Engine Summer

Lychee Light Club is a one-volume manga adaptation of a stage play the author was incredibly influenced by as a small child. In it, an incredibly screwed-up club of middle-school boys build an invincible robot powered by lychee fruit, as part of a two-part scheme of which the second half is 'rule the world', but their internal psychoses bring the whole thing crashing down long before it gets that far, despite the fact that the robot, you know, actually works.

I neither enjoyed Lychee Light Club (mostly) nor thought it was that good (mostly), but I am extremely glad that it has been translated and released in the U.S., I hope it enjoys commercial success, and I think it's important that English-speaking companies consider this a viable direction to go with things they license and put out. Despite the fact that I didn't like this. (Except that I kind of did.)

Let me unpack that a bit. The theatre who did the stage play that Usumaru Furuya adapted here were the Grand Guignol Theatre of Tokyo. The story is every bit as violent, sexually graphic, misogynistic, homophobic, needlessly cruel, and petty as you would expect from the words 'Grand Guignol'. That's the point. The reason I don't think it's very good is that it's also pretty derivative (except for the thing about the lychees)-- I could predict just about everything that happened as soon as I saw the setup, which I think may also have been part of the point, but seriously-- and the reason I didn't really enjoy it are that, well, the largest portion of the budget for the stage play must have been the fake blood. Also, piles of sexual violence.

However. Furuya is an underground artist, who got his start in the legendary magazine Garo, and whose work is only now starting to be translated. I am not sure whether he is actually definable as an ero-guro artist*, but he uses an art style here very similar to that and a similar visual vocabulary. When Lychee Light Club arrived in the mail Thrud and I looked at each other and said 'it's one of those, you know, what's that genre again, where it's not ero-guro because the content isn't extreme enough but it is in every other way, we used to know a word for this sort of thing...' and as far as I know it's the only one of those in English. And if you study manga, this is useful. For one thing, you can get some ero-guro in English, somebody has actually translated some of Suehiro Maruo DO NOT IMAGE SEARCH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD**, but why do this to yourself? I am willing to spend a lot more time studying the art and craft of Lychee Light Club to see what is going on in it than I am in looking at the harder stuff.

And there is art and craft here, and it's important to me to know what's going on in it. In a sheerly technical sense this is some of the best art I have seen in a manga. It is incredibly expressive, very well laid out, beautiful in all the wrong ways, very distinctive, and manages by virtue of drawing skill alone to force some emotional resonance and actual disturbingness into a story that I found, as I said, predictable to the point of boring.

Also, having read this makes reading the other series in English by Usumaru Furuya incredibly hilarious. You see, for a brief span of time recently Furuya did a series for Shonen SG, one of the Shonen Jump family of magazines, called Genkaku Picasso, and two volumes of that are out now. Genkaku Picasso is pretty damn terrible, unless you are in on the central joke, which is that the protagonist (including his art style) is directly out of an ero-guro. Everything else about the series, including what the protagonist is allowed to do, is drawn and written in extremely broad Shonen Jump house style, which involves speeches about friendship, everyone getting along after friendly rivalry, and everything working out for the best. Upon reading Genkaku Picasso I initially thought that it felt as though the artist was being forcibly restrained by his venue and it was a really stupid shonen series, but I now think that the point is that if you are a kid you read it as a stupid shonen and if you are an adult you expect it to devolve into terrifyingly degenerate pornography any second now and it keeps finding new implausible ways not to. Which, all right, I actually find pretty funny.

And if people are running jokes like that in a mainstream magazine? ... yeah, that's something in manga I want to keep up with, that's an actual thing. So props to Vertical for putting out Lychee Light Club, and I hope they keep on in this vein, because I appreciate it as an academic if not as a reading experience. (And hell, I may have been in the wrong mood. I usually have a pretty high violence threshold. Probably too much rape in it for me to ever actually like, though.)***

* Erotic grotesque (ero-guro): a genre of pornography generally expressed in manga by attempts to draw beautiful things as disgustingly as possible and vice versa, combining sexual content with the outré, surreal, gory, violent, and ridiculous.

** So much I mean this, you cannot even imagine. There is supposedly something coming out later this year by Maruo which is not porn, and which should therefore be amazing because the man is one of the finest technical painters I have ever encountered. I will let you all know when that happens, after I make Thrud read the thing first because I have a policy of not even touching the Maruo we currently have IT MIGHT STAY IN MY HEAD.

