Clumsy Carl - Notes on Good-Bye by Yoshihiro Tatsumi (Drawn & Quarterly 2010)
Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Good-Bye (Drawn & Quarterly: 2010)
I showed up at Atomic Books tonight (Thursday) only to see Benn and Rachel locking up the darkened store. It says Wednesday right on the Atomic Books Reading Club Facebook page. Wednesday night, I was sitting home alone, re-reading the stories in the book, tapping notes into my netbook, eager to attend the meeting having taken the time beforehand to reflect on this reading experience. Oh, Clumsy Carl, you've done it again.
I am a novice to this genre of literary comics-style short stories. The first story, "Hell", has a film noir quality to it. It depicts the unpleasant truth that atrocity destroys the wicked as well as the innocent.
There is a bit more traditional interiority in Tatsumi’s characters versus those of Adrian Tomine in the latter’s Summer Blonde, which we read last month. Perhaps it is the voice of the narrator, or the use of thought bubbles or the depiction of his nightmares (e.g., in “Hell,” the burned mother and son like something out of Day of the Dead, the statue of the hitman/son murdering the mother). We see the conflicting phases of the wartime photographer’s moods as he feels horror, grief, shame, pride, shock, shame, grim resolution, desolation. It felt a bit odd to me, culturally, at the end, that he still felt shame at committing murder, even though when he did so he was certain the victim was wicked. There was a slight question in my mind that maybe the man who had blackmailed him was not really the son. Still, the blackmailer was wicked.
In the next story, “Just a Man” we a see a theme developing with the mostly male, mostly impotent, protagonists of these stories. In “Hell” the photographer described himself as " wandering through hell like a zombie" (41). In "Just a Man" the dejected retiree businessman describes himself as a “walking corpse” (51). Yet within this milieu of death-in-life the lead character still shows a range of emotions. He feels dejection at retirement, the virility of desire, shame, disgust with his wife, disgust with himself, bitterness. The ending is strange, with him pissing on the cannon, a desecration of what for him was a symbol of virility, courage, glory, a purposeful life.
"Sky Burial" had a gothic horror feel to it (a la "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe). A young man is haunted by the thought of buzzards devouring his corpse. Everywhere he goes, he sees them circling in the sky. Again, there is the theme of death-in-life. They are circling because he is already dead, or because he feels that way, though he is still walking around. He hides from buzzards in a dive bar during the day. He breaks up with his girlfriend because he is too depressed to feel love. He is so checked-out of reality he doesn’t even notice the stench of a corpse, dead for three months, in the room next to his. After this grisly discovery, the other men move out of the rooming house. He is left alone in the vacant house and it is shown falling apart, gradually being taken over by weeds and stray animals. Interestingly, it is the artwork here that gives a sense that the young man actually starts to feel at ease in this environment. I think this was my favorite story in the collection, actually. But maybe this is just because I am a fan of gothic horror.
In "The Rash," a man living alone in the countryside struggles with a rash that comes and goes over his entire body. Again, I may be missing some cultural experience in interpreting the story’s central symbol, a mushroom, which seems to suggest both the prospect of suicide (because it is poisonous) and penile eroticism. I didn't quite get what the end scene depicted. Did he place that mushroom on the young woman’s bed? Was it an old symbolic communication of sexual desire?
"Woman in the Mirror": Slightly different feel to this one. The boy who was a cross-dresser turns out to be a happy family man (or so we are shown). It has in common with the other stories an anxiety on the part of the main character over his inability to live up to the cultural imperatives of manhood.
"Night Falls Again": This one is interesting mainly because there's no real plot. It just follows around a nameless impotent pornhound for a little while. His aspect with the glasses and bowl haircut kind of reminds me of Willam T. Vollmann's author photos.
"Life is so Sad": "This is so sad...why are you women like this...?" (164). The woman are somewhat unflatteringly portrayed in these stories as either unattainable young princesses or castrating bitches: greedy old wives and prostitutes (“let's milk those creeps dry again tonight” (155))). The heroine of “Life Is So Sad” seems to be an exception. We are given a glimpse into the mind of the unattainable young princess and the shit she has to put up with, with the impotent old man that usually leads the stories taking a secondary role.
In an interview I saw on Youtube, Tatsumi said when he wrote the story 70% of the work was done. This is an interesting view into the process. One wonders how the act of creating the artwork influences the subsequent revision of the story, if at all.
I liked the use of ellipses in the speech bubbles to indicate when a character was rendered speechless by another’s speech or action.
I wondered how these stories could be commercial. Yes, there are aspects of film noir, gothic horror, and pornography, but in general they are not at all like the flights of fantasy, adventure, or horror one usually associates with comic books. One wonders how the author made a living writing/drawing these in the 1970s in Japan, a time before what I consider to be the development of “literary” comic books in the West (e.g., those of Art Spiegelman).
The stories have in common a sense that life after the war, after the atomic bombs, though externally "back to normal" with crowded streets, prostitution, gambling, etc. was really a zombified normal - with the characters always returning to a state of bitter, empty, impotent perseverance (contemplating suicide but too cowardly or weak to undertake it).
All in all, it was a very interesting reading experience, but it doesn’t rank among my favorites.
