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rushthatspeaks) wrote2009-03-08 04:20 am
rushthatspeaks) wrote2009-03-08 04:20 am
50books_poc #1: Je ne verrai pas Okinawa, Aurélia Aurita
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50books_poc.
I actually read this quite early in January, but it's taken some time to mull over this complicated little book.
A bit of background: in the mid-nineties Frédéric Boilet, a French comic book writer and artist of some critical renown, moved to Tokyo and became successful in manga. Boilet felt that many French comics were stifled by outmoded genre and publishing restrictions, and that many manga had a more naturalistic, less stereotypical aesthetic, but that the manga that were most interesting to him were fairly unlikely to be translated. After a while, a group of artists vaguely under Boilet's organization coalesced into what he calls la nouvelle manga movement. Nouvelle manga focuses on French-Japanese collaboration and on what in the U.S. we would call an alternative comics aesthetic; artists involved with it have included Kan Takahama, Moyoco Anno, Jiro Taniguchi, Joann Sfar, Nicolas de Crecy, Kiriko Nananan, and Emmanuel Guibert. Several nouvelle manga are available in English, including Boilet and Takahama's Mariko Parade, Kazuichi Hanawa's Doing Time, Vanyda's The Building Opposite, and my personal favorite comic of the last several years, the anthology Japan As Viewed By 17 Creators.
The latter anthology was a product of Boilet and the French Institute, who flew French artists to Japan, housed them in different parts of the country, and asked them to draw comics based on their experiences; Japanese artists from each region then contributed a piece based on their thoughts about the place. (There are eight French and eight Japanese pieces; one of the French ones is a collaboration between a writer and an artist.) Aurélia Aurita was one of the French artists, and contributed probably my favorite piece in the collection, so I was on the lookout for more of her work. I found a copy of Je ne verrai pas Okinawa, her latest, during a visit to Montreal.
I should note right now that none of Aurita's work is available in English except for the piece in the anthology. I read French. However, I'm sure there are other people who do who might be interested, and this book has aspects to it that I think people who may not be able to read the book would still find interesting in discussion.
Aurita's specialty is autobiographical work, specifically surrounding her mix of heritages; she is Chinese-Cambodian raised in France. Upon first visiting Japan, she fell in love with both the country and Frédéric Boilet. (One of the persistent criticisms of Boilet concerns his tendency to develop relationships with women who are twenty years younger than he is, as in his much-publicized connection with Kan Takahama.) Je ne verrai pas Okinawa (I do not see Okinawa) is the story of her first post-anthology visit to Japan; specifically, it is the story of how on her first post-anthology visit to Japan she got tangled up with passport control upon entry.
On a technical level, this is a lovely book. Aurita's drawings are expressive, humorous, and have the loose quality of sketching while maintaining the polish of a finished work. Her memory for detail is precise and quirky. Her panel layout is clear and flowing; her captions apt.
On a content level-- well, the panel that is excerpted onto the back panel of the volume is of one of the things that Aurita says fairly early on to the passport inspector:* "I believe I have a perfect right to come to Japan. I have the right to live here if I want. Everybody does." To which my reaction, frankly, is '... no, you don't.' This is also the reaction of the inspector, and probably part of the reason she proceeds to be tangled in various forms of bureaucracy for the next eight hours.
Some of the reasons that passport control gives for not wanting to allow Aurita into Japan are silly. Some are valid. Some are confusing. Some of the reasons Aurita gives for wanting to be allowed into Japan are silly. Some are valid. Some are confusing. The passport office is, for example, perfectly appropriate in pointing out that they do not wish to issue Aurita a six-month visa because the last time she came in on a six-week visa and stayed for four months. Aurita is correct to be annoyed that the office spends two hours asking her repeatedly whether she is seeing a man in the country, and that they drop the question entirely once she says his name and they hear that he is a foreigner; she says outright to the inspector that she can tell that they are trying to figure out if she is going to marry a citizen and stay, and that they have the intention of not letting her in if she is going to, and the inspector basically admits it. Aurita has a point also in stating that the same office that denied her a work visa should not become upset with her for not having one-- it is, in fact, the same official involved, a fact she takes some trouble to ascertain. It is in the reasons she is annoyed with the office for not giving her a work visa that I begin not to follow her: they did not issue her a work visa because manga is not on the list of Japanese cultural arts which foreigners are permitted into the country to study (Aurita, with some grounds, considers this silly), but Aurita is annoyed because she feels that artists should never in any way be affected by international borders; she says "Artists are citizens of the world, and must go anywhere. How can anyone not recognize this?" I have some ideological sympathy for this standpoint, but it is quite clear that she has never considered the reasons the Japanese might have for wanting to control their borders; she certainly does not understand why the inspector is annoyed when she describes herself as a mangaka, a creator of manga, why it might be problematic for her to use that terminology.
