I am not a prolific reader of manga. I consumed a lot of anime in my teens and early 20s, but never crossed over much into manga, apart from big marquee titles such as Ghost in the Shell, and even then, I saw the film first. Since then, though, I have read a bit more, and I have liked most that I have read: and I feel like I know what I like. Just don't consider me an expert.
One artist I have recently begun investigating is Kenji Tsuruta, and the reason for this blog post is to share the material that first attracted me to his art: a lovely collection of paintings that concern themselves with female public nudity.
It should be no surprise to readers of my blog that I love seeing depictions of public nudity, especially where the nude is female, confident/comfortable, and the only one naked. To that end, I often find myself seeking out art, and porn, that shows these type of scenarios and situations.
If you are looking at collections of images on the internet, the chances are high that what you see will not be shown with any sort of attribution towards the artist/model/creator. People just right-click and save anything that they like the look of, then later they might image dump a bunch of pics related by subject matter, where it's found by people like me looking for inspirational kink fuel.
It was in one such collection that I found an image I particularly liked. It showed a young woman about to head out of her front door. She's carrying a satchel, so it may be she is off to college or to work. She's got one shoe on and she is just pulling on the other one as she opens the door. This, coupled with the slice of toast hanging out of her mouth (her breakfast) suggests she is running late (it is a common trope in anime and manga to show a female character who has poor timekeeping, maybe doesn't quite have her life together, is a bit lazy and likes to sleep in, running down the street with a piece of toast in her mouth so she can get to school before the bell rings).
Oh, and aside from her short cotton socks and sensible brown shoes, she is completely naked.
What is happening the painting is clear: this young lady is about to go out in public nude. Why? The painting by itself does not address it. Is she so disorganised, and in such a hurry, that she has forgotten to put on clothes (that can definitely be a fun starting place for an ENF-type scenario)? Or is this an intentional act? Does she inhabit a world where this would be something normal for a girl like her to do, or is she about to break a huge social taboo for reasons known only to her?
I love stuff like this for how it fuels the imagination. I could look at that image and come up with two or three scenarios for stories, depending on your nudity fetish of choice. More than once in the past I have written a story or a scene in one of my novels because of a photograph or illustration that encouraged me to come up with my own explanation for what I am seeing.
Of course, it doesn't hurt that the young woman is lovely to look at. The artist (who I will come to in a moment) has depicted her with pleasing, full breasts and a shapely bottom. She is idealised certainly - but there is also a realism in her stance and her pose, the positions of her arms and legs, the way her head is half-turned and her eyes looking back. She seems unselfconscious, adding weight to the interpretation that either she doesn't know that she is naked, or doesn't care.
As I said, when I first found this image, it was stripped (pardon the pun) of all context. I didn't know who had painted it or what it came from. I would have been interested to know, but this was many years ago, pre-Google Lens and so forth, when it was much more difficult to tell a search engine to find the source of a picture.
So it sat in my collection of inspirational illustrations for several years, until on another website I saw the following image:
Although not quite the same as the previous illustration, there are too many shared features for them to not be connected.
For one, they are both again in the same particular distinctive light watercolour technique. The woman has the same shapely figure, the same brown satchel, the same cotton socks and brown shoes. Her hair is a bit lighter in colour, but maybe that's because she is outside in the sunshine (this same blue sky that was visible through the crack in the door in the first image)?
Of course, she's also still naked. This time we see her from the front, revealing the body parts the previous picture doesn't. She still looks lovely, and we can see now she has a pleasingly-rendered bush of pubic hair (not all manga artists will include this detail so it helps add to what makes this image memorable) - again, despite the cartoonish manga style, the artist has taken the time to give a greater sense of realism and detail.
This time, the artist has added another intriguing touch - visible around the girl, against the blue sky, is the faint outline of clothing - a dress, perhaps, or a skirt and short-sleeved blouse. What does this mean? Is she dressed after all and we are seeing through her clothes? That seems unlikely. Is this outline telling us that she, at this moment, believes herself to be dressed?
That's certainly one option, but the girl's pose seems to tell a different story. She isn't cringing in embarrassment; quite the reverse, she almost seems to be jumping for joy. Does the outline of her dress represent the clothes she has consciously, deliberately chosen to leave behind? Is she reveling in the feel of the sun and the breeze on her bare skin? Is she enjoying going out in public naked?
The existence of two images of the same girl by the same artist made both together more intriguing to me than either might have been in isolation, although I was still (at that time) without the means to identify where either originally came from.
