Taiyo Matsumoto has created an avant-garde masterpiece in Tekkon Kinkreet, beautiful and complex. Viz Media has taken a near flawless reissue of the series from Shogakukan, the original Japanese publisher of Tekkon Kinkreet, and made an exact American mirror-image of it. In short, Tekkon Kinkreet: Black & White is a wonderful adult graphic novel that crosses national, ethnic and genre boundaries. It’s pretty much perfect. The only problem is, what the hell is a “tekkon kinkreet”?
Keeping the native-sounding original name of things is not new to cinema. Sometimes it’s a virtue made of necessity; most Americans will have discerned, for example, that Il Postino is a film about an Italian postman or a postage stamp. Other titles are simply unfathomable in any other language—Ran, anyone? Foreign names mostly add some cultural refinement. Cinephiles usually talk about Band à Part, not Band of Outsiders, and you didn’t see Dog Love, you saw Amores Perros. But of course, you didn’t see Amores Perros, either, because unless you have a hard-on for Gael Garcia Bernal or feral canines, you didn’t want to read subtitles. The average American is statistically allergic to foreign-sounding things, right?
It should come as no surprise, then, that it was a film adaptation that led to keeping the original phonetic title of Matsumoto’s eventual omnibus reissue. Viz first released Tekkon Kinkreet as Black & White, because anything too ching-chongy and not the name of a hero with a metal forehead kerchief or a “pocket monster” would send book buyers to the hills. But whereas European films can afford to alienate all of America with foreign sounds, Japanese content hasn’t really come to the point where a near unpronounceable title irrelevant to the characters’ names can move $30 books by virtual unknowns. Especially when said unknown’s previous endeavors have flopped faster than you can say tekkon whatchyamacallit. (No. 5, Matsumoto’s 2001sci-fi series sold less than a thousand copies between two volumes and was immediately discontinued.)
But not so fast. If the Japanese were dropping anglicisms in horridly broken English in the 1990s to seem rock ’n’ roll, Americans are making Japanese the language of the 21st-century exclusive class. It might be the new French. I mean, if Kanye West is releasing Akira-inspired music videos subtitled in Japanese—presumably not a second or even third language for him—and beating 50 Cent in the charts with them, well, let’s just say I hope Fitty’s manager is a fast learner, because even a Japanese girlfriend won’t get him that niche in time to capitalize on the trend.
Seriously, though. What the hell is “tekkon kinkreet”? The phrase is uttered exactly zero times in the 600 pages it takes to tell the story, and I’ll tell you right now it doesn’t mean “black and white.” When I tell you what it does mean, you’re going to want to take the three-pound book and hit someone really hard with it. Probably me. “Tekkon Kinkreet” is made of four sounds: tek, kon, kin and kreet. “Tekkin” is a real word, and “konkreet” is a real word, but “tekkon” and “kinkreet” are not. In other words, Matsumoto has taken two real words and mashed them up. The two real words mean, “metal reinforcement” and “concrete,” and when you put them together, it’s basically “concrete jungle.” Now “tekkon Kinkreet” seems like a hot of hot air right?
By mashing up the words to form the equivalent of “ConJung CreteLe,” Matsumoto has made a jungle of his own title. This is classic Matsumoto. His other classic bildungsroman, Blue Spring, is a play on a word that means “young adulthood.” The word (seishun) has been deliberately de-familiarized to call attention to the etymology—a “blue spring” is a fruitful season that has just reached its peak. There is not a page of his body of work that isn’t drenched in puns and double entendres, many of them cross-lingual and taking advantage of other Asian languages and even English. In other words, Matsumoto titles are all kind of untranslatable. I think now we can probably appreciate a little hot air.And fortunately, under the titular gimmick is a story that stands on its own.
In the mid-1990s, when Tekkon came out, Tokyo (where Matsumoto is from and where the story gets its infrastructure) was a concrete jungle. That’s to say, it was no longer a futuristic paradise. Black and White (the two main characters of Tekkon) jump and fly through this jungle with hardly a bruise, which isn’t to say they aren’t beaten and stabbed. It just means their wounds are never self-inflicted. Meanwhile, real Japanese businessmen faced with soaring debts from the bubble economy fallout were jumping in front of traffic and off buildings, too scared to lose their jobs and take out fifth mortgages. The Japanese salaryman’s golf vacation was replaced by a $1,000/hour fine on the family of anyone who disrupted the subway, and thereby inconvenienced other citizens, by committing suicide in it. I’m sure if Matsumoto depicted delinquent orphans jumping around town like immortal superheroes, it was to provide some optimism. Yet it’s an optimism that disdains the overpolished superconsumerist future. It’s an optimism that makes you nostalgic for a city run by the mob, the lesser of two evils.
Concrete jungles will do that to you. They will make the inhabitants nostalgic for grit and a certain unpolished, ornery or even criminal personality on the streets. Just look at post-Giuliani New York City—I don’t think there’s another subculture-savvy population in the world that complains as much about being cleaner and less dangerous than New Yorkers. I would include myself in that complainer’s lot if I’d been in the city long enough to witness the transformation, but suffice it to say Tekkon Kinkreet is a book for complainers like me. People who get nostalgic for the urban oddity, and the culture of gangsters; people who like concrete jungles to be difficult to navigate for anyone new to it; people who want to sound educated saying mundane or silly things like postman, and dog love. But it’s probably a book for everyone else too.
