Kakukaku Shikajika
Kakukaku Shikajika is a rare autobiographical manga by Higashimura Akiko (author of Kuragehime). It focuses on her eccentric art tutor whose spartan training gets her into art school. She dreams of becoming a mangaka, but life gets on way as it always does.
Started rereading Kakukaku Shikajika. I always think it will be great to reread and rewatch the works I liked so much in the past, and I’m indeed enjoying this, but surprisingly it takes a very long time before I feel ready to start something again. If I start too soon, I often fail to immerse properly, drop the thing and then it becomes even harder to restart.
In the narration and after-chapters, she constantly explains “I did that because I was stupid back them”, “Looking back that was horrible, I don’t know what I was thinking”, etc. It feels to me like there were perhaps other, unmentionable reasons for most of those things, and she only brings them up that way because otherwise her actions in the story might seem too harsh.
I don’t really know if there’s a better way. I’m quite sure this is heavily fictionalized, but some of the apologizing is a bit jarring — I don’t think she would apologize in the work if something similar did not actually happen in real life. Autobiography authors probably have to point out all those negative things, or someone might call them out on ignoring them.
Finishing my reread of Kakukaku Shikajika. It was good. I looked up the artists other work (already knew of Kuragehime which I have read), and the works of her past assistants since some of them are named in the work and have since become mangakas. It’s so depressing how them and indeed most mangaka, have like just 1-3 works, presumably having given up at that point. Also nearly every mangaka that has one or two very good works also invariably has great many mediocre ones (as judged from reviews, I very rarely read all the works of any author).
Some other serious manga about artists: Bakuman, Blue Period, Baka ga Zenra de Yattekuru.