That was until recently, when I happened to see both images on another website and, this time, one had been posted by someone who had taken the time to credit the artist: identifying them as Kenji Tsuruta.
Kenji Tsuruta is a manga artist known for his distinctive, light watercolour style, which you can see exactly in these two paintings. His manga also feature black and white pages drawn with fine lines and a great deal of detail. He also draws very lovely women, and is no stranger to depicting nudity in his work. The presence of pubic hair on the women he draws is something of a trademark and one that (as I have already said) marks him out from a lot of other manga artists who depict nudity (especially because Japan's publishing laws regarding erotic/pornographic material for a long time had stipulations about what could and could not be shown, and pubic hair - on both sexes - was on the no list).
Tsuruta is know for writing and illustrating the science fiction anthology serial Spirit of Wonder, which was published between 1986 and 1995 and stories from which were adapted into a couple of OAVs (Original Animation Videos - basically films or shorter serials that come out on video/DVD rather than being movies or TV shows). Since then he's written and drawn several short manga works and a number of art books, and has been recognised as an exceptional illustrator, receiving several awards.
In recent years, Tsuruta has embraced a more surrealist approach, which is going to be important when talking about these paintings.
In 2004 Tsuruta published an art book called Hitahita ( ひたひた), which means "lapping" (as in the motion of water) or "steadily". Although Tsurata had already drawn and painted some nudes in other contexts, Hitahita was his first art book themed almost entirely around the female nude. The paintings I have been talking about come from that book, and are part of a sequence. Aside from the two I have already discussed, four other paintings involve the same character and depict public nudity.
The previous two paintings do lend themselves, in my mind, to a "story" - although in Hitahita they are the other way around than I have recorded them here. The first painting, the "jumping for joy" one, seems to function as a sort of cover page, while the one where our girl prepares to leave the house naked for her day is the first part of the story itself.
The next painting in the sequence, I think, picks up a bit later on. In this painting, our naked girl has boarded a train, to commute into town. She sits between two middle-aged businessmen who are also commuting.
Now her morning appears to already be catching up with her. It seems that, if she was in danger of being late for her train, it was most likely because she overslept - and now she is on the train, she has nodded off again, her head lolling towards the shoulder of the businessman next to her.
And, of course, she is still naked, although she's covering herself a little by having her hands folded demurely in her lap. This is our first full glimpse of our girl interacting with the wider world, and from the limited perspective we receive from this painting, we can observe that her nakedness is, at the very least, not a state shared by everyone in this universe. The two men either side of her on the train seats are normally-dressed: this isn't some nudist alternate reality. We are beginning to get the sense that this girl, going nude in public, may be doing something that marks her as unique.
Unique, but not necessarily unacceptable. Perhaps it is just the famous Japanese politeness, but it does not appear, judging by this picture alone, that being naked is going to cause others to stop this woman leading her normal life - that people around her may find her unusual, but not shocking. The man reading the paper is looking at her with a mixture of surprise and annoyance, true, but this is slightly ambiguous as to whether or not this is because he has noticed her naked body, or because she is unknowingly falling asleep on his shoulder when he is trying to read his newspaper.
This type of only-one-naked scene is one that I particularly enjoy - a depiction of a nude female, completely comfortable with her own nudity, in some sort of interaction with clothed people who also treat her nakedness as relatively normal; or at least, not worth worrying about. I'm talking about something like Kara Bryn's story 'Dressed in Tattoos' where one (and only one) of the party guests is completely naked, and nobody else (with the exception of the narrator in that story) bats an eyelid because they are used to and accept her. It isn't immediately clear from the pictures we have seen so far, but the girl in Tsurata's paintings seems to be accepted even though she is naked. We still don't know why she is naked, but she is, and people seem okay with that - so let's just enjoy it.
Further confirmation that people who meet this girl seem to be okay with her nudity comes with what I think is the next painting in the sequence. Our girl has now arrived at her place of work (this is apparent from the fact that the two other women in the painting wear uniforms with name badges, while a computer running a spreadsheet or booking form is visible in the background) and is interacting with a colleague.
(Admittedly that is an interpretation, she could just as easily be a customer of this business, except that I don't believe she'd be running out of her house with her toast in her mouth early enough to fall asleep on a commuter train if she was just going to visit a business on an errand).
