In this volume of Oishinbo the topic of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizer is very prevalent throughout. Organic grown vegetables is the way to go. Which is all nice and everything, but I’m not sure if it’d change my grocery shopping habit. I find it hard to justify the double or triple price of organic food for daily consumption. Occasionally, maybe. Or if I cook only for myself, not for a bunch of family members who eat a whole lot more than me and may not appreciate the whole organic thing price-wise.

Perhaps I should read more on this topic?

2009, 268pp

This month’s task for Hello Japan is about Japanese cooking. Contrary to the lack of cooking post in Bookie Mee, I actually love to cook (who doesn’t if you love to eat?!). And Japanese is my favorite type of cooking, at home or outside. Will try to post something else before the end of the month, but if not, I have this post for submission :).

Bacon wrapped asparagus yakitori. My favorite! Yum! (photo source)

My next Oishinbo is Izakaya: Pub Food which I’m currently reading. I’ve committed to reading the whole series and only have a few more to go!

More in the series (links to my reviews):
Oishinbo a la Carte 1: Japanese Cuisine
Oishinbo a la Carte 2: Sake
Oishinbo a la Carte 3: Ramen & Gyoza
Oishinbo a la Carte 4: Fish, Sushi & Sashimi
Oishinbo a la Carte 5: Vegetables (this post)
Oishinbo a la Carte 6: The Joy of Rice
Oishinbo a la Carte 7: Izakaya: Pub Food

Oishinbo (美味しんぼ, lit. “The Gourmet”) is a long-running cooking manga published between 1983 and 2008, but only in 2009 it is published in English in thematic compilation volumes (7 volumes so far), which means they contain “best of the best” and do not follow the original manga chronological order. There are a few minor storylines that jump forward and back. But I guess in the big picture of things, it does not matter that much, because the food is really the central of excitement!

The big question throughout this volume is What constitute real Japanese cuisine? What menu is essentially Japanese? In Oishinbo: Japanese Cuisine we learn more about sashimi, rice, and green tea. (I love sashimi. I can keep eating sashimi if it’s not so expensive!) There are different cuts of sashimi, different fish (obviously), and even different way of “cooking” it, one of them with a complex method of using a special type of rice paper and pouring boiled water over the rice paper and the skin side of the fish so that only the skin is cooked, not the flesh. Definitely not something you can do at home! Then there’s one chapter about cooking rice competition. It’s later revealed that the winner hand-picks the rice so they are all the same size and cooked evenly at the same time. Talking about serious cooking!

So yes they can go a bit over the top, although are seemingly realistic at the same time. As a foodie, I just found it a joy to read a book that treats food with so much respect. The green tea ceremony at the end of this volume was a nice closure that reflects how respectful the Japanese are.

delightful sashimi (source)

2009, 272 pp

The volumes in this series (links to my review):
Oishinbo a la Carte 1: Japanese Cuisine (current post)
Oishinbo a la Carte 2: Sake
Oishinbo a la Carte 3: Ramen & Gyoza
Oishinbo a la Carte 4: Fish, Sushi & Sashimi
Oishinbo a la Carte 5: Vegetables
Oishinbo a la Carte 6: The Joy of Rice
Oishinbo a la Carte 7: Izakaya: Pub Food

A rather late shout for Bellezza’s Japanese Literature Challenge IV which runs until the end of January 2011. I’m not sure if I get a chance to read a Japanese novel before the end of January (so far I’ve read only manga), but I’ll try!

I am never a fan of war stories. I avoid them like a plague. I don’t exactly hate them, just have very little to no interest in them. Unfortunately war stories with mice made little difference to me, as Mouse Guard was far from rocking my boat.

The illustration is very beautiful and the mice super cute that I could enjoy it as a picture book. But the mice look so much alike with each other that it’s almost impossible to distinguish them if not for the fur colours, and the storyline somewhat choppy (on top of it being a traditional war story to begin with). At times I wasn’t sure who was who doing what at what time. It also bothered me that the actions were not drawn to simulate movements (no action lines or blurry ends for speed). The images are far too clean. Stillness instead of excitement, which is the complete opposite of exaggerated movements and emotions in manga. I once mentioned my observation of “static” drawing that I often found in Western graphic novels or comics, and the weakness couldn’t be more emphasized in what is supposed to be full-action comic like Mouse Guard.

Overall, I was underwhelmed. Mouse Guard is part of a series and I don’t think I’m rushing to get to the next book. Recommended if only for the illustration, but don’t expect too much for anything else.

