Preview by Publisher Blurb
Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month September 2025
"I feel like I'm in a Fellini movie."
Jiro Taniguchi is my favourite Japanese comics creator.
It's THE DISTANT NEIGHBOURHOOD which I usual show customers first, wherein a young man winds up back in his home town by mistake, thence in his fifteen-year-old body just before his father, he knows, will leave his family forever. Later on a flipside called A JOURNAL OF MY FATHER sees the mother leaves a different homestead, far earlier in a boy's life. I'll post a review of that shortly.
Taniguchi's works are always phenomenally beautiful with the most precise yet tender, delicate lines with a phenomenal spirit of place. They are quiet, questioning, and almost always in search of a truth.
This one he didn't write, but I can see why working with Masayuki Kusumi appealed to him for they complement each other beautifully in their perspectives, curiosity, humility and interests which extend far beyond the beautiful food our dapper young businessman in his shirt and tie is about to consume, in volume, over his dozens of excursions throughout Japan's delightfully different districts, for he wonders as he wanders, as one will. He's just as interested in the origins and aesthetics of the restaurants themselves, as well as who's dining in them, and why they've sprung up in that particular prefecture. He's in for a fair few surprises.
Each chapter comes with tasting notes, on both the food to be sampled and mused over, but also on the various districts he'll be strolling through; as such, this forms a cracking cultural primer for anyone's prospective trip to Japan.
Taniguchi's inquisitive artist's eye ensures you're blessed with views of parkland trees, wide-open beaches, black kites diving for food outside a cliff-top restaurant, and actual urban beauty in all its architectural glory wherever he spots it. He even gets to draw Paris, in a romantic reverie triggered by a district's love of leather jackets.
So it's not just about the food - which you are in any case humbly advised against devouring during a single gluttonous sitting - but about discovery.