On the other hand, the afterword, written by a Tokyo friend of Aurita's, ascribes her passport problems to racism, to the fact that she comes from two different Asian countries and specifically from a South Asian one, and recounts several instances of people of Chinese or other Asian extraction not being able to get visas. This is never discussed in the actual book, and it is not possible to know whether or to what extent it applies in Aurita's specific case.
Eventually, Immigration and Aurita come to a compromise: they will issue her a three-month tourist visa if she promises to leave Japan after three weeks, because there is no three-week tourist visa, and the one-month visa prohibits work being done by the person holding it, but they do not want her in the country for the entirety of three months. If she keeps her word and leaves Japan after three weeks, her application for a work visa will be reconsidered; if not, she will never be allowed into the country again. Both Aurita and passport control consider this a ludicrous, confusing, overly complex, and humiliating compromise. They are both right. Aurita is also very upset over the fact that cutting her stay short means she will have to cancel a planned trip to Okinawa (see the title of the book), and that she had to discuss her relationship with Boilet with an official.
In fact, she goes off on a rather extended rant comparing passport control with Orwell's 1984, by coincidence the book she was reading on the plane (in a rather funny moment, Aurita is thinking over the way that newspeak limits thought and destroys grammar when she notices that the bag from the bookstore she bought the novel at says "Our books are unputdownable!", a newspeak construction if ever there was one).
She does, however, leave the country after three weeks. The author photo on the jacket is of Aurita on the beach at Okinawa, and the author bio states that Aurita now lives in Japan permanently.
This book brought up very complex issues for me about privilege, travel, art, border control, most of which was not textual but rather brought on by considering the things Aurita clearly hadn't. I am still mulling over many of these things. It was definitely a valuable reading experience for that, as well as being from an art standpoint purely lovely. I spent a lot of the book wanting to smack her, but part of that was put in perspective when I realized that she is several years younger than I am (and I am twenty-seven). If you read French, or even if you have it on a high school or other non-fluent level, I would recommend this; her language is clear and not overly complex, with the exception of a few slang terms which are readily derivable from context, and the art makes the reading much easier.
I will be looking for more Aurita; her previous work, Fraise et chocolat (Strawberry and chocolate) is apparently about her sex life prior to meeting Boilet.
*All translations mine.
50books_poc.I actually read this quite early in January, but it's taken some time to mull over this complicated little book.
A bit of background: in the mid-nineties Frédéric Boilet, a French comic book writer and artist of some critical renown, moved to Tokyo and became successful in manga. Boilet felt that many French comics were stifled by outmoded genre and publishing restrictions, and that many manga had a more naturalistic, less stereotypical aesthetic, but that the manga that were most interesting to him were fairly unlikely to be translated. After a while, a group of artists vaguely under Boilet's organization coalesced into what he calls la nouvelle manga movement. Nouvelle manga focuses on French-Japanese collaboration and on what in the U.S. we would call an alternative comics aesthetic; artists involved with it have included Kan Takahama, Moyoco Anno, Jiro Taniguchi, Joann Sfar, Nicolas de Crecy, Kiriko Nananan, and Emmanuel Guibert. Several nouvelle manga are available in English, including Boilet and Takahama's Mariko Parade, Kazuichi Hanawa's Doing Time, Vanyda's The Building Opposite, and my personal favorite comic of the last several years, the anthology Japan As Viewed By 17 Creators.
The latter anthology was a product of Boilet and the French Institute, who flew French artists to Japan, housed them in different parts of the country, and asked them to draw comics based on their experiences; Japanese artists from each region then contributed a piece based on their thoughts about the place. (There are eight French and eight Japanese pieces; one of the French ones is a collaboration between a writer and an artist.) Aurélia Aurita was one of the French artists, and contributed probably my favorite piece in the collection, so I was on the lookout for more of her work. I found a copy of Je ne verrai pas Okinawa, her latest, during a visit to Montreal.
I should note right now that none of Aurita's work is available in English except for the piece in the anthology. I read French. However, I'm sure there are other people who do who might be interested, and this book has aspects to it that I think people who may not be able to read the book would still find interesting in discussion.
Aurita's specialty is autobiographical work, specifically surrounding her mix of heritages; she is Chinese-Cambodian raised in France. Upon first visiting Japan, she fell in love with both the country and Frédéric Boilet. (One of the persistent criticisms of Boilet concerns his tendency to develop relationships with women who are twenty years younger than he is, as in his much-publicized connection with Kan Takahama.) Je ne verrai pas Okinawa (I do not see Okinawa) is the story of her first post-anthology visit to Japan; specifically, it is the story of how on her first post-anthology visit to Japan she got tangled up with passport control upon entry.
