Then a kindly shop owner takes pity on the protagonist, and before long we're entertaining the possibility that the protag's body and soul have detached from each other. The surrounding neighborhood is devoid of bus stops all the taxis have flat tires.
Sometimes that closure is real, sometimes it's simulated, but somehow it's always palpable.Įxample: The protagonist gets off at the wrong stop on the train, and finds all subsequent departures have been cancelled. One strange thing follows another, and another, and another, and somehow the strangeness of everything that we're presented with joins back upon itself, Möbius-loop style, to bring us the feeling of narrative closure. The point of Crab is not to make any kind of statement about this character or her environment it's to conjure a mood of dislocation and quiet surprise, with this character as a befuddled witness to it all. This character lives in some urban environment in Japan - ostensibly Tokyo, but it's more just some generic City. It's broken into a slew of relatively unconnected shorts - some only a couple of pages, some running to dozens - that all feature a waifish female protagonist, a few recurring character figures: her dog, a man with a curious diving-helmet-like shape for a head, various animals that talk (or just pretend to talk). Even Tsutomi Nihei's alienscape BLAME! worked that way, too mood and atmosphere were the real point, not the plot.Ĭrab is closer to the former of those two than the latter. Nichijou is like this perhaps also Yotsuba&!. They are about the flavor and texture of a set of experiences rather than a formal story about them, although sometimes there's a story, if only in the - to use terms in vogue these days in science - emergent or procedural sense. Japanese popular culture has a whole subsection devoted to works that are essentially plotless but never boring.
It is also the only manga I have ever seen that has an index. Someday, I told myself, I'd find a way to commit this dreamland hyperspace to a story or a drawing, but panpanya beat me most of the way to it with An Invitation From A Crab. All of them familiar and alien at the same time, much like the things that parade past me in those hybrid spaces. I find myself in an environment that seems assembled from slices of various spaces in my life - schools, airports, hotels, city neighborhoods, hometown streets, shops, bedrooms, living rooms. On some evenings, after dinner but long before bedtime, I doze off briefly.
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