A Drunken Dream and Other Stories
Written & Illustrated by Moto Hagio
Translated by Matt Thorn
Published by Fantagraphics
Although there are hundreds of manga titles for youngsters and teens, and even a handful of violent genre titles for older readers, on American shelves, Drawn and Quarterly (with gekiga-originator Yoshihiro Tatsumi) and Vertical (publishing latter-era Osamu Tezuka tomes) seem to be among the few publishers interested in providing mature, adult material. So I’m happy to see Fantagraphics step up to the plate and deliver another such offering: A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, a collection of ten Moto Hagio short stories.
Compiling comics originally published between 1977 and 2008, A Drunken Dream showcases the full range of Hagio’s short stories, while also granting readers insight into the themes of lost innocence, family dysfunction and perseverance in the face of abuse that underscore much of her work. Two of the best pieces are “Hanshin: Half-God” and “Iguana Girl.” In the former, one conjoined twin appears healthy and happy, but never developed beyond the most simplistic (yet upbeat) personality. The other half, Yudy, processes all the nutrients that her sister’s body takes to appear healthy, while Yudy herself, her mind and personality fully developed, remains sickly and ill. “Iguana Girl” shows a mother’s disgust with her own child (depicted as an iguana) and the trauma of emotional abuse. Yet the tale also depicts the strength to persevere, to find something better and to, maybe, understand the emotional failings of another.
Using sci-fi and fantasy settings, Hagio balances the splendor of fanciful settings against the turmoil of the human condition. But amid the phantoms of the past, the space stations, or the elaborate backdrops, each story retains an emotional core.
With distinct character designs, detailed backgrounds and emotive character acting, Hagio’s artwork conveys the full emotional range of her stories, with dollops of humor mixed into sagas of sadness, survival and hard-won contentment. Crisp black and white artwork is abetted by occasional use of greytones to add depth and texture. The title story also uses a blend of reds and pinks to enhances its sci-fi and fantasy backdrops, while “Iguana Girl” contrasts the emotional abuse within by introducing itself with a vibrant and colorful title page.
Also in the book, translator and editor Matt Thorn provides two text pieces: an article on “The Magnificent Forty-Niners,” a group of women cartoonists (Hagio among them) who changed the creative lifeblood of shōjo manga (girls’ comics); and a longish, somewhat disjointed, but highly enlightening interview with Hagio, whose family history clearly forms the basis for much of her creative work. Although neither piece is essential for appreciating the strong cartooning work, each – particularly the interview – provides depth to the themes of the work and creative environment into which the stories were born.
Under a sturdy hardcover, with the manga unflipped and Thorn’s text pieces running from the back cover (you can read from both covers!), A Drunken Dream and Other Stories finds another important voice in Japanese comics history washing up on American shores. One hopes that Hagio, whose work manages to be both stark and beautiful, finds a welcoming and receptive audience.
October 20th, 2010 at 11:52 pm
Great review of, what’s to me, the most exciting manga release in years (I never dreamed we’d finally see more Moto Hagio content in English).
One very anal correction of mine– I’ve seen many reviews mention the date of the stories starting at 1977. This is one of my few, small gripes with Fantagraphics Books (my other one being just that no one caught the fact that in the Moto Hagio interview, we have the caption for one of the pictures wrongly repeated for a few other different pictures). Those dates are from the copyright of various collections where the stories were reprinted. I wish (like I do with all manga translations) they had given the proper date of publication.
