"Poe" was born - Interview by Moto Hagio III

(Continued from Installation 2)

Moto Hagio Interview (Installment 3)
*So was born "Poe no Ichizoku"

—Some say your magnum opus "Poe no Ichizoku" was influenced by Mr. Ishinomori's short "Mist, Roses, and Stars" (1962). Is it true?

Hagio: Yes, it was. I think I read "Mist, Roses, and Stars" when I was in middle school as a one-shot short in an extra issue of some magazine, just like I read "Yesterday Comes No More, But Neither Tomorrow…" Back then, it seemed like (Mr. Ishinomori) was into time lag—stories that jumped around between the past and future—and he did some full-blown time-shift stories for shojo manga, which were very rare. At that time, I thought "Mist, Roses, and Stars" was such type of story. It was about a girl who turned into a vampire and lived through the past, present and future. So, much later, when I thought about drawing a vampire story, what came back to me out of the blue was "Mist, Roses, and Stars." I thought, "Rather than be confined to one era, one scene, or one town, where a vampire appears, I could draw the past and future of the scenes as well." In "Mist, Roses, and Stars" you have the same scenes in the past and future, but the protagonist doesn't age. So I went, "Hot dog!" (laugh) As for vampire stories, I had read a Japanese edition in a manga called "Dracula the Vampire" by Mitsuteru Yokoyama, but I couldn't finish it because the images were too scary. I was under the impression that vampires were scary, so I don't know what went wrong when I decided to draw [vampires], I remembered the vampire in Mr. Ishinomori's story was beautiful, so I thought I would want to do it myself if it was a pretty vampire.

—I don't think there were any vampire stories that weren't "horror" back then.

Hagio: I don't remember anything else. So I went to see several movies when I decided to draw vampires, but I got scared whenever there were innocent families or a protagonist and they got attacked one by one by vampires laughing, "Mwahahaha." (laugh)

—Those are basically horrors. "Poe no Ichizoku" was special because it was drawn from the vampires' perspectives.

Hagio: Recently, there are some that are written from the viewpoint of vampires, such as The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice. I first saw it [Interview with the Vampire] in the film, and I thought it was cool and started reading the novels. When I discovered that they came out about two years after I did "Poe no Ichizoku," I broke out in a cold sweat, thinking "Oh, god, thank god I was first." (laugh) [the rest is omitted from translation]

(End)

"Poe" was born - Interview by Moto Hagio II

(Continued from Installment 1)

Moto Hagio Interview (Installment 2)
*Even the fighting scenes were sexy

—They say Dr. Osamu Tezuka and the so-called Tokiwa-so generation cartoonists were actively incorporating cinematic approaches in manga and innovative compositions. What do you think were Ishinomori's individual characteristics in his approaches?

Hagio: I think the most singular characteristics of Mr. Ishinomori were his poetry and his delicate pen strokes. I think cinematic approaches and compositions existed before Dr. Tezuka, but he advanced the techniques in laying out the page with a literary sensibility to such a point that it felt like you were really watching a movie, flowing naturally from one panel to the next. Then I think Mr. Ishinomori adapted his style to something we can only call "Ishinomori Rhythm."

—Do you mean there was something particular to his style, that was different from Tezuka's?

Hagio: There are significant similarities among Mr. Ishinomori, Ms. Hideko Mizuno, and Dr. Tezuka in drawing styles and the overall flavor of their layout. Ms. Mizuno and Mr. Ishinomori even collaborated in the beginning. But there are individual characteristics nonetheless, and Ms. Mizuno's strokes were very gorgeous and glittering. Mr. Ishinomori's were delicate and fragile, especially when you see his work in shonen manga [magazines]—you notice that his contribution stands out for its delicateness, like a handsome boy in the middle of fearsome warriors. (laugh) Dr. Tezuka drew in a round style but his strokes were sharp and hard. They appeared very solid.

—And you, Hagio-san, were influenced by those pioneers, too?

