Manga and Me

Before anything else: to Sato Kagesho, the bookshop that has been delivering to me for over fifty years and still does, I owe more thanks than I can put into words.
If they had not delivered, I honestly do not know whether I would still be the manga lover I am.

That is how close manga has always been to me. Close enough that I think of it as my schoolbook, close enough that most of what I know, I learned by reading it.
To say that manga was the textbook of my life would be no exaggeration.

Here are the ones that still come to mind without my having to reach for them.

Fishing: "Tsurikichi Sanpei," by Yaguchi Takao.
Dogs: "Shiroi Senshi Yamato," by Takahashi Yoshihiro.
Manhood: "Kohha Ginjiro" and "Yamazaki Ginjiro," by Motomiya Hiroshi.
Comfort: "SPLASH!," "Komorebi no Moto de...," "Sakura no Hana Saku Koro," "Tenshi no Okurimono" and "Angel Heart," by Hojo Tsukasa.
Cross-dressing: "Family Compo," by the same Hojo Tsukasa.
Cars: "Yoroshiku Mechadoc" and "Restore Garage 251," by Tsuguhara Ryuji.
Motorbikes: "Baribari Densetsu," by Shigeno Shuichi. (Nothing whatever to do with the story, but as a boy I got teased with "Hibari, Hibari." Bari-bari, Hibari. Come to think of it, they still do.)
Fermentation: "Moyasimon," by Ishikawa Masayuki.
Kart racing: "capeta," by Soda Masahito.
The shamisen: "Those Snow White Notes," by Ragawa Marimo.
Music: "BECK," and now "THE BAND" (still running as of August 2026), by Harold Sakuishi.
Ballroom dancing: "Welcome to the Ballroom" (on hiatus as of August 2026), by Takeuchi Tomo.

And when it comes to baseball, it is mostly Mizushima Shinji.
"Dokaben," "Yakyukyo no Uta," "Dantotsu," "Ikkyu-san," "Otoko Doahou Koshien," "Dai Koshien," "Heisei Yakyu Soshi," "Ohayo K-jiro," "Asako no Yakyu Nikki," "Abu-san."

To someone who does not read manga, that is a list of nothing but names.
To me it is an actual school timetable.

Because of "Tsurikichi Sanpei," right through middle school I went fishing in the Hinokinai, the river that runs through my town, every spare hour I had.
Then, in my first year of high school, I went up to fish a ravine below the teahouse at Senzan Pass, near where Akita meets Iwate.
On the way back, something happened that I thought would kill me.
Because of it my judo instructor told me, in our dialect, yamere. Quit. I have not fished once since.

I loved dogs before I ever read about them, and we kept two or three at home over the years.
I would still like one now, but on a walk the dog would end up dragging me, so it is out of the question.

In middle school I wanted a Tamiya Toyota Celica XX built to Mechadoc specification, and I lost count of the trips I made to Hitsujiya, the toy shop, long since closed.

From my thirties I read more from the Magazine line.
Thanks to that I can follow a conversation about fermentation, having never once laid eyes on a microbe.

I can drill judo throws all day, but I cannot dance.
Even so, the skill it takes to raise that atmosphere off a flat page leaves me shaking my head. I have never danced a step, and it made me want to know the world of ballroom dancing.

And then, from a page that ought to make no sound at all, sound comes.
The sight of a boy facing his music head on was, to someone hard of hearing like me, purely enviable.
And every time I reread it, I feel ashamed of the boy I was, the one who hated sound and threw fits in music class and made life difficult for his teacher and his classmates.

I suppose it shows that I read the Jump and Magazine lines. Laid out like this, that is the company I kept.
And there are still more that became my bible than I could ever list.

The interesting part is the two names at the top.
Yaguchi Takao came from Yokote. Takahashi Yoshihiro came from the village of Higashinaruse. Both grew up in the mountains of Akita.
A boy in Akita fell in love with fishing and with dogs through manga drawn by men from Akita.
It was many years before that occurred to me.

The strange thing is this. My parents bought me almost nothing when I was a warashi, our Akita word for a small child. But manga they bought without one word of complaint.
Why manga alone was allowed, I still do not know.
When I ask my mother, all she says is that I wanted to read them, so she bought them.

Not that I could have whatever I liked. But the weeklies and monthlies I wanted, I got to read.

At first it was mostly Weekly Jump.
Then the weeklies suddenly soured on me. I quit them and started devouring the monthly Jump and Magazine, and the bimonthlies in both lines.

The special editions above all: the extra issues made up almost entirely of one-shot stories. Any number of artists whose names everyone now knows came out of those pages.
The seed of ONE PIECE was a one-shot in the 1996 Summer Special. The seed of Fist of the North Star was a one-shot in Fresh Jump, another title in the same line.
I bought every one and read every one. If my parents had not called them clutter and thrown them out, they would be worth a fortune today.

Now, this may be the real subject of this piece.

That Takahashi Yoshihiro, it turns out, trained as Motomiya Hiroshi's apprentice.
At the time, of course, I had no way of knowing he was from Akita, or that he had studied under Motomiya.
I read them because I liked them. A manga you love needs no reason.

The trouble is that with Motomiya Hiroshi, I got the reading order completely wrong.

I went straight in with "Kohha Ginjiro" and "Yamazaki Ginjiro."
A man walks ahead in silence. A woman follows behind him.
I took that in without question, as simply the way of things.

This is the sort of accident that happens when your textbook is manga.

Never having picked up the correct knowledge, I spent those years doing little but making girls cry.
And I grew into a clumsy man with no idea how to be with a woman.

Looking back, I should have started Motomiya Hiroshi with "Ore no Sora."
Had I read that one first, I would have learned what love was, and could have gone on to the Ginjiro books afterwards.

If I had only got the order right, I need not have been so disliked.

I still think it was a good thing that my textbook was manga.
Nobody, though, ever taught me what order to read it in.

How about you?
Was there ever a manga whose influence was so strong that it worked out for you? Or that, as with me, it did not?

Or are you still out there looking for something?