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A review by uosdwisrdewoh
A Journal of My Father by Jirō Taniguchi
4.0
This subtle and restrained graphic novel has a simple premise. A man in Tokyo gets a call from his hometown. His father has died there. They’re not close, but he returns and finally, all too late, learns about his father and realizes how much he missed when he was alive.
It’s a very nice story that fundamentally relies on sentimental clichés. The tropes of a death of a loved one are tropes because they’re so widespread—it’s hard to avoid them in a story that steadfastly tries to capture the interactions of real families without exaggeration, one that plumbs for the depth of feeling often hidden behind the taciturn manners of Japanese mores.
This mood is helped tremendously by Taniguchi’s artwork. He renders every member of the family precisely across the ages, and every character looks like themselves even across forty years, a surprisingly difficult task in a style that, while not exaggerated, is far from being photorealistic. Every line has to count when the differences across a decade can be shown with little more than slight indications around the eyes.
You don’t see this type of story in comics a lot. Or at least, that’s the case in America. Japan, with its enormous proliferation of genres of manga, is another story. The default mode of manga that we get in America is wildly histrionic and cartoony, but in this book the most common panel is a person sitting silently with only an ellipsis in their thought balloon. There’s been a movement to translate more of these naturalistic gekiga stories in the past few decades—this one hails from the 90s but only now sees its publication in English. I hope to find more in the future.
It’s a very nice story that fundamentally relies on sentimental clichés. The tropes of a death of a loved one are tropes because they’re so widespread—it’s hard to avoid them in a story that steadfastly tries to capture the interactions of real families without exaggeration, one that plumbs for the depth of feeling often hidden behind the taciturn manners of Japanese mores.
This mood is helped tremendously by Taniguchi’s artwork. He renders every member of the family precisely across the ages, and every character looks like themselves even across forty years, a surprisingly difficult task in a style that, while not exaggerated, is far from being photorealistic. Every line has to count when the differences across a decade can be shown with little more than slight indications around the eyes.
You don’t see this type of story in comics a lot. Or at least, that’s the case in America. Japan, with its enormous proliferation of genres of manga, is another story. The default mode of manga that we get in America is wildly histrionic and cartoony, but in this book the most common panel is a person sitting silently with only an ellipsis in their thought balloon. There’s been a movement to translate more of these naturalistic gekiga stories in the past few decades—this one hails from the 90s but only now sees its publication in English. I hope to find more in the future.