Going the wonderfully thorough Hagio bibliography printed in The Comic Journal article where that Hagio interview comes from (in slightly longer form)…
Bianca comes from 1970
Girl on Porch with Puppy from 1971
Autumn Journey from 1971
Marie Ten Years Later from 1977
A Drunken Dream from 1980
Hashin from 1984
Angel Mimic from 1984
Iguana Girl from 1991
The Child Who Comes Home from 1998
The Willow Tree from 2007
I’m a geek for dates, but I think they’re pretty important in this case… The first three stories were from when Hagio had only been working two or three years. And while there had been some epic, form changing shoujo titles before (Mizuno Hideko’s wonderful 1969 title, Fire! comes most to mind), the shoujo landscape changed immensely between 1971 and 1977, stories three and four in the collection (besides the obvious works of Hagio and Takemiya, there were titles like Rose of Versailles that gave the format more prestige and notoriety). Anyway, with a volume like this I think the context can be quite important–some critics have been unfairly harsh on the earlier, simpler stories, assuming, due to the book’s copyright information, that they came fairly well into Hagio’s career. Though personally, I admit to having some particular affection for those earliest works.
October 21st, 2010 at 1:29 am
This is a bit of a long shot, but maybe they’re only counting Hagio’s works when she started to veer out into her own territority and produce works that were unquestionably her own? Because admitingly, the first couple stories, although revolutionary for their time, seem rather saccharine in comparision to her stronger stories.
This is actually a greatly watered-down criticism of some of the weaker stories in the collection, which, after reading, I was loath to admit was true.
http://www.tcj.com/hoodedutilitarian/2010/09/die-little-girls-die/
Not to mention the incoherence of the title story:
http://www.tcj.com/hoodedutilitarian/2010/09/incoherent-dreams/
I was more impressed with the fact that we were able to get access to more translated Hagoi stories than that several of them had Old-school Shojo sensibilities. Then again, the reviewer Noah Berlatsky, isn’t a particular fan of girly backgrounds or linge claire. He’s made claims that he can’t “get” into Tintin simply because everything’s too precise, as opposed to American art where Anything Goes. The reciprocal being that I couldn’t “get” American art simply because I thought the seriously drawn stuff was SUPPOSED to look ugly.
I’m still waiting for the announcement of their next Hagio book. Maybe we’ll hear more until after they release Wandering Son later this year.
October 21st, 2010 at 1:51 am
Haha, I was actually thinking specifically of those reviews–and I get where Noah Berlatsky’s coming from, even if I don’t fully agree. (Noah and I have agreed to disagree about various things before).
I get your point, though I think the interview makes a point that Hagio, pretty much from the start, was doing work that was different from the norm in many ways. But, of course it takes a while for most creators to find their footing. I think it was smart, and a good idea for Fantagraphics to start with some of her earliest work, to show the progression (not just for Hagio, but for shoujo and manga in general). But, I do now kinda get the flipside to the argument–which wouldn’t have occured to me before (but I’m someone who kinda delights in reading even some of those early shoujo “mothers with amnesia” stories mentioned in the book).
I guess that’s why I feel the book should have made slightly more of a point of when those earliest stories were written–even if admittedly they do a much better job of putting her work into context than nearly any other translated manga volume I can think of (I was disappointed that Vertical didn’t even have some sort of brief essay in their Takemiya volumes). Another issue is that Fantagraphics understandably both wanted to appeal to us manga fans who knew a fair bit about Hagio and her era, and really just wanted some of that stuff out in English, and trying to appeal to people who might not even remotely take shoujo manga (or even manga) seriously as “important” comics in the first place.
(That said, I love the incoherence of the title story. And I think I agree with your comment about American “serious” drawn stuff.)
October 21st, 2010 at 5:23 pm
I’ll have to admit a certain kind of self-plagiarization, since I already mentioned my distaste for American art elsewhere. I only blogged my opinion when I couldn’t find where I posted my comments about comnparing the founding of Image Comics versus L’Association. (I just found it today and edited it in)
http://sundaycomicsdebt.blogspot.com/2010/09/looooong-legs.html
If I have a tendency to repeat myself, it’s only because I know it’s true.
