Radical twenty-first-century walkers and the Romantic qualities of leisure walking

In Jiro Taniguchi’s 1992 manga, The Walking Man, the everyday walks of a conservative white-collar worker are diverted by chance and curiosity into an ambiguous zone between leisurely strolls and hyper-sensitised exploration, trespass, stalking and pilgrimage. The “walking man” breaks into a swimming pool to swim naked, climbs Mount Fuji symbolically and obsessively follows an elderly man. At the end of each disruption, he returns home and normativity is re-made.