松本 大洋
Born 1967
The author of Ping Pong, Tekkonkinkreet and Sunny, whose loose, distorted drawing gave manga one of its most distinctive styles. Filed under 9, the closing.
9The letters of this name total 54, a 9 — the number of endings, compassion, and the closing of cycles.
Taiyō Matsumoto was born in 1967 in Tokyo. He played football as a young man before turning to manga, and a trip to Paris, where he discovered European comics, changed how he drew. His early series appeared in Big Comic Spirits.
Tekkonkinkreet (1993–1994) follows two orphan boys, Black and White, who rule the streets of a decaying city. Ping Pong (1996–1997) is a table tennis story about friendship and talent. Sunny draws on his own childhood in a children's home, and No. 5 and Takemitsu Zamurai show his range.
Matsumoto's art is immediately recognisable: wobbly, energetic lines, distorted perspective, fish-eye cityscapes and children who look both small and fierce. He draws on European comics as much as manga, and his pages feel hand-made in a way that mainstream manga rarely do.
Tekkonkinkreet was adapted as an animated film by Studio 4°C in 2006, and Ping Pong as an acclaimed anime by Masaaki Yuasa in 2014. He is one of the most admired artists of alternative manga, in Japan and abroad.
Set against the Pythagorean table, the name totals 54. Reduced, that is 9. The weight sits in “Matsumoto”, which carries 29 on its own and reduces to 11.
The 9 governs endings, compassion, and the closing of cycles. The reference files it as a completion. It is a lens rather than a verdict, but it is a consistent one: the 9's sense of a cycle closing and something being released is the pressure under this entry.
Beneath the 9 sit two smaller figures: 5 in the vowels, 22 in the consonants. Change underneath, construction on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
The letters give 9; the subject's own figures do not agree. 人格 core is 8, 総格 total is 25, a 7 and born is 1967, a 5. Where the two part company the reference trusts the figures, because the romanisation is a convenience for readers abroad, while the strokes are what the pen name was actually built from.
The Closing asks one thing of everything on it: work out what survived the ending. The 9 sentimentalises. An ending is not automatically a meaning, and the reference tries not to pretend otherwise. The other entries that reduce to 9 are collected on The Closing.