Hagio: Today we can use various ways to divide a page into panels, but you seldom saw "Variable-shape Panels" in shonen manga magazines back then, and you could follow the panels in a flow. I learned such rhythms—the pacing—of the layout from them. Dr. Tezuka, Mr. Mitsuteru Yokoyama, Mr. Ishinomori, and Mr. Tetsuya Chiba, they all have their own pacing and stage direction. This may sounds strange, but you can follow all the lines in a balloon. I thought it was a given, but when I became a pro and Gekiga came out, I couldn't read in one breath all the lines in balloons because they were very verbose. (laugh) So I realized this was a very important technique. When it comes to Gekiga, I cannot read [balloons] without taking a breath in the middle. Then I forget what was depicted in the picture while I am reading.

—You ended up just following the lines.

Hagio:

Yes, yes! It just becomes an illustrated story. Cartoonists from Mr. Ishinomori's generation placed just enough lines in a balloon for one breath, no more, no less. It's not tiring to read them, and they were easy to absorb. Back then even my brain was plastic and flexible, so I could just remember a manga of this length (one-shot short) for about a year, with all compositions and lines. I absorbed them like photographic papers. But that didn't work for Gekiga. (laugh) [the rest is omitted from translation]

(Continues to Installment 3)

"Poe" was born - Interview by Moto Hagio I

There is a website called "Ishinomori Shotaro Complete Comic Works" run by Kadokawa, which is dedicated to the late Shotaro Ishinomori. It includes interviews with such notable people as Go Nagai (Cartoonist), Katsuhiro Otomo (Cartoonist/Animator), Sakyo Komatsu (SciFi Novelist), Yasutaka Tsutsui (SciFi Novelist), Mamoru Nagano (Animator), Hiroshi Fujioka (Actor), Shinichi Suzuki (Animator), Hideaki Anno (Animator), Jun Miura (Critic), Keiko Takemiya (Cartoonist), and, of course, Moto Hagio. You may recognize some of these names and be very curious about what they say, but this time I am going to focus on Hagio and only those bits that I find interesting to keep it short.

The interview is about Ishinomori, so it is not of our immediate interest, but there are some passages that reveal a great deal about Hagio. So I am going to translate only those passages that are relevant to our topic of interest: Hagio. Her interview was posted to this website on Nov 15, 2005.

-------------------
Moto Hagio Interview (Installment 1)
*009 was my idol

—Today I would like interview Ms. Moto Hagio about Mr. Shotaro Ishinomori's personality and his works. Hagio-san, I assume you read Ishinomori's work in your childhood. Do you remember any works of his that impressed you back then?

Hagio: Yes, back when I was in elementary school, there was a rental bookstore nearby. "Yesterday Comes No More, But Neither Tomorrow…" (1961) was in an extra issue of some magazine and I was blown away when I read it. Around that time, I rented "Shojo Club" regularly and had read "Emiko Story" (1962). And I then read "Funny Funny Funny That Girl" in "Weekly Margaret" (1964—). Then a bit later, I got obsessed with "Mutant Sabu" and "(Cyborg) 009."

—What was it that impressed you in "Yesterday Comes No More, But Neither Tomorrow…?"

Hagio: A girl comes from the future and she grows older and bigger (each time she appears); that idea, of a sort of time-layered structure, was in itself intriguing to me and I was wowed by it. I had also been reading "Ghost Girl" on and off since the second grade. It was about the 4th dimension, and the answer to the question, "How could she get inside the enclosed room?" was also based on the time gap (idea), and so I was interested in that one too. Besides, his drawings were cute.

—Not only was Ishimori popular among women in his shojo manga era, but also for his shonen manga works like "009," wasn't he?

Hagio: Yes, [the rest is omitted from translation]

(Continues to Installment 2)

SF Online Interview with Hagio (Part II-1)

(Continued from Part I)

Mizutama:

Now, let's talk about manga. We readers have your work, but as for your own experiences with SciFi manga, at that time wouldn't you have been reading Tezuka or Ishinomori—Ishimori back then—is that about right?

