Tonkatsu-meets-DJ Culture

What led you depict club culture in Tonkatsu DJ Age-Taro?

Yipiao (hereafter Yi): We’re not originally clubbers ourselves. Koyama knows a lot about music, but he wasn’t a seasoned club-goer or anything.

Yi:When we were both in our third or fourth year of college, there was a night when we thought to check out the clubs in Shibuya, just out of curiosity. That was how it all started.

Koyama: It’s not an instructional manga, but by Yipiao’s suggestion, I drew it as an overview of what sort of things could be found at the places where we went.

Koyama: I pretty much stuck to that approach throughout Tonkatsu DJ Age-Taro, and it became my style.

How did you express sound?

──Regarding the music, it was impressive how you were able to coin new onomatopoeia and use different onomatopoeic expressions depending on the music genre.

──In volume eight of the book version of the manga, there’s even a scene where DJ E-Dong Myeong remixes songs by Age-Taro and the others, fusing their distinctive onomatopoeic styles together.

Koyama: I’m glad to know that people are paying attention to how the sounds are expressed. I didn’t set out to develop anything like that initially—I drew it without too much forethought and it just sort of came out well in retrospect, so I say that I developed it.

Music in the Tonkatsu DJ Age-Taro manga

──The songs that appear in the manga are all fictitious, but many of them are based on real-life songs. In particular, in the “Kushikatsu 100-Skewer Mix” episode that appears in volume seven of the manga, you bring up a whole bunch of songs at once.

Koyama: We didn’t show a list of songs in other episodes, but in the “Kushikatsu 100-Skewer Mix” episode we wanted to show that there were a lot of them.
Yi: Like pounding out a whole bunch of major songs in rapid succession. I imagined the sound to be like that of NOEL & GALLAGHER, the DJ unit formed by Yasuharu Konishi and Kazuomi Tsuji.

Koyama: Age-Taro is a beginner DJ, so I thought it was pretty realistic for him to include so many major songs. This episode was the first time we picked out songs with the sense of being DJs, even though we aren't.

Depicting small neighborhood communities

──Another aspect of the manga is how it depicts the characteristics of different districts. I thought you really hit the nail on the head by describing Ikebukuro as a “sort of badass hip-hop town.”

Koyama: Today Ikebukuro has a stronger image of being a town for anime and otaku culture. But, for instance, there’s Bed (a night club) on the west side of the station, and we wanted to depict that sort of thuggish aspect of the district. I was also a fan of the television drama IWGP (Ikebukuro West Gate Park). Kankuro Kudo’s style is our ideal. From Yipiao’s perspective, the district makes up one whole work in itself.

Yi: Rather than imaginary places, I wanted the story to be set in actual locations. I was influenced by Kankuro Kudo’s style of depicting small neighborhood communities, which is why we had regular customers appear at the “snack bars” (cozy drinking establishments) and included the characters’ parents.

A coming-of-age story about a boy and a subculture

──While Tonkatsu DJ Age-Taro is a comedy manga, it’s also a coming-of-age story about a boy who encounters a subculture. In depicting a coming-of-age story, was there anything you were mindful of to maintain the balance of the story?
Yi: Yes—the last part, where he doesn’t get together with the girl he likes. I wanted the punch line to be that she’s moving away because she has her own life beyond how she appears in the story.

Koyama: People still tell us that it would have been better if he had gotten together with the heroine, as though she’s some kind of trophy, but without even having to discuss this with each other, we both agreed that it was definitely better for him to get rejected.

Yi: Fusanosuke Natsume said in his book, “how detailed pictures of food are alright, but nothing looks more delicious than the ultra-simple form of the rice cakes eaten by Shigeru Sugiura’s ninjas.”

Koyama: I really agreed with him on that one. Because of that, I think I may have been conscious of not drawing it too realistically because incorporating a bit of distortion in my style forces the brain to supplement the image and make it appear more delicious.

Tonkatsu and DJ-ing

──Once again, what are your thoughts on how well the combination of tonkatsu and DJ-ing fit together?
Koyama: Partway through the manga, I was truly astounded by how much tonkatsu and DJ-ing had in common. So many jokes matched up, it felt as though we were being called to do this.

Yi: It really was as though some invisible force had called us to make this manga. I think the limitations of having tonkatsu as a framework, rather than being constricting, worked in our favor and helped us to link the content together.