Red Snow

For me, a great find!I'm a retired guy who's been reading a lot of manga because there's a lot available online. 90 percent of manga is just fun stories for teenagers and young adults: magic fantasies, epic battles either made-up or from Japanese history, discreet love stories, lots of humor. These are fun for me because the drawing is often so good, and because every once in a whole a creator of these stories reaches far beyond fun. This is one of those cases. The drawing is cute. The events are realistic depictions of rural life of the past. But the people, ah the people! They are lovable and full of feelings and the author renders them and their difficulties and struggles with great insight and gentleness and the conveyance of their unspoken emotions with symbols well chosen.As the blurb on the back of the book truly says. "While the world [the rural characters] inhabit has faded into memory and myth, the universal fundamental emotions of the human heart prevail at the center of these tender stories."In particular, this male author has the great gift of knowing and depicting the feelings of women in the situations presented.

Susumu Katsumata was a manga artist who began publishing in the 70s, and belongs to the second generation of authors who started their career in the legendary Garo magazine. His short stories were much appreciated by colleagues such as Yoshiharu Tsuge (L'homme sans talent), Hinako Sugiura (Oreillers de Laque) or Shigeru Mizuki (NonNonBa, Gegege no Kitaro), but never became a mainstream success, which led him to slow down his production in the 80s, branching into book illustration and other activities. In a sad twist of fate, this collections of short stories, originally published in Japan in 2005, earned him success and critical acclaim, as well as the Japan Cartoonist Association Award, but he was terminally ill and did not live long to enjoy the belated recognition of his talent. Since then, this book has also been published in Korea, France and, of course, the US & Canada by Drawn & Quarterly.What you'll get inside are ten splendid short stories, set in a rural, pre-modern Japan of hard, snow-covered winters, where the natural and the supernatural, such as ghosts or kappa creatures, can still sometimes mingle together, although, whenever they appear in the book, these beings are on the retreat, the remains of a vanishing past. The protagonists are toiling peasants, travelling monks, sake brewers, and lots of boys and girls facing the adult world at the terrible age of 12-13.Let's take a look at some of the tales. We have, for instance, "Torajiro Kappa", in which a kappa is persuaded by a young kid to interfere in a case of a husband that beats his wife whenever he's drunk. In "Wild Geese Memorial Service" a young man who gets lost in a snowstorm is rescued by a local farmer, and is found to bear an uncanny resemblance to his (very attractive and widowed) daughter's late husband. In "Mulberries" a boy and a girl share the pains of puberty, their attraction to each other disguised as childish pigtail-pulling hostility. A traveling monk has a rather explicit dream involving "The Dream Spirit" after having too much sake and sleeping in too crowded common rooms at the local inn. The girl that works scrubbing the floors at the inn at the hot springs in "Cricket Hill", is getting old enough to hear suggestions about getting more involved in entertaining the male clientèle of the establishment.The drawing style is simple (these guys didn't have an army of assistants to do their bidding) yet beautiful and evocative. The first page of "Specter" is a lyrical 3-1-3 panel evocation of the arrival of spring, when blind traveling musicians came to bring a little entertainment to the people in the villages. Although "Now, it was just old Otora who'd come by the hot springs alone".At the end of the book, we find an interview with the author, that appeared originally in the Japanese edition of Red Snow, and a short essay about his life and career, first published in a Korean manga magazine (that's where my "knowledge" about the life and work of the author comes from, by the way :p). The typography work is excellent, as we've come to expect from D&Q (nothing like the arial or comic sans horrors of French publishers.) Sadly, the paper is nowhere as good and heavy as in the compilations of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's short stories, and this is the only fault i can find in this wonderful book.

This wonderful little book does a masterful job of creating a specific time and place. You really feel as if you are in a small Japanese village many years ago. Katsumata perfectly evokes the change of seasons, and the natural ebb and flow of rural life. The characterizations ring true, as do the charming and sometimes unsettling superstitions. Be warned that some of the stories are very dark.This book is a gem, one of the few comic collections I would keep to read over and over again. Very highly recommended!

There are 10 pictorial stories, all dealing with life in the countryside in semi-modern Japan. The stories are all interesting and the drawing is excellent. I've uploaded the images in sharp, 600-pixel resolution so you can judge for yourself. Unfortunately they are displayed at half the resolution size. Anyone who loves stories and pictures should get a copy of the book. The author has died and this book is about the final of his life's work.

These stories are rich with quiet contemplation of the contradictions of the human heart, often bawdy and rambunctious. They remind me of the early films of Bergman or Fellini, love letters to people living in simpler times but with all the complications of love, lust, ambition and coming of age.Katsumata's art at first appears simple and unsophisticated, but one quickly realizes it's as subtle and elegant as the stories. I think this book is a rare classic.It should be pointed out that a 2nd posthumous book, Fukushima Devil Fish, has been published in 2018, which Amazon should link to; Katsumata's name has been reversed, so the two books don't coincide on the author's page.https://www.amazon.com/Fukushima-Devil-Fish-Anti-Nuclear-Manga/dp/0957438192/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1545076891&sr=1-2-fkmr1&keywords=susuma+katsumata

Un buen ejemplo de Gekiga que se desvía de lo urbano para contar historias rurales con un certeza sencilla que a momentos lo hace poético.