Hagio:

Yes. When I was in elementary school, a decent amount of SciFi stories appeared in shojo manga magazines. There was a cute SciFi story by Reiji Matsumoto—there was an incident [non-fiction] where the wintering team [of the Japanese expedition] left behind Taro and Jiro [sled dogs] in Antarctica. [In the story] They're rescued by space aliens, who augment their intelligence, and then Taro and Jiro come back to retaliate on the earthlings. Isn't it fun? (laugh)

Sakai:

That was in a shojo manga magazine?

Hagio:

Yes, it was.

Mizutama:

So you thought you would become someone who did those types of stories. No, not the revenge of Taro and Jiro; I mean SciFi manga.

Hagio:

Of course you are influenced by what you read. Even while you're in the middle of reading a book, you're appreciating how good it is. So I had a notebook for ideas, or so-called production notes of my own and that's where I wrote down the titles only or titles and rough plots, and the majority of them were SciFi. Perhaps there may have been a lot of outrageous ideas, I'm afraid. (laugh)

Sakai:

So at the point when you became a cartoonist, you already had the intention of doing SciFi, didn't you?

Hagio:

My head was half-filled with SciFi, so I wanted to.

(Continues)

Hagio's Interview "Hatachi — 20 Years Old"

In my earlier post I quoted a few paragraphs from an interview Hagio gave over 10 years ago, entitled "Hatachi." Hatachi means "20 years old," the age you reach legal adulthood in Japan.

This interview was included in a college project, "Hatachi," which is part of a course called Cyber University taught by a famous Japanese journalist/critic, Takashi Tachibana at the University of Tokyo. This project aims at collecting interviews with people talking about the time when they turned 20 years old. For Hagio, the year she turned 20 contained some pivotal events in her life.

Therefore I thought this interview may be of interest to many Hagio fans and decided to translate the whole document.

This interview with Moto Hagio was conducted on September 30, 1996, at Ikebukuro Metropolitan Hotel.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Situation

I was in Fukuoka at that time. I made my debut around the time I graduated from design school. A debut for a cartoonist means to have your work published in a magazine for the first time and get paid for it. I began submitting my work from the time I was in high school, and I got accepted at around my tenth submission. Since it had been a dream to become a cartoonist, I was so happy when I made my debut. I had lots of stories I wanted to draw. My parents had been against my career choice, but they seemed to give up after I started to get paid.

Pen Name

"Moto Hagio" is my real name. It sounded like a boy's name, so I was thinking of coming up with a pen name when I was making submissions, but I couldn't think of any. As for the origin of my name Moto, whenever I ask my father, he gives a different answer each time. For example, there was a virtuoso called Omoto-san among some Kyushu-based poets and I was named after him, or—do you know "Hamabe no Uta"? The lyric of the song goes: "Yuube Hamabe wo Moto Oreba" and that's where it came from—just like that, on a whim. And there is one [version] where it was "Mo" and "To" from Mozart[o], combined. My father played violin as a hobby, and my older sister is Sayo [little night] or serenade [jp.: night little music, ie: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik]. And my younger sister is Wakako [harmony song child], and my younger brother is named Genichiro [string first boy]. So I guess the 'Mozart' version may be the truth.

Childhood

Reading manga was banned. My parents were education-obsessed papa and mama, and they would say, perhaps just as rhetoric, that you have to get a perfect score on every test, that you cannot read anything but textbooks…just like that. That's the generation, the most faithful to Diplomaism [Note 1] from the postwar era of spectacular economic growth. But I completely dropped out from the competitive society during middle school. I escaped into the world of manga.

[Note 1] a set of beliefs that getting the right diploma ensures happiness in life, and which places high stakes in getting into the top schools at any cost.

