While Pika-don was an engaging read and certainly possesses its merits from a social perspective—that it was the product of a collaborative effort and that it gives voice to a human tragedy for, arguably, the benefit of greater society—I had some problems with the graphic novel from a storytelling perspective mainly through the use of the voice-over narrative text and the text-image relationship.
As a narrator, Tsutomu is quite dry in his exposition and it quite detailed in describing the exterior, factual reality or appearance of things and his own actions. The language he uses is detached and unemotional, and for the sake of covering his expository ground by being an authority on the factual world, (“The bus stops at the end of the line.” (39) and “There are office buildings half a mile ahead” (40), I expect that. However, the fact that his voice-over narration occurs in the first person creates a problem. Aside from making direct statements about the factual world and his physical actions (“I walk the rest of the way through the potato fields (39), he also chooses to reveal subsequent expository information through a subjective language—presumptions and perception (“That woman must be hot wearing a black kimono” and “Those women seem to be headed there” (39). In both of the above cases, Tsutomu actually wants to tell us that one woman is wearing a black kimono and that the women he sees on the road are headed towards the buildings ahead. This is an interesting problem because the originator of the voice does not change, instead it vacillates between objectivity and a objectivity masked in subjectivity when really it might serve the subject well to be perceived visually. It’s also very indirect at getting across its information as it has to use Tsutomu’s voice to state the obvious.
Aside from creating exposition, the voice-over narrative also makes a lot of statements about how Tsutomu perceives his human interactions in a way that could be more vivid and convincing if confined to dialogue. This may be a question of economy. For example, across two panels on page 20, the voice-over narration reads: “Sato doesn’t understand the worries of a father…but his intentions are good, so I just smile.” The preceding panel which takes up the top half of the page already shows us a few “misled” comments by Sato which demonstrate his misunderstanding of Tsutomu’s paternal worries. For economy’s sake, I think we already have enough information to draw the same conclusions that the narration drives home in the following two panels. Without the two subsequent panels featuring the two-part voice-over narration, we as readers would be given the space to draw our own conclusions about Sato’s paternal tendencies. To achieve an enhanced result, in lieu of those two panels could be one panel with a close-up of a weak smile, which would be enough to illustrate Tsutomu’s resignation at his friend’s inability to understand him.
What’s interesting about reading Pika-don right after Fox Bunny Funny is the question of the interplay of text and image used to tell a story. Fox Bunny Funny is remarkable for its fluency and even eloquence in a purely graphic language which tells a story without the use of a single word of text. Pika-don, on the other hand, really stood on the other end of the spectrum in creating an image-text relationship that largely subjugated the image to a subordinate role to the text.
In contrast to Fox Bunny Funny, in Pika-don the image holds a function which is primarily illustrative. It many instances in the novel, there is a direct equivalence in meaning and information between text and image in so far as there is not any new information to be discovered in the picture. Sometimes, illustration is useful for the story, for example, when Hisako takes Tsotomu on a visualized journey into their memories. It is interesting to note the effects that the condition of text and image being equivalent has on the way the eye moves across the page. As a reader, once I realize that the bulk of information resides in the text and that the image surrounding will only serve as a comparison to the mental image I have already created in my mind, the act of “double-reading” each panel becomes perceptibly more laborious.
Equally interesting are the instances in which the text tells more than the image can, so that text and image not equal, but the text could very well function without the aid or even detraction of the illustration. A case of this is on page 129 where three vertical, inset panels read in their voice-over: “A thousand needles prick my skin,” “My burns are red like raw tuna,” and “It feels as though even my insides are burning.” The language of the text is already loaded with imagery, so it is difficult for the image to “live up to” the words. On the other hand, as I noted earlier, there is also the opposite problem of simplified, dry, and direct language used in the narration to describe hopes, fears, dreams, memories when they might be better served by action or imagery. If it could be better conveyed in words, why accompany it with an image and vice versa? How can the text work with an image to provide just the right balance of information without being noticeably didactic and therefore subtracting?
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