A Single Match

By Oji Suzuki

A new author in D+Q's acclaimed gekiga line In this collection of hauntingly elliptical short stories, Oji Suzuki explores memory, relationships, and loss with a loose narrative style, filling each tale with a sense of unfulfilled longing. He plumbs the dissolute depths of human psychology, literally bathing his characters in expansive shadows that paradoxically reveal as much as they obscure. A young man catches a cold after being soaked in the rain and is tended to by his grandmother. He drifts, dreaming of a train trip with an older brother he doesn't have. A traveling salesman comes across a boy lying in the middle of the road and stops to have a cigarette and tell a story that sifts through memories of faces and places before settling back on the boy and pretending to not look at the stars. A young woman walks along the river with her bicycle and a friend who is nothing more than a disembodied head--discussing past times together, memories they have of each other. Although he touches on many of the same themes as his contemporaries in the field of postwar alternative manga--Yoshihiro Tsuge ( L'Homme Sans Talent ) and Seiichi Hayashi ( Red Coloured Elegy )--Suzuki uses an ever shifting narrative approach and dashes of surrealist humor to distinguish his work from that of his peers.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1770460098
• ISBN13: 9781770460096
• Release Date: January 2011
• Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.6" x 8.8"