Saiyuki commentary: art (volume 5)

[kate_nepveu]

More commentary on Saiyuki's art, volume 5 this time.

A reminder: coffee_and_ink analyzed six pages from the opening of this volume in three posts: one, two, three.

Also, can anyone out there come up with a reference for the flower symbolism? I've been spotting repeated flowers, but I have no idea what they are or what they mean, and I really, really, really don't want to find myself making a series-wide index of all the flowers and the situations they're used in, because this series has eaten enough of my life already. Please?

Still haven't read Gaiden or Reload, still will kill you with my brain if you spoil me for them.

On to the discussion.

The Pretty

I'm not going to inline these images, because I don't have anything to say about them except "ooooh, pretty," but I have to post links because they are pretty: chapter art for "Be There [1]" (a.k.a. the handcuff picture; note who isn't fully handcuffed); chapter art for "Be There [2]" (a.k.a. Gojyo looking much prettier than I usually find him) (also available in color (and as an icon!)).

Page Layouts

The opening of chapter 25 is kind of interesting. It starts with possibly the most shoujo page in the volume, 5.25.41 (original size):

Again I put out a plea for information on flower symbolism. Other than that, what's to say about this and its shoujo-ness?

Well, it's big and dramatic: the first single-panel page of the volume. It's a bleed.

It's got Cho Gonou—and it is Cho Gonou, note the longer hair—all bloody and sad. The three figures form a tall triangle; the last speech balloon comes atop a burst of pure white, which defines the center of the triangle and also visually emphasizes "He's a mass murderer on the run." Which deserves emphasis, since this is the first time Gojyo's heard that bit of news (and I think the look on his face and the angle of his cigarette indicate some shock).

And yet somehow I find it not very interesting. [*] Possibly because I had to remind myself that Gojyo didn't know what the guy he saved had done, since I knew perfectly well. (This comes back to my slight puzzlement at the placement of this arc, which I intend to go into in the non-art posts. Whenever I get there.)

[*] I am also curiously unmoved by the "Sanzo reads a sutra" pages (5.26.94-95), which seems intended as the big emotional climax of the arc. I think it's because I vaguely expect to see him knocking something over by the force of his voice, which is more comic than moving. I dunno, I'm strange. I did at least notice that it's a parallel layout to finding the castle burnt a few pages earlier (5.26.90-91).

I like 5.25.42, the next page, better (original size):

Gojyo's facing the same way as on the previous page, so when the reader turns the page there's some visual continuity. (He's recovered from the shock, now, also.) He mirrors short-haired probably-former-Gonou (it is ridiculously difficult to decide what the hell to call him during this arc): they're both looking down and off the edges of their respective sides of the page, and they both have their outer eyes obscured. They pivot around Sanzo, the only one looking straight ahead, as he calls bullshit and forces the action. (This page is also more dynamic than the last because it's divided into panels.)

The characters' faces and the speech balloons form two mirror-image triangles. Gojyo and probably-former-Gonou's gazes draw the reader down to the speech balloons below their faces; the reader has to work slightly harder to go up from Sanzo's face and light hair to the speech balloons above him, but only slightly because they stand out against the dark forest. The strict reading order has a lot of zigzags, but the triangles get you almost all of it:

I think I have a fondness for triangles.

Here's a neat trick with panel layouts, 5.25.46 (original size)

This strikes me as highly cinematic in the way the focus gets tighter from panels 1 and 2, to panels 3 and 4, and then zooms back out to show the bullet going past Gojyo and hitting the wall. And yet it's not just cinematic, because the top row gives you the strong impression that they're so upset, they're literally nose-to-nose; the dispelling of that illusion is part of the shock of panel 5. I think you've have to rapidly cut to get that effect in film, and it might not work as well.

Next, a layout that didn't work for me. Here's 5.27.105 (original size):

I initially missed the bottom text in panel two on both my first and second reads, because the stall divider (top outlined in red in the version below) between the different kinds of produce looks kind of like a panel border, and leads right into the next panel's bottom border (also outlined in red at the top). Also, the bottom text doesn't stand out well against the dark fruit.

Finally for page layout stuff, 5.28.136 has an effect that I don't recall noticing before (original size):

The characters' bodies are continued in the borderless panels, but are greyed out, possibly to make their faces and the speech balloons stand out better, or possibly to contrast them with Shangri-La on the right, or both, or something else I'm not thinking of. (That little burst of white next to Dokugakuji's face (and dear me what a name. Cut and paste, baby) both shows surprise and pulls the eye across the page so that the balloons are read in the correct order.)

