Reading Manga Slowly

A case for taking your time

And an excuse for me taking my time. The Taishō Café hasn’t opened its doors for more than a month now. The reason was not renovation. I have been busy with a pretty intense surtitle translation job for a contemporary Japanese play until the day before yesterday, while in the beginning of June I interpreted for several guests at the Japan film festival Nippon Connection. Among the guests I interpreted for was the director of the anime film Poupelle of Chimney Town. During research, I found a video on Okada Toshio’s Youtube channel, in which he talks with Nishino Akihiro, the author of the children’s book that the anime film is based on. In that video, Okada said something about diverging comic reading habits that stuck with me, so I decided to write this short piece about it.

Kumeta Kōji Sayonara Zetsubō Sensei; watch designed by Satō Ōki’

Japanese people watch manga

Nishino talks about how he intentionally created Poupelle in a way that it takes time to read. Okada then compares this style to Bande dessinées and says Europeans and Americans read comics in a different way than Japanese people read manga: “They read comics. But we don’t read, we watch them. We don’t read.” Thinking from the Japanese perspective, it seems strange someone would pay for a 20-30 page comic book, when one could read hundreds of manga pages for the same money. In “America/Europe you have to read every single panel”, Okada says. He further explains that Americans would spend “10 to 20 minutes on average reading a comic page”. I don’t know how accurate this is, but I noticed from my own experience of (proof-)reading American/Franco-Belgian comics that it took me a lot longer to get through them compared to manga and that was not just because I was more used to the latter.

But in Japan manga is fast entertainment, a commodity more than an art form. If you think watching anime at 2x speed is unacceptable, you have never seen a Japanese person reading manga on a train. It comes closer to watching someone use a flip book. The phenomenon of watching videos at a higher speed has gotten some critical attention even in Japan recently (see the book: 映画を早送りで観る人たち). But when it comes to manga, no one even raises an eyebrow when someone devours a whole volume on a short train ride.

Confessions of a slow reader

I am a slow reader, no matter the medium. One exception is Oshimi Shūzõ (even I could read a whole series of his in a few hours). But in general, it takes me a long time to read and digest anything. So when I recommended Tsugumi-Project (my favorite manga from last year) to a Japanese friend and she devoured the first five volumes in less than an hour, I wondered: “Well, where’s the pleasure in that?” She said you read the first time to get the gist and then reread the manga slowly later, but it still didn’t sit well with me. Of course I am in no position to tell people from another culture how to consume media from their own country, I even tried to do the same when I spend some time in a manga café.

But then I found a Japanese person who shares my views on reading slowly: Satō Ōki, who happens to be one of my favorite designers as well. In his book ４００のプロジェクトを同時に進める 佐藤オオキのスピード仕事術 (meaning roughly: How Satō Ōki is able to handle 400 projects at the same time. You can tell I love this guy, because otherwise I would never buy a book with such a title). Anyway, this is what he writes:

When I read books or manga, it takes me about 2 to 3 times longer than the average person. That’s because I try to make my first impressions stay in my memory. […] If I try to read quickly, I get anxious about missing something important. On the contrary, having read something once, but not being able to remember anything about it, feels like a bigger waste of time to me so I read carefully and want to retain the essence [of what I read].¹

It’s interesting to see this in a book about increasing your work speed, but I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. Whenever I talk with avid readers, who can devour whole books in one sitting, they tell me they hardly remember anything a week or even days later. To me that’s the same as having not read at all. So I, very consciously, decided to be a slow reader. I am not saying this to criticise anyone’s reading behaviour, I just want to say that it is perfectly legitimate to spend 2-3 hours on a single manga volume. I wish someone had told me that earlier in my life.

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To my German-speaking readers:

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1. In Japanese: 本や漫画を読むときもおそらく普通の人の２〜３倍の時間がかかっています。これは、最初に見たときの印象をしっかり記憶に残そうとしているからかもしれません。[…]　私の場合、早く読もうとすると大事なものを見落としてそうで不安になってしまいます。「一度読んだけれど頭に何も残らない」というのではかえって無駄が多い気もするので、時間をかかて丁寧に読み、大事なエッセンスは頭にとどめておきたいと思っています。(p.59)