*** Serious props to the U.S. manga-and-anime mag Otaku USA for managing to find ten consecutive worksafe pages of Lychee Light Club to use as a preview. I do not know how they did it because if I hadn't seen that preview excerpt and compared it against the volume I would have sworn there were not ten consecutive worksafe pages in there. Now that is an impressive editor somewhere-- either at Vertical, sending the preview, or at the magazine itself.

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MW is seventies Tezuka, the God of Manga in his darkest period, the time when he was observing and partially creating the men's-magazine style of manga with its James Bondish action and adventure and nudity, but also exploiting the content allowed him by that style to produce absolutely lacerating commentary on human cruelty and darkness. Which is to say, this is the darkest of noir, saved from total nihilism only by tiny and astonishing moments of a rare and vanishing kindness. It's hard to read, which is why I've been putting it off for a few years, but it's also absolutely brilliant. It's basically Tezuka doing gekiga, and it's one of his natural genres.

The manga centers around an unlikely couple: the up-and-coming young bank executive Yuki, notable in his office for his good looks and his celebrity Kabuki actor brother, and the Roman Catholic priest Garai. They're bound by shared secrets on all sides: their affair, of course, which Garai is desperately metaphysically tormented over, but also the fact that Garai is half-intentionally using the seal of the confessional to shield Yuki from the police. Yuki is a brilliant sociopath, who kills and robs with an amazing indifferent cruelty, and Garai is his only real emotional connection. Garai believes with all his heart in the sanctity of the confessional, and is genuinely trying to save Yuki's soul, but they are inextricably entwined not only sexually but because of a horrific chemical weapons accident fifteen years previously. Yuki and Garai are the only survivors of eight hundred and fifty people in the area, as well as the only witnesses missed by a massive government coverup, and brain damage brought on by chemical exposure is part of what destroyed Yuki's conscience. So Garai is willing to work for a shared revenge-- but is that actually what Yuki wants? How much of what Yuki is is what he has been made, and what things really made him? Where should the responsibility for crime be placed, and whose crimes, in this world full of them, are worst?

Believe me, I'm not telling you too much of the plot. There's a lot of plot here to go around. The book's main weakness, in fact, is the sheer amount of plot; there is so much going on here that portions of it don't quite hang together, and areas where the action makes more sense thematically than in a rational way, or where character motivations turn on a dime with no explanation, or where the logistics of what is going on are too complex for even Tezuka's spectacular panel layouts to adequately get things across. But it all makes emotional sense, always, and there are indications that some of the incoherency is intentional expressionism, the gripping confused urgency of nightmare. I admire a sequence in which a perfectly ordinary conversation between Yuki and Garai has its visuals morph into seamless pastiche of Aubrey Beardsley, so that when Garai admits his utter helplessness against his lover he is drawn as the head of John the Baptist, and Yuki in a precise and grotesque fusion of his own face and the original is a coldly chilling Salome.

This makes me want to have read Yukio Mishima, because I suspect it of being a homage and riff on that writer's politics and life. I think Yuki was named after Mishima, whose suicide was six years old when the manga ran; there is a sequence in which Yuki toys with and uses a writer who runs a political/terrorist student group similar to Mishima's cult of personality. In the end Yuki drops the writer: for not going far enough. And the central questions around Yuki's identity, the way he takes on the roles and personalities and appearances of the people he betrays and kills, the way he is all things to all people, also remind me of things I've heard about Mishima's ruminations on identity and appearance, and a part of Garai's backstory reminds me very much of something I've seen mentioned as a major plot point in The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea. But this is all speculative, because I haven't read any Mishima, so I could be totally wrong. (I should read some Mishima and see.)

Not an easy book. It's extremely violent, physically and emotionally, and it has sexual violence in a direction so appalling it had not crossed my mind as possible, and the most charismatic and interesting character is, intentionally, Yuki, who is also vilely, disgustingly, but sadly not unbelievably evil. It has no answers to the questions it raises about responsibility and justice, religion and mercy, crime and existence, and it means to have no answers, to sear into you that there may not be any. But it's one of those works of art that is so incredibly well conceived and executed that I cannot find it depressing, so beautifully done that its very existence belies its own negationism: it is too good to mean nothing. If you can cope with it, I recommend it.

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A one-volume piece by Fumi Yoshinaga, also author of Ōoku, Antique Bakery, Flower of Life, and many other extremely good manga of which I am very fond. Honestly Yoshinaga is probably my favorite mangaka. She references eighteenth-century philosophy in her gay romances and is doing a gender-switched version of the history of the Tokugawa shogunate, what's not to like?

