A Drunken Dream and Other Stories Book

This is a beautiful book of short, often mystical or fantastical, emotionally complex stories.

To quote a goodreads reviewer Charles Hatfield:
Hagio does comics the likes of which I've never seen anywhere else. The best stories in this volume, such as "Iguana Girl," "Hanshin," and the title story, are disturbing little masterpieces of mood, insinuation, psychological depth-sounding, and sheer gender-troubling uncanny strangeness. Sentimentality turns on a dime into horror; horror into weird humor; sadness into reflection.

I've read these stories before and this second reading I appreciated them more and felt moved by the emotional depth and anguish, as well as the small victories of empathy and connection.

The first story, "Bianca", sets the mood for a book about misunderstandings and tragic mistakes. Clara, a painter in her later years, is showing art pieces to a man who comments on the subject of much of her work, a dancing girl in the woods. Clara goes on to tell the story of this girl, Bianca, a cousin who stayed with her family very briefly when they were children. As she narrates the story unfolds in eerie and yet sparkling pictures. We witness not only the childhood scenes, but the mystical worldview of Clara unfolding. The natural world comes to life in Clara's eyes in a way that at first seems idealized, but also hints at an awareness of a wolfish hunger and brutality. By the end of the childhood saga, Clara has become something of an adult. At least, this is a coming of age story. But we see that she has also, in a way, because of this same story, remained a child. She cannot move past the trauma and the magic and the charm, and it is what keeps her art repeating and repeating the moment of injury and transcendence.

Throughout the book, characters admire each other, resent each other, work to run away from the past or to address and make peace with it. Their realizations can lead to self-doubt, tragedy and loss, or spiritual growth. Sometimes a combination of all of these things. Always there is a wisdom in the sadness and anguish of those who make terrible mistakes, or discover something important, but too late. There is also wisdom in the contentment, which, I am glad to say, shows up in these pages, too.