Female Cartoonists in the United States by Hélène Tison

Author:Hélène Tison [Tison, Hélène]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367861612
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2021-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

4.5 Fragmentation, incorporation: MariNaomi

Turning Japanese (2016) is an autobiographical graphic memoir by Japanese American author MariNaomi36 (b. 1973) that requires an active, attentive reading, as we regularly feel at odds with what the narrator says; the discrepancy between what is written and what we understand is occasionally made apparent by the duality of the page or panel, as though narrator and monstrator37 had different stories to tell. MariNaomi draws in black ink, using the clear line and a stylized, cartoon style (the characters’ features are simplified and there is generally little or no background); her layouts and occasional grids are varied, with framed and unframed panels, and she often resorts to splash pages. Combined with her very regular drawing style, this makes for a dynamic and clear reading (graphically, Turning Japanese often recalls Forney’s Marbles). This is a personal story, which (unlike Thi Bui’s memoir about Viet Nam, discussed below) makes no reference to the history of US-Japanese relations (not even when the protagonist visits Hiroshima), nor to that of either country.

The eye-catching title suggests a complete transformation and also a puzzling process – how does one “turn” Japanese or any other nationality? Indeed, this is not literally what the book narrates, but the title suggests the importance of the process at stake here, which can be described as a form of cultural recovery. Early on, the narrator38 describes her relationship with the Japanese language as “a rocky one” (she draws her frustration, as a child, at her mother’s refusal to teach her), and with Japanese culture as “nebulous and (…) usually relegated to food. I suspect I wasn’t the only Hapa39 kid who lived in such limbo” (18). On the next page, she illustrates how she sees herself, the result of a simple sum: “white dad + Asian mom + white town = me” (19), and draws herself as a small face on a banana body, with the clarifying text and arrows (since the book is in black and white): “white inside” and “yellow outside”. This is tongue in cheek of course, but revealingly reductive and reminiscent of the accusations of acculturation and racial disloyalty that are often leveled at the children of migrant parents and at visible minorities more generally (the image functions in the same way as the pervasive “Oreo” metaphor applied to African Americans).

The book then describes how, almost accidentally, she sets on her path of cultural recovery, first by working at a Japanese hostess bar in San Jose (the subject of Book One) and then by traveling to Japan with her boyfriend Giuseppe (Book Two). The plan, as it unfolds in Book One, is odd, to say the least; it is a symptom of her hunger for Japan (she seizes the opportunity without a moment’s hesitation), but it leads her astray. Though the experience enables her to (slightly) improve her command of Japanese, everything else that it entails is destructive, and even before its narration proper begins, she remarks:

But when I got the hostessing job,

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