Books: not simple (Natsume Ono)

Ian’s entire life has been a tangle of bad decisions and mislaid trust. It starts when he’s just a child, when his parents split up — or maybe it started long before that, if we pay attention to hints sprinkled throughout the book. Ian is only twelve when his parents divorce, leaving him stranded in a dead zone between them. His mother’s an alcoholic now living in London who spurns her children; his father wants nothing to do with Ian, but has an overweening interest in his sister, Kylie. This family’s not just broken — it was defective before it came off the assembly line.

Some of the damage most likely started with Kylie. Not because it comes from her, but because it was done to her and has been transmitted through her to another generation. She’s a number of years older than Ian, and as the story opens has spent at least some of that time in prison. Armed robbery, she says, but we know that people in prison have plenty of reasons never to tell the truth about what they did. She gets out, finds Mum and Dad have split, hunts frantically for them, and finds Ian living with her mother — barely living, since the two of them are subsisting on a combination of neighborly charity and Ian working part-time for a butcher up the road. Then Kylie finds out Mum has pressed Ian into providing them with another source of income, something that no mother should ever ask her child to do. (She didn’t ask, either — she simply made it happen, so it is all that more stomach-turning when we realize what it is. More than that I will not say here.)

All of this being shuttled around and treated with cavalier lovelessness has made Ian strangely hollow. He only answers the most direct of questions. He looks at everything with the same sad, blank eyes. When he smiles, it’s only his mouth that’s smiling — except in one photo where he and his sister are crowded into the frame and grinning without a care in the world. He’s not a bad fellow, just limp and diffident in the face of what he’s accepted is his lot in life. The only real ambition he has is to become a runner, and it’s the one goal he seems to be able to chase earnestly and without compromise. It would be nice, we think, for someone who has been given so little in life to have something he can call his own. This is where he crosses paths with Jim, the reporter who grows at first fascinated with Ian and then horrified of what has been done to, and with, him. It’s not enough for him to simply bear witness to Ian’s life, he realizes; he feels obliged, in some way, to atone for not doing more than simply looking. And then there is the business of the way Ian and Kylie feel about each other, one of those situations where feelings provide more of the truth than any searching for facts would.

The author and artist, Natsume Ono, has presented all of this in a series of stark, simple, almost distant scenes. There are almost no major moments of action; most of the panels are just people looking at each other. Backgrounds are simple. Environments are reduced to a few functional details. Like more conventional manga the characters all have outsized eyes — but only so that we can look first at everyone else and then at Ian, and from him feel a hunger and thirst of the spirit that is downright frightening.

I have been vague about a lot of what happens, detail-for-detail and moment-for-moment, because a lot of what hits hardest in not simple is how those things are revealed — both to the people in the story, and to us. And by and large, the story takes a quiet approach: it doesn’t need to shout. Things speak for themselves. A simple image of a cube of bubble gum clutched in someone’s hand has all the impact of those early panels of Ian dying, because we know what they represent and we don’t need to be told any more than that. The comic doesn’t hold our hand; it just shows us what we need to see, and lets us fit the rest together on our own.

Do this. Go buy the book, and read it once, all the way through, in one sitting. Then stop for a few minutes. Step outside, look at the sunset, eat an orange. Then go back in and read it again from the beginning, and see how you notice a whole ‘nother book’s worth of story that wasn’t there before — all hidden in the ways people glance sidelong at each other, or stare into each other’s eyes, or smile up at a camera. You could, I think, come back to it any number of times and find that much more there.

I wondered about the title. Is it about the story itself, or the people in it? Doesn’t matter. Never did. Simplicity in life is only something you find after the fact, in the process of paring down and distilling and finding the threads that matter most. Here is proof.