Sex & Realism in Goodbye

Goodbye was unlike any of the comics we have read for several reasons. Reason number one, and the reason that took me the most by surprise was the degree to which the book was sexually explicit. The most risqué or suggestive comic we’ve read so far is probably the Crime SuspensStories, which avoided nudity because of the Comic Code Authority. As we see, Goodbye has no restrictions or boundaries as far as innuendo, nudity, and graphic sexual acts go. I was shocked by how much sex and nudity there were, and that often sex was the main theme of some of the stories. In retrospect I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised based on cover of the book, which was indiscernible to me until I saw the full image in one of the stories. What I will say is that the sex made the stories involving it, book itself, more realistic. I think this book displayed and expressed the most realism out of anything we’ve seen so far. While the sex definitely drives the realism, the other factor is the commentary on the events of that time period in Japan. For some reason I feel like when there is excessive sex in some type of media (book, television show, etc.) it dumbs down the content, but in Goodbye the sex did not affect the way I thought because of the historical and realistic portrayals of the time, location, and characters. I haven’t read many books written by Japanese authors, or too many about this period of time in Japan, but I feel that Goodbye is an important piece of literature that captures, and shows exactly what was going on.