Review - Red Colored Elegy by Seiichi Hayashi
Seiichi Hayashi’s “Red Colored Elegy” evokes French New Wave film as it follows the relationship between Ichiro and Sachiko, investigating the personal tortures that have an effect on their status as a couple.
Structurally, Hayashi unfolds his tale through disjointed scenes that either hint at more than they reveal, or sometimes just make the reader feel left out from a secret. It’s that arm’s length mode of storytelling that grew out of films like “Breathless,” where it’s hard to engage with the characters since it’s impossible to get inside them beyond their whining to each other.
Hayashi matches the oblique attitude with simple artwork — sometimes so simple that characters can become interchangeable in appearance. That’s a shame because at points, Hayashi lets his skill slip through, mostly with some lovely renderings of landscapes, street scenes, and architecture. The complication of these renditions make it seem as if he is holding back too much with his characters — especially since there are points where the author is really on the verge of drawing a reader into his characters’ dramas.
At the same time, Hayashi does have the detached, disjointed storytelling technique down. It’s not hard to see that in 1970/71, when this first appeared, it certainly was groundbreaking — it’s just that decades later, it has little emotional resonance and stands best as a technical example of experimentation in the graphic arts.
It points to what could be and shows an astonishing level of creative maturity — it is, unfortunately, a promise of what could be rather than a realization of it.
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