Solanin, review: life is a passing train

Solanin, review

Sometimes you feel suffocated. You think it is normal, perhaps stress, you give little weight to what the body suggests, but the body does not speak for itself. It is the soul and the heart that suggest to the body how to move, what to do, where to have pain, if to have it. And when you feel suffocated, it is often life that starts to crush you starting from within, starting from where it hurts the most. Thoughts, dreams, disappointments, small conquests and a whirlwind of sensations. The life.

In itself a rip off. You are born with a single certainty, your end. The conclusion. Greetings to all. What is involved you cannot control. You can try, you hope, but it's not like that, never. There are those who live, those who pretend to do so, those who try and are disappointed, those who believe in it and overcome their fears. Nobody knows what is in that fascinating journey, which is why the only way not to regret it is to try to live it intensely. In any difficulty, in any complexity. This is our destiny. The fate of a generation, perhaps two, that does not know what will happen to it tomorrow, that tries to let go, to create a family, to overlook the weight that feels inside, to the lack of fulfillment, to the absence of gravity, it remains suspended . Suspended in a present that wants to deceive you, trap you, govern you, which tries to make you live something, as if nothing is happening, even if, in the meantime, you feel suffocated.



Solanin 1

Solanin represents the uncertainty of a generation

There is no need for someone else to feed this disgust, we are enough. Marginalized from society, young people without hope, without ideas, without concrete projects. We can have all the cards on the table in the world, but no one will give us space. Easy to say that "sooner or later, if you really believe in it, if you sacrifice everything for the goal, in the end you will arrive at the result". I can be clear: that's not true. Because? Because whoever tells you all this is someone who has made it. Bravo, lucky, stubborn, certainly. He, however, did it. Do not believe those who tell you that sooner or later you will be able to carry out your project, to reach the finish line, to overcome all fear. It is not so. It takes talent to begin with. It takes courage to follow. And then you need that dose of luck that never hurts.



Solanin 2

Solanin: either change or die

Asano has the right sensitivity, thanks also to delicate and sincere drawings, to tell the rhythms, the distortions, the symbolic follies of Japan that are a bit like those of all of us. Parents who want more from their children who give their all in a society that is nowhere near satisfying their hunger. So down with childishness, heartbreaking promises and monotonous repetitive actions that only lengthen the agony. There is a sort of promise not kept by the generation prior to ours, that of the forties and thirties of today. A bit as if someone had betrayed, lied, played dirty on the life of future stars. And those stars today feel the full weight of the sky on their shoulders.

Asano is an enchanting narrator

The mangaka born in 1980 is known in Italy for the publications, also published by Planet Manga, of Buonanotte PunPun, The girl by the sea, Il campo dell 'rainbow and Dead Dead Demon's Dededededestruction, works capable of always putting the person and their emotions at the center. Asano manages to tell the everyday life, the contrasts, the uncertainties, the ingenuity of the human race, the disagreements and the oxymorons that we experience every day. How are we really? How do we think we are? Asano focuses on the classic existential questions to which the Greek philosophers were already trying to answer without any certainty. The enormous sensitivity of him gives, page after page, a crescendo of emotion. The works of the mangaka are oxygen for the mind and soul.

Asano was born in Namegata, in the prefecture of Ibaraki. In 2001, he won the GX award for emerging authors and made his debut with the manga "Uchuu kara konnichiwa" (Greetings from the Universe) on Sunday GX. His Solanin manga was adapted into a live action film released in Japan in April 2010, with some success.


Solanin

Solanin: a train passing by and watching it go

The definitive edition of Planet Manga, the Complete Edition, created in a single volume surprises on several fronts. Not only does it satisfy the fetishism of having an object in your hands that can be read without effort, without weighing down your eyes and hands, but it also makes Asano's drawing enjoyable. Furthermore, the cover represents all that desolation that our protagonists feel inside. A pressure that is too high, a bar that rises inexorably, a pressure that never goes away.

A girl, maybe Meiko - but maybe not, an ordinary person, like us - lost in a meadow. In front of her there is only a succession of blades of grass and then in front of her, higher up, a bridge and a passing train. Maybe the very train her dreams are traveling on. A train that she, far away in the meadow, surrounded by greenery, will never take. A train that you watch go away and helpless you just feel suffocated.