"No matter how angry you are, no flicking over tables."
The graphic above is a warning sign my husband and I saw at an izakaya in Little Tokyo back home in Los Angeles. This little visual harkened back to my mind after I finished Karen Tei Yamashita's Circle K Cycles, which, admittedly, has been my favorite graphic memoir this whole semester. I want to start by briefly talk about its status or inherent being as a "graphic" memoir, and I think it wholeheartedly is, despite the reservations I have. The genre of "graphic" memoir is evolving and changing, as is the genre of memoir, and as a subgenre of memoir, graphic memoir does have some restrictions, I believe, that can make it a graphic memoir. And I think these restrictions are brief and simple:
1. Using the techniques of "nonfiction" as a vehicle for storytelling (memoir portion)
2. Using images to further and embellish and grant a higher understanding of the said memoir (graphic portion)
I guess, from my experience of reading the graphic memoirs from this class, I submise these two nonrestrictive "restrictions" to enable myself to understand a particular piece of work as a graphic memoir. I feel like some graphic memoirs heighten or burden the two different portions (graphic/memoir) and others use them equally (e.g. Alison Bechdel). For me, I felt that The Impostor's Daughter gave more weight on the graphic portion to tell its story, while Circle K Cycles used imagery as an integral supplement to the burden and essence of the story. And it has to do with what Japanese culture is--both diasporic and "pure." Japanese culture, as least what I have learned of it by growing up in a city with the highest population of Japanese immigrants in North America--Torrance, CA--is, as one can overtly tell, a culture of images. A culture of the treachery of images. Images bleed and dictate the Japanese way of life--from metaphoric to literal, to their written language and spoken language (the 'face' making of Miss Hamamataru '96), to their proliferation of manga, anime, and love for graphic material that bleeds into their pornography (hentai), or to their systematic organization of living (their traffic signs, food signs like the one above, or the green and yellow sticker on the back of the car to label a "dekasegi," etc. etc.). Japanese culture is a graphic memoir. And Yamashita captures this variation of images beautifully, subtly, and painstakingly in her fantastic book, blending images with text with kanji/katakana/hirigana and advertisements, vendiagrams, and graphic explanations everywhere. The short stories and nonfiction blogging pieces worked with the interplay of images and graphs, building a collage of alienation, foreigner vs. purebred, and love for one's identity and nationality. It's why I loved this book and called it my favorite thus far. It's an intense novel and it reminded me very much of Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, which are image-stocked vignettes (shorter short stories but not quite microfiction), a purely Japanese style and structure of storytelling. It's the same with Circle K Cycles, but from the latter, I digest a deeper meaning from it, one that bleeds into my own culture of the Philippine diaspora, which is, as well as Brazilian Japanese, a highly individualistic and pedantic one.
I can't wait to talk about this graphic memoir in class. My favorite story thus far in it is "What If Miss Nikkei Were God(dess)? The aisles and aisles of videotapes and JVC video players filled my brain with amplitude and force. I was glad that Yamashita chose showing the movie poster of Gaijin and the small black-and-white photo of a woman and three suited men instead of the room of Miss Hamamataru's work. There are some things that images cannot represent visually that the mind can represent more fully and metaphorically. I feel like that has to do with the "image" limitations and the deep wells of words. The image is drawn out and limited structurally and can represent only the impressions that we can give to it by context or content. When a cramped room of JVC video players and bookshelves of videotapes is presented, it is stronger for the mind to imagine it in its own space and field than to have it be drawn and presented. It's because we impress the feelings of entrapment unto the setting, the physical space, and when it is instead drawn, the impressions can come out similarly but not with the same amount of weight or burden. It takes repetition and the allusions of emotive words to bring about the right amount of impressions to the image at hand. But, this is just my personal feelings about the "treachery of images." It has to deal with the image and its stimulus relationship, and how it can accomplish that relation in a visual embodiment. Words have a similar way of functioning. But there is something about fashioning a physical place with words and disembodying that place with images. It's because with an image, you can only capture a certain amount of space within that plane or box or panel. With words, it is endless--the picture you can paint is like a well.
~ Melissa
You were at a different Starting Point than the rest of us Melissa because of your immersion in Torrance and recognizing that words/pictures are basically the same thing, from the text level to the proliferation of comics, anime and the theater of the Japanese which use caricature and mask for drama -- rarely the true realistic face. Thank you for your insight. It should be a good conversation!!!
ReplyDeletee
oh yeah, so glad you brought this up. I just assumed the smiley face was Japanese keyboard/ emoji. And marveling with the list you provide and my experience of the book, at how comfortable the Japanese seem with interruption. The tech boom and so much of the new imagery is postmodern and Japan is no surprise, the epicenter of disruptive image. What other response, post Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
ReplyDelete" There are some things that images cannot represent visually that the mind can represent more fully and metaphorically. I feel like that has to do with the "image" limitations and the deep wells of words. The image is drawn out and limited structurally and can represent only the impressions that we can give to it by context or content."
ReplyDeleteI too found myself asking the question what do the images have to do with whatever story they are shown in conjunction with. In the end I decided that the pictures didn't have to do with the surrounding text, per se; the images corresponded to a broader impression (to use your word) of the novel, or the content of the novel. I wonder how this decision affects other readers. To me, the images seem tossed away, like garbage, but also put on display and therefore assigned value.
i don't challenge that this text is a graphic memoir, i agree that it is one that pushes our expectations for what one is. i'm interested in what you said about japanese culture being one made up of images. a graphic memoir in itself. in that way, the images we see (in general and in the text) do something different than what we're used to in graphic memoirs. the images don't attempt to show the plot or represent the story in the narrative way that we're used to, but instead fill in for the culture of japan-- one that is hybridized linguistically, culturally, etc. the images she includes are exact replications of the actual aspects of the culture and environment-- the ads, graphs, clippings, photos, etc. in this way, the process of mediation is eliminated. we don't go through the stage of artist recreating the scene, the nuts and bolts. they come to us as they appear in real life.
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