Page 45 Review by Stephen
If it were at all possible, would you want to go back in time with your current critical faculties and relive your life from the age of fourteen? What would you change, if anything at all, and what would you learn that eluded your former fourteen-year-old mind? Executed with all the dignity and accomplished craftsmanship that made THE WALKING MAN such a beautiful and transporting experience, this sees a forty-something businessman, tired and hungover, boarding the wrong train by mistake, which takes him back to the town he grew up in. Rather than fret, he takes advantage of the happenstance to stroll through the streets of his childhood. They've changed so considerably that they're barely recognisable now, but when he reaches the graveyard under the verdant hillside where his mother lies buried, he stops to meditate by her headstone:
"What were my mother's thoughts when she passed away?
"My father suddenly went missing when I was in eighth grade. I have no clear idea why my father decided to leave. Even now, whereabouts still unknown, I don't know what's happened to him... I don't even know if he's alive or dead! I don't know the pain she might have felt inside, but Mom passed away without ever saying a hateful word about my father.
"I asked my mother once again. 'Were you happy?'"
There's a shift in his shadow as the sun shines down from above, and a shift in his weight so that he loses his balance: he's wearing his old school uniform. A butterfly flits by.
Nakahara is fourteen years old again. His mother's alive, and his father's still there with no sign at all of significant strife. So why did his father suddenly disappear, and can Nakahara do anything to prevent it?
Through no fault of his own Taniguchi's the victim of a delayed translation here, giving Alex Robinson's similarly themed TOO COOL TO FORGET the chance to emerge onto our shelves first, for this was originally published in Japan in 1998. And whatever their similarities, stylistically they're very different beasts: Taniguchi has an exceptionally fine, precise yet surprisingly soft and sympathetic line whereby even interiors are spacious and full of window light, whilst his landscapes are a loving tribute to the beauty of nature, the grass dappled in sunshine and shadow, the leaves painstaking rendered in gentle folds above. One can't help but fall in love with so many of his cast, either. Whether wide-eyed in wonder or deep in reflection, harbouring a melancholy kept to himself, Nakahara is drawn in perfect sympathy with his inner monologue. For although he delights in a confidence around girls he never had as a child, although he rejoices in a rejuvenated athleticism and overindulges in an alcohol binge his younger body can't cope with, there are school friends chatting to him now without a care in the world whose funerals he's already attended, and he can't help but look at his mother and father with a different eye to a child's. For he knows his father will leave his mother soon, just as his own family in the present are wondering what's happened to their husband and father...
It's a work that can't help but catalyse self-reflection. How would you cope in the same situation? Who would believe you if you told them the truth? How soon would one simple act cause a domino effect leading you down a completely different road to that trodden before? And how come you can't just take a girl out to dinner any longer?!
