The Source

“Tokyo. The capital city of Japan. In 1991, its population numbered 11,923,346. Between day and evening, it differed by two million souls. The unparalleled city of night.”

Tokyo Babylon pairs surface-level cheerfulness with genuinely dark social commentary and an occult flair. The manga is completely in love with dualities of all kinds (light/dark, ancient/modern, love/apathy…) and embraced negative space and heavily contrasting blacks in a way that was completely novel to me at the time. Subaru also had a very thriftable outfit for someone who could not sew and did not have a sewing machine.

The Costume (2005)

I was able to thrift a red jacket that was vaguely in the right ballpark, but had absolutely no luck finding a hat with the right shape. I eventually made one myself by cutting up a shoebox and handsewing a broadcloth casing around it. The shape was roughly right, but the “craftsmanship” quality was highly questionable. I found some leather gloves at Walmart and whipped up some onmyoji ofuda with a Sakura (heh) brush pen and some heavy art paper.

Photos

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