And she is also something of a foodie.

This particular work is semi-autobiographical, in that way one sometimes gets with Japanese pseudonyms where the character is called F-mi Y-naga and everyone else is also called their names with parts blanked out. The principal effect of this is that one knows perfectly well that it is autobiographical... ish, because it is, in fact, a pseudonym; it gives her plausible deniability. Probably best to read this as fiction, though she assures us on the title page that all the restaurants are real, and gives their addresses, phone numbers, days open and nearest train stations.

At any rate, F-mi Y-naga, who is a manga artist, gets hired to do manga recommendations of good restaurants in Tokyo, and the manga is about how she does that. Along for the ride are her assistant/roommate/absolutely not boyfriend S-hara and their various friends, blind dates, colleagues and other people who can be taken out to dinner. The personal relationships are fun and interesting and do not follow the usual cliches-- when I say that S-hara is absolutely not her boyfriend, I mean that these are two people who would rather crawl over broken glass than date each other, but who are starting to worry that the expectations of their families and society in general combined with the oddly scheduled life of a manga studio may leave them no alternatives. Their friendship is bitchy, hilarious, and weirdly touching, and they are quite right that they shouldn't be dating.

But the main point is the food porn. Which is really impressive. I am glad that a) these are all real restaurants and b) she gives their addresses, because even though restaurants shift over time I will be hitting any one of these that is still there if I get to Japan in the next decade. She draws food quite appetizingly (there's a great repeating gag about how she keeps meaning to take reference photos when her meal arrives and then forgets until after she's eaten it), but as anyone who's read her Antique Bakery will remember, what she's really good at is how people talk about food. Everyone in this manga can talk about food in a knowledgeable, descriptive, non-pretentious, mouthwatering way that I wish I could do myself. Food is serious business to Y-naga, who at one point breaks up with a guy for not liking a restaurant she suggested, and her joy in cooking well, taking people to good restaurants, feeding people good food and watching them revel in it shines through continuously. (When someone asks her how it is she knows so many good restaurants, the reply is "There are maybe between four and six hours in a day when I am not either working or sleeping. During all of that time, I think about food. Or, better to say, depending on the work I might be spending my working hours thinking about food too. Since I've given that much of my life to food, don't you think food owes me a little bit of payback for it?")

Seriously, the only way this could be better is if there were recipes.

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This is one of the manga that Viz put out back in the day, where by back in the day I mean the late nineties, which in manga fandom times is not quite the Jurassic but is certainly somewhere around the Cretaceous. When everyone still flipped manga to read left to right and not only the word shoujo but the concept of comics by and for women had to be spelled out repeatedly on the covers of the books-- that era. Viz was doing sterling and unappreciated work in those years putting out Moto Hagio and the contents of Pulp magazine, and Matt Thorn, who was doing a lot of things for Viz, must desperately love Keiko Nishi. He put two of her short works in Four Shoujo Stories, the seminal and now-impossible-to-find anthology which has become the Really Famous Viz Rarity. And he had four more of hers released as Love Song.

I was skeptical going into this, because the two Nishi stories are... decidedly not my favorite things about Four Shoujo Stories. In point of fact I have never reread them, whereas I go back to the other half of the book about once a year. But I'm cowriting a book on shoujo manga and this is one of the first volumes of shoujo in English, which earns it some importance. Therefore.

Unfortunately, most of what I got from this is that Matt Thorn and I do not have similar tastes. I mildly enjoyed two of the four stories. 'Jewels of the Seaside' is a perfectly respectable black comedy about three sisters consumed by rivalry for the same man; Nishi's elegantly restrained artwork keeps it from tipping over into a one-note Gothic joke, although everything about it is predictable from very early on. And the title story, while it lacks even a pretense of plot, is not terrible. Its portrait of a young woman who becomes abusive towards her boyfriend because of past trauma is compelling although shapeless.

However, 'The Skin of Her Heart' is an attempt at an SF story which falls miserably flat because it does not manage to include enough worldbuilding to make sense. It's trying to be SF about working-class people, a small story about the way that aspirations don't change in a futuristic environment, with Earth as a pipe dream for its heroine to yearn after; but it doesn't have enough of its environment showing to lend it the necessary touch of strangeness. It comes off as a standard portrayal of poverty and anomie. I think the problem here is mostly visual, that Nishi didn't find the correct mixture of the familiar and the confusing. This script could, possibly, have worked, but here it doesn't.