Are they friends catching up on office gossip? Or is the clothed woman a superior, and the naked woman is having to explain why she has arrived late to work? Perhaps clothed woman is telling naked woman she had better look lively as the boss is on their way. Going by facial expressions, the naked girl does look like she might anticipating trouble.
Or, is she explaining why she has arrived at the office in the nude? For some reason I can't fully explain, I don't think this is the case. For one, once again our naked girl isn't showing any sign of shame, or of discomfort with the fact her body (including, again, her bush of pubic hair - which we now know is something of a Tsuruta trademark when he draws naked women) is revealed. Nor does it seem as though the clothed woman is especially shocked by the presence of her nude colleague - while in the background another clothed woman is quietly plugging away at her work and not reacting at all.
We are starting to get a sense, I think, that however remarkable it might seem to us, within the world of this story, people who see this girl simply accept that she is naked without questioning it. Indeed, it may be the way she usually is. Apart from her being late, this might just be another workday for our girl - she may never wear clothes, and never wonder to herself why everyone else around her does, either. Nudity may simply be her normal state of being.
Our fifth picture takes our girl's adventure to after the working day is finished, and maybe gives us a bit more insight into her life.
Our girl is now in a restaurant or bar, sitting down at a table and enjoying a meal. She is, as we would expect, still completely naked, and is now also in the process of downing a sizeable mug of beer.
Once again, we see that her being naked is not, for her, any sort of barrier toward interacting with the society in which she lives. She has been allowed in to the restaurant, seated, and served food and beer, all in spite of the fact that she has absolutely nothing on. So her nudity is not a problem for others. Indeed, she is once again pictured alongside clothed people, but these people are all engaged in their own activities, eating and talking. They have surely noticed the naked girl in their midst, accepted her and moved on.
But back to the beer. I know from my own travels in Japan, and my interactions with Japanese people who have travelled here to the UK, that the Japanese can drink. Pounding a few beers in an evening is just one of those things a lot of working-age Japanese people like to do to wind down, especially those who have high-pressure jobs. So the fact that our naked girl is putting the beer away should not be interpreted by us as a sign of problematic levels of drinking; as a Japanese person would see it, she is just doing a normal post-work activity.
The beers on the way home, though, might serve to give us some insight into why our naked girl might be finding herself oversleeping in the morning, dozing off on the train to work, and maybe getting to the office late. Indeed, we can see something of that in the "final" image of the sequence.
We're back on the train, now, and our girl looks... a little the worse for wear. She may well have had one beer too many at the restaurant. In the morning, even though she was dozing off on her commute, she was sat demurely, with her hands folded in her lap. Now, though, even while awake she is slumped and sprawled in her seat, with her face flushed, and her legs spread wide.
Of course, because she is still naked, her sitting position is almost certainly giving the boys in their baseball caps opposite her a veritable eyeful (if you look very closely at the boy on the left, holding his glove up to his face, he appears to be having a nosebleed - a very common manga and anime trope that afflicts horny teenage boys when they see an attractive female in some sort of state of undress). She doesn't seem to care though, and it is this lack of caring that is amusing in this scene. It's also the first time we've seen anybody definitely greeting our girl's nakedness with anything other than casual indifference, which is interesting - apparently her body is still an exciting sight to some, even if almost everyone else treats her being nude as completely normal.
So there, with all six paintings, we have a complete story. We have a woman who, probably through having overslept, has to quickly get out of the house to avoid missing her train for work. She falls asleep again on the train, and although she eventually does make it to her workplace, she may well have failed to avoid being late. After work, she stops to eat at a restaurant and gets a bit drunk before heading back home, and will no doubt oversleep and find herself late and in a rush again tomorrow.
The only thing is, of course, that during this entire story, in all the public places she visits, she's completely naked.
Why is she naked? Is she an exhibitionist? A nudist? Magical? Has she simply tested the boundaries of the society in which she lives and found them more tolerant than she ever could have expected?
I wrote the majority of this blog post before reading the Hitahita art book. As a result, at the time, I had no idea if there is an explainable, logical reason for the woman in the paintings' nudity that the book would make clear.
And, having now read Hitahita, I'm not really any the wiser! Hitahita apparently contains an interview with Tsuruta but the scanned copy I am working from (the book was only published in Japan so a physical copy is expensive and not easy for me to acquire) excludes this and anyway, I can't read Japanese. So I don't know if Tsuruta talks about these particular pieces, about other pieces in the book, or just about his work in general.
