Melancholy and nocturnal mood pieces told in a highly elliptical fashion. Single flashing moments of great emotion are surrounded by shadow as if everything else were just beyond the reach of memory. I agree with all the older reviews here with the exception that I actually love it to bits. What a disquieting, haunting volume. If you know of any other works like this, please drop me a comment! ( )

Moody black and white drawings coupled with a pensive, poetic, unfinished -- writing style. Sometimes the writing was a bit obscure, the words and pictures drifting apart (which is why I've given it only three stars). But the comic effectively inspired moods of wonder, dread, loneliness, distance. ( )

A Single Match is surreal gekiga by Oji Suzuki. The Japanese manga realm of gekiga is often associated with a kind of brute realism, thanks in large part in the U.S. to the work of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, though that isn't really the case. In A Single Match, published in English by Drawn & Quarterly (also Tatsumi's English-language publisher), it's a series of increasingly peculiar dream-like states, presumably of the young boy who, in the opening chapter, catches a terrible cold and it left hallucinating under his grandmother's watchful care. There is a boy buying a radio with his father, who has some trouble with the mob; a woman submitting to a man sexually; a girl seeming to reenacting, really more to mime, the woman's deeds; a disembodied head asking to rest in a woman's lap. It's a beautifully drawn and often effectively disorienting quasi-story. The art changes frequently, from simply drawn faces to nearly abstract chiaroscuro, mirroring the narrator's state of mind.

One note: the book is "flipped," which is to say it reads left to right instead of right to left, as it was originally published. Some people prefer it this way. So be it. I do think it's unfortunate, though, that the sound effects were replaced with translated ones. Japanese sound effects are so visually evocative, especially in a setting as symbol-laden as this one -- anyhow, it seems like an unnecessary decision. That said, I haven't seen the original, so perhaps they were perfunctory in their presentation.

(One minor note: The book is titled A Single Match, though it's also reportedly known -- perhaps in Japan as the original title? -- as Red Kimono. In Goodreads it shows up in the database as Red Kimono, even though the cover clearly reads A Single Match.)

Thanks to the Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly I've had the privilege of reading several volumes of gekiga, a sort of underground cartooning from Japan created, most notably, by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Oji Suzuki's A Single Match is the latest example to come my way, and it is also the most mysterious. Far from the gritty worlds that characterize the work of Tatsumi's I've read, Suzuki seems more concerned with dreams, and thus his comics sometimes make as much—and as little—sense as dreams, and are as fragmentary as memory. Perhaps for that reason, his stories are as compelling as dreams and memory so often are. A frustrating, fascinating read.