Goodnight Punpun – Inio Asano, translated by Hox

I came to this manga by a very strange, circuitous route. My ‘homebase’ of Udine, Italy, has several strange pieces of graffiti hanging around:

I was often captivated by these pieces, and never really understood them. Then one day, while I was browsing reddit for I forget what else, and I stumbled upon someone else’s pictures of said graffiti, and came to learn that it was in reference to the manga “Goodnight Punpun”. I had never heard of the manga before, but doing a little research illuminated something that should have already been clear by the fact that someone was going around drawing on walls because of this manga: that it had one hell of a cult following. Thus I said “fuck it”, and dove right in.

As a necessary point of clarity, it should be said that I read a fan translation of this work. I tend to trust such things, often more than official translations, but there is no accounting for these things. The two criteria I would judge this on are accuracy to the original and legibility. To truly judge a translation’s accuracy, you need to know something about the original, which frankly I didn’t. But as to the legibility, I thought it was fine. I had one issue with it, when one of the characters mention having worked as an “idol”. As a native English speaker, I have no idea what that is meant to mean. I am guessing it is a Japanesse thing, and a footnote explaining it wouldn’t have harmed. The translator did it for other terms. I took it to mean “some kind of model”. But this was the only issue. I will just have to take it on faith that the rest of it is fine too.

Goodnight Punpun is a kind of bildungsroman. I guess. It follows the development of Punpun, a Japanese child, and some of the people in his life. We watch Punpun grow up to a not very well adjusted adult. All fine and well, but a bit boring right?

No.

Goodnight Punpun is filled with a whole lot of heartache. It isn’t exactly a bildingsroman as it is an analysis of how the horrible circumstances of life create maladjusted people. This piece is really fucking depressing, and while I get that this is largely exaggerated for effect, it made me a bit afraid of Japan. In the earlier volumes, there is a strange mix of seeing the world with a degree of happy childlike wonder and a unease at what happens to the young characters. Without spoiling the ending, you really get the impression that the kids are not alright, and that they never had a chance to begin with.

The art style would be what we could consider to be manga standard, and that alone would be a bit boring for me. However, the artist keeps it interesting by drawing Punpun and his family as weird bird like creatures, and later in the series drawing Punpun as other weird creatures. There are also other occasional moments of quirky multi-modality in the graphic novel that helps to keep it visually interesting.

I don’t think I truly understand what was going on with some of the visuals regarding the character of Punpun. I imagine that the author’s choice to draw him as a pyramid with legs for an issue was not arbitrary. Sometimes the titular Punpun looked like a dick, and that made a sense to the narrative. There is a fair bit of graphic sex in this, at least towards then end. It does become a story of people trying to balance sex love and feeling at home as a human. I may have missed something. Still, it didn’t detract me from the work. If anything, it made me wish I had the time to bog down and look into such things. But I am now almost a middle aged man, and somethings require time that we just do not have. A more dedicated reader can look that up – I will just flow with what the narrative gives me.

Right. It is hard to know to what extent a work should be recommended or not. I enjoyed this a lot, but I am not sure if it is everyone’s cup of tea. Italian cinema is often pretty depressing, so I am used to sad media. If you can handle some pretty heavy topics, than yea, give it a shot.