PESTS
KAFKA A manga adaptation
NISHIOKA KYŌDAI Translated by David Yang 176pp. Pushkin Press. Paperback, £12.99.
A round the work of Nishioka Kyōdai – a sibling duo first published in the manga magazine Morning in 1989 – long has the word “Kafkaesque” lingered. Their oeuvre includes the story of a man who swaps his mundane life for a surreal journey to the end of the world (Kono Yo no Owari e no Tabi, 2002–03), the story of a girl raised by wolves (Ookami Shōjo Laura, 1991) and numerous other oddball adventures. They come across as Japanese cousins to Edward Gorey, when they come across at all: little of their work has been translated.
The Nishioka Kafka first appeared in Japanese between 2008 and 2010. Its bold blackand-white panels adapt in manga form some of the Czech author’s familiar and much celebrated works (“The Metamorphosis”, “In the Penal Colony”), alongside several shorter stories of which, proportionally, a larger proportion of text is retained.
Kafka begins with “The C oncerns of a Patriarch” (“Die Sorge des Hausvaters”; “The Cares of a Family Man” to readers of Willa and Edwin Muir’s translation). The Nishioka fondness for abstract pattern-making informs the opening panels’ depiction of the modest but unsettling entity that is the Odradek, this “flat, star-shaped spool” with threads “composed of torn yarns of different textures and colours”. The story’s narrator remains no more than a wispy outline that watches the Odradek as he descends the stairs. People in the stories that follow boast mask-tight faces, their eyes black, mouths pinched and noses long and thin.
The patterns persist: as the closed double doors to Gregor Samsa’s room; as the three lodgers who take exception to this “enormous pest”; in the double-spread denouement of “A Fratricide”, which has the dead man lying dead centre in the town’s cobbled square, symmetrically surrounded by observers, but concealed by his wife and her fur coat. “In the Penal Colony” opens with another double spread, an arid declivity set among geometric peaks, with death (or the means of execution) again at its heart. The sparely deployed words invite the reader to rush on, but these are pages worth studying for their graphic artistry. A pertinent example is “A Hunger Artist”, in which the protagonist remains caged in the middle of every page as the world changes around him – until he vanishes, that is, and is replaced by a “ferocious panther”.
Or rather, on this telling, what seems to be a ferocious leopard. Likewise, Kafka’s “Kübelreiter” (“Bucket Rider”) now soars as high as two storeys rather than one. David Yang’s afterw
