Henshin

From the Publisher:

I KILL GIANTS co-creator KEN NIIMURA (International Manga Award winner and Eisner nominee) brings a unique vision of life in Japan to the page in HENSHIN. The lives of a kid with peculiar superpowers, a lonely girl discovering herself in the big city, and a businessman on a long night out are some of the short stories included in this collection that will make you laugh, and even maybe shed a tear. Explore Tokyo as you've never seen it before under NIIMURA's masterful and imaginative storytelling, printed here for the first time in English.

My thoughts:

I like reading English translated graphic novels/manga/comics from non-American illustrator/writers because they open up a different lens for readers. The aesthetic, both in the illustration and in the story is refreshing in its non-western lens. The line for what is beauty, humor, tragedy, horror gets moved and as a reader, makes my world expand because I must face my own boundaries and outer limits. 

Niimura is an internationally recognized craftsman in his art, so these 13 vignettes, I am making up, reflect/respond to, or shine a mirror on the Japanese aesthetic in manga. If I am correct, these stories that fictionally center around the larger metropolis of Tokyo teem with hidden layers of disconnection and disenfranchised grief from other people, from nature, from ourselves. 

One of the stories, "Watermelon summer" was shocking at the end, enough so that I had to stop reading and put it down. However, the more I thought about it and acknowledged the lens with which I was judging this story, I realized that no, there was a kind of Kurosawa-ish beauty to this story, an almost honorable, poetic, Shintoist harmony to the process in the story. I stopped focusing on the end and re-looked at the journey.

I am not sure what my middle level reader will takeaway from this, but for me, this was a haiku. Seemingly simple, but metaphorically complex.