News

Glacier Bay Books Licenses Arata Imai's Underground Manga 'F'

The America-based online bookstore Glacier Bay Books announced on Friday that it will release an English edition of Arata Imai's F manga. The manga released in Japan in 2015 under the title I Am John Cantlie.

Comics historian and translator Ryan Holmberg is translating the manga, and will also provide an essay to accompany and contextualize the manga.

Holmberg describes the manga:

Though virtually unknown in its home country, Imai Arata's F (2015) is easily the edgiest work of manga made in the wake of the 2011 tsunami and nuclear meltdowns. It is a couple of years after the disaster. Tohoku, northern Japan, has seceded from Japan. The rebels, known as the Nihonmatsu Front, have been battling the more heavily armed Japanese government along the southern border of Fukushima. Meanwhile, they are being overwhelmed internally by a faction who call themselves Nation F. Composed of radicalized Tohoku natives and foreign guerillas, the black-clad Nation F and their Pennywise-like leader know only absolute obedience and cutthroat terror. Narrated from the perspective of a British-Japanese photojournalist who has secretly entered Fukushima to document the conflict, Imai's F is a sharp and harrowing reflection on the resentment felt by Fukushima residents toward the Japanese government's negligence and the historical sacrifice of Japan's rural margins for the majesty of its urban centers. Crossing splintery drawings of the devastations wrought by the tsunami and meltdowns with images drawn from newscasts about the then-rising Islamic State in the Middle East, this manga trespasses upon many taboos regarding political expression and moral etiquette in Japan, where the discursive climate around the 2011 disasters was, for many years, sensitive to the point of repressive.

Holmberg stated the manga had 200 self-published copies that sold at avant-garde art exhibitions in Japan, but did not have distribution in Japan outside of that. He added he had been looking "for years ... for a collaborator to publish [the manga] in English."

Glacier Bay Books will publish the manga in 2021, which will mark the 10th anniversary of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami disaster.

Source: Glacier Bay Books