Read This: I’ll Give It My All… Tomorrow

Shortly after turning 40, Shizuo Oguro quits his routine office job because he needs to find himself, and winds up playing Nintendo in his boxers all morning—until he decides that he’s going to become a professional manga artist. Never mind that his draftsmanship is merely adequate at best, and his stories aren’t even that. Never mind that he’s forced to make ends meet by taking a job at a fast food joint where his co-workers (all barely older than his teenage daughter) jokingly call him “Manager.” And never mind that he doesn’t even seem to have that much ambition… Mind you, if you think he’s going to be able to overcome all these deficits by sheer determination, you’ve picked up the wrong manga, at least if the first volume of I’ll Give It My All… Tomorrow is anything to go by. (Maybe things will take an upturn when the next volume comes out in December.)

Imagine if Todd Solondz and Chester Brown teamed up to tell a story about a Japanese man’s midlife crisis. Shunju Aono’s artwork even has the rough, loose feel of Brown; it feels a lot more like the North American “alternative” comics I grew up reading in the ’80s and ’90s than what I’ve usually seen from manga publishers (which is probably, I’ll admit, a function of my own interests and pursuits as much as anything else). And the story isn’t quite as depressing as you might think from my description above: Yes, Shizuo is pretty much a loser, and more than a little desperate, but he’s not (entirely) deluded, and he’s got heart. (Plus, you can tell the people around him, including the father and daughter he lives with, and a sort-of-friend from the burger place, will continue to play a meaningful role in the story.) I don’t want to lay on the “for anybody who’s ever had a dream” jazz, so let’s just say it’s an emotionally authentic story that isn’t going to make you burst into laughter or tears, but can still get inside your head.

16 June 2010 | read this |

Read This: American Music & American Taliban

Next week (Tuesday, June 22), I’ll be hosting an evening of “All-American” fiction at the Center for Fiction, with four authors who’ve each recently published an American novel. I’ll be telling you a little bit about the quartet between now and then…

I’ve been friends with Pearl Abraham for a while, and her new novel, American Taliban, actually quotes from my version of the Tao Te Ching on the very first page. But I’d be recommending it to you anyway; it’s a captivating look at how a young, “clean-cut” teenager like John Walker Lindh (but not simply a novelization of Lindh) could gradually become attracted to a philosophy and a way of life so radically opposed to his upbringing.

I’m also looking forward to seeing Jane Mendelsohn for the first time since I interviewed her in 1997; her new novel, American Music, starts with a wounded soldier and a physical therapist in a veteran’s hospital, but quickly expands into a series of interlocking flashbacks which impinge upon the central couple’s lives—even though they have no idea how these other people are connected to them, if at all, and the ongoing experience of these “memories” brings no little amount of trauma. Their conversations about the other stories may well echo your own responses; you may see the final shape of the arc just ahead of them. Either way, once you start, you are likely to see their story through to its end.

15 June 2010 | read this |