Ever since I was little I liked stories and pictures. Even in kindergarten I drew pictures at every available opportunity. After entering elementary school I frequented the library to read books. Greek mythology and collections of world masterpieces. SciFi series for children also started to become available. If my mother found out I was reading such materials, she would scold me, so [I read them] only at school, in secret. Formally, I needed to get permission—"May I read this?"—from my mother. On Sundays the teacher librarian gave me the key. I kept reading there. Not that I didn't play outside, but isn't it not unusual to keep thinking about the book you didn't finish on Saturday?

I grew up in a coal mining town called Oomuta City. The aftermath of the Miike Coalminers' Struggle was still felt and I remember the tense atmosphere that enveloped the whole town. Trucks ran around full of men shouting their respective slogans and skirmishes broke out from time to time. But in the world of storytelling, no matter how much violence erupts there is always a proper resolution at the end. It is a complete and balanced world that gave me peace of mind. In many of my works, I also try to achieve an ending where you have salvation or healing. Of course that's not all I do, but I prefer stories with a clean resolution.

Manga Upbringing

Among my father's distant relatives was a bookstore owner. Whenever I visited he/she would let me read whatever I wanted. I always read manga there. Back then, there were only seven or so female cartoonists. Miyako Maki, Masako Watanabe, Hideko Mizuno, Yoko Imamura, Setsuko Akamatsu, and Toshiko Ueda. Who else? Anyhow, there weren't many, so Osamu Tezuka, Shotaro Ishimori (now Ishinomori), Fujio Akatsuka, and many other male cartoonists drew shojo manga.

The cartoonists I liked were Osamu Tezuka, Hideko Mizuno, Mitsuteru Yokoyama, Fujio Akatsuka, Masako Watanabe, Miyako Maki, perhaps. When I was in elementary school, I was just following examples and copying the pictures. I tried to copy the faces from various angles. Facing right, facing left, facing front, and back, and so forth. As for the way you draw eyes, Masako Watanabe would do this, or Miyako Maki would do that—I was like such an Otaku, wasn't I?

As I read lots of volumes, it gradually dawned on me—"Aha, I see how you draw manga"—a kind of pattern. I wanted to draw manga purely because I got so much pleasure out of reading them, not because I was unsatisfied with what I was reading, or in some spirit of critical response. For example after I read a beautiful manga about ballet, then I go, "Ah, I want to draw something, a story of pretty girls dancing." My motivation is very simple.

Prior to My Debut

In the middle school I had a friend who drew manga. It was she who taught me how to get the manga you draw placed in books so that other people can see them. Back then there was something called "Red Book"—not even a magazine, but some sort of simple publication that rental bookstores offered. Such publications accepted submissions from newcomers. That was when I learned that all cartoonists started out by submitting their work for publication. She told me that first of all, you must not draw on the both sides of the single sheet of paper. I didn't even know that. I didn't know to use a ruler to draw the frame border lines.

In the meantime, sixteen-year old Machiko Satonaka had debuted in Weekly [Shojo] Friend. Oh, wow, someone totally unknown could publish in a magazine just by submitting good pieces—and it finally became real to me.
By the time I was in high school I knew all the basics and started submitting work. Still, it was in the same spirit of participating in our school festival—my friends and I would show and discuss our work with each other, jabbering away in excitement.

It all changed at the end of my junior year. Tezuka Osamu's work called "Shinsengumi" came out as tankobon. When I was still in the lower grades in elementary school I had read the first half of it. I was anxious to know how it continued, so I brought my otoshidama [Note 2] to buy it. And I was completely knocked out.

[Note 2] a gift of spending money Japanese children receive from parents and relatives around the New Year's holiday. It can accumulate into a generous amount but parents generally force children to save it.

It was one of those stories Tezuka sometimes did about young men torn between the old world and the new world. Another example would be "Hidamari no Ki." Anyhow it was awesome. My state of shock lasted about a week. It was then that I really wanted to become a professional cartoonist.

