Good-Bye Book

The characters in Yoshihiro Tatsumi's comics are sad. They are sad in the something is missing way. There are good reasons to be sad, if you need reasons. Getting old. Getting cold. Political reasons of being sad. The whole place getting old and cold along with them. The faces are identical expressions of sad. Almost inhuman. I squinted my eyes and the drawings could have been of primates. Stuck in a zoo some place. Labeled No Longer Erectus (yeah, some of these guys can't get it up anymore on top of everything else). They could have felt a moving feeling traveling from one person to another like an infection you wouldn't want to share. I don't know. I wasn't feeling a mood as much as species... Feelings too permanent... I don't know. I don't think you can catch that so much as get mounted on the wall next to it.

There was a part missing. The part missing from the self that's hidden. It's the voice in your own head that you don't know what it is going to say next. It's the ability to be surprised. (I try not too think too hard so I can get this more often. It's the part that gets me into trouble when I don't think before I talk. Oops.) You could call it hope, I guess. I call it a part of yourself that keeps you from being utterly alone. These stories almost lacked that part completely. There was no life. The plaque was mounted. The museum has opening hours of 11 a.m. until 4 p.m. It shouldn't have been that way (the first story was about a photographer who took a photo of what seemed to be a moving glimpse of enduring family life before the black rain of Hiroshima. A man and a country scramble to profit on the signs of their own victimhood and tears. Make it a holiday. That's not a photograph! That's today). Sometimes.... I liked the story 'Sky Burial' the best. A man doesn't move with his neighbors. He stays alone in the building with the dead body, unwilling to move himself. He looks into the sky to see vultures all over his building. They know dead things when they see it. I liked the old man who chooses to live alone in the wilderness in his middle age after a life handed over to office work. His mental energies are exhausted on a rash. He's still working too hard. All of the old men want a young and pretty woman. The women give themselves away to them when they are tossed aside by a younger man. Is that their only direction?
These guys (and women) all have vultures... It's that there is no other direction. The end story is Good-bye. A prostitute (for soldiers. She's not too well liked by her fellow Japanese, obviously) forces her father to have sex with her (hey, just like the dream sequence in Norma Jean & Marilyn) so that he'll be "just another man" to her. "Good-bye." I don't know. Is that good bye? It's burial, isn't it? That's what giving up is.

I'd want to scream. There's a part missing. Good-bye is an interesting book about being buried alive, I guess. Maybe I should read it as that and move along in the mausoleum of corpses... It's closing time. Should I have been living their lives more than they were? Maybe I didn't really LIKE this...

Are you sad if you are always sad?

P.s. Okay, so I didn't agree with Tatsumi's version of events either. When a young man dresses up in his sister's clothes he is spied on by someone he knows (it was a haunting image of the house burned down and the mirror he is seeing looking into cracked. Either from the fire or from self disgust. I liked that it wasn't stated). The mate thinks he dressed up as a girl because his many sisters and mother pressured him to be more of a man. I thought he was kissing the girl him in the mirror because he was lonely. The make up was to look like someone else. Someone else to love. Almost...

And if you are going to get into the whole politics (which others have said about this book that it was politics and maybe it was. But the thing about politics, since it isn't the '70s anymore...If it connects to now...)... It still matters about the missing part.