Circle K Cycles
Graphic Memoir?

At first I struggled to understand how Circle K Cycles was categorized as a graphic memoir. Before reading it, I flipped through the pages and landed on the section where Yamashita narrates in Portuguese and panicked that I’d bought the wrong book. So, before even reading the first page it was obvious this story would be entirely different from everything else we’ve read this semester (even Mother’s Urn) and that it would require seeing and looking for things that may have, in previous stories, made it easier to see how the story was graphic memoir. The elements of fiction throughout the story make it less autobiographical than a story like Persepolis, which at first made it seem like it couldn’t really be a graphic memoir, because the stories were not all hers and the graphics did not directly illustrate every scene. But eventually it became easier to connect Yamashita’s story to those elements we have so far attributed to the genre, which really ended up expanding what I have thought defines a graphic memoir. First, the fictional elements do not have to detract from the memoir. Can’t she incorporate the stories of others? The numerous characters’ stories, both actual and fictional, really wove one much larger narrative: one about identity, alienation, homesickness, success, failure, and change. It didn’t seem like the author’s intention was to tell her one personal story, but instead to create a memoir of a people who had stories in common. If a memoir is a slice of life, a piece of a larger picture, then Circle K Cycles seems to fit, just on a larger scale. If it is a memoir, then the other half of the question is whether it is graphic. Obviously it looks nothing like anything we’ve read. The graphics or pictures themselves are small and infrequent and don’t reiterate exactly what the text says. But aside from the actual images there is something about the way the story incorporates so many facets of life that lend it graphic qualities, and the perfect example of this is the collage presentation. “Touch Your Heart Circle K” is a collage made of text excerpts instead of images, many of which aren’t even related in terms of content. Yet the combination of Portuguese and English to caption the subject matter creates a display much like actual graphics would, and flows from side-to-side like we would read panels. The collection of news clips sort of function like a page of panels with images would, because every excerpt conveys such a distinct scene. Even things like the great variety of text sizes, shapes, and boldness contribute to the sense of collected stories and scenes. The chapters that aren’t in the collage format still contain elements of the graphic part of memoir, a lot of which has to do with the way multiple languages are incorporated in the same page, even the same short paragraph. “Zero Zero One-derful” in particular shows the effects of the author’s use of language as imagery. Distance and alienation are conveyed not through a series of drawings but through constantly incorporating two, even three languages. On pg. 70, a sentence in English is broken where a sentence in Japanese is inserted. I found myself really curious what the sentence said, if it meant the same thing in English or something entirely different? This was likely the point, to remind the reader of a sense of alienation that the characters in her stories experience. It is hard to forget about this over the course of the story, because we’re consistently presented with visual differences, such as “wakatar/to understand,” and the Japanese-Brazilian-American blocks of rules. These qualities seemed to support Circle K Cycles’ place as a graphic memoir.  As Yamashita says, “Your tradition is someone else’s originality,” which can apply to both the subject of whether or not it fits the genre of graphic memoir, and the way the story works to engage with a culture struggling to have a presence inside of another.