(Tokyo) He created one of the most famous manga in the world, but despite his notoriety and a frenetic pace of work, Eiichiro Oda, the author of One Piecelikes to cultivate a part of recklessness in the image of the hero of his work.
Posted at 6:44 a.m.
The 47-year-old artist refuses to be called “sensei” (master), a title generally attached to the name of mangakas, and has a reputation for showing up in restaurants or chic hotels in bermudas and sandals, the outfit of the pirate Monkey D. Luffy, main character of One Piece.
“I want children who read One Piece consider me their brother,” the author said in a rare magazine interview in 2017 on the show’s 20th anniversary.
But “I know I’m more of an age to be their uncle… so maybe a funny and nice uncle”.
A very modest project for the man whose most famous work, telling the adventures of Luffy, who dreams of becoming the king of the pirates, and his motley crew, earned him entry into the Guinness World Records for “the number of circulating copies of the same series of comics by the same author”.
“As if he was Luffy”
On Friday, this cultural phenomenon sold nearly 500 million copies worldwide will celebrate the 25e anniversary of the beginning of its publication – still in progress – in the Japanese weekly Shonen Jump.
The final arc of this story-river, which to date has 102 volumes released in bookstores in Japan, should be published from next week in the magazine.
Mischievous, fearless and smarter than he lets on, Luffy, the straw hat pirate in search of the legendary One Piece treasure, embodies the manga’s target audience according to Oda: teenagers.
“Every week, I ask myself whether at 15 I would have enjoyed” this episode, Oda said in 2009. “The goal is not to make the reader think,” he assured, clearly presenting his works as pure “entertainment”.
Luffy is more interested in adventure than matters of the heart, as Oda thinks those would not excite his fans. “I know there are a lot of adult readers out there now, but if I align myself too much with their tastes, I feel like One Piece would lose value,” he said.
The mangaka himself has kept a child’s soul, transforming his house into a real amusement park, with a little train and stuffed animal-catching machines, not to mention an impressive collection of figurines and dioramas.
“It’s like he’s Luffy himself,” a close associate of Oda said on a Japanese TV show.
Workaholic
Oda says he sees Luffy as his “ideal child”. “I wish kids were like him. He sometimes says something that inspires everyone, but I wish he would always remain a child,” he told the Yomiuri daily.
Luffy “keeps a part of the mystery for me”, he admitted. ” It’s very good like that. If I knew all about him, readers would be bored.
Originally from the Kumamoto prefecture in southern Japan, Oda entered the ultra-competitive world of manga at the age of 17, when his first work Wanted! wins magazine award Shonen Jump.
His career then experienced headwinds and several failures. But Oda was only 22 when the publication of One Pieceinspired in part by his childhood fascination with the German-Austrian-Japanese cartoon Vic the Viking.
At that age, “I was too passionate about manga. I was even prepared not to go to my parents’ funeral if they died when I had “a manuscript to return,” he once said.
A workaholic, known to sleep only a few hours a night, Oda relies little on his assistants and draws almost all of the characters and objects on his own. And if he relaxed over time, his passion remained intact.
“For me, drawing manga is a hobby,” he explained in 2017. “It doesn’t stress me out, so I’m sure I’ll never kill myself at work.”