Knowledge as Play: Comics by Japanese Modern Literature

Abstract

In the context of Japanese cultural postmodernism, the phenomenon of resuming literary masterpieces in comic book form appears as a juxtaposition with a specific purpose, resulting in a hybrid form which we would regard as komiXLit. As part of a specific way of knowledge, we interpret komiXLit as an alternative model whose characteristic is that of the combination of two apparently contradicting terms: the “high” literature and the manga pop culture publication, a cultural move placed by the Japanese publishing houses under the credo “understanding literature through manga”. Using the illustrative example provided by the masterpiece authored by Yasunari Kawabata Snow Country (1935-1937/ 1948) and its manga version (2010), with drawings by Sakuko Utsugi, the present endeavour proposes a reading in which the komiXLit version is interpreted as an architectonic structure inspired by the former, in an attempt to identify the dominants of the textual poetics. We propose that the term komiXLit designate the cultural and social phenomenon of resuming the masterpieces of the Japanese literature in manga (comics) versions, as a self-sustainable category within the genre, meant to complete the already existing ones: story manga‚ dramatic pictures, graphic novels, boys’comics, girls’comics, men’s comics, ladies’ comics.