![]() ![]() "In this pleasantly meandering graphic album, Italian cartoonist Igort (The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks) collects his scattered impressions of Japan, stitching together short stories, essays, and samples of the comics he drew for manga publisher Kodansha while living in Tokyo. Short, but scholarly musings on Japan's strict class system and the everpresent iconography of the chrysanthemum sit comfortably alongside tributes to pop-culture icons such as Isao Takahata, Hayao Miyazaki, Shigeru Mizuki and Seijun Suzuki - all rendered in a flexible style that is part comics, part illustrated essay." Such fantasies rarely involve being, say, a burakumin, but Igort's drawings of that posh, tidy vision are beautiful enough to get away with it." In the book's afterword, he relates a dream in which his translator imagined him as "a high-class woman of a certain age" in a kimono shop in the early 1900s. (He tells the story of how his initial meeting there went on for three and a half hours: He didn't realize that it was his role to end it, and so his editor raised his rate three times, thinking that Igort was subtly negotiating.) His editors, he notes, told him that they were "honored to work with you, who in turn, in your previous life, were Japanese." That's the deepest longing of any cultural outsider, and like many such outsiders, Igort is particularly attached to the aspects of the country that are gone or vanishing. ![]() Those observations are peppered by stories of Igort's personal links to Japan, where he's been unusually successful for a Western creator since the early '90s, when he got a job drawing comics for the publishing company Kodansha. (As the subtitle suggests, it owes a bit to Roland Barthes's own book about Japan, "Empire of Signs.") It's a loose chain of commentaries on bits of Japanese culture that have made an impression on him - the films of Seijun Suzuki, the life story of the murderer Sada Abe, discrimination against the burakumin caste, the national fascination with chrysanthemums - illustrated with exquisite pen-and-watercolor images that filter iconic Japanese imagery through the visual techniques of European comics. JAPANESE NOTEBOOKS: A Journey to the Empire of Signs (Chronicle, $29.95) is partly a remembrance of his experience working in the Japanese comics industry, and mostly an extended meditation on his long, deep fascination with Japan and its art. ![]() "Over more than three decades, the Italian cartoonist who goes by the single name Igort has written and drawn fictional, historical, biographical and experimental books, relatively few of which have been translated into English. ![]()
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