GRAPHIC FICTION
Do not go gentle
A determined elder tries to outwit death in Hiromi Goto’s graphic novel debut
BY IAN DAFFERN
★Shadow Life
Hiromi Goto and Ann Xu, ill.
First Second
AWARD-WINNING NOVELIST and poet Hiromi Goto has written her first graphic novel, illustrated by debut artist Ann Xu. Together in Shadow Life, they tell the tale of Kumiko, an elderly woman who battles the shadow of death, armed only with tenacity and a second-hand vacuum cleaner.
When we first meet Kumiko, she is on the run from the long-term care home where her well-meaning adult children placed her. Soon she has her own apartment and struggles with life in a body that is not as strong as it used to be. And yet she perseveres, with dignity and good humour. She swims, takes her pills, makes noodles, and somewhere along the way starts to see death’s shadow. Sometimes it takes the form of a crow, sometimes a black cat. She wonders if these visions are real or “ideas of a demented mind.”
Goto and Xu skilfully weave in ambiguity to make a reader wonder if this is fantasy or a realistic literary treatment of a hallucinatory imagination (think Michael Redhill’s Bellevue e). Graphic literature is uniquely ideal for such a journey. The monsters of manga masters like Junji Ito are metaphorical fears given flesh and blood, physical beings as much as they are symbols. By speaking in the language of pictures, as opposed to prose, you can have both at once. Death may seem like a spider that can’t wait to get its teeth into the protagonist – but it’s far more fun for the reader when it actually entangles her in its web. Soon we realize that the black spots and creeping running shoes that haunt Kumiko are perilously real.
Oh yes, shoes. Goto injects a slice of local British Columbian Gothic by including a real-life horror. In the last dozen years, severed feet have washed up with disturbing regularity on the B.C. shoreline. Kumiko later finds herself pursued by a ghost walking around on its bony stumps. In this creature, Goto and Xu envision a true Japanese-Canadian spirit – think the girl from The Ring in a plaid jacket. This playful hybrid sensibility thrives throughout the novel.