(I also would like to note that thanks to the black and white art, I had no clue that Kougaiji also had red hair and eyes until later volumes, so I couldn't figure out why he'd care so much, on the next page, that Gojyo was probably sterile.)

Understanding Comics

After reading Understanding Comics, I decided to try and apply McCloud's characterization of panel transitions to this volume. I spotted one transition that I'd call moment-to-moment, the very funny little bit where probably-former-Gonou tells Gojyo about being in an incestuous relationship (5.25.56):

(The effect isn't the same with the scanlation's text, but the Tokyopop version cracked me up completely.)

Mostly I was looking for what McCloud calls aspect-to-aspect. The examples he gives are kind of successions of related images, and he talks about how they are usually parts of a single moment and establish a mood or a place. I didn't see a lot of that, because it's the rare panel that doesn't have dialogue over it, and as McCloud points out, sound introduces time so these don't feel like a single moment over several panels.

I suppose one could consider aspect-to-aspect the panels that are just objects with continuing conversation over/around them. I didn't get the impression that's exactly what McCloud meant, but it's interesting to note the prevalence of these panels anyway; sometimes they give physical context without cluttering up other panels (food, cards, furniture, those condoms on 5.25.58), and sometimes they emphasize (the eyes in a jar, particularly). The transitions to panels that are just text, plus a tone or flowers, seem to fit McCloud's scheme less well to me, but I don't know how much things have changed since McCloud wrote in 1992. Whatever you call them, reading his classification scheme did help me explicitly notice transitions that weren't action-to-action, subject-to-subject, or scene-to-scene.

Questions:

As Sanzo remembers an imprisoned Goku calling him, there are these pieces of paper with characters on them, on 5.24.24 (full panel). Any ideas what they are?

Tokyopop didn't translate the symbols on Gojyo's headband in this volume, to my annoyance (I know we've seen a symbol translated somewhere else, but I can't remember which volume now). I think they're all the same, 5.28.131, 5.28.143, and 5.29.175, so here it is from 5.29.175, which is the clearest:

I am still frightened at how I keep finding more to say about these. Volume six won't be until next week at the earliest.

[ more Saiyuki art commentary ]

Comments

[desdenova.livejournal.com]

You had to post this *right* before I was planning to go to bed, didn't you?

I suppose one could consider aspect-to-aspect the panels that are just objects with continuing conversation over/around them. I didn't get the impression that's exactly what McCloud meant, but it's interesting to note the prevalence of these panels anyway;

I would categorize those as "aspect-to-aspect"; while there is often dialogue (or narration, which is not quite the same thing) running over them, they do function to drag the reader's attention around different aspects of a scene, set tone, etc. I dunno, maybe they're best categorized as some sort of hybrid transition.

The paper strips on Goku's prison are spell talismans. You see them all over Asian fantasy stories (comics, movies, etc.). Think of them as the Buddhist version of Glowing Mystical Runes.

Re: Gojyo's bandanna, I think it has the same symbol all the time (off the top of my head, I can't remember what it means, although I have seen a translation somewhere), except for one scene where it's changed as a visual gag.

I'm sure i'll find more to blather about later (although I am hampered by my copy of Vol. 5 being on loan), but for now I am going to sleep.

[desdenova.livejournal.com]

And also: it is not by accident that you're not sure how to refer to he-who-was-Gonou in this story arc, it's all Symbolic and stuff. (But of course you knew that, 'cause you are Smart!) For convenience, I generally refer to him as Gonou at this point, but really, I consider Gonou to have died at the castle, and Hakkai to have been born later, at the temple. In between, he's in a sort of Limbo.

I do have a lot to say about story structure (and why this story is told *after* the Chin Isou arc), but I will wait on that until the proper time...

[greenapple2004.livejournal.com]

Gojyo's bandana does indeed have the same symbol 99% of the time. It says "pleasure." :-)

(and that one time, it says "kill.")

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Do you know what the flowers symbolize, and if there's a generally accepted symbolism for them in Japan, or if Kazuya Minekura invented it?

[greenapple2004.livejournal.com]

That I have no idea about. Flower language in general seems to be a pretty common component of manga, so I imagine that may be some significance behind the choice of images, but I don't know what it would be, sadly.

