I feel a lot of thematic similarities from my last post talking about the Takahata helmed masterpiece film Only Yesterday when I think about Taiyo Matsumoto comic Tokyo Days, which over the last couple of years has been released in three hardcover volumes in the United States via Viz. Actually the next post I do about a book is a novel that hits me a similar way and all three of these represent in general among my favorite things.
Matsumoto’s previous work is a catalog that makes him probably my favorite living cartoonist. This title of course shifts in very non-scientific ways at any given moment but he and Zoe Thorogood are probably the two cartoonists at the moment that I’ve been enthralled with the most lately. Right now let’s talk about Matsumoto’s latest.
The story begins with an ending.
Shiozawa, a manga editor of thirty years, retires. He leaves behind his desk, his meetings, his responsibilities, and the strange, chaotic intimacy of shaping other people’s stories. The people around him offer polite congratulations, a bouquet, a bow. And then they continue working. The room does not change shape after he exits. That’s when the real story begins.
In Tokyo These Days , Taiyo Matsumoto gives us not a tale of creation, but of the long echo that follows it. Across three volumes, he draws the afterlife of a man’s professional life with the same grace and asymmetry with which he once drew boys flying through cities or ping pong balls splitting the sky. Here, the wildness has been replaced with quiet. Phone calls unanswered, city walks without direction, names remembered more by absence than by presence.
This is not the Tokyo of hypermodernity or frantic speed, but a Tokyo that recedes, like memory, like relevance. Shiozawa’s world is soft, smudged, thinning. The line between the professional and the personal, once clear and fortified, begins to blur. He begins to visit people he hasn’t seen in years. Some are thriving. Others have left the world altogether. All of them, in one way or another, are shaped by manga. Not just as art, but as a structure of living. As an organizing principle.
There’s a temptation in writing about Tokyo These Days to over-intellectualize its premise, the aging editor as a metaphor for all unseen labor, or the comic itself as a metatextual reflection on the mortality of art. These interpretations are valid, of course but they also risk flattening what is most powerful about Matsumoto’s work. Its silence. Its willingness to dwell in non-events. Its embrace of ambiguity, of emotional inertia.
Shiozawa is not redeemed. He does not create something of his own. He is not an artist waiting to blossom. He is an editor, and he always was. He is learning, slowly, uncertainly, how to live with that.
And what does an editor do when there is nothing left to edit?
They walk. They remember. They listen to the city without rushing through it. They begin to notice the people they used to observe only in relation to their work.
Matsumoto’s art, long celebrated for its restless energy, here becomes something different, a kind of visual stillness. His characters still bear his trademark distortion long faces, elbows bent at impossible angles but they no longer seem in motion. They hesitate. They linger at thresholds. Backgrounds fall away. The eye isn’t guided so much as invited.
This visual economy feels deliberate. In one panel, Shiozawa sits with a former artist on a rooftop. They don’t say much. The space between their words becomes the real dialogue. The city hums below. Life goes on.
And that, perhaps, is the series’ most beautiful truth, that the world does not stop when we do. That a life spent in proximity to creation is still a life. That our impact is often invisible, but not insignificant.
Shiozawa begins to reach out, not dramatically, but gently. A call returned. A hand extended. A meeting accepted. There is no climactic arc. Only gestures. Only breath.
Tokyo These Days is not a requiem, and not quite a confession. It is something rarer, a work of art that honors its own quiet. That accepts aging not as tragedy, but as transformation. That understands the page not just as a space for action, but as a space for reflection.
From a much more nuts and bolts aspect, I very much like that Matsumoto draws life. There’s people doing people things, not just standing in front of backdrops or at tables. People are eating, drinking, smoking, people are communing with wild animals in the way we all sometime know we do when we think we are otherwise alone.
In the end, Shiozawa walks alone through the city. He passes by bookstores, cafés, old alleys. His figure is small, almost incidental. But for once, he’s not walking toward a meeting, or away from one. He’s just walking. He sees.
He is, at last, the protagonist of his own story.