A Drunken Dream
by Nicole Rudick
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Read Comments (4)
I saw Joe’s post that included Moto Hagio a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve had the galley of the book in hand for a while. Still, not being a big manga reader, I didn’t expect to like the stories nearly as much as I did. But then smartly done genre tales make for some of the best literature, comics, film, etc. What I liked most about the different pieces in A Drunken Dream is the psychological form of sci-fi she employs (strictly speaking, the title story is the only sci-fi one, but I think a looser definition that incorporates the social aspects of the genre also applies here). I thought often of Tarkovsky’s Solaris. The idea of a reality that is simultaneously real and imagined—like Rika’s appearance to herself and her mother as an iguana, or the little girl
sitting on her front step joyfully appreciating a world in which she is an aberration for doing so—are very much the same as Kris Kelvin’s unreal existence in his very real past on the surface of the planet, at the close of Solaris. (more…)
