Mud Men, vol. 1 comments

(Image from Amazon.co.jp. Used for review purposes only.)

Mud Men, vol. 1, Daijiro Morohoshi, Grade: B+
Morohoshi is one of Japan's more influential manga artists. I've written about his works, most recently Box, in 2017. The Mud Men series began in 1975 in Monthly Shonen Champion. This volume has chapters up to 1980. The last three chapters of the 2006 Shueisha printing are stand-alone stories (Unicorn (Young Jump, 1980), Alligator (Manga Action, 1979) and the previously unpublished "Karakuchi Kaidan" (Spicy Mystery Story). When Haruomi Hosono, guitarist for YMO, saw Mud Men, he decided to write a song for his album Service, which accidentally got mistitled as "The Madmen." I liked Box, and a few weeks ago I decided to get both volumes 1 and 2 of Mud Men.

Namiko is a school girl living in Tokyo. One day, her anthropologist father returns to Tokyo from Papua New Guinea with surprise guests in tow - Miss Barton, a fellow specialist in New Guinea culture, and a native boy covered head to toe in tattoos. While life in the house gets slightly disrupted (the boy kills a rat in his room and leaves a few arrows in the corpse in a closet), the real shocker occurs one night when Namiko can't sleep, and goes into the hallway where she hears her father in another room talking to Miss Barton. Turns out that her father had been so desperate to be the first foreigner to see the secret tattoos of the New Guinea shamen that he had a baby with a New Guinea woman years before and groomed the resulting child to become the village's next shaman. The boy, Kodowa, is Namiko's half-brother.

That night, their father drugs the boy, and while Kodowa is unconscious, has his photographer take pictures of the tattoos. When the two men leave the room, Namiko peeks in through the door and sees a Mudman disappear through a wall. The next day, Kodowa is up and walking around, seemingly unaffected by the effects of the drug, but he gives Namiko an ornate necklace, telling her this will protect her from whatever happens next. What happens is a heavy storm, summoned by the boy and several Mudmen spirits, along with the appearance of a monster called N'Baki. Kodowa kills the cameraman, and N'Baki destroys the family's house and kills Namiko's father. Kodowa tells her that this is the result of violating Mudmen taboos, and he returns to New Guinea.

The subsequent chapters have Namiko going to New Guinea to reunite with Miss Barton and her half-brother, and being drawn deeper into Mudmen legend. Kodowa gets entangled in a Cargo Cult revival, in which the leader, a Maori skull collector, uses magic to kill N'Baki and mortally wound Kodowa. At the same time, several Japanese anthropologists, oil company execs and missionaries use Namiko and Kodowa to get their hands on a Jomon totem that looks like Kodowa, as part of a plan to steal the "big face mask" of the forest god Aen, and/or explore the forest for oil. While none of the interlopers do get the mask, or keep the totem, the Maori skull collector uses a minion to steal the totem and crush it, which is what kills N'Baki and almost kills Kodowa.

The story stops here. In Unicorn, a girl encounters a crazy old man on a hunt for unicorns. He discovers some deep gouges in a utility pole, which he claims came from a unicorn using it as a scratching post. One night, the girl is out wandering around the city, and is attacked from behind by the old man. When she wakes up, she's in a park, being approached by a big horse with a horn in its forehead. The guy, using the girl as bait, lassos the unicorn, but it breaks free and escapes, with the crazy old man chasing after it. Some years pass, and the girl is an adult, currently on the hunt for Griffons.

Alligator revolves around a man who had seen a picture of an alligator climbing up the back of a victim in a book when he was a child. One day, he goes to a zoo, and is reminded of the book when he sees an alligator in a pit. The creature follows him back home, and no one else notices it. It bites his foot and slowly works up to swallow him whole, still unseen. Finally, it shows up at the guy's office place, wearing a full business suit and tie, and bellows out the joke "Doumo Arigator" (Thank you-gator).

The book closes with a very early work, Spicy Mystery Story. The protagonist goes to a curry shop, where one of the customers is crying over a plate of curry rice. There's a fire, and the customer dies in the flames before being able to eat his meal. The protagonist runs screaming away from the blaze and escapes through the front door. When he turns around, there's no shop, only an empty lot.

Summary: Mud Men is a mystery adventure set mostly in Papua New Guinea, specifically featuring the traditions and mythology of the Asaro Mudmen. Morohoshi spent several weeks there researching the myths and taking lots of photos and sketches. The stories show how the people of New Guinea were exploited by capitalists and religious missionaries, and the conflicts in the manga are influenced by these issues. The artwork is highly detailed, the characters are mostly well-drawn. Morohoshi has improved as an artist since then, and his pacing has gotten tighter, but this is still a fun read. My only complaint is that the Shueisha printing is too small, making the kanji almost impossible to read in places. Still, recommended if you like mystical adventures in jungles, and cargo cult airplane replicas.