The Tiniest Garden – A Mini Comic in the Making

Update June 2020: Get your copy of ‘The Tiniest Garden’ shipped to your home: https://etsy.me/3epJNyY

If you prefer a paper to print-out, get your copy from my etsy store here: https://etsy.me/3epJNyY

There are many ways to tell a story. I’ve been working on the story of my 90 days in Kyoto on and off for the last few years, stalling and starting again and again. Maybe there is a different way to get my experience across?

In my time in Japan I discovered manga as a reader. Especially slice-of-life manga like Yamazaki Mari’s travelogues about her months or years spent in foreign places inspired me. There is also a plethora of books with short manga episodes about topics like Feng-Shui, Japanese History, cleaning your apartment (most notably the KonMari Manga), taking care of your finances, owning a cat. In Japanese, this format is called Manga Essay and many of these are aimed at women between 25 and 45. So I am right there in the target group.

Browsing the shelves of the local Book-Off, I discovered this manga essay written by Mafune Kyoko, a female graduate of the Kyoto University of Arts, who discovered her love to Buddha statues and Buddhist sculptures. In short chapters she describes her trips to temples and the statues she sees there, explaining along the way the basic and finer points of Buddhist sculpture appreciation.

If something like that could be created for Japanese Gardens? I had this idea early on, but while I knew how to write, I was not confident in my drawing skills. However, like a bubble, the idea popped back up again and again. And since my writing was going slow, I figured a new approach to the subject, a new medium, could rekindle the fire. So I started creating a short four page, 16 panel comic with the help of a Coursera course on making comics. It is about how my friend from work Kobayashi and his friend Ikeda built a tiny mountain stream garden in a the vegan Ramen restaurant Mamezen.