Creative Staff
Story & Art: Tatsuki Fujimoto
Translation: Amanda Haley
Lettering: Snir Aharon
What They Say:
From the creator of Chainsaw Man, Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Look Back is a poignant coming-of-age story that captures the struggles of being an artist through an acute lens of personal trauma and perseverance.
The Review:
Content (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Riding the wave of his breakthrough manga, Chainsaw Man, Tatsuki Fujimoto did the unthinkable – he stopped making Chainsaw Man. For manga artists in Weekly Shonen Jump, serialization is everything. Ending a story on your own terms is very admirable, but to wrap it up at the height of its popularity, in Japan’s premier comics magazine, is almost unheard of. Granted, this was just the end of Chainsaw Man’s first part. But at the ripe age of 28, Fujimoto still has many stories to tell.
Between Chainsaw Man Parts One and Two, Fujimoto wrote two short stories for Shonen Jump: Goodbye Eri and Look Back. The latter of the two was published just seven months after Part One had concluded. One might ask themselves, “Why would Fujimoto stop Chainsaw Man to write these stories?” The way I see it, Fujimoto wrote Goodbye Eri because he wanted to, but he wrote Look Back because he needed to. Look Back is the most personal story of Fujimoto’s career.
The story begins with our main character Ayumu Fujino, an elementary school student with a knack for writing comic strips. While her art is crude and amateur, they always get a laugh out of her fellow students, who shower her with compliments. But one day, a student named Kyomoto adds her own comics to the weekly school newspaper. The stark contrast between Kyomoto’s artistic talent and Fujino’s is clear as day, as even the other students point out. With a new rival on the scene, Fujino is determined to improve her art and beat out the competition. This is where Fujimoto sets up the first of Look Back’s major themes.
Being an artist is difficult, to say the least. If you’ve ever web-searched for ways to improve your drawing skills, you’ll come across a plethora of tips and tricks to make you a better artist. Advice will vary, but in all honesty, there’s only one surefire way to becoming a better artist: “Just draw, stupid!”
Draw. Draw, and draw, and draw some more. Keep drawing until you can’t draw anymore. Draw something 1000 times, and then draw it again. And after all that time spent drawing, you might improve a bit. Even then, sometimes it isn’t enough.
That painstaking endeavor is displayed abundantly throughout Look Back. At just 142 pages, nearly a quarter of its panels illustrate the countless days Fujino spends drawing at her desk. Time marches on, the seasons change, and suddenly two years go by. Fujino would forego socializing, extracurriculars, and all other facets of life to spend more time drawing. She alienated herself to improve her craft, yet her friends and family show a complete disregard for her efforts, and actively shame her for prioritizing art over all else. And while Fujino’s art marginally improved overtime, it still paled in comparison to Kyomoto.
This is the Achilles heel for anyone attempting to improve their craft (whether it be art, music, etc.). The amount of time and effort needed is daunting, and often times there’s no reward at the end of the road. You can spend years giving it your all and still come up empty-handed. They say not to compare your art to others, but it’s only human to feel like you’re always one step behind your contemporaries. Looking at the school newsletter, it’s clear that Fujino is still no match for Kyomoto. That’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. Fujino decides to spend the rest of sixth grade making up for lost time, hanging out with her friends and family; abandoning her art.
But the strings of fate would tie Fujino and Kyomoto together once more. On graduation day, Fujino’s teacher asks her to deliver Kyomoto’s graduation certificate to her house. Despite all their time spent beside each other in the newsletter, the two have never met because Kyomoto doesn’t come to school. When Fujino arrives at Kyomoto’s place, she’s greeted with a blunt realization of what she was up against. The hallway leading to Kyomoto’s room is filled with illustration books. In comparison, for every book Fujino filled out, Kyomoto had drawn tenfold. Fujino draws a quick comic strip to spite Kyomoto and accidentally drops it underneath Kyomoto’s door. She tries to run away but Kyomoto stops her. Fujino is blindsided by what happens next – Kyomoto reveals that she is Fujino’s biggest fan.
The veil is lifted from Fujino’s eyes. She believed she could never match up to Kyomoto, but the one holding Fujino back from improving, and more importantly, enjoying her journey, was Fujino herself. With her confidence newly restored, Fujino runs home in the rain, resulting in one of the most stunning page-turns I’ve ever experienced in manga. The look on Fujino’s face is a mix of frustration and elation, as if she felt ridiculous to have given up her art in the first place. She had been ridiculed for the one thing she wanted to do the most, and at times it felt like her endeavors were worthless. But Kyomoto was the one person that truly understood her, and her support was life-affirming for Fujino. The fire had been reignited; Fujino once again picks up her pencil and goes back to the drawing board.
