Flipped!: David Welsh on Inio Asano's Solanin



At some point, creative people are advised to write what they know, which is fine and practical advice. It also leads to a fair number of entertainments, be they novels, films, comics, or possibly operas, about underemployed twenty-something hoping to succeed in some creative endeavor without looking ostentatiously driven in the process. Some of these entertainments make you wish the creators' teachers had placed more emphasis on the advice's natural follow-up, "Try to know new things."

But some of these entertainments are perfectly capable of winning you over as they stay within their narrow confines. The ones I like best generally don't ask you to find any particular heroism in aimlessness. Nostalgia, maybe, and rueful laughter almost certainly, but they don't suggest that this is the way life should be, just how it can be for a while.



Given Japanese comics' frequent focus on be-the-best strivers, a healthy dose of slacking can offer a nice change of pace. I love Kio Shimoku's Genshiken (Del Rey), about a college club dedicated to manga, anime, video games, social awkwardness, and shared terror at being asked to accomplish anything. I don't care for the manga it inspired, but I loved the way Tatsuhiko Takimoto's novel, Welcome to the N.H.K. (Tokyopop), took inertia to insightful but absurd heights. And the titular graphic novella of Hiroaki Samura's collection, Ohikkoshi (Dark Horse) makes that inertia lively, funny and sexy.

If a pack like this can have a leader, it would have to be Seiichi Hayashi's Red Colored Elegy (Drawn & Quarterly). Hayashi's lovers were transgressive when they debuted -- weighed down by conventions even as they flouted them. Their position would be less shocking now, and if you were wondering how the concept holds up and how it might change three and a half decades on, you might check out Inio Asano's Solanin (Viz).



The character dynamics are virtually identical. A young woman works in an office and hates it, and she's in a passionate but uncertain relationship with a young man who works part time but dreams of something bigger. (Elegy's Ichiro wants to be a manga artist. Solanin's Naruo wants to be a musician.) While Asano treats his characters and their predicament with similar seriousness, his approach is more straightforward and sentimental. Think of it as Sherbert Colored Power Ballad.

That might actually underestimate the degree of edge the book possesses. In an early sequence, disgruntled office drone Meiko notes, "On days like this, I'm filled with a burning hatred for everyone I see... and I spend the commute to work wishing death on the people around me." It's probably telling that, in 1971, that passage might have been the prelude to a violent psychodrama. In 2008, it's more likely to make the reader smile in sympathetic kinship. (That was the line's effect on me.)



Meiko doesn't endure her lecherous boss or vapid co-workers for long. After what Naruo clearly thinks of as a theoretical discussion, Meiko quits, planning to live off of her savings while she figures out what she really wants to do. Naruo's reaction filled me with confidence in Asano's capacity for nuance: he's horrified. It's as though the fact that he theoretically supported Meiko's desire to quit should have negated any need for her to actually do so. He's not hypocrite enough to deny her the freedom he enjoys, but he's unnerved all the same. It's subtle and surprising.

It's the first of a number of astutely observed, emotionally awkward moments between the two and their friends and family. At loose ends and making no progress on deciding what she wants to do when she grows up, Meiko encourages Naruo to seriously pursue a musical career. There are lots of small ways that Meiko and Naruo live with, for, and through each other; their relationship feels very real. If Naruo's trajectory as a musician is less convincing, it's largely a matter of personal interests rather than a failure of creativity. (Talk to me about chords, amps, and gigs, and my eyes glaze over.)

Character design supports the feeling of realness, though Asano's illustrations are stylized. There's little of the shimmery, elongated radiance that can be distracting in some styles of manga visuals. Everyone who's supposed to looks like they're in a slightly awkward physical place between the last of adolescence and early adulthood, from a spattering of freckles to ridiculous attempts at facial hair to the clinging remnants of baby fat. Asano isn't trying to mimic reality, but he's overlaying enough bits on his own style, and the effect is comforting. The frequent photorealism of the backgrounds works well in counterpoint. The characters pop, and the occasional use of white or negative space as a background is more effective because it's used infrequently. And while there aren't many experimental visual flourishes, there are some terrifically funny bits.

I don't know if Solanin will stand the test of time in the way Red Colored Elegy has, because it isn't breaking new ground so much as treading familiar ground very deftly and sincerely. Asano is talented enough to make a look at an in-between phase of uncertainty very involving.

*****

* Solanin, Inio Asano, Viz Media, 432 pages, Oct. 21, 2008, ISBN: 1421523213, $17.99.

*****

David P. Welsh has loved comics since his parents first used Archie and Casper to sedate him during long trips in the family station wagon.

He's worked as a reporter and editor for daily and weekly newspapers, and later sold out for the glamorous world of public relations. Prior to relocating to The Comics Reporter, he wrote his Flipped column for Comic World News for just over three years. He's written articles on comics for print outlets and a variety of other web sites.

He lives in West Virginia, which he says has gotten a lot easier since the Starbucks and Barnes & Noble opened up.

You may e-mail David with questions or commentary You can write to this site about David's columns

Please bookmark his site, Precocious Curmudgeon.

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