Ippei Okamoto’s “The Picture Story of Botchan” appeared in the 1917 December issue of Chuobungaku (Shunyodo) as a serial, and was published consecutively until the July issue of the following year. Characteristically, each picture included a 300 to 400 character excerpt from the original story and was published in sections. In short, Botchan was a story recollected from different layers of “memories,” and in order to represent these “memories”, the narrator manipulated the narration and wording by intentionally changing its position. Ippei was constantly conscious of the narrator's position within the story and this was represented through his pictures.
On the other hand, Koichiro’s Cartoon Botchan (Shinchosha, 1918) created his own version of the original and in the reconstructed narration he attached a 160 character text to the 102 pictures in the work. Accordingly, Koichiro’s work maintains a constant distance between the narrator and the main character, and in this recreation each picture appears as if it were a scene from a theater production.
Ippei’s attempt to represent as close as possible the sensory experience and its memories through an acute reading of Soseki’s narration, alternating from close-ups to a bird’s-eye view of the text, and Koichiro’s abstract version of the original Botchan, merging the several positions possessed by the narrator into a single third-person narration, are meaningful, even if unintentionally so, because they clearly represent the controversy that has since resulted over the interpretation of Soseki’s Botchan.
The fact that the movies, plays, television dramas and other such genres utilized in reproductions of Botchan have since then shied away from using Ippei’s picture and text expression, and have instead chosen to adopt Koichiro’s more fixed composition, should be noted, and I intend to continue my analysis in this area.
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