2007, 176 pp

Challenges
Graphic Novels Challenge 2010

Also reviewed by
In Spring it is the Dawn | Sasha & the Silverfish

This must be the bleakest graphic novel/manga I have ever read. I was intrigued when I saw this copy at Sydney Japanese Foundation Library. The book is designed and edited by Adrian Tomine (whose Shortcomings I have yet to read), and includes Tomine’s introduction.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi is known as “the grandfather of Japanese alternative comics”. In 1957, he coined the term gekiga to differentiate the gritty, naturalistic style of cartooning he helped pioneer from that of the more commercial, youth-oriented manga. From the Introduction by Tomine:

“As plans for this translation project began to get off the ground, it soon became apparent that a comprehensive reprinting of Tatsumi’s work would be literally impossible. With a career spanning from the 1950s to the present day, and with a work ethic that yielded up to twelve pages in a week (and, with the help of assistants, fifty pages in one night!), Mr. Tatsumi has produced a mind-bogglingly immense body of work. So this will be a selective survey of his best work, beginning, at Mr. Tatsumi’s request, with the year of 1969. Our hope is to release one volume per year, each focusing on a single year in Mr. Tatsumi’s career.”

So Push Man and Other Stories is Tatsumi’s best-of collection from 1969. It contains slice-of-life portrait of grim life of Japanese working class (or what they literally call “salary-man”). The stories were originally published in a bi-weekly magazine called Gekiga-Young, a minor young men’s magazine with limited print runs. Tatsumi was only given 8 pages per issue because he had no reputation as a manga artist at the time. So most of the stories in this collection (16 altogether), except for a couple, are super short. Too short in fact that I found myself flying through the pages, hungry for more. I read this thick volume in almost one sitting, almost unheard of me.

Going back to my impression at the beginning of the post, the book is surprisingly grim, with numerous sexual elements and violence, “both refreshing and unsettling” according to Tomine, to which I have to agree. The illustration style is very simple. The main character is always a man, who almost looks the same in all the stories, and eerily, rarely talks, which makes the underlying silent resignation from and frustration of life strongly resonate throughout the book. The title story is about a pushman (you know how in Japan they have official pushers to push people into the overcrowded trains?). Many, if not all, of the stories revolve around hopelessness of everyday’s life and often end in death, murder, or suicide.

There’s an interview with the author at the end of the book and when asked about his influences in general that had a significant impact of his work, Tatsumi answered police reports and other human interest articles in papers, and that he hardly read any manga. Little wonder then that reading this book almost feels like reading crime newspaper, full with events and crimes that are hard to believe, but you know they must be happening somewhere in the society. The stories are highly unsettling, but really addictive. I likened it to watching a train-wreck. You know it’s horrible and probably haunts you for a while, but you can’t look away.

I think it needs a lot of courage to produce this kind of work and I commend Tatsumi for that. He himself doesn’t feel very secure however, noting at the end of the interview “I myself am a very normal person. Please do not interpret these stories as representative of the author’s personality.” I’d be worried too if I were him. I mean I don’t even dare to summarize you the stories. If you’re curious, Drawn Quarterly, the publisher, provides one complete story as a preview (click the pdf file on the side), so you can check that out.

The Push Man and Other Stories is quintessentially Japanese, the darker, perverse side of it that is. Recommended for the freshness, the boldness, and the absurdity of it all. But the sensitive and the faint of heart must stay away. Will I read more Tatsumi’s works? Uum.. YES. I’m dying to read A Drifting Life, his massive 800+ page autobiography (in comic form, of course).

1969 (Japanese), 2005 (English), 202 pp

Pushman and Other Stories is included in Time’s Top Ten List for Comics.
Star interview for 2009 Toronto Comic Arts Festival
About.com 3 pages interview (also at 2009 Toronto Comic Arts Festival)

Challenges
Graphic Novels 2010 (book #9)

Have you read the book or Tatsumi’s other books? Let me know!

But there are really something about these stories that make you want to read more. (Otherwise how do I get to the third book?) They are weird and hypnotic, they pique my curiosity. What’s going to happen next? How many weird stories can Neil Gaiman pull off? How many tricks does he have up his sleeve?

Dream Country has 4 stand-alone short stories. In Calliope a writer who’s desperate for ideas makes a dirty deal to get Calliope, one of the Muses in Greek mythology. He keeps her like a pet, raping her body and mind for inspiration for his later successful novels. (Told you it was sick)

In A Dream of a Thousand Cats, one cat goes on a journey to find answers to life. There are lots of miserable cats here. Too bad I’m not a cat-person, so I don’t relate much to their misery.

