2023 | 7 min read
Not a lot happens in the 18-part manga series Aruku Hito (The Walking Man) but anything that does happen is loaded with enormous significance. In that sense, it’s how all good walks should be. Safe, mostly uneventful, but allowing for the chance opening of certain windows of the mind. In manga artist Jiro Taniguchi’s hands, the simple act of walking also becomes a transgressive or rebellious state of being.
First serialised in 1990, The Walking Man is pristine graphic storytelling. There’s not much dialogue, but it’s rich in nonverbal signs such as the tilt of a head or the direction of a gaze. Taniguchi’s style belongs to the gekiga school of manga, which aims for a more realistic and cinematic effect. His immaculate draftsmanship renders city buses, guard rails, overhead wires, cherry trees and concrete riverbanks into a detailed tapestry of suburban Tokyo where most of the story takes place.
In Episode 1, the eponymous Walking Man (based on Jiro Taniguchi himself) ventures out, has a chance meeting with a birdwatcher, and returns home to find that he and his wife are now the chance owners of a mysterious dog that has appeared on the scene. Chance and serendipity are a theme of The Walking Man. As are dogs, which if nothing else are an excuse to take another walk. If you like dogs, you’ll love The Walking Man.
In Episode 2, after building a kennel out of wood, our hero goes off on his walk, dog in tow. He’s becoming a more observant walker now, a noticer of birds and hidden details of the neighbourhood. One of those details is a dragonfly mosaic laid mysteriously into the pavement. In the end, the Walking Man walks a bit further than he probably intended. There’s an actual field. It snows. Luckily, he’s wearing a thick sweater.
In Episode 3, the Walking Man leaves the dog at home and ventures further to a more built-up area, a shopping district. He purchases some kamifūsen paper balloons and takes them home. The dog is not impressed. By this point, you’re beginning to notice some changes in the Walking Man. He’s becoming more playful and adventurous. In Episode 4, he’ll even climb a tree.
The Walking Man can be read as a series of meditative vignettes of mid-life introspection. There are wordless hints of mortality, childlessness, past loves, and redefined expectations from life. In Episode 9, when the Walking Man finds himself following a dapper old man of the neighbourhood, the pathos is tangible. Taniguchi came up with most of the story ideas on his own neighbourhood walks, accidentally inventing a new komichi or “small lanes” genre of small-is-all self-examination.
Taniguchi speaks to the shin-jinrui, or “new breed” who came of age in the 1980s, the generation that came after the generation that rebuilt Japan. Roughly equivalent to Generation X, the shin-jinrui found themselves living in a consumerist city that was largely stripped of history, and they began the slow process of constructing usable pasts from the material culture of everyday life. In other words, they were the first to discover all that Tokyo retro stuff you’ve come to love.
The Walking Man might be the first in a menagerie of lost or wandering men who also drift through other canonical works of the Heisei period, including Haruki Murakami’s 1994-95 novel The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (jobless man goes in search of a missing cat and ends up losing his wife) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2008 film Tokyo Sonata (man takes great pains to conceal the fact of his unemployment from his own family), each a luckless symbol of Japan’s lost decades or employment ice age.
The Walking Man presumably has a job because we see him come and go wearing a suit and tie. In Episode 8, we even follow him on his commute into Tokyo. Only he doesn’t make it to the office. He gets off one station early and heads off on one of his now-customary wanders. After coming upon a river, he crawls under a road bridge to find an old man fishing on the riverbank. But fishing for what? “Oh, I’m just pretending to be fishing,” says the old man. “I really just like this place. The best things cost nothing.” The old man repeats these words like a mantra: “The best things cost nothing.”
That the best things cost nothing forms part of The Walking Man’s subversive appeal. It gently proposes that meaning is best pursued outside of work or consumer activity, an idea that wasn’t obvious to that many people at the time. It suggests that we begin this process in our own neighbourhoods, by walking and observing. It then suggests that, with a little practice under our belts, we can do this anywhere in Tokyo, a supremely walkable city. Through walking, the city can be reclaimed.
Tokyo Vernacular is Jordan Sand’s extraordinary account of how Tokyoites have tried to reconstruct the city’s past. One example he gives is the Rojō-Kansatsu-Gakkai, or Street Observationists, a group of writers and urban theorists active from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Street Observationists approached Tokyo’s ahistoricism in a novel way. Instead of behaving like historians and trying to explain the strangeness of the city, they treated each new object as a chance discovery. “What they preserved instead was the object’s enchantment,” writes Sand. “Its aura lay in the confluence of happenstance and human effort – effort that was sometimes futile, yet beautiful in its pathos.”
Walking is observing and even documenting, but that doesn’t explain all of its appeal. Often the enjoyment comes from resisting claims on our attention. Walking exercises the right to be left alone. In Marcher, une philosophie, Frédéric Gros writes that: “The walker considers it a liberation to be disentangled from the web of exchanges, no longer reduced to a junction in the network redistributing information, images and goods; to see that these things only have the reality and importance you give them.”
Who in Tokyo hasn’t found themselves between places during working hours, with an overflowing inbox or other urgent claims on their attention, and not simply gone for a walk? Like all great cities, Tokyo offers instant anonymity to those who seek it for any reason. It’s an open invitation to put work on silent mode and enjoy an hour or two of strolling incognito. Seen in this way, walking becomes more than an act of sensemaking: it becomes an act of liberation, or even defiance.
In Watashi no Sanpo (My Walks), his afterword to the 2010 “Director’s Cut” edition of The Walking Man, Jiro Taniguchi writes that walking was for him an act of absolute freedom and of enjoying time without purpose. Everything from length of stride to walking speed, he reminds us, must be decided entirely on one’s own. In later episodes of The Walking Man, his actions become increasingly transgressive and out of step with society, implying a darker side to Taniguchi’s absolute freedom.
Jiro Taniguchi, who died in 2017, is a revered figure in France. It’s through the French translation L’Homme qui marche that The Walking Man later arrived in English. The themes Taniguchi explores are possibly universal. They speak to any urban milieu where people find themselves sort of marooned. This might explain why Taniguchi didn’t include any famous landmarks in The Walking Man. If walking was a state of mind, there was nothing special about the place you walked. I can write that Tokyo is a supremely walkable city. But does walkable always mean worth walking?
Chris Arnade Walks The World is a Substack by a writer and photographer called Chris Arnade who, well, walks the world. I followed Chris recently as he walked from central Tokyo to the outermost suburbs. Over five days he experiences “a series of minor disappointments” and can’t imagine himself living in Tokyo due to the oppressive built environment. The city is for him “the sense of being trapped in a massive sprawling shrink-a-dink mall, where everything is both too ordered and yet somehow also too cluttered… where no matter what direction you go, it’s a slight variation of the same boxy hard surfaced backdrop.”
That’s the thing about walking in Tokyo. It’s not an aesthetic pleasure worth travelling the world for. It’s more a recalibration of the self to the world. I’ve begun to realise that there are two kinds of walking. There’s walking as a tourist, where you hope for an experience, a warm welcome, communion with strangers. All of these can be hard to find in Tokyo. Then there’s walking at home, or with a sense of being at home, where you really just want to be alone with your thoughts, to let that gentle breeze flow through the windows of the mind. The second kind of walking rarely lets you down.
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