Review - Good-Bye by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
July 22nd, 2008 John Posted in Comic Books, Reviews |
If Ingmar Bergman were a Japanese Manga creator, he would no doubt have been Yoshihiro Tatsumi. In “Good-Bye,” a new collection of Tatsumi’s short works from 1971 and 1972, the underbelly of the Japanese psyche is examined in from an intimate and often grim vantage point with masterful results.
Japanese Manga has been the hottest comics trend in the United States, with shelves of the books finding their way into mainstream bookstores and the hands of American teenagers everywhere. Tatsumi, though, is a pioneer of the form and if the current onslaught is mystifying to adults on a number of levels — from the youthful subject matter to enormity of the titles available — Tatsumi provides a reference point for the lost, both in chronology and maturity.
In Tatsumi’s world, Japan is land of not merely of repression, but of the illusion of repression. Nastiness still abounds and people still act out their coarsest desires, but society turns a blind eye to it, creating the mass delusion that there is nothing wrong. The way Tatsumi tells it, this results in a world of colliding, mournful loners who want and take and hurt.
In “Hell,” Tatsumi uses the bombing of Hiroshima as the ultimate indicator of the fraud of Japanese society, with the desire for upright decency being revealed as a compulsion enabled by the country’s nostalgia for its own need for honor.
Japanese women are portrayed as being expected to submit to being objects of lust, while being shamed into doing what their society demands of them. In “Life Is So Sad” Akemi is forced to work as a hostess after her abusive boyfriend lands in jail — but his assumptions about her job push her into fulfilling his worst expectations. In “Good-Bye” Mariko — branded a slut by her neighbors — finds herself torn between her American lover and her sleazy father, a conflict that results in a horrible dehumanization of the woman.
Meanwhile, men are desperate and lonely, filled with self loathing due to the expectations of society. In “Just a Man” and “Rash,” older men grope for their fantasies and end up with further dark holes in their souls. In “Woman in the Mirror” and “Night Falls Again” the inability of Japanese men to express themselves in a sexual manner is turned inside out on them by the world at large.
Tatsumi’s bitter slices of life unwind with a silent grace — his artwork renders the tragedies with a compassion that never hides the starkness of the emotions portrayed. Tatsumi is spare with dialogue, but it packs a punch when his characters speak, bring the reader to intimate corners as we intrude on the most private — and sometimes horrible — moments in their lives.
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