And the longest story in the book, the two-part 'The Signal Goes Blink, Blink' is a terribly cliched story about a bullied adolescent boy who manifests superpowers, evidently to help him like himself better, or something. The amount I was unable to bring myself to care was staggering.

These are not stories American comics were telling at the time, it's true, and the fact of their existence in English is interesting, that this is what Thorn thought there was an audience for and worked very hard to bring to the public, these particular things out of the whole giant selection of things that could have been chosen. But there is so much better shoujo available nowadays that unless you, like me, are curious about the history of manga in America or are trying to read everything Viz put out before the year 2000 (I have faith I will manage this eventually), it's eminently skippable.

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I know William Weaver primarily for his translations from the Italian; he's done both Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino. Thrud had a fellowship for some time at the Villa I Tatti, and it turns out that Weaver wrote a history of the house, so I read it mostly out of curiosity about where Thrud had been living. A Legacy of Excellence: The Story of Villa I Tatti is I think a vanity project, honestly; it's a factual account of the house, its various refurbishings and renovations and contents, but it does not make an argument as to why the house is so important except that Bernard Berenson bought it, Edith Wharton stayed there a lot, and Harvard owns it now. There are a great many photos, and honestly that is what was important to me, but I cannot recommend this to anyone who is neither passionately interested in the architecture of Italian villas nor doing research on one of the relevant historical figures, especially as the last chunk of the book essentially reads as one long apologia for Harvard's tenancy and a lot of assurances that they are Maintaining The Place's Historical Value, which, I mean, it's Harvard, I was not going to assume that they aren't. Personal interest barely got me through this, though Weaver's prose is perfectly competent. I wonder why he wrote the thing?

And then the next night I read Paul Kozelka's The Theatre Student: Directing, because I have never been in a play and have always been curious about the directing process-- there is a lot of mystique surrounding it. Unfortunately, while vaguely informative, the Kozelka was also fairly dire. It seemed to be aimed at persons wishing to direct community theatre for an audience of children and operates on the assumption that such persons are by definition more cultured than the people around them and must bring this culture to the unenlightened masses; it also worships Stanislavsky, which does not seem entirely compatible with the previous. And the included play may be by Betty Smith, but I am sorry, a novelist does not always a playwright make. I learned some details about ways directors could organize their lives into a notebook and that is really all the help this gave me. Can anyone recommend anything better on the philosophy and technique of stage directing and acting? There must be more than this.

Fortunately after that I came to Osamu Tezuka's Swallowing the Earth.

I have an odd relationship with the God of Manga. Honestly, I don't enjoy Tezuka ninety percent of the time. I find Phoenix too unbearably depressing to be manageable, I tend to summarize Princess Knight to people as 'a comedy where all the wrong people die', and I find Urasawa's Pluto far more readable than the chunk of Astro Boy from which it is adapted. However, I keep reading and watching Tezuka, because every so often something happens like his nineteen-fifties theatrical version of Saiyuki (the English dub stars Frankie Avalon, I will never get over this), or the first ten pages of Apollo no Uta, or the Tezuka studio's gorgeously weird Kanashimi no Belladonna, one of the strangest films ever made (it's a film based on the 1860s book about witchcraft La Sorcière, and almost all of the animation consists of still pans over paintings-- I love this movie, but I totally understand why it was an utter commercial failure).

So I tend to go into Tezuka with a certain hesitancy. I refuse to become attached to his characters, and honestly I am usually waiting with trepidation for the book to do something I hate.

( Swallowing the Earth I do not hate. )

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Penguin, of all people, have started putting out manga. Specifically, they've started putting out socially-relevant-to-leftists manga biographies. They've got one of Che Guevara and one of the Dalai Lama. Our household obtained the one about the Dalai Lama, called, straightforwardly enough, The 14th Dalai Lama: A Manga Biography, by Tetsu Saiwai. Saiwai apparently specializes in educational and environmental manga. His art is clean, if generic in a fairly obviously Tezuka-influenced sort of way, and his people are recognizable as themselves internally but might not be able to be matched to their photos. The book begins at the death of the 13th Dalai Lama, covers the search for the new lama, his upbringing, the political unrest in his adolescence, and the Chinese invasion and subjugation of Tibet which led to the Dalai Lama's fifty-year-and-ongoing exile. It's an authorized biography and behaves like one: solid on names and dates and facts and politics and things people said in public record, but if you want to get a sense of the person and not the religious leader this is not your book. It also skips oh about forty years of his later life in the interests of time. So I would call this a useful elementary text, in an entertaining format, the sort of thing I would in fact cheerfully assign to sixth-graders for a history unit, but, you know, it does not exceed my expectations in any particular direction and I will look elsewhere for my deep analyses.

