Red Colored Elegy

By Seiichi Hayashi

Book Overview

An influential and experimental work, in an all-new paperback edition

Ichiro and Sachiko are young artists, temperamental and discouraged about what life has to offer them. They fall in and out of love, jealous of each other's interests and unchallenged by their careers. Red Colored Elegy charts their heartache, passions, and bickering with equal tenderness, creating a revelatory portrait of a stormy love affair.
A cornerstone of the Japanese underground scene of the 1960s, Seiichi Hayshi wrote Red Colored Elegy between 1970 and 1971, in the aftermath of a politically turbulent and culturally vibrant decade that promised but failed to deliver new possibilities. Sparse line work and visual codes borrowed from animation and film beautifully capture the quiet lives of a young couple struggling to make ends meet. Ichiro and Sachiko hope for something better, but they're no revolutionaries; their spare time is spent drinking, smoking, daydreaming, and sleeping together and at times with others.
Red Colored Elegy is informed as much by underground Japanese comics of the time as it is by the French New Wave. Its influence in Japan was so large that Morio Agata, a prominent Japanese folk musician and singer/songwriter, debuted with a love song written and named after it. This new paperback edition features an essay on Red Colored Elegy and Hayashi's contributions to contemporary Japanese comics from the art historian Ryan Holmberg.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1770462120
• ISBN13: 9781770462120
• Release Date: February 2018
• Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 1.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.2" x 8.4"
• Age Range: 16 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 11 and higher

Customer Reviews

Rewarding

When I first read it, I didn't understand anything that was going on. Is still felt like there was something wonderful in it and worth exploring. Like the first time I watched Lost Highway, there was an itching to delve into the work. Since it only took me an hour to read, I read it again. This time I started to catch on to the pacing and story of it all but there was still something I needed to figure out about it. Time for a third read. This time things unfolded more coherently. I'm not saying everything was clear to me, but I felt satisfied. It's also good to know that next time I pick up the book there will be more to explore. I get to figure out what's missing on the page and piece together the visual poetry of the work. Sometimes I want a very well structured story, other times I like to read something bewildering with lots open to interpretation and connections yet to be discovered.