Guyabano Holiday

Guyabano Holiday is a work of genius, and yet if you’ve been following panpanya’s work, that’s hardly even a statement to make. After the dreamlike Ashizuri Aquarium and the surreal An Invitation from a Crab, Guyabano Holiday is practically a victory lap. Of course panpanya makes manga this good, of course one of the most memorable artists and interesting minds in the industry continues to impress.

You can’t apply a neat timeline to this, of course — Guyabano Holiday is a collection of short stories from throughout the years, so it’s not a clean progression from the prior work. Yet there are still comparisons to be made; this collection was curated well.

Ashizuri Aquarium was like a collection of dreams. Completely surreal and often abstract, with art that felt closer to real dreams I’ve had than anything else I’ve seen in the world. An Invitation from a Crab felt less like a dream, and more like the things you see when half-asleep, when the world blurs and shapes form in the darkness. Still surreal, but more of a surreal slice of life than stories beyond life.

Compared to those, Guyabano Holiday is grounded, yet still plays to one of panpanya’s greatest strengths — the ability to look at ordinary things in surreal ways. Take the chapter The Mechanism of Homework, which sees the protagonist bored with summer work. She decides to construct a machine that can solve math problems mechanically, and the way she accomplishes this, and how the story ends, are ideas that could only have come from a unique mind. It involves a parrot, believe it or not. The relatable scenario is exaggerated into something out of an old cartoon, yet is treated seriously by the characters.

It’s easy to see how many of these chapters start from a simple feeling — haven’t you ever seen a weirdly large pigeon, wondered if you could can your own fish, or seen a strange circling bird in the distant sky? If you haven’t, don’t worry — panpanya follows these thoughts through in the strangest ways. It’s like watching improv, for it never betrays the “Yes, And” attitude, as you never deny a thought, but just go with whatever is suggested. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of panpanya’s stories began as daydreams, daydreams that began at seeing something odd in the distance or on a shelf.

Yet this is contrasted with objective truth, in factoids or even scientific diagrams in the most unexpected places. If you ever wanted to learn how far electric poles go underground, in Japan at least, you’ll learn it here. Genuine research is baked into this as much as daydreams are. The thirst for knowledge in its purest form. I’m not sure if they help emphasize the surreality of the rest, or help you mind pretend that what happens could really happen, but they add to the atmosphere of the work. Truth can often spark the imagination further than lies.

Birds have been mentioned three times now, and I truly believe this gets at the core of panpanya’s kind of surrealism. It’s not separate from reality, but exists relative to it, manifests when you simply look at things, and realize how strange they are, realize you’ve never looked at them so closely before. That’s what panpanya’s art incites you to do; look at things in shapes you never quite thought about. I have a long-running theory that all surrealist mangaka love to draw fish, because there’s honestly just something funny about the way they look. And while they certainly make their appearances here, birds get a spotlight of their own today.

The art is in some ways standard for panpanya, here — which is still exemplary. Even the intentionally simplistic characters are rendered in such soft, cozy, almost crayon-like lines. The simpler the face, the easier it is to relate to it. And the easier they stand out against the impossibly detailed backgrounds, detailed without chasing realism, caring more about the feeling of light and shadow, the texture of a view, than however they might have originally looked. It goes without saying that perspective and form are still played with to great effect.

There’s a few more subtle tricks of visual creativity than usual, as well, in ways I hadn’t seen before from panpanya. A short chapter where the characters move in real time, but months subtly pass in the backgrounds, if you squint and read the details. Or the chapter Signs of a Coincidence, which I won’t spoil, but might be my favorite manga chapter I’ve ever read. Certainly, it’s a hilarious and clever visual gimmick, all the while being something you might genuinely think about yourself while walking down the street.

It doesn’t often have the heavy, moody watercolor environments of An Invitation for a Crab, or the insane imagery of Ashizuri Aquarium, but that matches the more realistic approach perfectly, as seen in the titular collection of stories, Guyabano Holiday. There, panpanya abandons even the pretense of surrealism and simply draws a travelogue of their trip to the Phillipines, in search of the Guyabano Fruit. If you’re experienced with panpanya’s past work, you might expect this to be a completely fictional fruit, but it’s very real, and this story made me want to try it.

Even for a travelogue, panpanya approaches things strangely. Things you might expect to be the highlight of a trip, like seeing whale sharks in the ocean, are glossed over in a couple of goofy images. Most of the time is spent on noticing ordinary things, the way traveling brings you new experiences by making everything subtly different. The billboards, the items sold in stores, the way people travel, the way people look at dogs. It’s not about seeing the big tourist attractions. It’s about comparing the way wild dogs in the street are ignored to a heartfelt movie about a man’s relationship with a dog that’s played while on a ferry, and wondering what the exact cultural view of dogs is, knowing you can’t truly understand things like that as a tourist.

It could have been drawn in an accurate, photorealistic way, that would show you how these places and things looked. Instead, it’s drawn as panpanya draws, that shows you how they felt.

All autobiographies, but especially those in manga form, abridge and simplify and make more entertaining, but it feels like a lot of truth leaks into this travelogue, in both real-life photos and sketches that seem like panpanya made while there, while looking out the window of a car.

Truth in other forms, too. There’s a part where the protagonist runs through an almost-closed shopping mall, hoping to find dried guyabano to take back home to Japan. That mall doesn’t have it, but they do reflect upon how the experience itself of wandering through a foreign shopping mall, powerless and barely able to communicate with anyone, was a rare and valuable one.

This kind of simple yet relatable profundity is yet another thing that makes this work special, and it permeates the whole of it. It’s an aspect of the human condition, the way we need to embrace and experience everything from the simple things to the struggles. That if we focus too hard on where we’re going and what we need, rather than what we have, we fail to appreciate life.

Maybe we should play more frustrating and confusing video games, instead of the ones that hold our hands. Maybe we should watch more movies with plots we can't follow, listen to poetry in languages we don’t know, or buy foods we’ve never heard of. Maybe we should let ourselves get lost, whether it’s in the wilderness or a foreign shopping mall. Or maybe we need to grab some object in our room and let our imaginations wander, thinking of where it was created, what could be done with it, what its existence says about humanity, and come to wrong but interesting answers.

I doubt panpanya is some kind of buddha, immune to the anxieties and needs of ordinary life. It’s because we dislike getting lost that we have to remind ourselves the value we can get out of it. But they’re able to identify emotions with a rare amount of truth, and communicate it with a vulnerable honesty through the veneer of absurdist fiction.

And sometimes, it’s just fun. It’s not all existential emotions, but is dense with comedy. It’s the simple feelings, the goofy ones, the questions you ask when you know you have better things to do but can’t help but be bored. Who wants to do summer homework, when you can start using your brain instead and think?