Third story is A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which Shakespeare and his group of actors perform in front of The Dream King and his fantastical friends. The short won The World Fantasy award for short fiction in 1991, apparently the first time for a comic book to win this category. I know A Midsummer Night’s Dream from various sources (never read the original), but I still found the flow kinda confusing. It was hard to know which one was real and which one was not. I imagine it would be mighty difficult for someone who has not known the play to follow the story.

The last story Façade is my favorite, though it’s not less disturbing. It follows the life of a forgotten DC super hero: Element Girl, a girl whose superpower is transforming her body to any natural elements, but as a trade she looks absolutely freaky, almost like her whole body is burnt. Unwillingly retired, she is incredibly lonely and unable to end her life because of her body condition. Like a lot of other Sandman stories in the previous volumes, I needed to wiki my way to find out the background story to get the full picture.

The real highlight of Dream Country for me though is this quote I found in the book:

“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.”

A treasure.

1991, 112 pp

Challenges
Graphic Novels 2010 (book #8), Once Upon a Time IV (book #6)

We know from the second page that Pedro was going to die. The book is a tribute to him and what a special tribute it is. Judd Winick is a fine cartoonist and storyteller. His illustrations are full of emotions and the story is told in a very gentle heartfelt way. You can really feel that their friendship was genuine and they made an impact on each other’s life. One of the most interesting things about the book is that we are told about the life of a gay guy from a straight guy point of view, not just any straight guy, but his roommate and best mate. What a unique perspective.

Pedro died in 1994 at the age of 22. The book was published in 2000 after 2.5 years in the making by Winick. I read it in 2010 and it made an impact on me. It’s amazing how Pedro’s legacy lives on even after he is long gone. I believe it’s an important book, the book to read for anyone wants to know more about gay people and people who lived with AIDS. Thanks to Pedro, he put a human face to those with the disease. Pedro and Me is about intimate life journey of a brave man and the wonderful friendship he had with another man who is just as great. It’s about fighting for life, about living, surviving, loss, friendship, and love.

“I think the experience of watching two people fall in love is like seeing a snowfall. It’s slow. It’s lush. And when everything is covered, it all looks perfect. It was magical. I’m biased. But you would’ve been, too.” ~ Judd Winick, on seeing Pedro fell in love

A lovely book that will stay with me for a long time..

2000, 187 pp

Judd Winick and Pedro Zamora

Judd Winick site

Challenges
Graphic Novels 2010 (book #7)

Also reviewed by
su[shu] | The Zen Leaf

Tender Morsels started from a rough point. Liga is a teenage girl who is sexually abused by her father after the death of her mother. After a couple of forced abortions, she is determined to keep the last one. Coincidentally her father dies before he gets to kill her last unborn baby. Her peace lasts very short while before another unfortunate, evil event befalls her once more, which pushes her to the end of hopelessness. Magical things happen. Liga is transferred to a place of her heart’s desire where people are always nice and safe, and that’s where she raises her two daughters, Branza and Urdda.

There are some obvious dark themes, and while it is never explicit, the incest and the rapes were very hard to read. Here’s where I think Margo Lanagan shows her skills. She is very good at writing around something without actually saying the words. The book is very well written, though I did have problem with the dialect style at times.

Tender Morsels has received so many raving over-the-top reviews from the book blogging community, so I feel a bit out of the loop to say that it didn’t blow me away as much as I expected. I thought it was skilfully written and it flowed nicely from beginning to end, BUT I felt very little connection with any of the characters. Liga’s parts are told with third-person point of view, while the bears are told with first person. I never understood why and it just bothered me. In my view Liga was the main character and her stories with her daughters were the most interesting. I was annoyed with the change of perspectives to the bears, who I thought were less interesting less important characters. I just couldn’t shake my annoyance off for the entire book for some reason. The third-person view of Liga made her felt very distant.

[Minor spoilers ahead] I also had some qualms about how the story turned at certain points. For one, I’m not sure if this is the book to read for how it deals with rape. Getting sent to one’s heaven is so far from being realistic, and I’m not talking about the magical aspect of it. Who in the real world would ever be able to conveniently run away from everything and come back to successfully take revenge? Isn’t that a misleading illusion to how the real world works? It felt a bit self-indulgent. I don’t mind magical world and humans transforming to bears, but the way the problems get resolved kept reminding me that this was a work of fiction, so I was unable to be completely immersed in it. The problems were too serious and realistic for a fantasy, yet the resolutions were too unrealistic. The balance just wasn’t right for me to be believable.

Having said all these, I think Tender Morsels is great as fantasy or adventure book. I loved how it ended for Liga, which wasn’t exactly happy-ever-after so it had that realistic edge. The book has a couple of fantastic female characters who I loved dearly. I realized that I got a bit critical over this book, perhaps I entered it expecting… something else.

