Pandora

by Hagiwara Rei. Published by Glacier Bay Books
264 pages,
 
Five meditations on grief receding into memory, phantoms of traumas past but not yet forgotten, people struggling to make peace with loss. Hagiwara Rei sets out a sequential tapestry of transcendent watercolor comics which linger in the back of your mind like words you never got to tell someone you loved. Heart-wrenching, intimate.
 
“A collection of five short stories that aren’t quite connected by narrative, but are definitely connected tonally and atmospherically. Each story tie together with their quiet sense of melancholy and loss, and are gorgeously rendered in soft watercolors reminscent of other noted painters in the medium like Hayao Miyazaki, Kent Williams, John J. Muth, etc. The quaint quality to the storytelling also reminded me a little of Linnea Sterte’s A Frog in the Fall, though this one is signficantly more sadder to read.” [Rick Ray]