Overview

Anxiety and longing suffuse incisive portraits of postwar Japan. Nazuna Saito began making comics late. She was in her forties when she submitted a story to a major Japanese publishing house and won an award for newcomers. She continued to work through the 1990s until she stopped drawing to take care of her ailing parents. In her sixties, she took a job teaching drawing at Kyoto Seika University and became inspired by her talented students. When she returned to teaching, her storytelling interests had shifted. Before suffering a stroke she drew In Captivity (2012) and Solitary Death Building (2015) both focused on aging and death. Offshore Lightning collects Saito s early work as well as these two recent graphic novellas. Stories like Buy Dog Food and Go Home and Offshore Lightning focus on middle-aged men caught in a cycle of self pity and self reflection. Saito gently pokes fun at their anguish and self-involvement while capturing the pathos of these men as they revisit childhood friendships and lost loves. By contrast, In Captivity follows three siblings visiting their ailing mother who is succumbing to dementia and resentful at her loss of agency. The siblings take a drive as they reckon with balancing the painful legacy of her caustic personality with attempting to honor this woman at the end of her life. Solitary Death Building documents an eccentric cast of elderly gossips as death descends upon the housing complex where they all live.

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9781770465053

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Reviews

"""The solitude and anguish of life in postwar Japan are portrayed in crisp black-and-white drawings."" --The New York Times ""[This] stellar collection of Saito's short manga about death, memory, family tensions, and human frailty... lends fresh perspective in the growing body of indie manga imports."" --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review ""Saito's English-language debut, seamlessly translated by Frank, comprises 10 stories that include a two-decade break between the first eight and final two. Japanese editor/manga historian Mitsuhiro provides an edifying overview of Saito's fascinating career... Manga aficionados will recognize nods to Yoshiharu Tsuge and Shigeru Mizuki."" --ALA Booklsit ""These stories crystallize the small mysteries and experiences between life and death... [Saito] explores human connections in a way that feels true and authentic."" --Graphic Medicine ""It's quiet and satisfying, but makes its point forcefully from a creator forced to consider death more personally herself."" --Slings & Arrows ""There's something incredibly rewarding about a collection like Offshore Lightning, which allows readers to see Nazuna Saito's talent deepen and evolve over the course of many years... the stories she tells are empathic and moving."" --Words Without Borders ""Grounded in reality and the every day, profound in [its] examination of the ordinary."" --Book Riot"

Author Information

Nazuna Saito was born in 1946 near Mount Fuji. She became an illustrator almost by chance when a coworker left and Saito replaced her. She drew her first comics at the age of forty.

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