The second act begins similarly to the first one, with Fujino working tirelessly on her craft. But there’s one key difference – Fujino isn’t alone anymore. She and Kyomoto spend their middle school days drawing side-by-side. No longer shackled by invasive thoughts and jealousy, they each put their best foot forward and use each other’s strengths to create something neither of them could have created alone. With Fujino’s writing skills and Kyomoto’s impressive art, the two of them manage to win an amateur contest and debut a story together in Shonen Jump under the pseudonym Kyo Fujino. Not only were they excelling artistically, but their solidarity had also vastly improved other aspects of their lives. The two spend time hanging out, shopping, going to movies, and doing all the things they couldn’t afford to do when consumed by the trials of creating art in isolation.
This high point in the story is the foundation for another one of Look Back’s major themes – the importance of inspiration. When they were in grade school, both Fujino and Kyomoto had very halfhearted reasons for drawing manga. For Fujino, she drew because people told her she was good at it. Friends and family alike told her she could be a manga artist, and that alone was enough for her to pursue her art. But creating art with the expectation of admiration would prove to be a double-edged sword when her admirers eventually turned on her. On the other hand, a shut-in like Kyomoto drew simply because she was bored. But boredom isn’t a credible motivator in any walk of life. It wasn’t until they had each other that Fujino and Kyomoto would make their dreams a reality. I think Fujimoto’s intent here can be applied more widely – if you choose to start a career in any form of art, but especially manga, you’d better have a damned good reason for doing it. Like I said earlier, making art isn’t easy. But to truly make it in that world, you need something or someone that can inspire you through both the good times and the bad. It’s that important bond between Fujino and Kyomoto that leads us into the devastating third act of Look Back.
Kyo Fujino are offered the chance of a lifetime – a serialized manga series. As students on the verge of graduating high school, this opportunity has a chance at setting them up for the rest of their lives. But this crucial juncture presents a catch-22 – Kyomoto wants to go to art school.
Fujino and Kyomoto stand on opposite sides of the artist’s ravine. Both believe their path to be the right one, to a selfish degree. But neither choice is a guaranteed success. A lot of the points Fujino makes, while harsh, are true to an extent. An art degree does not always entail a job, and balancing her art on top of experiencing college life is a lot to ask, especially of a girl like Kyomoto. With a chance at instant acclaim that comes with serialization, it does seem like a no-brainer that Kyomoto should use the serialization experience as a means to improve her art.
But serialization is also a slippery slope. If you’ve read enough weekly manga over the years, you should be somewhat aware of the toll it takes on the artists. Producing high-quality art and writing on a weekly basis is unequivocally difficult, and many popular mangaka will literally work themselves sick to stay on schedule. This has led to an unhealthy culture of expectations for serialized artists, to the point where many of them have permanent health issues or in worse cases, die from overworking. And that’s only if you actually manage to keep your serialization. Publications like Shonen Jump can be a dog-eat-dog world at times, and the threat of losing your serialization can come to fruition in a matter of weeks if readers aren’t interested. Neither of them has an easy decision to make, and unfortunately, that impasse would spell the end of their partnership. Kyomoto would go to art school and Fujino would continue the serialization alone.
For a while, things seem to be going well for Fujino. Her serialized manga “Shark Kick” goes on for 11 volumes and even lands an anime adaption. But while working on the next volume, Fujino sees a disturbing news headline: a man walked into Yamagata Art College and attacked students with an axe, leaving 12 people dead. One of those 12 victims was Kyomoto. Following the news, “Shark Kick” would go on indefinite hiatus. Fujino returns to Kyomoto’s old house, standing in the hallway filled with books just like she did all those years ago. On the floor outside Kyomoto’s bedroom, she spots the comic strip that inevitably brought the two together. Fujino convinces herself that if she never drew that comic, they never would have met and Kyomoto wouldn’t have died. In the depths of despair, Fujino has lost her reason for creating art and once again throws it away. She tears up the comic strip, but just like that first fateful day, a piece of the comic floats beneath Kyomoto’s door as we enter the final act of Look Back.
What if on that day, Kyomoto couldn’t muster up the courage to leave her room and confront Fujino? What plays out is an alternate reality where the two of them never created manga together. But as fate would have it, Kyomoto still pursued art school to hone her craft, and the killer would once again appear. But just as he’s about to kill Kyomoto, Fujino flies in with a heroic kick to the assailant. Kyomoto thanks her savior and realizes she was Fujino-sensei, the girl whose comics she idolized in grade school. The two would become friends, and possibly reignite Fujino’s passion for art once more. Kyomoto returns home and draws a comic about their fateful meeting and thanks to a handy gust of wind, blows the comic under her door, where the dejected real-world Fujino would receive it. Fujino hurriedly enters Kyomoto’s room, but the reality is that Kyomoto is gone. In her room is a full collection of “Shark Kick”, a Shonen Jump reader survey, and hanging on her door, the sweater that Fujino autographed when they first met. She remembers a certain day she and Kyomoto spent together. Fujino seemed self-aware of all the pitfalls I mentioned about the struggles of being an artist. With all that insight, even she thought she’d be better off not drawing manga.
“Then why do you draw, Fujino?” Kyomoto asks.
Looking back at the only times she was truly happy making her art, it was all because of Kyomoto. That was reason enough for her to move forward. The story ends right where it began, looking at Fujino’s back, as she continues to write her story.
