Think of Akira Toriyama and the manga he really wanted to draw

On March 8, I heard that Akira Toriyama had passed away, and my mind went blank.

He was only four years older than me. I never expected to hear of his death while working as a journalist. No, let me be honest. I didn’t even want to expect it. It was the situation I feared the most.

An obituary for a famous person in newspapers is usually accompanied by a side story called hyoden, a short biography. This is usually written by a reporter who interviewed the deceased during his or her lifetime and introduces that person’s voice to readers – how he or she spoke – while conveying his or her achievements and personality. When it comes to a super big name like Toriyama, it is impossible to print his obituary without such a biography article.

The job was assigned to me even though I never had the chance to meet Toriyama in person. After “Dragon Ball” became a big hit in the 1990s, Toriyama stopped giving interviews to the mass media, and it wasn’t until 1994 that I joined The Yomiuri Shimbun’s Culture News Department. We don’t know why Toriyama made that decision.

Therefore, I am not qualified to write his biography article. Still, I had to write something. I had no choice but to reread previous Toriyama interviews found in print and put together something close to his biography.

The last time Toriyama’s own spoken words were published in print for me to read was a conversation with Kazuhiko Torishima, a former editor of the manga magazine Shukan Shonen Jump (Weekly Shonen Jump), in his book published last year . In the article, Toriyama said, “’Well, it’s my job after all,’ that’s how I let things go, and maybe I quite liked that.

If you ask me if ‘Dr. Slump’ and ‘Dragon Ball’ are my favorites, not my favorites at all. I know that if I really drew them the way I wanted to, they would never become popular.”

His comments left a deep impression on me.

This is a brutally honest and detached position. “Dragon Ball” started out as a light-hearted comedy manga that didn’t gain much popularity. On Torishima’s advice, Toriyama turned the work into a serious battle manga, making the work an explosive hit. At one point, an overwhelming 80% of readers responding to the popularity poll included each week in the Weekly Shonen Jump magazine ranked “Dragon Ball” as the best manga of the week, a testament to the outpouring of support it got. When an issue of the manga magazine reached an unprecedented sales record of 6.53 million copies sold in late 1994, Toriyama was the driving force behind the achievement.

“Dragon Ball” also created an innovative plot pattern for a battle manga. The main character defeats one enemy, but then faces a more powerful enemy, with the main character himself becoming stronger each time. This model still shapes the royal road of manga plot patterns shown in Weekly Shone Jump today.

For Toriyama, however, he was just doing his job. It wasn’t what he wanted to do. This has led me to feel like I can somehow understand why Toriyama stopped giving interviews as his popularity grew.

What then are the works that he actually drew as he wanted?

Here I finally come to the introduction of “Cowa!” which I have chosen for this month’s column. It was serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump for a brief period in 1997, after the “Dragon Ball” series was completed. The story of “Cowa!” is about Paifu, a mischievous vampire child who lives in the obake (monster) village of Batwing Ridge. Together with Maruyama, a former sumo wrestler, he goes on an adventure in search of medicine against the obake flu. It’s a heartwarming comedy with a fairytale feel, but spiced up by portraying people as more evil than obake. The picture book style panels and pages are stylish and pleasant to look at. Above all, you can really tell that Toriyama really enjoyed drawing this manga.

I also recommend his “Sand Land” (2000), which has a similar flavor and was recently made into a movie, but personally I prefer “Cowa!” Both works have recently been reprinted and are now more readily available. Although I was not able to meet Toriyama in person, I want to reflect with sincere respect on what he really wanted to draw.