There also turned up in our house recently a book on how to take a Japanese bath, called, straightforwardly enough, How to Take a Japanese Bath. I am not entirely sure why it turned up-- I certainly had nothing to do with it-- but there is this thing where Thrud buys things that seem relevant to her, even if they do not seem relevant to anyone else, so I am going to assume it had something to do with that. At any rate, I mostly wanted to compare it to my experience, as I have in fact been to an onsen more than once. It turned out to be mostly about bathing in private houses, which I did find interesting as I have never done that, and the etiquette of leaving the water hot for other people and so on. And it does cover onsen and public baths thoroughly. If you need bathing etiquette, and if you are going to Japan you do, this is a handy little book which matched what I saw done. It did not answer my personal Japanese-bath-etiquette question, which is whether I now have a sufficient number of tattoos to be asked to leave a respectable bathing establishment or whether the We Expect Nothing Of Gaijin card covers that, but, you know, that's very specific. (I only had one tattoo when I went to Japan, and nobody batted an eye.) Man, I wish we had onsen in this country, though if you live in Boston/Cambridge/Somerville you have Inman Oasis which is pretty much the same thing and I envy your continued geographic proximity. Sigh. There totally are not public baths in Texas. At least, not our part of it. We have some similar equipment in our house now, but it isn't the same.

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From the author of Akira.

Thrud bought this recently because it came recommended to her as good horror manga, but I'd call it science fiction, and indeed it won the Japan Science Fiction Grand Prix. It's familiar subject material-- a densely crowded urban housing complex becomes a battleground between two psychics, one a deeply senile old man who has regressed to mental childhood and kills randomly, and the other an eight-year-old girl who's trying to stop him-- but it's so well done, and uses so few of the tropes of psychic-battle manga or this plot in general, that it feels, and is, completely original. There are cops, looking in the wrong direction or in the right direction but at the wrong time; there are the people who live in the complex, whose weaknesses are grist for the combat and whose ordinary lives go on around it; there is the endless sense of how little privacy there is in this kind of public housing, where one of the things the police find most inexplicable is the ability of various people to move for more than a hundred feet without there being a witness. (Literally. They express confusion and fear at the thought that someone could climb a flight of stairs in this building without it being seen, and they're right.)

Honestly, in tone this reminds me profoundly of J.G. Ballard. It's in the sort of urban landscape he made his own, and it shares his pragmatic and cynical coldness. The questions the manga is pondering are those of moral responsibility: the old man is out of his mind when he does horrible things, and the child who does horrible things to stop him is a child and cannot be expected to understand the consequences, but can be expected to remember, later, what she did and can do. I don't think I've ever seen a manga wondering before whether growing up can or should absolve a person of the crimes of childhood-- I mean where childhood is seen as a state in which, through ignorance, any child can and probably will do things an adult would consider terrible. Usually people think of childhood pretty much the other way around, but honestly one of the major moral differences between the psychics in this book is that she can grow up, and he cannot.

An odd, taut, carefully brutal little masterpiece.

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A rarity in English: a collection of business and salaryman manga. Or, well, excerpts from business and salaryman manga.

Business manga is one of the genres of manga for which there is no American comics equivalent, except maybe Dilbert, though comedy isn't business manga's only forte. It doesn't get translated much because the art is not usually pretty, the subject matter is quotidian, and the cultural references are very specific. Honestly, that's one reason I find it interesting. It's usually very interesting to see what people don't translate because they don't think it would travel.

Bringing Home the Sushi is, I think, a collection intended for American businessmen. It's meant to throw some light on Japanese business culture and practices. It came out in 1995, so I'm sure a lot has changed. The nine pieces here are excerpted from famous and long-running work, mostly; Tsuri-Baka Nisshi (Diary of a Fishing Freak), for example, has been serialized continuously since 1979 and has been made into twenty-two live-action movies. It's one of the two manga in here I'd heard of; it focuses on a man who is a total loser at his office, except that his obsession with fishing means a) that he doesn't care and b) that his company can use him to mollify clients who also fish. It's kind of a triumphalist ode to hobbyism, and I think is both escapist fantasy and expression of a real belief that there has to be something important in a person's life. The art fascinates me because it is as caricatured and anatomically squished as American newspaper comics, which is not an art style one sees much in translated manga.

