Drunks

In the shadow of the mainstream North American manga industry, there are a handful of indies who are keeping manga weird. They’re publishing the kind of offbeat stories that you won’t read in Shonen Jump or stream on Crunchyroll, stories that are elliptical, profound, strange, funny, or unsettling in ways that My Hero Academia or Blue Lock aren’t. 

On a recent visit to Star Fruit Books, for example, I discovered Okaya Izumi’s Drunks, a pair of stories that put a novel spin on the meet-cute. In the first, a shy salary man staggers home from a night of drinking only to fall prey to a chatty vampire who casually asks, “Do you have blackout drapes at your house?” You can guess where this is going, but the light tone and odd notes of humor push “Drunks” in an unexpected direction as these two wildly different people find solace in each other’s company—think Jim Jarmusch, not John Carpenter.

The second story—“Tick Tock”—opens with a flashback, as a young boy plays near a strange object in the family apartment: a cryogenic capsule containing a distant relative named Tomoko. Flash forward fifteen years: the boy is now a twenty-something man who accidentally frees Tomoko and stumbles into a relationship with her. Though ostensibly a love story, Okaya focuses as much on Tomoko’s complex reaction to rejoining the world as she does Tomoko’s new romance. Tomoko is both shocked and comforted by the discovery that the future doesn’t look much different than the past—a realization that prompts her to reflect on why she put herself in a state of suspended animation.

Art-wise, Okaya’s style recalls Nishi Keiko (Love Story) and Yamada Murasaki (Talk to My Back, Second Hand Love). Izumi’s characters are delineated with thin, almost scribbly, lines that make them look a little fragile. In her stories’ most emotionally charged scenes, there is almost no background detail; the reader’s eye is drawn to the characters’ faces and body language, allowing us to more fully appreciate their sense of joy, astonishment, and confusion over finding companionship in unexpected places. The quiet authenticity of these moments help both stories transcend their more cliche elements to make a deeper point about the mysteries of human connection. Recommended.

DRUNKS • BY OKAYA IZUMI • TRANSLATED BY DAN LUFFEY • LETTERING/RETOUCHING BY KELLY NGO • STAR FRUIT BOOKS • 60 pp.