[kate_nepveu]

Thank you. I figured out why I was confused and thought the symbol only appeared when it was saying something specific--it's there almost all the time in vol. 1, but by this volume, it's much more like the writing on Sanzo's sutra, or even worse, since the writing on the sutra appears more than three times. It was one of those didn't notice-it-until-gone things.

[kate_nepveu]

Oh! They're strips on _Goku_'s prison! I thought Sanzo was using them for some reason, which would've been a first I think. Okay, I get it now. *duh*

As for story structure, if you don't mind I'll try to muddle through it myself; I'm kind of putting a lot of non-art things aside with notes that I need to think hard about them later. As for probably-former-Gonou, well, I agree that he died at the castle, but since that's not _quite_ text, and because "nameless" sounds dumb, I went with the wording I did.

I wish he'd been able to finish the "My name is--" sentence that Sanzo interrupted.

[desdenova.livejournal.com]

I was gonna joke that Sanzo doesn't need to use the spell papers because he's got the big version, but then I remembered that he does use them later, when they have to break the magic barrier to get into "Kami-Sama's" hideout.

Re: story structure, yeah, that's what I meant about waiting for the proper time--waiting until you got around to it. 'Cause I'm lazy that way.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

From my vast storehouse of Asian magical lore gained from watching a lot of anime, so therefore we know it's totally accurate, those pieces of paper are probably magical seals. I don't know if they're Japanese or Chinese, but I've seen a lot of magicians slapping rectangular pieces of paper on stuff with dramatic moves and music.

A bit of a poke 'round Google turns up evidence that it might be more of a Chinese thing - Daoist in fact: here (http://www.logoi.com/notes/seal_magic.html) and here (http://www.eng.taoism.org.hk/religious-activities&rituals/rituals/pg4-6-10-2.asp).

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they're magical post-it notes. I know from Mr. Vampire that if a Taoist magician sticks them on a hopping vampire, the hopping vampire will freeze unless a gust of wind blows them off.

[kate_nepveu]

. . . which I should've recognized from Rikudo in volumes 2 and 3.

In my defense, I hadn't realized they were on Goku's prison, and thought they were something associated with Sanzo, and he hasn't used those so far that I can recall. Not that my recollection is proving to be so good, these days.

Further thoughts

[kate_nepveu]

I should have put in the Tokyopop translation of the the very funny little bit where probably-former-Gonou tells Gojyo about being in an incestuous relationship, huh?

Right text balloon (Gojyo): "What's that mean?"

Left text balloon (probably-former-Gonou): "She was also my older sister."

(It's the lack of an exclamation point that makes it funny.)

Also, WRT to the big shoujo panel:

It seemed too obvious at the time to point out that Gonou was the biggest thing in the panel and was looming over everything else. I've finally figured out what completely unrelated image it reminded me of [*], which brings up something that doesn't seem quite too obvious--

The composition of the Gonou-section of that picture seems more iconic or symbolic than the rest. That's a figure or a statue or an image, not an active _person_ like Gojyo and Sanzo on the bottom, or probably-former-Gonou on the next page.

Which might be indirect support for probably-former-Gonou being *definitely* former-Gonou, or might just indicate the general problem of getting out from under this looming presence.

[*] Charles Vess's _Book of Ballads_, the story Emma Bull wrote, which ends with Herne (I think) rising up over the forest trees.

Flowers

[(Anonymous)]

From somewhere I read that Minekura-sensei herself said that the flowers are plainly there for the sake of decoration and there's no significance. However I can also analyse it as a symbol of short-lived beauty, and everchanging metamorphism. Pardon me for saying this but maybe there's some sensual or sexual references too (It is a manga with pretty guys to attract female readers, after all).

flowers

[torre85.livejournal.com]

Sorry. I know this is a late comment. Very late. But I just got into saiyuki and I happened on your manga observations, which btw I find fascinating.

I don’t know about Japanese culture or the specific flowers, but flowers have been known to symbolize beginnings. The start of something. And rebirth. Which I feel is very fitting in this book where gonou is being reborn into hakkai.

Re: flowers

[(Anonymous)]

The seals on Goku's prison are seals placed on the bars to keep him from aging and getting hungry from the guy who put him there ( I think it was Buddha actually...lol don't remember- trying to base it off of the real Journey to the West(Saiyuki) make up...), according to a source I got from watching the anime on youtube:) Not really sure tho but it's a start.