Word: saibara
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Death and taxes are supposed to be life's only two certainties, but Rieko Saibara has cut the list in half. The Japanese artist depicted her successful battle with tax authorities in Dekirukana: Datsuzei (Daring Tax Evasion), a book that began as a magazine cartoon column in which she recounted her real-life adventures. These included testing a homemade radiological monitor at a nuclear power plant and working at a hostess bar, where her job was to stroke the fragile egos of lonely...
...drawing skills, at first glance, may seem to resemble a 6-year-old's. But her work has unique twists: she often incorporates photos into her comics, lending them another layer of reality. And her tone is refreshingly caustic. Saibara's fictional characters are delinquents and outcasts, and her nonfiction characters, mostly her friends, family and herself, aren't much better. And yet Saibara's intimacy with the characters allows readers to laugh with the unsympathetic lot, not at them. "I grew up watching women get beat up by their drunken husbands, raising kids fathered by different men, never smiling...
...Saibara attended art school in Tokyo, but she wasn't considered talented. To make ends meet, she began drawing for pornographic magazines. Publishers noticed the humorous comments she added to compensate for her lack of drawing skills; by junior year in college she had debuted as a cartoonist. After her series about losing $500,000 in illegal mah-jongg became a hit, she went on to cultivate her personal style of manga (the Japanese term for comics), which now has many imitators. Says Saibara: "People who can draw well are too proud to do anything, and many of them...
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