Congrats to Utilitarian Miriam Libicki on her multiple nominations at this weekend’s Stumptown Comics Festival in Portland.
I’ve been fiendishly busy and scattered besides, with a mind to post on myth & pop or the spate of great semi-comics anthologies of late or butter or something. Then my mind crumbles and, oh, not so much. I am that of the title, melted on couch and floor.
Better just to look at the images of Laura Park. I could say comics, since that’s what she does. But she also doodles, draws in her Moleskine, and fits none too well the frameworks I have for evaluating comics.
Like this image, the cover of her mini Do Not Disturb My Waking Dream:
Buoyed by soporific mumblings. I can relate.
I pointed to the mini in my best of ’08 in TCJ, though not on the strength of its stories. It’s a 90s-style one-person anthology with short strips and doodles. The only longish story I recall is a sort-of parable that felt like a false start.
But the drawing, the line, the fine hatching, the fact that she balances her compositions with all that detail. The mini’s remarkable for that, and better as a point of entry to her Flickr page, where she’s posted a trove of art.
For a critic, it’s hard to frame. There are drawings, a few strips. Really, she jots down bon-mot doodles, a kind of artist’s daybook. Sometimes they hint at diary or autobiography. While most such works pare events into a literary form, Park’s comics dart from moment to moment, focusing on atmosphere and sensations. So the recipes and drawings of food seem like key parts of her work, not petty indulgences. I think trying to fit her talent into a “graphic novel,” at least with the implied primacy of a capital-S Story, would suck.
Instead I have this image of her much like the drawing above, leaving a trail of exquisite drawings wherever she goes. Like Johnny Appleseed, only the trees are flat and dead.
When I first read Do Not Disturb My Waking Dream, having long been an admirer of her drawings, I thought it the work of a gifted artist looking for something to say. In other words, I missed the small things. Now I hope Park doesn’t find a story. Not a capitalized one, anyway.
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Checking email, something new from the Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater. Not sure how I got on their list, since I’ve been to LA just once, but the theater seems worth another trip. Movies for the month:
Actually, I just wanted to point everyone to the glorious Kevin H. cover for the March-April 09 cover. Funny how Keaton’s Great Stone Face doesn’t look Kevin H. at all while everything else does, and works so well.
And to put off finding Form 8903.
Back to the abacus…
One of the manga conventions that came up in discussing YKK was the Perfect Girlfriend. The first volume presents Alpha as the sort of single girl readers might desire, though later volumes might shoot me down. Either way, she fits the ideal: demure, bright, beautifully plain.
This type shows up enough in manga for males, often played for romcom laughs. Boy meets girl through wizardry, tear in reality, adminstrative fiat. They spend a lot of time together, and boy thinks to himself, “it’s almost like we’re a married couple” as his nose erupts with blood. Video Girl Ai, Oh My Goddess, etc etc… I think it’s an 80s/90s trend, though the teenage wish, “If only everyone else in the world were wiped out in a cosmic explosion, then she’d have to love me, or just have sex with me, I’m not picky,” that’s probably eternal.
The sexual dynamics are usually very 50s, the plots wish fulfillment. So the chief pleasure’s in seeing wishes unfulfilled as the genre’s twisted into new shapes. The strangest shape of all, and the preemptive last word, Minami’s Sweetheart (?????) appeared from 1985-87 in Garo and elsewhere. The first work by Shungiku Uchida (????), it hints that she would become a key feminist author of comics like We Are Reproducing and the autobiographical novel Father Fucker. In Dreamland Japan, Fred Schodt profiled her work and unconventional personal life– each of her children has a different father, none Uchida’s lover.
Minami’s Sweetheart, her first major work, takes the fantasy for what it’s worth, more or less. Minami’s a high school senior and nerd with a six-inch girlfriend.
They live together in his room “like a married couple,” he says, as his would-be wife’s mother-in-law yells at him to study harder. Chiyomi, his sweetheart and several years his junior, shrank for no good reason one day. Now he keeps her in a doll house by his bed, sneaks her food when his mom’s not looking, and takes baths with her. For vague reasons he keeps her a secret; I’m not sure if her family’s contacted Missing Persons.
Their interactions teeter between sweet nothings and adolescent drives. He cares for her, makes her clothes (including an Iowa State sweater, go Cyclones!) and at one point thinks of her as his kid. Then they get into an argument because her breasts are growing and she wants a bra. His fantasies of them as equals make do when he’s not fretting about the tactical impossibility of sex. When it gets really bad and everyone’s asleep, he sneaks in some “onanie,” the Japanese-via-German-via-Genesis 38:9 loanword for masturbation. His real trouble, though, is not his tiny girlfriend: it’s that he’s awful with the ladies. When faced with a much cooler couple who talk of marriage after graduation, he squirms. Back home, Chiyomi greets him cheerfully, far from the complications of a the adult world.
Its complications include his mother, always hidden behind a nagging word balloon, and Nomura, a sensual classmate who toys with him. By comparison, Chiyomi is his very own toy. In fact, he imagines her as a doll in an early nightmare, pulling her limb from limb. Later, he says “you’re my toy” while thinking out loud. She agrees, teasingly calling him a pervert.
This is a female character roundtable, and at first glance Chiyomi’s not much of a character. She’s quite two-dimensional, just as Minami would imagine her. And the trick is that he’s imagined by Uchida. Men often enough have trouble writing believable women; here Uchida writes an adolescent boy who’s kind of pathetic with great sympathy. She lets him create Chiyomi, a Perfect Girlfriend so perfect reading about her is almost viscerally painful– since I’m convinced she’s his elaborate way of avoiding real interactions with real women.
In the ending (yes, I’m ruining it for you), Minami ventures out into the world with his sweetheart. They hop the train for the hot springs. Chiyomi, happy and bright, peers out from his shirt pocket at the view. A series of older women wonder why this kid’s walking around talking to himself. After they climb a mountain, a car of young punks rounds the bend and knock him off the road. You can fill in the details. On the last page, some time later, he walks past a young mother with her kid, asking why her pet bird died. “Because it was small.”
I read somewhere that Uchida wept on drawing the last chapter. Reading the blog reviews and so forth, most people read it as a “Pure Love” story, which is how I guess the two TV versions played it. Others in the genre feature young lovers whose feelings stay pure forever thanks to the sweet embrace of tuberculosis, war, etc. The only tragedy in Minami’s Sweetheart is adulthood. Put away childish things, like a boy’s elaborate fantasy of a doll that’s his girlfriend. Still, you could read it as a magical romance, though what a strange one it is. The story’s strength is that Uchida never commits either way, never judges.
Dovetail: The name of Uchida’s first baby? Alpha.
***
Update: the critic Adam Stephanides drops by in the comments (scroll past all the Victorian lit), and notes his own fine review of Minami’s Sweetheart.
I won’t see the Watchmen movie, though I value the book and don’t mind when the film factory injects a treasured classic with silicon[e]. I even think it’s a plus when I’ve never heard of a single actor in it, save Billy Crudup, who’s replaced early by a computer chip.
Mostly, it’s that I can’t endure the coloring.
In the comic, John Higgins’ colors seemed nasty, lurid, like touching them would infect you with a superbug they’ve only got two antibiotics for and one doesn’t work. My enduring image of it is whole pages of flat magenta or yellow with minor shifts in value. It matched the rotten story and the paper stock. If newsprint seemed to smear color, even absorb it, Baxter(?) paper made it brighter. It’s surely one of the great works of coloring in mainstream comics.
If nothing else, it put me off baked beans for years.
Yet in the movie (trailers), everything’s slick and cool. Its visual sheen has been honed in recent cycle of superhero movies; I guess X-Men was the first, where costumes gave way to hard plastic muscles on bodysuits. Regardless of what they do for the body, they catch the light just so, like a luxury sedan.
Much of the blame should go to the colorist. Even critics who talk about cinematography and lighting, and the rare ones who know the gaffer’s dark art, never talk about coloring (or color grading, as it’s known). The job’s like making a print in a darkroom with expensive hardware.
Stu Maschwitz, a sharp technical mind who until recently ran the VFX house The Orphanage, has a couple of posts on his blog about how color grading can affect a film:
So, just from what I’ve seen in trailers & clips, the cold sheen of the images could have been avoided. The recent superhero movies Maschwitz have done, like The Spirit, at least have arresting visuals. Watchmen looks like Turtle Wax.
During our roundtable on YKK, TCJ‘s Dirk Deppey took exception to the uncoordinated lukewarm feelings we have for the book. Fair enough, but I still disagree with this:
“So I fail to see how a reasonable person can describe Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou as reactionary.”
If I want to be precise, I should’ve said “So I didn’t see anthing resembling reactionary sentiments in Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.” You never know — some argument here could change my mind, I suppose.
Both quotes are his, from this comments thread. I introduced the term, then wondered if it was accurate. Dirk defined it in that same thread as “an attempt to roll back some aspect of recent political or cultural change to which the author has objections.”
That’s what YKK is. Here are two reasons, three points:
1.The Park
Google Maps satellite image of the area around Minato Mirai 21, the building complex shown in the art from my first post. On the left, a shot of a part of metro Tokyo that runs uninterrupted to Yokohama. (It’s 30 minutes on the Japan Rail Yokosuka line from Tokyo Station to Yokohama Station.) Click to enlarge; the “A” is the building. Play with it in Google Earth for a while and see how many Manhattans you can fit in metro Tokyo.
In the scene, Ashinano puts Alpha on a picturesque hill by the tallest Minato Mirai building. I’ve been to Yokohama a couple of times, and the two crummy parks I know would be underwater. She might be at the park on top of the International Port Terminal, but it’s mostly twisted metal and boardwalk. Maybe the boards composted.
So there’s no green space in reality but YKK shows some. So what?
There used to be green space, but Japan’s government-mandated construction policies erased it. They have a one-party democracy whose main voting block is the construction industry. In fact, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is so intertwined with builders that they call it “the construction state” (????), and a main policy platform in the post-Bubble years (90s to now) has been construction subsidy. Thousands of small towns rely on construction of needless roads and monuments for jobs, and fiscal policy ensures that houses don’t gain value as they age. This ensures that the construction state can step in, tear down the “old” houses like Legos, and throw up new ones in a couple of weeks. (A friend of mine bought a plot of land in order to restore the 200-year old farmhouse on it; he had to negotiate hard for the seller not to tear down the house, because the land was worth less with the house on it. Even then the seller thought he was nuts.)
Everyone I’ve talked to about it, from friends to acquaintances, just throw up their hands. There are moments when community groups have blocked a few of the most ridiculous construction projects, but not very many.
(Lately, the Democratic Party of Japan has made some inroads and there’s talk the LDP’s days are numbered. DPJ’s head is an old LDP bruiser, and they both seem to be owned by the guy who runs the Yomiuri newspaper, or whoever owns him. I’ll believe change when I see it– because PM Aso’s stimulus package will be full of construction projects.)
Given this reality, when I see a work of fantasy hit “Reset” to avoid dealing with the present reality– and all works of speculative fantasy deal at heart with their present reality– I call that reactionary, “an attempt to roll back some aspect of recent political or cultural change to which the author has objections.” New Engineering deals with the construction state in an imaginative, ironic way; YKK pretends it never happened.
2. Shopping Street
In YKK vol. 1, the only shopping trip takes Alpha to an old-fashioned shopping street. The stores are like the ones currently dying in all cities and many towns, mom-and-pops where the owners know you by name. It’s like the street markets found throughout Asia, embattled by Western models of efficiency and scale.
The American-style supermarket has taken off in Japan, putting pressure on small family operations, like the two excellent hole-in-the-wall sushi bars shuttered in a one-year span in the town where I lived. Both owners cited the fact that supermarket sushi was just too cheap to compete with. In fact, they survived longer than should have been expected, and you can still buy Panasonic goods in downtown shops as big as a closet. This is a political issue, as the mom-and-pops have enjoyed protections that drive foreign economists nuts. If all that matters is the numbers, they make no sense, but identity and webs of relationships matter here. This is especially true in agriculture, as Japan has fought liberalization of the rice trade for years, even though farmers have a median age in the 900s. As far as I can tell, the core’s Japanese identity. Rice is life is Japan, and our rice tastes different than Thai rice or California rice. I guess eating that stuff throws local identity too much into question, even though coffee shops like Alpha’s probably serve 30 kinds of bread.
While I support a farm subsidy for a variety of reasons, the ag policy’s meaningless unless it addresses wholesale rural depopulation. Some manga, like Iou Kuroda’s Nasu, toy with the idea in a playful, satisfying way. Ashinano hits reset again, rolling back the last 60 years with a convenient apocalypse that kills all the economists but not the supply lines to coffee-growing lands, all while turning tarmac into healthy loam.
Maybe everybody’s dying off with great poignancy and there’s a spaceship towards the end– I’ll find out now that I’ve committed to read later volumes– but under normal circumstances I wouldn’t get that far for all the corn being served up in the first one. Comfy old-fashioned shopping streets and wizened leathery farmers with huge crops of watermelons and no drinking problems. I know it’s a gentle vision, any sins surely vestal, and it does remind me of Miyzazaki’s works, the best compliment I can pay. His works, however, are defiantly pastoral, always furiously engaged with the present. In his script for Whisper of the Heart, the unbelievably romantic ending, an eye-roller for the jaded among us, came as a riposte to what he saw as the failure of the younger generations to commit to much of anything. YKK‘s shares more with unending pop waves of uncomplicated nostaglia, most recently for the 1950s as shown in works like the manga/movie Always: Sunset on Third Street. When you can make the “good old days” the poverty & destruction of the postwar, that’s some doing.
3.
“Reactionary” here I think is more cultural than political, though it’s a reaction against a political reality. And while it mirrors the tendency I see in left-wing Western environmentalists like Derrick Jensen and the Peak Oil cheerleaders, who seem to pray to Ma Nature every night that Western industrialism collapses because then we’ll all surely go back to the ecovillage, and the conservatism of those on the Western Right who pretend Real America lives in dying small towns though half the world lives in cities, while it mirrors those, I think trying to connect the “reactionary” I’ve argued for in YKK to any kind of Western political “reactionary” is a stretch to say the least. Not as much of a stretch as Amity Shales’ creative writing project in WaPo, but a stretch nonetheless.
So I’d say I used the right word with too much brevity, and let the associations it carried get away from my original point. I still have the reasoned view that YKK‘s picture of the world is reactionary, while admitting that someone without knowledge of what I outlined above or the same care for it I have will likely take another view.
To close, I’m reminded of the movie Amélie, which I liked well enough and which was universally praised in the French press on its release. Then Serge Kaganski chewed out Amélie’s throat in Libération, and Frédéric Bonnaud summed up the controversy that followed in Film Comment:
the so-called poetry that trickles through Amélie depends on a profoundly reactionary impulse – the reinstatement of a cliché snapshot image of France in order to reaffirm its enduring value.
Switch France & Japan: while YKK is not like Amélie in scale– there’s no tsunami of fois gras and Renoirs– it is in kind.
That’s it.
Footnote books in English for further reading, if like me you find this kind of thing interesting:
Alex Kerr, Dogs & Demons. A breezy rant, it’s not great, and FOTB Westerners discover it and overquote it when they’re frustrated that Japan doesn’t flatter their expectations. It’s a poorly-written, or at least translated, book. Kerr wrote it in Japanese, which might explain why the research is so thin. He relies almost entirely on Japanese newspaper sources, which do little investigative journalism and are ruled by press clubs that restrict access to information. I picked up the book hoping for research on par with Robert Jackall’s Moral Mazes. It’s more like a 200-page blog screed with lots of links to nothing but Yahoo News. Still, it’s the English book that will give you some idea of what I’m talking about.
Gavan McCormack, The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence. This is academic version I was looking for.
Or you can just go to The Economist and do a search for “LDP” and “construction.” You’ll get 81 articles, an afternoon’s reading and a sick feeling in your stomach.