Tonoharu: Part One

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So instead of striving for the impossible ideal of perfection, my first priority was to first finish something, anything, that could technically be considered “done”. That involved dashing out a clunky script and slapping together placeholder images, with characters being represented by blobs of color. I had that bare-bones version done in about 10 days. It was complete in that you could read it from beginning to end, but it was pretty awful. APA style: Tonoharu.. (n.d.) >The Free Library. (2014). Retrieved Nov 25 2023 from https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Tonoharu.-a0483135392

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/12/paul_muldoon_s_selected_poems_1968_2014_reviewed.html I’m not a programmer, so there’s nothing I can do to fix these issues, so I decided to release this exclusively as a video (at least for now). Wow, that’s pretty short!” she says. She tries to help spice up his speech and asks what he does in his free time. “I watch TV sometimes, or sleep.” Constance lends him a book that better explains self-introductions before she takes off. Tonoharu tells the story of a young American who moves to rural Japan to work as an assistant English teacher. It is based (in part) on my own experience doing the same from 2003 to 2006. Because Tonoharu is fictional and not a direct telling of your Japan experience, what inspired you to tell this story? Did you have an "aha" moment? It took me a long time to get around to reading Tonoharu: Part One, Lars Martinson's graphic novel about a young American who gets a job as an English teaching assistant in a small Japanese town. I'm so glad I did, though, because its incredibly good. It reads like an autobiography. Martinson actually did work in Japan as an English teacher, so I'm sure parts of the story are based on his experiences.*This is the story of an American teaching English in Japan. While the sense of disconnection and uncertainty is understandable, the book seems to be not about the disorientation of living in a foreign country, but about the character's own apathy and inability to connect with anyone. The story moves very slowly and very little actually happens. For someone who was willing to take the step of moving to another country alone, Dan is surprisingly unwilling to make any effort to interact with people, try new things, or even learn the language so he can work better with his colleagues and students. It takes a lot of effort to move to such a different place and not have interesting experiences and meet interesting people, but this character has the perfect mix of laziness and ineffectiveness to pull it off. There was a glimmer of hope near the end that he might start opening up and that the people he meets would help him live this experience better, but it was not to be. As time goes on, Dan establishes something of a social network (including an affair with a female teacher at his school who visits his apartment to have sex with him), and he is introduced to a baffling family of seemingly wealthy Europeans living in an old Buddhist temple. Born in Minnesota in 1977, Lars Martinson currently teaches English in Kameoka Japan, while drawing comics in the evening. Tonoharu tells the story of a young American who moves to rural Japan to work as an assistant English teacher. It is based, in part, on Lars own experience doing the same, from 2003 to 2006. I enjoyed the art and the bits of Japan and Japanese culture we get to see in this graphic novel. It's also pretty clever how a sprinkling of the dialogue is written in Japanese, without translation. If you don't read Japanese, this really transports you into Dan's experience of people saying things all around you and laughing together and you feeling left out. If you do read Japanese, it's probably marvelous on another level. I can read the basic kana, but not the kanji, so I get a little whiff of what's going on (e.g., I understood when a teacher said "Welcome, everyone!" but not the rest of what was said). There’s no way to save or bookmark progress, meaning if you close the program, you have to start reading from the beginning.

Maybe I’ll revisit it someday and make some of those improvements, but for now, in the spirit in which it was created, I’m content calling it done. Instead I’d like to move on to another project, and try to finish it in a similar time frame. Maybe I’ll give myself a little more time so I can add music and tweak a few things, but I still want to shoot for around a month in any event. To review only Tonoharu Part Three would be like reviewing only one image of a triptych, or the last third of a movie. Sure, you can read each part as a stand-alone book, but I highly recommend reading all three “parts” to get the most out of this three-course graphic feast. So let’s take a look at all three books, starting with Part One. Tonoharu Part One (2008) I've always been fond of stories told through pictures, so most of what inspires me has visual and/or narrative elements. Wong Kar-wai movies, Knut Hamsun novels, and Hokusai's sketchbook collections spring to mind as sources of inspiration. For music I really like Scandinavian folk; Hedningarna and Triakel are particularly good. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/12/hammer_is_the_prayer_by_christian_wiman_reviewed.html Appendix B steps closer to the present (or just a little past the end of the story), and we finally see who our Part One prologue ALT is.Although inspired by Martinson’s real-life experience as an ALT, the series is a complete work of fiction. Martinson started on his Tonoharu three-volume venture when he was 25-years-old, and didn’t finish until he was 38. If he were to continue at that pace, we’d be fortunate to get just one more trilogy out of him. But Martinson has decided to change his approach to be more prolific. In fact, in the future he’d like to take just three months for each new project. I look forward to dedicating a bookshelf to more of his work. My short term goal is to finish a few projects in roughly the same amount of time, but to improve each one bit by bit. Then if I reach a point where I think these are ready for prime time, I might devote more time to one of them. I'm a big fan of books where the main character is unlikable. A jerk or an idiot or even painfully shy. But painfully shy is hard. As a reader, it's hard to feel compelled to keep reading when you're sort of yelling crappy high school football coach encouragements at the main character in your head. With each book, I've tried to capture different aspects of the experience of teaching in Japan. Notably absent in the first two books is any sort of meaningful interaction between Dan and his students, so I devote a significant chunk of the third book to that. This makes for some of my favorite scenes in the whole series, so I hope readers enjoy it as well. What is your opinion of Japanese cake?