Offshore Lightning

In the essay from Mitsuhiro Asakawa that bookends this stellar collection of Saito’s short manga about death, memory, family tensions, and human frailty, the artist is quoted as saying, “Happy people don’t need to draw manga.” Saito’s gekiga, or manga aimed at sophisticated adult readers, shows the influence of pioneering artists like Yosihiro Tatsumi and Yoshiharu Tsuge through unflinching, lifelike portrayals of ordinary people. The longest piece, “In Captivity,” illuminates the interior and exterior life of a cantankerous old woman descending into delusions in her final days. Other selections involve a woman puzzling over her mother’s cryptic final words, boomers reminiscing at a bar about their campus radical days, and a struggling manga artist with a house full of parakeets. Some stories thread together through shared characters, such as a journalist and illustrator jointly covering “the sex industry beat”—a job Saito herself once held, as illustrator of a lurid newspaper column in the 1970s. Her art is defined by loose, gently cartoonified lines, and, unlike her sometimes grim gekiga peers, she envisions hope: marital disagreements strengthen a relationship, estranged children find a hard-won final understanding of their parents. “The way we enter this life, the way we leave it... it’s all so unfair,” one character sighs. But where Saito can’t offer fairness, she can offer grace. Such nuance lends fresh perspective in the growing body of indie manga imports. (July)