asianamlitfans | Dec. 27th, 2010

Most everyone here has (I hope!) read Tomine's Shortcomings, his best work to date, I think, and one that definitely belongs in the canon of Asian American Graphic Fiction we all seem to be assembling. It's a bit backwards to read Sleepwalk and Other Stories after Shortcomings, but it also helps you to see what might become of some of the ideas that appear to have intrigued Tomine since the beginning. Here, too, there are Ben Tanaka types who are frustrated by love, and the awesome lesbians who are there for them when they're dumped. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I think Tomine's at his best when he's channeling his inner lesbian/alternative chick. My favorite story in this collection is "Dylan and Donovan," an amazing take on the relationship between two sisters who are growing apart. They are best friends out of necessity at the beginning of the story, out of necessity because they are the only non-white students to be found. But as high school goes on, and their attention turns away from one another, and toward typical adolescent concerns like becoming an artist and having sex, they start to lose their connection, which is sad until you realize it has to happen in order for either of them to have the required mental space to tell their own story.

Tomine is amazing in short fiction, but it's almost like there's too much in this bound collection. I know that I raced right through it, craving more at every turn, but I definitely felt like I lost some of the organic connection I would have had to the originals, had I read them when they were published separately. More than short fiction, it's almost like a poetry anthology in that way, and without even a narrative anchor, apart from the authorial voice.

Even there, though, Tomine moves through so many different moods from story to story, that it's hard to imagine all of this coming from one imagination. He really feels through the static of day to day life from a perspective that changes attachments, but never that feeling of being absolutely damned by one's own poor decision making skills. It seems like a lot of his characters are confident that everyone else in the world either has it all figured out, or is too stupid to realize that they don't. It's a perspective many of us probably know well -- I certainly find pieces of myself in these pages, and it's uncomfortable the way he forces me to inhabit those nooks and crannies of my mental life that I'd rather repress.

I love -- well, love's not the right word, because I couldn't bear to re-read it -- the story "Hostage Situation," which is about a young man who feels trapped on a bus when two white guys begin heckling everyone. The protagonist is absolutely torn by how he should be feeling. He says, "the tension was unbearable...I wanted to crawl under my seat and hide." (63) It's something about that feeling of just wanting to disappear, and for everyone to keep quiet and return to their own thoughts, the way you always do, as a courtesy to them.

So...yeah. Read this collection, but not too fast. There's humor as well as all that awkwardness, and a veritable goldmine of teachable material for talking about ethnicity and representation in graphic narrative. It doesn't surprise me that Tomine ended up providing a "guide to the characters" in Shortcomings -- the graphic form provides amazing possibilities for talking about identity in new ways, but it could be that, in the 90s, Tomine was ahead of many other authors in being ready to let readers figure out labels for themselves.