Visual Echoes in Good-Bye

A persistent melancholy dominates Tatsumi's writing and drawing, especially insofar as melancholy makes one feel stuck in inexplicable pensiveness that is at odds with perfectly ordinary surroundings. Time and time again, either the drawings or the writing has a cyclical aspect that hearkens back to earlier in the story, or to earlier in history; we are always in the same shadow of post-war uncertainty. These visual echoes pervade the text and, in combination with the starkness of the drawings, contribute first to a sense of unease, but on a broader scale serve as unification in a disparate landscape.

From the outset, the shadow of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial included on the inside front cover of the collection looms over the stories. It is a visual echo to the first page of "Hell," which itself deals with shadows and echoes. The image taken by Mr. Koyanagi is of the shadows of two people scorched into a wall by the force of the atom bomb. This shadow is a visual echo within the story in that it evokes Japan's past, yet keeps returning as the Koyanagi's understanding of its significance changes. Each time, it becomes more distorted, yet closer to the truth. The echoic nature of this image is particularly interesting because it is located within a story told in images; it is a drawing of a photograph within a comic. It becomes a multivalent icon not only within the text, but on a meta-level as well. 

"Hell" is far from the only story which depends on visual echoes. "Sky Burial" returns to the vultures from the first part of the story, the nonlinear exposition. "Night Falls Again" is quite literal in its cyclicality as the protagonist finds himself returning again and again to the same peepshow. But overall, the visual echoes work outside of the stories themselves. Generic faces return again and again, the same themes are revisited, the same cultural markers are used and re-used. The emergence of all of these story aspects emphasizes the melancholic nature of Tatsumi's work. We are part of an uncertain landscape with the pretense of normality but a deep underlying existential dread that proves inescapable. Yet the return and resurgence of these visual echoes also carries with it a kind of relief. When the themes and icons of the past return to the surface, they bring with them new importance, or perhaps we ascribe new importance to them. I would go so far as to argue that, by their return, we are gradually reaching enlightenment as every new echo shifts our perspective closer to understanding and to unification . The characters are Everyman/Everywoman characters because they are vessels for the reader and with every story, we are reincarnated into a new character with new understanding of the past.