We had often talked among friends about how tough it was to become a pro. It was just around the time Shotaro Ishinomori's "How to Become a Cartoonist" and "How to Become a Cartoonist Part II" came out. They depicted in a realistic way how much hardship he and his friends endured to pursue life as cartoonists. When he bought a daikon [large Japanese radish], for example, he would live on it for a week. The concept of willpower is completely alien to me, so I was vaguely thinking I couldn't endure a daikon a week. But after reading "Shinsengumi" I started thinking perhaps I could manage a daikon a week. But I don't like daikon, so I thought I would go with a potato a week instead.

From that point I began real serious efforts toward making my debut. I submitted about ten times but in the end it wasn't any of these submissions that I made my debut on after all. Just for once I wanted to see the editorial department of a manga magazine, and so I was introduced to Kodansha through the connection of a local cartoonist called Makiko Hirata. At that time I had an opportunity to have an editor take a look at my manuscripts. Then I was told, "Please write something short; I will take a look again." I was asked how soon I could send them one, and so I replied, thinking that I had better get it to them before they had a chance to forget, "I will send something in two weeks." Then I drew 20 or 24 pages and sent it in. That became my debut piece.

Period of Rejections

I made my debut in "Nakayoshi," and I was told the main readers of "Nakayoshi" were third graders. So I had to develop stories children at that age could understand. However, it was very difficult to create stories for the lower grades. First, the scope of kanji and words you could use was narrow. So I reread "Astro Boy" to study the dialogs for my reference. I learned its dialogs were really easy to understand. Yet they conveyed a very sophisticated content.

There was a story called "Episode of an Electronically Transferred Man". It was about a machine that could break down humans into atoms and transmit them like a human fax, which was called an "Electronic Transfer Machine." There was an accident during its experimental use and a man couldn't rematerialize himself and so wandered like a shadow-like ghost. That ghost caused trouble and Astro Boy came to deal with him. But the ghost sent morse signals to Astro Boy and explained his side of the story. Such a complex SciFi-like plot was conveyed in very simple dialogs. I was really impressed.

Now that I was about to debut, an editor was assigned to me. This time, instead of sending a finished manuscript, the editor would check on it at the plot, or synopsis, stage. Then you sent what we call a storyboard [jp ネーム], which is a very simple pencil sketch of the actual layout. If that got approved, then you could turn it into a finished manuscript. However, in most cases I got rejected at the plot stage. Even if I passed the plot stage, then my storyboard got rejected. About eight stories were rejected like that, and even I started to get distressed—perhaps I wasn't suited to this job.

Even though I was drawing what was interesting to me, I got instructions like "This is too difficult for children," or "This kind of subject wouldn't be popular." Or "How about sports-themed stories, because they are popular now." If I had liked sports-themed stuff, I would be able to draw it well, but somehow I couldn't. I seriously wondered why SciFi wasn't popular. If it was SciFi, I could draw it. This period lasted for about two years.

I was just a new face and pretty unknown to readers. I was thinking that perhaps I should follow the editor's advice and pursue popular themes until I established myself, and then I could start doing the stuff I actually liked. But I just couldn't draw what I didn't want to. On the other hand, I guess those people who draw popular stuff, saying, "This genre sells well now," do it because all in all, they actually like the genre. And it didn't look like I could fit in.

After much agony, I reached the conclusion that there was no point if I couldn't draw what I liked, since I wanted to become a cartoonist ultimately because I loved manga. So if it didn't work out after I gave it a try, I just had to give up.

Moving to Tokyo

With my publisher located in Tokyo and all, I ultimately wanted to move to Tokyo as soon as possible, but my parents wouldn't let me go. Around that time, I was asked to work as an assistant and that led to meeting Keiko Takemiya, a cartoonist. She had already moved from Tokushima to Tokyo. So when I mentioned how I also wanted to move to Tokyo but was prevented by my parent's opposition, she proposed to live together. An acquaintance found us a house—it was more like a tenement house with three adjoining units. And finally I was able to move to Tokyo. It was around October of the year I became 20 years old.