I’m STILL waiting for a scanlation of Banana Bread Pudding, whose plot I’ll repeat verbatim for anybody who’s missed it the first time around:
“…features a young girl slipping into madness because her older sister is to be married, and won’t be able to accompany her to the bathroom after 10 PM and stand outside singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Without this protection, she believes, a beautiful androgynous clown will take her and run her through a meat grinder. Since her dream is to marry a closeted gay man and help him to accept his sexuality, her best friend convinces her playboy brother to play gay. As it turns out, the boy this best friend is in love with is an uncloseted gay who is in love with her brother. And, in turn, this boy is sexually abused by a middle-aged teacher who is a closeted gay man. Are you still with me? It may sound comical (and it often is), but I’ve had to swear off reading Oshima’s stories in public because I’ve never gotten through one without crying.”
Why isn’t anybody looking up these kind of crazy stuff that NEEDS to be translated??? Also, I’ve just recently found out about a French Canadian comic titled Red Ketchup, who originally ran in CROC Magazine, the Quebec equivalent of MAD Magazine, only raunchier. Red Ketchup is an albino FBI Agent who could be described as a cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Hunter S. Thompson. He’s very effective at killing, and regularly takes various drugs to starve off the “shakes & headaches”, and is ABSOLUTELY INSANE.
http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/r/redketch.htm
One assignment called for him to arrest a Football player who was suspected of having a drug connection, and if proved, should be arrested discreetly. Upon finding a packet of cocaine in his locker, what does Red Ketchup do? He tackles the football player from making the winning touchdown in front of MILLIONS of viewers in the audience and on TV. Red Ketchup then breaks the Football player’s arm and congragulates himself on a job well done.
He’s what The Implacable Man would be like if he was a main character. However, because of it’s casual nudity of both male and female anatomy, it’ll probably never be translated in English. Maybe a scanlation will be available on a 4chan board, but I’m not holding my breath.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImplacableMan
October 21st, 2010 at 5:35 pm
Haha I actually read some of those comments on your blog
And don’t worry, I repeat myself all the time int ehse various comments…
There IS a scanlation of Banana Bread Pudding, one of two Oshima scanlations I believe (check out mangaupdates). I had to read it twice to decide if I liked it–I actually was kinda disappointed the first time, after reading Matt Thorn’s raves for so long, but I think I’ve come around. At any rate, since most of her best work is short fiction, I think she’d make an ideal Fantagraphics collection similar to Drunken Dream (as much as I like Hagio’s short fiction, on the other hand, I think her greatest work are titles like Thomas and its prequel, Poe Family, Mesh and Cruel God Reigns).
Wow, I know NOTHING about French Canadian comics, even though I’m Canadian and fluent in French–in fact in French Immersion school one year we had copies of Croc in the classroom. I’ll have to track it down. (There are a number of manga titles that have great French translations, and little chance of an English one–and I have some knowledge and experience in French/Belgian comics–and not just from reading Asterix and Tintin as a kid).
I’ll have to research French Canadian titles more…
October 22nd, 2010 at 8:29 pm
Thanks for telling me about the scanlation for BBP! I didn’t even know there was one available until you pointed it out to me! I really need to keep a better lookout for translated Shojo Mangas. Apart from a few chapters of Rose of Versailles and 32+ Volumes of Glass Mask, there aren’t really any other noteworthy titles with much name recognition. Is there anything out there I should read? Apart from a few side projects from the now-defunct Stage Storm forum, I haven’t tried anything else.
I can see your reservations recommending the BBP Manga. It doesn’t quite reach the levels of insanity Matt Thorn’s description conveys, and is more about Soap Opera dynamics than anything. After the last chapter, I also wouldn’t trust Oshima with any interpretations of Freud.
Like you, I’m hoping to hear another announcement from Fantagraphics once Wandering Son gets released later this year. For the moment, we’ll have to deal with rumors of “Big Changes” at Viz. Apart from a large staff layoff, and the possibility of an online Shojo Beat, I’ll be holding my reservations in check until our suspections are confirmed.
http://www.kuri-ousity.com/2010/10/big-changes-coming-to-viz-media-let-the-theories-fly/
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