nwasianweekly.com
Mar. 1, 2008

Shortcomings

By Andrew Hamlin
Northwest Asian Weekly

The characters in Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel don’t exactly know what to do with their lives. That isn’t clear at first, when the narrative begins where an independent film ends, then follows a young man and a young woman, both Japanese American, who walk out of the theater, climb into a car, and motor down the road, arguing ever-louder about the merits of the film. The young woman helped create the film festival. She liked the movie. Her boyfriend runs a theater. He says none of the movies he saw at the festival (maybe least of all the one that just finished) could possibly play where he works.

The two aren’t having a healthy relationship. A few pages later, when the young woman beckons from near the bedroom, wearing only a T-shirt and panties, the young man, hunkered down with a new shipment of DVDs, doesn’t, or won’t, take the hint. His face, side-lit from the television set, shows hints of both.

Tomine’s individual panels often sit up as subtle, worthy works unto themselves if you look more than once, though he keeps his narrative running smoothly enough.

Graduate school once held these people together: Ben, the young man; Miko, the young woman; and Alice, Ben’s chubby, horny, take-no-prisoners lesbian of a best (only?) friend. But Ben left school. Alice, in a rare vulnerable moment, admits the only reason she stays in college is to appease her Korean family. She drags Ben to a family function; her family doesn’t know she likes girls. In World War II, she reminds Ben, Japanese soldiers brutalized Koreans. World War II left hideous literal and metaphysical scars across Asia, but in Berkeley, Calif., in the early 21st century, it’s something to joke about on the way to church to see one’s parents for the first time in a long time.

Miko wants an internship in New York City. She watches Ben carefully, but he never tells her not to go. Tomine often frames people’s heads in successive frames opposed to each other, or turning away from each other. Often his characters don’t seem to understand each other despite all their verbiage. Toward the end of the story, during the last argument they’ll share, Miko reminds Ben of something that the reader didn’t see happen. Did it therefore not happen, or, as Miko accuses, has Ben “blocked that out”? Sometimes the most important things drop into the chasms that we keep forgetting about, between the self and the everybody else.

Ben tears away at Miko’s deceptions, only to find her ready to rip away his own mask. “Shortcomings” spans a lot of talk about stereotypes, identity politics, and acceptable versus unacceptable cravings, but its pen-and-ink characters always seem effortlessly well-rounded. “We all have our reasons,” Ben sighs. He’s borrowing a line from Jean Renoir’s “Rules of the Game,” and with his DVD collection, he probably knows the line well.

“Shortcomings,” by Adrian Tomine. Published by Drawn And Quarterly, Montreal, 2007. $19.95

Andrew Hamlin can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.

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