The house was in Oizumi Gakuen. We lived there together for two years. During this time I was very fortunate to get acquainted with many people, such as Ryoko Yamagishi, Mineko Yamada, and Nanae Sasaya (now Nanaeko). Since I had not had many manga friends before, I was so happy to talk about manga from morning to evening. I could also draw pictures without worrying about my parent's disapproving eyes.

Road to "Tooma no Shinzou"

One of the friends I made during the Oizumi Gakuen era was an avaricious book junkie, and she recommended a lot of books, like "Demian" by Hermann Hesse. As for Hesse, I had read "Beneath the Wheel" but its dark ending kept me away from other titles of his. But "Demian" was so good that I ended up reading all his stuff after all.

That person really liked the world of shonen-ai [Note 3]. She recommended those, too, even what one might call "porn", but I didn't like any of those. I would say "What's so great about this?" when I returned the book after reading it. In the meantime, Takemiya-san was also reading those stuff alongside me but it was she who got hooked. Later, Takemiya-san invited me to a movie. It was released as "This Special Friendship" [Japanese Title: "Kanashimi no Tenshi"] back then, but it is now available as a video called "Kishukusha."

[Note 3] I believe she was talking about Norie Masuyama, collaborator on "Kaze to Ki no Uta" by Keiko Takemiya.

The hero is a thirteen year old boy, and the story is about the upperclassman who loves him. It was such a beautiful movie—romance developing in a school. But at the end the hero commits suicide due to misunderstanding that he was betrayed. I didn't like such an unreasonable story without salvation and felt really sorry for the hero—it was too much to let him die like this…thinking he was betrayed. Then, I thought of drawing a story in which the hero dies but he gets something out of it in the end. That's how I got the original idea for "Tooma no Shinzou". When it came to that movie, perhaps I had some critical judgment.

From Closed Space to a Boys' World

I like closed space. That's why I depicted stories with such settings as dramas set within spaceships, or stories about the people who moved to another planet—no wonder I wouldn't be popular with readers. This is how closed space turned into a boys' world:

First of all, "Tooma no Shinzou" was a private work I began in objection to "This Special Friendship" and I had no prospect for publication. Back then I had many pieces like that just for fun. Since I was doing them for fun, I didn't get to finish them of course. But in "Tooma no Shinzou", the characters came to life pretty well as I drew. So I couldn't possibly publish this story, but I wanted to try a short story based on the same settings, and I published "The November Gymnasium."

Since the intended publication was a girls' magazine, I thought perhaps it was not a good idea to have a male protagonist, and I developed two plots, with all-girls' and all-boys' versions. Then in the all-girls' version the relationship got wet and sticky for some reason. I was wondering why the all-boys' version did better, and then I realized this:

After you get to a certain age, the male-female gender roles in society have been internalized in your psyche, and you cannot be free from them. Especially so for my generation. But when I draw all-boys' stories, I am not bound by those constraints. It came as a big surprise to me as I drew. That's what interested me in drawing a boys' world.

Regarding the Current Work, "A Cruel God Reigns"

Lately I am interested in the duality of love and violence. There is a Polish-Jewish philosopher called Alfred Lévinas [Note 4], and he was a Holocaust survivor. He argues, in sum, "The world itself is already collapsed and only thing that can call back the world is love. " He uses more complex words, but that's what I can say within the scope of the words I can comprehend. And he also says, "We are accountable for others." We owe it to the people we know as well as those we don't know. What I do here now can affect someone somewhere, and I am responsible for that. If you think of it that way, we would need God-like wisdom, wouldn't we? So when the interviewer who was listening to Lévinas asked, "Isn't it really tough to love everyone equally? Isn't it natural that we can love certain people a lot but no so much for some?", Lévinas answered, "Yes, there is an order of preference in love, and that's where violence exists." Isn't this brilliant? I think "All we need is love" is just a dream. That's the kind of things I have been thinking and that's the current [work] "A Cruel God Reigns."