The other work I'd heard of is OL Shinkaron (Evolution of the Office Lady), which is a four-panel gag manga about the lifestyle of the office lady, who is generally a young woman working until she gets married and whose job is to make tea and be secretarial. As an artifact of the eighties and nineties and the way women thought of themselves and work in Japan at that time this is priceless. We own a volume of it in a Kodansha bilingual edition, which I recommend to people who can find it (good luck). It exists here, anyway, and it miiiiiight be very slightly easier to find this book than the Kodansha. Maybe.

And the other highlight is Torishimariyaku Hira Namijirou (Director Hira Namijirou), in which a middle-level functionary at a Japanese auto company is paid a visit by the very thinly disguised head of Chrysler, who proceeds to behave exactly like every conceivable Japanese stereotype about Americans except that I don't think he actually fires any guns at anything. The art and writing are wildly surrealistic-- it's exactly like an action manga, people keep throwing furniture and crashing through walls; but there are special touches such as the American wearing a flag as a suit jacket-- but they are all talking very earnestly and sincerely and passionately about the trade deficit. Comics just don't do this sort of thing much and it is kind of profoundly entertaining.

Oh yeah and there are also some essays in English by various experts about various aspects of Japanese business culture, most of which focus on 'you know that thing that happened in panel x of this manga? here is the explanation'.

Anyway. I think this book is totally awesome, but I have spent the last six months plotting to obtain the manga biography of the inventor of cup ramen. (Which has a real English translation and everything!) So your mileage may, as they say, vary.

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Today has been a tired day, so I decided to read something that has almost no dialogue.

Jiro Taniguchi's graphic novel is about a man, who walks. He lives in a town somewhere in Japan that may or may not be a suburb of a large city, but is definitely fairly close to the ocean; he is happily married; he has a dog. He walks by himself, with his wife, with his dog, in the rain and the shine and the snow. He takes off his shoes to go through puddles, climbs fences and trees, looks up birds and shells and points of interest at the library, at one point steals the use of a swimming pool. He observes the people around him and has the sort of quiet interactions you have with friendly strangers-- I particularly like a bit where he gets into a subtle speed competition with an older man who is walking the same route.

As I said, there's very little dialogue, and most of it is about ordinary things. The manga is resolutely ordinary, but also very quietly happy. It's precise and detailed in its place drawings, its expression work, and you do get a sense of who this man is, and that walking this way, being a person who knows everything about his neighborhood and many points farther afield, is one of the major components of his being and the way he defines himself to himself. It's not so strident as to tell the reader outright to pay more attention to birds and trees and other people and what have you, it just uses the man's attention to draw the reader's, so that his pure pleasure in a long walk becomes the principal feel of the book.

Taniguchi is a major mangaka, very popular in France and at home, and the other work I've read by him tends to be melancholy and nostalgic evocations of a Japanese village childhood in the beginnings of industrialization. This is in fact a theme he has returned to so many times that I had started to assume that, in one way or another, all of his work would be a melancholy and nostalgic evocation etc. etc., even the science fiction story I have not read set in Antarctica. Some writers are like that, you know? But while I would not call this a major departure-- it is still a gently paced urban pastoral, after all-- it's not melancholy at all, and it left me smiling and feeling relaxed, which is, I believe, what it's for. If you are in a mood for something subtle and wordless and contemplative in which nothing particularly happens, this should do you nicely. Of course, if you aren't in that mood you will find this deadly boring, which is one reason I hadn't read it before, because I was expecting see above re: nostalgic evocation, and honestly I'm only in the mood for that maybe once a year. It's nice to get this instead, I have to say.

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I really love this thing where Drawn & Quarterly has been fairly quietly putting out a whole line of gekiga and underground manga. My household pretty much buys whatever they do in that direction-- it's all worthwhile. Red Snow came out last year, so I'm just catching up.

Susumu Katsumata debuted his work in the late nineteen-sixties in Garo, which is undisputedly considered the greatest magazine of underground manga. Unusually, Katsumata's work consisted of four-panel comics, a format I had not realized Garo ever did. Four-panel comics can be spectacular, but the most famous examples of them I'm aware of are comedic, and it's fascinating to contemplate what a regularly-running four-panel in a seriously literary magazine intended for avant-garde readers would look like. Somebody could maybe think about putting those out? Red Snow is a collection of his longer work, i.e. short stories.

( This is an interesting set of pieces which grew on me more as they went on. )

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