Gourmet Manga
Food and Communication in Comics
All around the country this week, Americans are whipping up holiday favorites, from roasted turkey to stuffing balls, yams dotted with marshmallows, and cranberry sauce. And maybe some are documenting this cornucopia through comics! It’s a good week to consider how comics can make food so appealing.
To get into the feasting spirit, we wanted to take a look at a delicious genre that may be less well known stateside. We Americans have comic-cum-cookbook Relish by Lucy Knisley and some food loving characters like Jughead Jones and Nancy herself (her adventures collected in a TPB, Nancy Eats Food). In Japan, there’s a whole comics genre devoted just to food, called gurume (gourmet) or ryori (cooking, cuisine) manga. Some focus on tales of training to become a chef, competition and connoisseurship, tips and tricks in the kitchen, and what it’s like to tend a ramen noodle stand at night. Food is featured in romance stories, fantasies, mysteries, comedies, and crime stories.
Many of these delicious comics will help you work up an appetite, and we spoke with Dr. Lorie Brau, professor of Japanese language and culture at the University of New Mexico, to learn more about how these comics invoke such strong responses in the reader.
They tap into your senses, even sound. While cooking, onomatopoeia and mimetic sound effects fill the air:
Oishinbo employs this vocabulary extensively, both as illustrated sound effects and as part of the characters’ utterances, to evoke the sounds of preparing and eating food: the ton ton ton of a knife chopping, the gu gu or gura gura of a stew simmering, the juu sizzle of hot broth poured over fried rice, the saku saku sound made when a character crunches into something crisp. Even the temperature and textures of the food are identified with their own mimetic effects. The word hoko is superimposed on a picture of a hot sweet potato—hoka hoka means hot—and hoku hoku suggests the softness of a starchy food. When a sound effect is written into such an illustration, it seems almost as if the food were speaking for itself. (p 37)
The food is more rendered than the comic characters—cross-hatched and nearly photorealistic, it can dominate a panel, as in the example below:
In the Oishinbo story “Mother Apple,” Aosawa savors an apple tea and slice of apple pie. The sensuality of food—in many gurume manga, the relationship to food is a sensual one—food, after all, is a gustatory delight. In many comics, eating is portrayed as a religious experience—the eater’s face full of anticipation, then ecstasy. Some of these moments of consumption are easy to read as nearly orgasmic—wide open and closed eyes, flushed flesh, drool, sweat droplets, emanata lines of transcendence, all show the reader just how fulfilling this eating experience is.
In Mogusa-san, main character Mogusa Minori indulges her superhuman appetite.
How might you draw your Thanksgiving feast? What sounds does a turkey make as it roasts, how realistically can you crosshatch your mashed potatoes, what expression do you make gazing at cranberry sauce?
Hopefully your turkey isn’t too far from being cooked, and you can enjoy some food after whetting your appetite on gurume manga!
Links and Miscellany
This post is indebted to the work of Dr. Lorie Brau, professor of Japanese language and culture at the University of New Mexico. She is currently working on a book on gurume manga. You can check out one of her essays on the subject here:
Brau, Lorie. “Oishinbo's Adventures in Eating: Food, Communication, and Culture in Japanese Comics” Gastronomica, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Fall 2004), pp. 34-45
The New York Public Library has rounded up some examples of gurume manga here.
Gurume manga may also be taking over the TV; this Food and Wine article discusses several adaptations available online.
Diana Ault, the author of Cook Anime, also has a delicious-looking Instagram.