[Note 4] Hagio mistook the name. His real name is Emmanuel Lévinas and she read a Japanese translation of "Emmanuel Lévinas: Qui êtes-vous?" by François Poirier (reference).

The Present and "20-year Old"

When I compare my present self to my 20 year-old self, I was bolder at 20 because of limited experience and knowledge. I had unwavering faith in what I believed in. After 20, you as a life form go down the path of aging and become more inclined to self protection.

For example, if I try to depict a pure character, there is a difference between pureness when you are 20 and when you are 30. In terms of empathy, it is much easier to empathize with a pure character when you are 20. When you are 30, you feel like it's phony. Like, "You can say things like that because you have overlooked this and that." Therefore, there are types of works you can produce because you are in your 20's, and there are characters you can depict because you are in the 30's. Come to think of it, you shouldn't put off doing your stories until you get older, really. You have to do your stories at each stage of your life, braving embarrassment as you go. Past 30, you cannot do "Tooma no Shinzou". Even now, I am too embarrassed to re-read it.

Message to Current "20-Year Olds"

What I realized once I started working was that the most important thing is human relationships. I have seen a number of cases of people who came out of top-rated universities and got jobs at publishers at the first shot but then totally floundered after that. If you are not good at building relationships, you drop out of the fast lane, and get isolated. What's most critical as an adult is to be trusted by others. How you empathize, how you can get along, how you keep your promises—your human networks grow relative to the degree of such sincerity.

Anyhow, there is nothing I would call a "message." I think it is best if you just find what you like to do, and do what you like. If you try what you like and it doesn't work out, then there is no regret. But when the world of adults enters into it and starts saying this is good, this is better, you end up getting confused. But confusion is good, too. There is nothing that goes to waste in life.

Translucent Silver Hair (Page 18)

//Panel 1//
SFX:
CRACK! RATTLE RATTLE
//Panel 2//
Charles:
The family that inhabits the blue mists and twilight, and lives forever…

End —January 1972—

Notable rightward slanting of the carriage in Panel 2, to illustrate how physically at odds the carriage's inhabitants are with the townspeople on the outside. Then in the next panel, Marybel is also shown veering away off-kilter, while the "reaction shot" of Charles shows him in balance and straight-up (though obviously stunned).

In Panel 4 we see that the rose Marybel holds (the one the middle-aged Charles has given her) wither away in her hand. In this episode, we are never told what Marybel and Edgar are, except for not aging at all over a long time and this very subtle hint.

Moto Hagio say in her interview that she got inspiration for the "Poe no Ichizoku" from "きりとばらとほしと (Mist, Roses, and Stars)" by Shotaro Ishinomori - published in 1962 when Hagio was still in middle school. I never read this manga, but Hagio was making a reference to this work when she depicted the rose dying in Marybel's hand.

In the interview Hagio says Ishinomori had a number of manga stories with time travel motif. In another interview she mentions "きのうはもうこない　だがあすもまた… (Yesterday comes no more, but neither tomorrow…)" by Ishinomori, which she says shocked her. The story is about a girl from the future who keeps coming back to the present, each time growing bit by bit. Hagio was intrigued by this whole concept. And she was looking for similar stories when she encountered "Mist, Roses and Stars". This turned out to be a story about a girl who turned into a vampire, told in three parts - past, present, and future. It was not a traditional gothic horror - rather it was from the vampire's perspective, and the same girl, never aging, appears across a vast time expanse, just the opposite to the structure of "Yesterday comes no more, but neither tomorrow…"

When Hagio thought of drawing a vampire story, she didn't want to do a horror story where a vampire approaches its victims with evil laughter, and she remembered "Mist, Roses and Stars", where a vampire was beautiful and sympathetic. Thus "Poe no Ichizoku", a multi-layered saga that covers a vast time range, was born.

In the interview Hagio mentioned Anne Rice. She saw the movie first, then read the Vampire Chronicles. She says she was relieved to find that "Poe no Ichizoku" predates the Chronicles by two years.