Baron Yoshimoto arrives at Lucca Comics & Games 2024 directly from Japan, with a cowboy shirt and an impeccable hairdo. Ha 83 years old and it doesn’t show them. He debuted in the world of manga in 1959, and immediately became one of the most influential representatives of the genre gekiga: comics that were instead aimed at adult readers and young workers with dramatic, noir, realistic stories, full of eros, violence and pathos. In Lucca, the manga sensei left his mark (literally) in the Walk of Fame of the largest Italian event dedicated to comics and manga.
Yoshimoto arrived in Italy this year (for the first time since his trip in the 1970s) with Coconino Press together with a work that was unpublished by us for too long, but so popular in Japan that it has generated a saga of over 9 thousand comic pages: <a href="https://www.archysport.com/2024/06/cuban-judo-legend-luis-teodoro-gaston-castro-dies-at-age-86/” title=”Cuban Judo Legend Luis Teodoro Gastón Castro Dies at Age 86″>The legends of Judoa story that follows multiple generations of a family of judokas, whose lives, loves and efforts are intertwined with the history of Japan from the Meiji period (1868-1912) to the 1970s.
“I worked on The legends of Judo for more than 10 years, and among my manga it is the one I am most attached to”. This is what Baron Yoshimoto says when meeting the press at Lucca Comics & Games, also returning to the origins of his own astonishing career: “Start working as a mangaka it wasn’t easyin an era when it was not a widespread or well-accepted profession. But I felt it was a life mission, and I was lucky because I met some editors who understood my needs, and let me carry on my style.”.
Yoshimoto’s stories are strongly rooted in Japan, describing its peculiarities, vices, defects and virtues, and sketching portraits of extraordinary characters (such as the “judo masters”) as well as common people who find themselves for one reason or another on the margins of society and live abnormal experiences, as in the anthology Seventeen **(J-Pop editions). It is surprising, then, to discover the breadth of sources of inspiration from which the mangaka has drawn over the course of his decades-long career. “I spent a period in the United States, during which I read American comics, and I got carried away a lot by western genre films”. A trend that is still evident in the author’s clothing, as he himself underlines by indicating his own suit sheriff style. “I also loved the macaroni western Italians [così sono noti in Giappone gli spaghetti western, ndR]; but also Italian neorealism, such as Bicycle thieveswhich is very famous in Japan. I love Giuliano Gemma, Franco Nero, Gian Maria Volonté. And above all – the maestro laughs – I love it Claudia Cardinale”.
