My Name is Shingo, Perfect Edition Vol. 1 - Kazuo Umezz

Now 87 years old and retired for a few decades, Kazuo Umezz is considered one of the most important and influential of Japanese manga artists in the horror genre, a master recognised by current leading artists in the genre including Junji Ito, but until relatively recently little of his work has been translated into English. One feature that is becoming common now that more works are being published in the West, is the question of how children relate to the the world their parents have created for them, whether it's the apocalyptic landscapes of his masterpiece The Drifting Classroom or the legacy faced by a child twisted by her mother's complex with her appearance in Baptism. The first volume of My Name is Shingo, now being published by Viz, is another major Umezz work that points in the same direction.

The subject that influences 12 year old Satoru Konma and sets him apart from his parents appears to be their relationship to new technology, but inevitably the situation is a little bit more complex than that. Satoru is already different from the other kids. He's not just the odd one in the classroom, although he's definitely one the other kids in the class make fun of for being a little bit weird, but he is Kazuo Umezz kind of strange. Come to that, everything seems strange in the world of Kazuo Umezz, and certainly his parents might have something to do with his character and the strange relationships Konma forms over the course of this first volume.

Satoru's father is of another generation and mindset altogether, which to Satoru is strange in a different way. His father is proud of his physique and his traditional role in the family, even stripping off and showing his muscles in one early scene. His father works at Tokyo Manufacturing a factory that makes motors and parts for farm equipment, but when he arrived home one evening he has news that fires the imagination in the young boy; the company are about to introduce a robot into the factory line. He gets even more excited when a school trip is organised at his dad's place of work, where they now have two robots. Monroe the original and now Leigh, named after two famous movie stars.

The robots are perhaps not the way Satoru imagines them, more simple machines that are programmed to perform basic repetitive tasks. Even that though is a little too much for his father to adapt to, and other work colleagues find it much more difficult, but working with a young girl Marin who he meets from another school on a visit to the factory, Satoru recognises that Monroe has the potential to learn new things, and - we must presume since it is the main narrator of the story - begin to think for itself. Things indeed take a significant turn when Satoru interacts with the robot, the younger boy being more capable of adapting to the newness of the technology than his father. Satoru's unique character allow his to see the potential of what the robot can achieve, and perhaps aid it in getting to a new level.

Created and published between 1982 and 1986 you can imagine that My Name is Shingo might now be predicting the rise of Artificial Intelligence, which makes it a very timely subject to reconsider, but that idea has of course been around for a long time and thoroughly explored in science-fiction. I have no doubt that Umezz's take on the work in subsequent will present his own highly original, unpredictable and disturbing take on the subject.

By the time we get to the end of Volume One of My Name is Shingo, things are already starting to get more than a little weird as we delve into the strange world or connection that is developing between Satoru and Monroe, one exacerbated by the young boy's relationship with Marin. The artwork reflects this beautifully, not just in the situations, not just in the abstract emotional tones that Umezz employs as visualisations in background, but there are some beautiful little surreal standalone images in-between chapters that add to the sinister nature of the story. If previous works by Umezz are anything to go by however, it's very early days yet, and in a series that was originally published in 10 volumes in Japan, you can expect things to get considerably weirder and more horrific still in the volumes to come.

Reading notes: My Name Is Shingo: Volume 1 by Kazuo Umezz is published in Perfect Edition hardcover by Viz Media on the 11 April 2024. It's also available in eBook and Kindle editions. The book is presented in the original Japanese right-to-left format. I viewed a preview copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley.