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Sean Kim — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:00:22 +0000

Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s memoir, A Drifting Life, chronicles the youth and career of a prominent graphic novelist.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s stories have appeared in the U.S. these past five years in three hard-bound volumes published by Drawn and Quarterly. These collections (Push Man and Other Stories, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, and Good-Bye) were put together with the assistance of Adrian Tomine and were a great discovery for me as a comics reader. Voyeuristic, perverse, psychologically taut and even violent, Tatsumi’s work has a nihilistic strain and often portray grotesque and morally ambiguous people. Each panel is drawn in a loose style that’s clean and free of affectation. The work is far ahead of its time and I read each collection straight through, loving every page.

Tatsumi’s most recent book, A Drifting Life, is a fictionalized graphic memoir which, at 840 pages, chronicles his uneventful youth in Japan, his entrance into the post-War manga scene, and his evolution as an artist. Though the artist’s name is changed, everything else in A Drifting Life is pretty much Tatsumi.

But a writer’s life—or in this case a manga artist’s life—hasn’t much to offer in and of itself. It’s an existence inside cramped rooms, scribbling stories on blank sheets of paper, occasional arguments about the nature of the art, insecurities about your lack of public recognition, and debilitating doubts about whether you’re wasting your life. It’s all there in A Drifting Life and, in a phrase, it’s kinda boring.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi

The recounting of a life has as much to do with the period in which one lives—from the people one knew to the major cultural/historical events—as it does about the life itself. A Moveable Feast isn’t about Ernest Hemingway writing his stories, it’s about the scene and the people, about Gertrude Stein’s fight with Alice B. Toklas, or Hemingway’s observations of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Tatsumi notes major events in the post-war era, scattering them through the book with illustrations in that same loose style, only with a touch more realism. He also recounts memorable episodes like his meeting manga godfather, Osamu Tezuka. Tatsumi was excited. His colleagues were excited. I was excited. But reading further I found fewer moments of such loving attention, many others that seemed unnecessary and too literal, like Tatsumi’s searches, on foot, for a publisher. Still other incidents are left unfinished, such as the story of a woman who had a crush on Tatsumi and came to visit him every morning. At least these interludes offering fresh breaks from the narrative, which otherwise simply drifts.

To be fair, this broken up, meandering narrative is announced in the book’s title. Life is nothing more than a parade of people who suddenly appear then disappear, and events that burst on the scene now eventually fizzle out later. It’s this aesthetic life that Tatsumi presents us in A Drifting Life, a life lived on the surface with nothing to know beyond what we see. The motives and psychology behind the decisions, the forces that propel a life forward, are inexplicable, unknowable through words, even words accompanied by graphic illustrations. Tatsumi knows this, so he doesn’t try.

Ironically, the undercurrent of dark desires missing from the memoir is exactly what is so pregnant in Tatsumi’s stories. What we have in A Drifting Life is more like reality: a long, unending stream of unrelated, unconnected events strung together by a singular person. The same book might have had greater power had it been shorter, the historical events more smoothly integrated; as is, Tatsumi’s long memoir is evenly paced, and eventually that pace begins to drag. What more is there to say about the working life except that it is endless?

The Rumpus Review of Tokyo!

Sean Kim — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 16:09:44 +0000

There aren’t many three-part, thematically connected, self-contained, trilogy films (I’m trying to avoid that abused word “triptych” here). The best one I can think of was New York Stories from back in 1989, featuring a set by Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Woody Allen. The few other films I’m aware of are Four Rooms (not the best), Asia Extreme 1 and 2 (saw 1, not 2), more recently Paris, je t’aime, and going way back, horror collections like Creepshow and Twilight Zone the Movie. But these tripartite films aren’t very popular, they’re something of the publishing equivalent of short story collections; only practitioners of the art ever read them, or watch them. And it’s too bad, because one can always pick out a real gem in every one.

Tokyo! runs through its share of what we’ve come to expect of most things Japanese, that it’s weird and subtly bizarre, but the directors here don’t assume this is inherent to being Japanese. Michel Gondry’s story fits in with what Gondry has always been interested in, and Leo Carax I’m sure does the same, as with Bong Joon-ho. But with any collection of stories, each one are of varying quality and character, and often of varying strength.

The film isn’t so concerned with Tokyo the city as it is with its people, the Tokyo-ers or -ites. The first by Michel Gondry, “Interior Design” is probably the strongest. One immediately knows this is about Tokyo, because how better to open than with a neophyte couple moving into the giant metropolis for the first time? They go through the familiar rites of searching for apartments (mortified by the over-priced rates and frightening living conditions), getting their car towed, to dealing with the awkardness of over staying one’s welcome at a friend’s. But then this story alone wouldn’t be enough, so what should happen but that the girlfriend suddenly turns into a chair? It was the most unexpected and whimsical thing, like Gondry simply decided midway through this would happen, the girl will turn into a chair. And you believe it. You accept it without pause.

Gondry also touches on the core idea of seeing the city in a new and unexpected light. Scenes of a naked woman sprinting lightly down the nighttime streets is brief but powerful, as her pale figure is set against an intensely urbanized Tokyo. She then squeezes between tightly stacked buildings and disappears into the dark. It’s the most striking moment of all three films, touching on the extremes of tender flesh and giant, urbanized concrete.

The other two films stand out less. Leo Carax’s “Merde” starts strong with an extended shot of the sewer dweller Merde rising from the depths to terrorize the local Ginza district shoppers on his long march down the palisade. But a lot of what’s funny in the beginning wears thin as the story gets bogged down by attempts at satire. Punctuated by a soundtrack and sound effects from the original Godzilla, Carax draws references to Japan’s dark history of imperialism lurking in the sewers underground, where Merde blithely trots along. The mystery of Merde’s identity turns into a kind of metaphor for terrorists or cult leaders or your run of the mill fanatics, potentially done to reveal the contemporary soullessness of the Japanese people, or maybe by extension modern man. Who knows. The metaphor is far too drawn out. What initially started as funny and interesting, becomes labored and loses all force. The same goes for Bong Joon-ho’s “Shaking Tokyo.” Much as I enjoyed Bong’s feature The Host, the latter’s same biting satire is completely lost in this story of a hikikomori (the modern equivalent of a hermit extreme) who falls in love with a pizza delivery girl. Bong’s reliance on earthquakes as a plot device is excusable if the use is spare and pointed, but in “Shaking Tokyo” he uses three earthquakes to move the story forward. There were some nice touches though, like the electric shock that wakes the girl from her faint, but small touches aren’t enough to carry even a short film like this one. The one interesting moment is when the hero steps out of his house and sees an entire population living ‘inside.’ The question remains, is this science-fiction or is it a social critique? The film didn’t go far enough with this and instead drew back to the old standard of a guy finding the girl he loves.

The idea is good, a collection of three films about a city as seen by non-natives. But these films are as much about the theme as it is about the directors and their individual muscle power. With Tokyo!, Gondry flexes easily and shows striations, Carax goes for the big guns and falls a little short, and Bong, well he’s the lone chessman of the bunch, which begs the question why the producers didn’t stick with the French theme and have a third Frenchman at the helm (Jean-Pierre Jeunet maybe?). The movie then could’ve been titled “Japon!” or “Japonais!”, but then I guess Tokyo! is just as fine. And two out of three isn’t so bad.

Sean Kim: The Last Book I Loved, Last Evenings on Earth

Sean Kim — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:35:14 +0000

It used to be that exile was unique to small, tight knit immigrant communities, but now I know it’s just a condition of living in the world. Roberto Bolano proves it. For him, exile is a life lived in existential crisis, only the feeling isn’t so much desperation as it is an endless, numbing ennui. Loneliness, boredom, an eerie sense of impending violence; one flies to Paris via Buenos Aires in the same banal fog as one walks across the street to a neighbor’s. You meet people who wonder at their situations as revolutionaries, as writers, daughters, travelers, each attempting to make some kind of connection that, in the end, disintegrates into a fine dust. This collection is perfect, not one story falters, though some do stand apart, like “Sensini,” “Anne Moore’s Story,” “Last Evenings on Earth.” Each one unfolds as a series of consecutive events that could be random or fated, or both; and every one of them is sad.

The Rumpus.net » Sean Kim

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Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s memoir, A Drifting Life, chronicles the youth and career of a prominent graphic novelist.

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The Rumpus Review of Tokyo!

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