The struggles of being an artist are outlined all throughout Look Back, but Fujimoto saves the most visceral ones for the final act. Most artists (well, most people for that matter) experience regret in their lives. The stories that failed, the stories that didn’t live up to their potential, the stories that were never told. Throughout our lives, we look back on the moments that made us, and we ask, “What if…?”. Sometimes it was a choice we made, and sometimes it was a matter out of our control. What if all it took was one simple decision for things to turn out differently? The answer to those questions will never be solved. Life just isn’t that simple. But Fujimoto’s fatalistic response to Fujino’s “What if” is a perfect ending for Look Back and brings together a strong final theme for the story.
Before we get to that, we need to talk about the timing of Look Back’s release, which came with implications that readers think may have attributed to the manga’s creation. On July 18th of 2019, news broke that Kyoto Animation Studio 1 was burned down in an arson attack. 36 people were killed. It goes down as one of the deadliest massacres in Japan since the end of World War II. This event shook the anime industry and forever changed the lives of many.
Look Back was published two years after the arson attack, almost to the exact day. There are also haunting similarities between the Kyoto Animation arsonist and the assailant from Look Back, both claiming their attacks were fueled by accusations of plagiarism. Whether Fujimoto knew a victim personally, wrote Look Back in response to the event, or just happened by sheer coincidence, we’ll never know. What’s more important is the harsh reality that both represent about the current state of entertainment, not only in Japan but around the world.
Creating art is as much a struggle with oneself as it is with one’s audience. Anime and manga specifically have skyrocketed in popularity over the last decade, reaching international acclaim the likes of which we’ve never seen. Fujimoto himself is no less part of that momentum – with the imminent release of the Chainsaw Man anime, it’s looking to be one of the biggest television events not only in Japan but around the world. But with all that acclaim and hype comes an equal amount of resistance and toxicity. The internet age gave birth to a massive shift in how we consume media and interact with the creators and other fans. Online discourse spawned fans and haters in equal parts – it’s hard to scroll through Twitter on any given day and not see people arguing over their favorite pieces of media. But sometimes the discourse goes far beyond civil, and some people end up committing heinous acts to those they don’t agree with. It’s a big reason why many manga artists operate under a pseudonym, some of them going so far as to mask their social presence to avoid readers finding out what they look like. Fujimoto himself is no stranger to death threats and even stated in an interview that, “I don’t show my face for fear of being killed.” We live in a world where people are willing to kill each other over the most trivial of things, and the Kyoto Animation arson attack is a devious byproduct of what our online culture (not to mention the poor state of mental health awareness in modern society) has come to.
In response to the devastating arson attack, fans and businesses raised over 3.3 billion yen (as well as 2.3 million dollars internationally) to support the studio, survivors, and grieving families. Since then, Kyoto Animation have recovered ever-so slightly, continuing to train aspiring animators and produce new animations. Even in the aftermath of complete devastation, there’s still hope for the future. It’s that spirit of perseverance in the face of trauma, regret, and an unknowable future, that shapes the final theme of Look Back.
When I say Fujimoto needed to make Look Back, this may be the reason why. Look Back feels like a personal letter from Fujimoto to his younger self. Not only are certain details very similar to Fujimoto’s own life (winning awards at a young age; the “Shark Kick” spoof) but the characters names are quite literally an anagram for his name (Fujino and Kyomoto). It’s likely that both characters represent a side of Fujimoto. With that in mind, what is Fujimoto trying to tell himself, as well as the readers, with Look Back?
Taking the title into consideration, what does “Look Back” mean? I think it can be interpreted two different ways, each pertaining to a different part of the story. At the beginning, “Look Back” is portrayed as a weakness. Fujino can’t help but remember the respect of her peers and family as the catalyst for her artistry, and so she chases those feelings of adoration. But once those same people turn their backs on her, she looks back at those moments with contempt, a version of herself she can no longer attain. It becomes a cycle of self-loathing, a mental barricade that stunts her growth as an artist. If all Fujino does is look back, she’ll never see the road ahead. But by the story’s end, I think “Look Back” has a more optimistic connotation.
The loss of a loved one is something we never truly recover from. When overcome with those intense feelings of sadness, anger, regret, confusion, it can be hard to even see what’s in front of you. But it’s in those times of uncertainty that we can look back and remember the reason you’re here in the first place. Why Fujino draws; why Fujimoto draws. It’s that inspiration that allows us to pick ourselves up and keep moving forward. For Fujino, looking back on her time with Kyomoto is reason enough to carry on.
“Keep your eyes on my back and you’ll grow too.”
In Summary:
Tatsuki Fujimoto pens his most personal story to date, equal parts heartbreaking as it is inspiring. Look Back is a master craft in short-form storytelling.
Content Grade: A
Art Grade: A
Text/Lettering Grade: A
Age Rating: Teen+
Released By: VIZ Media
Release Date: September 20th, 2022
MSRP: $12.99 (paperback) / $8.99 (digital)