However, despite there being no explanatory text, or even titles, in the book, viewing these paintings in their original context in the art book does give a bit more insight, and offers up interpretations that don't rely on logic or realism.
The six paintings I've described above come towards the end of the book, and do indeed seem to detail the life of a single character (it is, admittedly, hard to tell; Tsuruta definitely has not just a style but a type, and the other women depicted nude in the art book all look very similar, although some are clearly meant to be characters from his other works, and occasionally he will vary the hairstyles).
However, intriguingly, the six completed images are not the only paintings and drawings in this set. In between the scene of the woman drinking in the restaurant, and her train ride home, Tsuruta has inserted two pages of unpainted sketches showing the same character; whether drafts, discarded ideas or just practice attempts isn't mentioned.
The second of these pages contains a sketch that would seem to fill in a gap between the painting of the woman at her front door, and her sleepy commute to work - it shows her walking outside, nude, along a bridge, satchel over her shoulder. There is also another image in the foreground of her from the back - interestingly in this image she seems almost to be covering herself: if she is, this would seem to be the only time in the sequence she would be showing any awareness that she is naked.
More interesting still is the first of the two sketches. In this drawing, the woman appears four times: twice in the nude, once in her underwear - and once fully clothed.
It is this fully-clothed image, ironically, that is the most revealing; because the woman is standing nude looking into a mirror, out of which her reflection stares fully-clothed.
Does Tsuruta's choice to sketch her this way imply a way to interpret the other paintings. Is the woman going out nude, but believes she is not? Does she see herself as fully dressed as she makes her way naked through her day? It's only one of many possible interpretations, but the presence of this sketch does raise it as a possibility.
But if the woman is under the delusion she is clothed, when in fact she is naked, how is she able to maintain this delusion? How has nobody said; "excuse me miss, why are you walking around with no clothes on?" How has her boss at the company where she works not admonished her for being out of the employee uniform?
Perhaps I'm being too literal in my interpretation. Perhaps the figure in the mirror is not how she sees herself, but how the world at large sees her. Perhaps nobody knows she is naked but the woman herself. Perhaps this is why her colleagues don't have any reaction, why she is able to be served in a restaurant despite being completely naked?
Except... the boy in the final painting has a nosebleed, which is anime/manga shorthand for "horny teenage boy sees something sexy". That certainly suggests that he's able to see that the young woman is naked when she's slumped opposite him on the train with her legs akimbo. So I don't think her clothes are meant to be illusory - I think she really is supposed to be nude in public.
Ultimately, I think it is perhaps not correct to try and apply a cohesive narrative, or a logical explanation, to these paintings. It is useful to remember that Tsuruta is often a surrealist painter, and the get-out clause for surrealist art is that it is deliberately obscure in interpretation, that it does not need to 'make sense', and any sense imposed on it comes from attempts made by the viewer, not necessarily from the artist.
Because my interest is themes of public nudity, and because these are fun, titillating images showing a young woman going naked in public places where everyone else is clothed, and because I am a writer who likes to describe such things, I find myself drawn to wanting to make a narrative around them to make sense of them where, perhaps, none really exists.
In fact, seeing them in Hitahita actually serves to disprove my interpretation that these images depict a single, typical day in the life of the naked woman. That's because Tsuruta has also produced, after these paintings, duplicate sets that are much more safe-for-work, showing the same woman, in the same locations and poses, but in her underwear and fully dressed. And, when she is fully dressed, she wears different clothes in each image, suggesting that each of these images shows a different time period in her life, rather than the same day. That's added to by the sketch drawings, including a third sketch page after the final train picture, which all show a recurring motif of calendar days, possibly implying the passage of time.
I feel that, ultimately, chasing a definitive answer to what is happening in these paintings is not in the spirit of them as art. Part of what I so enjoyed about these paintings is in my discovery of them piece by piece, putting a story around them together in my head; but the real fun is in the not knowing. I don't know why this woman is naked, just that she is, and that's a cool thing by itself.
There's a quote I saw attributed (with a caveat - this was on Instagram so I don't know if he really said it) to Kenji Tsuruta, discussing how he has drawn or painted so many of his female characters in the nude, that seems to gently rebuke those who go looking for a reason for this. "Nudity is absurd", he says. We shouldn't assign significance to nakedness. Looking for deeper meaning in these surrealist drawings of a young woman going about the chaos of her daily life completely, unselfconsciously, obliviously naked isn't the point. It's beautiful, sexy, fun art.
Just enjoy the train ride.
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