2008, 380 pp

The basis of the bear ritual: Fete de l’Ours

First line
There are plenty would call her a slut for it.

Awards
2009 World Fantasy Award (Novel)
2009 Honor Book: Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature

Challenges
Aussie Author (book #3), Once Upon a Time IV (book #4), Book Awards IV (book #10), Women Unbound (fiction #8)

Also reviewed by

Loved it unconditionally!
things mean a lot | my fluttering heart | A Striped Armchair | Stuff As Dreams Are Made On | The Zen Leaf | YA Fabulous! | Sarah Miller

Liked it with some reservations (like me). Regular Rumination | Farm Lane Books Blog | Dolce Bellezza

Thought it too flawed. Nonsuch Book

“Will Eisner, born in 1917, saw himself as “a graphic witness reporting on life, death, heartbreak, and the never-ending struggle to prevail.” The publication of A Contract with God when Eisner was sixty-one proved to be a watershed moment both for him and for comic literature. It marked the birth of the graphic novel and the beginning of an era when serious cartoonist could be liberated from their stultifying comic-book format.” ~ from the cover flap

One of the comic industry’s most prestigious awards, The Eisner Award, is named after Will Eisner, and he is referred to as ‘father of the Graphic Novel’, so I don’t know what the heck I was thinking that it never crossed my mind to look for his works. But serendipity took over, and I got introduced to his work from the oddest source. When I went back to Indonesia in February, I flipped through a local newspaper to find a glimpse of intriguing illustration. The article was on the raise of graphic novel and the illustration belonged to Eisner’s A Contract with God, which I had never heard of before. Wonderment just surged through me. I thought I knew my graphic novels! I came back to Sydney and the week after found a tome of the book sitting on the shelf of my library. I had never seen it there before. Serendipity.

The Contract with God Trilogy is a compilation of three separate volumes: A Contract With God, A Life Force, and Dropsie Avenue. With 500 pages, it is graphic novel at its truest sense of the words. The stories revolve around the people in tenement buildings on Dropsie Avenue, the mythical street of Eisner’s youth in Depression-era New York City.

The Trilogy started with Preface by Will Eisner himself:

“This book contains stories drawn from the endless flow of happenings characteristic of city life. Some are true. Some could be true.

Born and brought up in New York City and having survived and thrived there, I carry with me a cargo of memories, some painful and some pleasant, which have remained locked in the hold of my mind. I have an ancient mariner’s need to share my accumulation of experience and observations. Call me, if you will, a graphic witness reporting on life, death, heartbreak and the never-ending struggle to prevail… or at least to survive.” ~ Will Eisner

The first in the trilogy, A Contract with God has four short stories in it. The title story, according to Eisner, was “an exercise in personal agony”. It tells a story about a man who is outraged by the death of his daughter. He breaks his contract with God and turns to become a rich, but unkind, bitter man.

“My only daughter, Alice, had died of leukemia eight years before the publication of this book. My grief was still raw. My heart still bled. In fact, I could not even then bring myself to discuss the loss. I made Frimme Hersh’s daughter an “adopted child.” But his anguish was mine. His argument with God was also mine. I exorcised my rage at a deity that I believed violated my faith and deprived my lovely 16-year-old child of her life at the very flowering of it. This is the first time in thirty-four years that I have openly discussed it.” ~ Will Eisner

Eisner continued to share how the other three stories came to be. My favorite is the one called The Street Singer. (“The street singers were men who appeared in the narrow space between the tenements to provide impromptu concerts.” ~ from the Preface) While the four shorts in the first book of the Trilogy are disconnected, the second and third book take a different approach, even a different way of illustrating. In A Life Force, the second book, we are introduced to many new characters in the tenements, disconnected at first, but they start to cross paths along the way, and everything comes together at the end. Dropsie Avenue is centered around the neighborhood, the main character. People and characters come and go, there are births and deaths, and we see how the neighborhood transforms for better or for worse. While the illustrations in A Contract with God are big–with one panel often filling the whole page, the second and third book in the trilogy are full of detailed illustrations packed with panels and text. Obviously the latter volumes were the more ambitious projects and they succeeded.

The preface was written in December 2004 by Eisner, and he died on 3 January 2005. Did he write the preface in the hours of his dying days? Knowing how important these books were for him made them all the more important for me too. The three volumes were originally published separately over long period of time, but I can’t imagine not reading them together. I encourage you to read all three of them if you can. Only then it would come full circle. In my mind all the little stories make one big tale of sadness and desperation, but also of hopes and luck. Like life itself.

