The Bloggomist: Table of Content
Book Review

Being fourteen – in my memory, anyhow – is no piece of cake. It’s kind of a no-man’s-land: you’re no longer a grade-school kid, your parents don’t (really) pick your clothes anymore, your secondary sexual characteristics are either out of control or out-of-order, and you’re suddenly held responsible for your music choices and weekend activities and the overall plotting of that path toward the actuality, not just the fevered imagining/dread, of full-fledged adolescence.

Fourteen’s also a time you can and cannot make big decisions. You should be carefree but not careless,  and you must and must not take things as they are, as they come. It’s a period that could be greatly improved by some grown-up insight – or hindsight, especially if by some improbable coincidence that grown-up happened to be you.

Jiro Taniguchi’s A Distant Neighborhood: Volume 1 (Fanfare/Ponent Mon), originally published in 1998 by Tokyo’s Shogukukan, Inc. and made available in English just this year, presents one such story. In this first installment of a two-part graphic novel, forty-eight-year-old Hiroshi Nakahara visits his hometown and there finds himself suddenly and unaccountably transported to his youth. The protagonist does, as one might expect from this premise, indulge in certain small victories he did not enjoy in his youth – he takes Nagase, the class beauty, on a movie/curry date, and shows up the star eighth-grade athlete on and off the track – and he also gets himself into some trouble when his middle-aged appetite for whiskey forgets his unaccustomed teenaged body.

Nevertheless, Taniguchi’s restrained yet evocative black-and-white illustration and narrative approach (with the latter to a somewhat lesser degree) mostly precludes cliché. Where an artist/writer less judicious might have resorted to sentimentality or antics, Jiro Taniguchi instead renders Hiroshi with even-handed sobriety. Nakahara’s ambivalence about his situation, which grows out of the store of knowledge, memories, and experience he has carried into his re-living, makes him an easily sympathetic character. Because of this, too, his resolution to do whatever he can to prevent his father’s mysterious abandonment, despite changes the effort could effect not only in Hiroshi’s own future but also in others’, is invested with greater, more serious consequence.

That Nakahara makes his decision with the audacity of a boy at fourteen; the gravity of a man thirty-four years his senior; and the hopefulness of any individual, of any age, contemplating the prospect of a longed-for restoration of personal and familial peace gives A Distant Neighborhood: Vol. 1 an appeal at once broad and focused, youthful and mature. Such interplay really doesn’t get much more fourteen – or simply human – than that.

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For more from E. Tae Cha, visit: www.evilmonito.com/author/elaine

Published on 17 November 2009 | |