Tadao Tsuge's "Manhunt"

"We can form no wish, which has not a reference to society.” - David Hume A Treatise of Human Nature 2.2.5

Tadao Tsuge’s Trash Market is a simultaneously playful and depressing master class in wrestling with one’s own society through narrative art. These stories are Springsteen-esque in the readiness with which they juxtapose frivolity and the soul-crushing existential circumstances brought on by a lower-middle class life in tough times in a tough area. Despite the fact that Jersey sort of smells like a trash market as well, there are no Courtney Cox cameos in Tsuge's work, so I guess the similarities end somewhere. In any case, Trash Market was very well received, and Shea Hennum has already done justice to the overarching spectrum of Japanese life presented in Trash Market.  The story I am going to focus on is "Manhunt," a brief, strange, but effective meditation on the defining relationship between our identities and society.

The story centers on the cornerstone of Japanese society, a salaryman, this one by the name of Mr. Taguchi. Mr. Taguchi had been missing for some time, you see, and upon his return, all he seems to remember is loitering outside of a strip club and a burning desire to see a steam engine. As two reporters try to get the scoop on Mr. Taguchi’s disappearance, they continue to press him on his reasons for leaving. And the more they press him for concrete reasons—the more sensible, logical questions the two men ask him—the more Mr. Taguchi becomes alien to the scene.

From a rudimentary understanding of Japanese culture, it’s clear to see what’s going on here: a salaryman is such a vanilla, routine, automatic, ubiquitous part of culture in Japan that their disappearances are truly odd, newsworthy events. We can imagine such a thing being odd in smaller towns here in America, but even back when this story was created, such disappearances were probably a given in urban life on this side of the ocean.

But notice that Tsuge does not leave it at that. After an off-kilter introduction which is justified as a product of Mr. Taguchi’s shoddy memory, things begin to appear more normal in this story. Tsuge quickly makes things weird again after an inciting moment made up by the reporters dealing, mutually, with facts. Simply being asked why he disappeared is enough to put distance between Mr. Taguchi and the two reporters. Tsuge silhouettes them and veils them in Kirby dots leaving Taguchi alone, cast off by a simple request for reasons.

What makes a reason a good reason, generally speaking? Well, we could probably debate for several hundred years (and sort of have been!), so let’s just look at the particular case. Mr. Taguchi’s response to being asked why he left is, “honestly, there was no real reason. Suddenly I just really wanted to see a steam engine.” But he very clearly did have a reason, and he knows it because he just said it: he wanted to see a steam engine. Sure, maybe he had no reason for that and it was just a deep, weirdly powerful and specific impulse to get acquainted with the latest in not-actually-the-latest train technology. Yet he knows that to them—to the reporters and literally anyone else in society—just wanting to see a steam engine is not even a bad reason for walking out on his life:

It’s not a reason at all.

“Manhunt” occurs in a world much like ours in which people are strange but singular genetic and behavioral warps on the interconnected web of civilization. To put it another way, “no man is an island.” Yet, via Mr. Taguchi, Tsuge depicts just how odd it would be for a man to make himself one.

The Hume quote that I share above bears repeating: “We can have no wish, which has not a reference to society.” Starting with Rousseau, in an intellectual tradition that runs straight through Hume and has a big revival with John Dewey, (by way of Hegel, but let us not speak of Hegel), there is a thought that it might be mistaken to think of an individual as being the sum total of what they are without any reference to the society in which they exist. In fact, not only is it perhaps mistaken to think the primary, foundational unit is an individual; but, imagining a fully-formed individual without any meaningful ties to their society might be inconceivable (!!!). Rousseau thinks that once humans entered into an organized society, for reasons that are fun to talk about but far too long-winded for this post, there is no going back. There is No Exit, as it were. Society is there to stay, and every person born into society has the entirety of their values and passions molded as a result, no take-backsies.

Any time you talk about something that is inconceivable, things get really interesting and disappointing at the same time. You have reached the edge of something which we can wrap our heads around— THE conceptual limit, the end of our flat intellectual planet hive-mind thing. That’s really cool. But it also means the conversation will end on that vista. If you ask any enterprising philosopher sympathetic to this notion, "what would it be like to exist free of the chains of society?" you will receive a shoulder shrug.

What philosophers resist doing with their dialectic (perhaps not because it's impossible, but because they choose to toil elsewhere), Tsuge does with “Manhunt.” Shit, he does it in one panel:

Here is what you would be if you took a full shot at self-exile form the society that defines what you are: a goddamn ape! The ever-musing Ales Kot was recently pondering on twitter about whether humans are the only animal who feel guilt and shame. Well, I’m sure that discussion is going on somewhere, but the fact is even if we are not the only animals with something resembling a public shared value system, we are the only animals with THIS shared value system. Certainly if Fido has something resembling a standard to which he holds himself among his fellow dogs, he doesn’t have anything remotely similar to the very specific thought that abandoning your family to go see a fucking steam engine is wacked.

The monkey mask that Mr. Taguchi wears is not a mask at all. It is the shedding of a mask. It is a bare look at what hides in the shadows throughout his other lost, silhouetted depictions. The mask he wears is a human one, not in the cliché sense that we all put on a facade, but in the very real sense that our personal identities are sutured to the culture in which we exist just as the masks in “Manhunt” are sutured to the faces of men. Mr. Taguchi succeeds in losing his mask when he succeeds in finding no reason at all to step away from the very thing that defines him: life within society.  

To the reporters, he is at least a curious salaryman.  To the strippers, he is at least a real weirdo.  To the steam engine, Mr. Taguchi is nothing.

And we actually see the moments where things begin to unravel. After several hours of sitting at his work desk, festering in the lukewarm pot of his day job--a pot meant to simmer with other ingredients during daylight hours--Mr. Taguchi becomes paralyzed “like a puppet feeling his strings attached.” Here he spies the secret of the puppet show, and rather than going outside and having a smoke like the rest of us when we see it, he yanks at his strings and flounders through a handful of days as a hopeless marionette ronin clanking about the Japanese countryside.

At the end, the two reporters sit and wonder what will happen if he inevitably goes missing again. Of course, they’re mainly worried about losing their story, as any good, modern, immoral journalist would be thinking. But then one of them wonders much more specifically, “what’s there to keep him?” We of course know the answer: everything. Inherently, society itself should keep him, somehow, because the minute he is no longer kept, the minute he steps outside of its limits, he is no longer ‘him’ and ceases to be entirely. "Manhunt" is an ode to this existential tautology.

As Tsuge cuts to the last panel, one reporter lights a cigarette for the other, as he thanks his friend for the light, unspoken. Where Mr. Taguchi's reasons were obtuse, his mind impenetrable, even at times from his own internal gaze, a simple thank you readily passes without words between the two reporters, dancing across The Ties That Bind like a telegram.