crowbar in the box

reposting anywhere is fine, but please credit me.

Q: While the setting of Hokkaido at the end of Meiji era does feel somewhat familiar, it was still abundant with novelty. It seems to me that the more new stuff you bring into a story, the easier it conflicts with the way people are used to reading manga. How do you find the balance?

Noda: Exploring what others have barely touched upon before has been my goal ever since I was but an aspiring mangaka. Things like baseball and soccer, magic, demons, superpowers, all the genres that have so many fingerprints on them already have never inspired a desire of competition in me.

Rather than fighting my way climbing on a huge mountain with countless rivals, I’d rather make my own little mountain, with what I, myself, find fun. My previous work was about ice hockey, this one was about Ainu as a key element. I have also considered it crucial to include human drama that anyone at all could relate to. Besides that, I was sure to include things that only I have seen and things that the people I’ve met across my life have shared with me, it was all done on purpose. This way, my original story is my own, something that only I would be capable of creating.

For example, take the scene with Ariko Rikimatsu’s father stubbornly showing his son how to carve a makiri. This was a real episode that Kaizawa Tooru-san, an Ainu artisan, has shared with me, and I depicted it as such. Perhaps Kaizawa-san’s father also wanted his son to continue their craft, but didn’t want to force him into it, or so I would like to assume.

American or Brown Creeper (Certhia americana), family Certhiidae, order Passeriformes, WI, USA

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