundity and successful literary potential of an outsider’s look into Japan.
Divided into “pods” resembling a typical hotel “floor,” each frame works chronologically and thematically into the architecture of these temporary outposts for those who’ve missed the last train. The drawings are also a fragmentation of Shwieger’s body, contorting through different frames, to find comfort. An apt metaphor for the anthropologist.