On a technical level, this is a lovely book. Aurita's drawings are expressive, humorous, and have the loose quality of sketching while maintaining the polish of a finished work. Her memory for detail is precise and quirky. Her panel layout is clear and flowing; her captions apt.
On a content level-- well, the panel that is excerpted onto the back panel of the volume is of one of the things that Aurita says fairly early on to the passport inspector:* "I believe I have a perfect right to come to Japan. I have the right to live here if I want. Everybody does." To which my reaction, frankly, is '... no, you don't.' This is also the reaction of the inspector, and probably part of the reason she proceeds to be tangled in various forms of bureaucracy for the next eight hours.
Some of the reasons that passport control gives for not wanting to allow Aurita into Japan are silly. Some are valid. Some are confusing. Some of the reasons Aurita gives for wanting to be allowed into Japan are silly. Some are valid. Some are confusing. The passport office is, for example, perfectly appropriate in pointing out that they do not wish to issue Aurita a six-month visa because the last time she came in on a six-week visa and stayed for four months. Aurita is correct to be annoyed that the office spends two hours asking her repeatedly whether she is seeing a man in the country, and that they drop the question entirely once she says his name and they hear that he is a foreigner; she says outright to the inspector that she can tell that they are trying to figure out if she is going to marry a citizen and stay, and that they have the intention of not letting her in if she is going to, and the inspector basically admits it. Aurita has a point also in stating that the same office that denied her a work visa should not become upset with her for not having one-- it is, in fact, the same official involved, a fact she takes some trouble to ascertain. It is in the reasons she is annoyed with the office for not giving her a work visa that I begin not to follow her: they did not issue her a work visa because manga is not on the list of Japanese cultural arts which foreigners are permitted into the country to study (Aurita, with some grounds, considers this silly), but Aurita is annoyed because she feels that artists should never in any way be affected by international borders; she says "Artists are citizens of the world, and must go anywhere. How can anyone not recognize this?" I have some ideological sympathy for this standpoint, but it is quite clear that she has never considered the reasons the Japanese might have for wanting to control their borders; she certainly does not understand why the inspector is annoyed when she describes herself as a mangaka, a creator of manga, why it might be problematic for her to use that terminology.
On the other hand, the afterword, written by a Tokyo friend of Aurita's, ascribes her passport problems to racism, to the fact that she comes from two different Asian countries and specifically from a South Asian one, and recounts several instances of people of Chinese or other Asian extraction not being able to get visas. This is never discussed in the actual book, and it is not possible to know whether or to what extent it applies in Aurita's specific case.
Eventually, Immigration and Aurita come to a compromise: they will issue her a three-month tourist visa if she promises to leave Japan after three weeks, because there is no three-week tourist visa, and the one-month visa prohibits work being done by the person holding it, but they do not want her in the country for the entirety of three months. If she keeps her word and leaves Japan after three weeks, her application for a work visa will be reconsidered; if not, she will never be allowed into the country again. Both Aurita and passport control consider this a ludicrous, confusing, overly complex, and humiliating compromise. They are both right. Aurita is also very upset over the fact that cutting her stay short means she will have to cancel a planned trip to Okinawa (see the title of the book), and that she had to discuss her relationship with Boilet with an official.
In fact, she goes off on a rather extended rant comparing passport control with Orwell's 1984, by coincidence the book she was reading on the plane (in a rather funny moment, Aurita is thinking over the way that newspeak limits thought and destroys grammar when she notices that the bag from the bookstore she bought the novel at says "Our books are unputdownable!", a newspeak construction if ever there was one).
She does, however, leave the country after three weeks. The author photo on the jacket is of Aurita on the beach at Okinawa, and the author bio states that Aurita now lives in Japan permanently.
This book brought up very complex issues for me about privilege, travel, art, border control, most of which was not textual but rather brought on by considering the things Aurita clearly hadn't. I am still mulling over many of these things. It was definitely a valuable reading experience for that, as well as being from an art standpoint purely lovely. I spent a lot of the book wanting to smack her, but part of that was put in perspective when I realized that she is several years younger than I am (and I am twenty-seven). If you read French, or even if you have it on a high school or other non-fluent level, I would recommend this; her language is clear and not overly complex, with the exception of a few slang terms which are readily derivable from context, and the art makes the reading much easier.
I will be looking for more Aurita; her previous work, Fraise et chocolat (Strawberry and chocolate) is apparently about her sex life prior to meeting Boilet.
*All translations mine.