Keyaki no Ki

Every time I read taniguchi's graphic novels and I always wonder, how the heck he manages to draw so well that the plates look like museum artworks or just photographs, the author of the eight stories is Ryuichiro Utsumi and I am amazed that from such small and insignificant things you can come up with very beautiful and touching stories with different nuances, each story has its own theme and they all want to represent something of Japan, with its rules that break the wings of spontaneity, in the first story you he dwells on whether a simple tree has a soul, in the secondstory we get to know a normal girl but much more intelligent than her peers, in the third story a father wants to meet his daughter again in the same city where he works as he hasn't seen her since the divorce with the wife, in the fourth story we talk about two brothers who try to survive in a world that sees them already old even if they themselves still have a lot of energy to spend, in the fifth story it is dedicated to the relationship between brother and sister, in the sixth story we talk about love even in an age that is defined as elderly, in the seventh story two brothers go in search of their dog that they had entrusted to an acquaintance finally, the last story talks about the difficulty of adapting to another country that you don't know, each story refers to a theme of the same, the characters show off their desire to be morbidly attached to traditions and disturbed by prejudices or how it should anything be done. I haven't found any stories done badly or that I didn't like and I believe that this, like the other works by the author, must be read for the beauty of the tables, the way Jiro Taniguchi makes the settings make you breathe Japan deeply even if they are settings of ordinary places known by Taniguchi, and this is a characteristic of the master. The interview made by panini both with Maestro Taniguchi and with the author of the eight stories was very interesting, I found it one more thing to get to know him, even if many of the things he said also transpire from his stories. I give the stories a 9 and the drawings a 10.