Trilogy: 2005 (A Contract with God: 1978, A Life Force: 1988, Dropsie Avenue: 1995), 498 pp

Will Eisner’s A Contract with God Trilogy

Challenges
Graphic Novels 2010 (book #6)

Also reviewed by
A Contract with God: things mean a lot | Boston Bibliophile | Experiments in Reading

Pride of Baghdad is graphic novel based on a true story of four lions that escaped from Baghdad Zoo after American bombing in 2003. Since the animals have dialogues, obviously it’s highly fictionalized. One may read it as an allegory of the Iraqis. I just read it as what it is.

Do you like Disney’s Lion King? I liked it but never really loved it. This book initially reminded me much of Lion King, mainly because the appearance of the lions. But be warned that it is nothing like Disney’s. And I will stop talking about how the two compare, because they’re nothing like each other. There are several adult themes in Pride of Baghdad, the conversations are deeper, and some scenes are quite gruesome.

The art is stunning. I have never seen so much orange colour used in one book. Almost everything is gradient of orange, and it’s brilliant. I loved it to bits. The lions look so real, yet ooze human expressions. Definitely better than the cartoony Lion King. (argh I’m sorry for another comparison)

Since the story is so short, there’s really no time to go in-depth on anything, but the bittersweet journey was enough to make an impression. And I loved to learn little facts, like how lioness is the one that does the hunting, not the male lion. The four lions have their own distinct personality (one male, two females, and one cub). The competition between the two lionesses are well done, one is young and yearns for freedom, while the other one is older, one-eye-blind, and had enough of the wild.

I asked hubby to return the book to the library, he flipped a little bit, then sat to finish it until the end. It’s a lovely graphic novel and we both loved it. I’m so tempted to give this 5 stars, to show how impressed I was with it and I think I will. Really, would you think that a graphic novel about lions could be that good? I was skeptical, but proven wrong.

Thanks to Michael Kindness of Books on the Nightstand who first introduced me to this graphic novel (he talked about it in BOTNS podcast episode 3). I wouldn’t have picked it up if not for him!

2006, 136 pp

Awards
2006 IGN Best Original Graphic Novel

Challenges
Graphic Novels 2010 (book #5), Once Upon a Time IV (book #2), Book Awards IV (book #8)

Also reviewed by
Loved it! Shelf Love | Adventures in Reading | avidbookreader
Didn’t. epiBloguer

The style of illustration is one of the most unique I have ever seen. Jillian Tamaki definitely brought her Japanese influences into her drawings. It reminds me of Japanese old paintings with its fluid lines. Not only that, the main character is also one of the most unique in graphic novels, or any medium really.

She is Kimberly Keiko who is called Skim, a Japanese descendant girl, who is chubby, gothic, and a bit into witchcraft. One of her popular schoolmates committed suicide and it was rumored that he did so because he was gay. It caused an uproar in the school and the students and teachers work on “save life” campaigns (of which the use is arguable). Meanwhile Skim has her own problems. She happens to have a crush on her female teacher, which forces her to question and figure out her sexuality.

The book captures the moodiness of adolescence, which is probably the most difficult phase of anyone’s life, when everything doesn’t seem to make sense and you don’t quite know where to put yourself. It touches on the issues of depression, love, peer pressure, sexual identity, and just the whole the pain of being young and different.

Skim is rather sad and melancholy, but I think it is an important book to understand what the teenagers might be facing in our time. Also, it would be a perfect book for GLBT challenge (IF I were joining :). Talking about GLBT challenge, Nymeth recently posted about her recommendation for LGBTQ graphic novels on the challenge site. Michelle also just recently posted her review on Pedro and Me by Judd Winick which sounds fabulous. I have Fun Home by Alison Bechdel waiting be read at home. It’s so great how graphic novel is used as medium to discuss serious issues. I hope and feel positive that we will have more in the future.

Sample of illustrations:

2008, 140 pp

Authors’ Sites
Mariko Tamaki | Jillian Tamaki

Awards (from Jillian’s site)
2008 Ignatz Award for Best Graphic Novel
2008 New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books List
2009 Doug Wright Award Winner, Best Book
2009 Eisner award nominee (Best Publication for Teens, Writer, New Graphic Album, Penciller/Inker)
2008 Best of Books of the Year, Publishers Weekly, Quill & Quire

Challenges
Graphic Novels 2010 (book #4), Book Awards IV (book #3), Women Unbound (fiction #6)

Also reviewed by
Regular Rumination | In Spring it is the Dawn | The Written World | Chasing Ray | A Striped Armchair | Stuff as Dreams are Made On