:: 9/21/2009 :: John Dermot Woods on Hayashi ::
Seiichi Hayashi’s Red Colored Elegy is melodramatic, but in a very true way. It may be more fair to say that Ichiro and Sachiko, the central characters, are melodramtic, and even maudlin, in the way that they live their young and severe lives. And there is something very accurate and moving in their earnestness; you believe in their tragedy as surely as they do.
Hayahsi’s debt to French Nouvelle Vague cinema is obvious, with stark panels of storms and beaches interspersed among the regular marking the conventional pace of comic narrative that tell us the story of Ichiro and Sachiko’s relationship. But to see this trope used in the comics form is stunning. The comics page invites you to linger and stare at these panels; the interruption is more substantial than in film, which pulls you forward automatically. The chorus of interrupting images has as much presence in Red Colored Elegy as the central narrative itself.
Hayashi takes advantage of the levels of abstraction that he mastered as a professional animator himself (much like Ichiro). While his simple, cartoonish figures describe the actions of the couple’s story, complex, photographically inspired images punctuate the narrative, tapping into the world of the sublime. (The detailed drawings focus on subjects ranging from broad landscapes in the rain to a moth resting on a light bulb; they highlight the face of a far-off relative who is suffering, as well as the left side of Sachiko’s face, a face portrayed simpler than Mickey Mouse’s in the panels directly before and after.) Hayashi understands how to pace his reader, when to slow them down, when to move them along.
This book was hugely influential when it was released in Japan in the early 1970’s (according the jacket copy in Drawn & Quarterly’s English translation), but the English-speaking world had to wait almost thirty years to read it. And despite some attention when D&Q released it last year, the book was largely overlooked. But this is a comic that breaks rules of regularity and consistency, that offers creators license in a way that today’s comics are only beginning to (and rarely). It offers a particular realization of the medium’s potential that we’ve waiting for, and that has, apparently, been waiting for us to notice for three decades.
H_NGM_N
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