ALTERNATIVE [SELF LINER NOTE] Manga Review

Synopsis

By day, Rio works a corporate job to pay the bills. By night, she plays guitar on stage. Juggling her career and her real passion has kept her alive for 28 years. But as far as she’s concerned, she still hasn’t achieved anything that will last after she dies. Now it might be too late. Questions ring in her mind: Are you living your life to the fullest? Do you think you can make a living? If it’s so hard, why not give up?

NIRVANA

ALTERNATIVE [SELF LINER NOTE] is drawn by Chiaki Yagura and published in the United States by Manga Mavericks Books. At just 40 pages, it’s much shorter than we typically see from published “one-shots.” Instead, it’s closer to a minicomic, the kind you’d see sold in print by Bugilhan Press or online by ShortBox Comics Fair. These works have existed in Japan for many years and yet have typically been passed over for localization. Only now are small presses like Glacier Bay and Manga Mavericks scooping up indie titles for translation and publication abroad.

Yagura’s style combines characters drawn in thin lines with digital lighting effects. The lighting is at its best capturing Rio’s night-time activities: playing on stage, recording under lamplight, watching neon lights pass from a train window. The backgrounds are either simple or nonexistent, but they don’t need to be complex for this kind of story to work. It’s all about the suggestion of urban ennui, lonely souls meeting in a sea of impressionistic neon.

The panelling and gutters also display an attention to formal detail. Night and day are heralded by black and white gutter space, respectively. Panels slice up moments but leave space for ambiguity between them. When the book explodes into a splash page, it hits. Meanwhile, the Q&A conceit (“Do you think you can make a living?”) keeps the reader in Rio’s headspace.

GRAPEVINE

Really, though, this is a comic about raw feeling rather than formal tricks. Its guiding theme is simple: “Is it too late to achieve your dreams?” Who among us has not wondered late at night if our lives meant anything? If we were living up to who we wanted to be as kids? In the afterword, Yagura writes that when they drew the comic, she herself was 28 years old, just like their protagonist. “I’m elated that this work filled with my early inspirations and impulses will now be read worldwide,” she says.

On the first page, Rio says, “My god died when he was 27.” The god she’s referring to is Kurt Cobain, the lead vocalist of Nirvana, who killed himself at that age. Cobain’s death is terrible, but it cannot be denied that he made an impact on the world of rock. Rio, by comparison, is 28 and (as far as she’s said to us) has nothing to show for it. Did the well-paying job that kept her alive also ruin her chance to stand alongside Cobain as a musician?

eastern youth

It’s tough to keep these feelings as an adult because sooner or later, they are squeezed out of you as if you were a tube of toothpaste. You need money for rent, healthcare, and childcare, depending on your situation. Your parents might be growing older, or your relatives might be sick and need your care. What’s an artistic career compared to these humble concerns? Not to mention that art-making as a career in our world today is totally different from art-making as a hobby. It empowers you in some ways, but can also restrict what work is feasible for you to produce.

So I can imagine a thirty-something hard-working careerist looking at this very earnest book and saying, “Yeah, I know. Why should this be relevant to me?” Well, it’s relevant to a couple of folks I know who are older than 27. First among them is Mike Jokoh, who translated ALTERNATIVE into English. As he told me in an interview with Manga Mavericks Books, he lost his job with the United States government shortly before the time came to announce his new micro-press. Even before that, when he still had his job, it was a separate concern from his work as a manga journalist and scholar. Keeping those two parts of himself separate, he told me, was challenging, even though he wanted to do well by both.

NUMBER GIRL

I can say the same thing for myself, as well. I spent eight years working a day job at a bookstore alongside freelance writing. Sooner or later, I came to question whether I was falling behind my full-time writing peers because I wasn’t getting enough practice. Would I ever be good enough, I thought, if I kept to writing as a hobby rather than a career? When I asked a friend that question in New York last year, they laughed it off and told me to focus on quality rather than quantity. Still, though, it bothered me.

Another part of this book I’m familiar with: envy. Rio goes out drinking with a friend of hers, Kei, who has recently won an award. Kei has everything Rio wants: He’s a writer who pursued his passion for a decade and was publicly recognized for it. Yet Kei confesses to Rio that ever since winning the award, he’s been terrified of failing to live up to the high expectations of others. I recognize Rio’s complicated feelings in her finger touching the rim of her beer glass, and in her half-lidded eye looking out from her fringe. Frustration at your own lack of achievement, concern for your friend, and what is either grudging acknowledgement or disbelief that artistic success might not even make you happy.

Verdict

ALTERNATIVE ends in perhaps the only way it could, with a shrug and a wry smile. As someone still looking for answers myself, I wasn’t surprised that 28-year-old Yagura also ended Rio’s story in a place of searching. Some selfish part of me, though, couldn’t help but yell, “Is that it?!” ALTERNATIVE isn’t really for me, though. It’s for those who are 28 or in danger of becoming 28, standing at their own crossroads between their heart and the world. I suspect it’ll resonate with them because Rio’s struggle is our struggle, and their struggle, and that struggle is real.

If you like ALTERNATIVE [SELF LINER NOTE], you might also like…

• Solanin by Inio Asano
• Blue Period by Tsubasa Yamaguchi
• Young Frances by Hartley Lin

Credits

Story and Art: Chiaki Yagura
Translation: Mike Jokoh
Lettering: Victoria Esnard
Editing: Miki Davis, Joshua Martin-Corrales
Quality Assurance: Siddharth Gupta, Colton Solem
Published in English by Manga Mavericks Books

Thank you to Manga Mavericks Books for providing an advance review copy of this manga. Receiving an advance copy had no impact on the reviewer’s opinions.

Article edited by: Adam Wescott