A group of friends is attempting to enter a garden just beyond a wall. When they succeed, the garden they finally enter is no Eden, but rather a massive landscape of machines, geometric forms and all manner of nonorganic objects. In Japanese comic-book artist Yuichi Yokoyama's newest and longest (at 328 pages) work of graphic magic, his characters become enmeshed in a fantastic wonderland of distorted mirrors, photographic equipment, massive libraries and complex pathways. To his signature vivid visual style, Yokoyama has added more dialogue than in past works, fleshing out the characters and allowing them equal billing with his spectacular architectural creations, thus yielding a reflection on the myriad ways human interact with the complex mechanical world we have created. Douglas Wolk, writing in the New York Times Book Review, declared that few cartoonists of the moment are "weirder or more original than Yuichi Yokoyama."
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When a group of friends decides to enter a garden through a break in an enclosing fence, they find themselves in a world never before imagined. Instead of wandering through a natural landscape, they are in the midst of a fusion of the natural and mechanical, including rivers of slowly moving balls, buildings of finely cut paper, and mountains made of seed bags. As the characters move from one part of the garden to the next, their dialogue is exclusively devoted either to describing matter-of-factly what they see or asking questions about it, questions that are often delightfully unanswered. If this seems bizarre it certainly is, but it is also strangely beautiful and illuminating. Yokoyama (Travel; New Engineering) creates a visual landscape that is so imaginative and so dynamic that it sometimes looks as if Picasso and Dalí are having an intellectual argument about the limits of manga as an art form. Ultimately, the narrative is a celebration of the natural world through the observation of its forces at work, rather than a critique of our fascination with technology, though some will no doubt read it this way. A stunning, mind-expanding achievement of graphic storytelling. --Publisher's Weekly, May 9, 2011
Sure, all the characters have no personality and there's no story to speak of. But that's beside the point: This architectural fantasia by the Japanese art-manga master looks like a geometry textbook from an alternate, 6-D universe. --Dan Kois, New York Magazine, May 2011
Yuichi Yokoyama's Garden is like looking at plans for an art installation that's too big to ever be made. This 300-page graphic novel takes some large risks with its storytelling, but those risks pay off big time. Garden has been translated from Japanese to English, but it kept the right-to-left, back-to-front style of book-lookery. The story concerns a group of friends who are denied access to a place called "the garden," but sneak in anyway. The characters exploring the space are nameless humanoids who are all pretty freaky-looking, which is fitting because the shit they find in the garden is pretty freaky-looking too. First they come across a waterfall with rubber balls instead of water and a bridge covered in swivel chairs. To cross the river, the explorers transfer from chair to chair, all while spinning around in circles. The things they encounter later are harder to describe, although they make sense when the confused characters observe and comment on them. The plot doesn't build like a traditional story. The characters explore, comment on beautiful and frightening things, and occasionally engage with or hide from security patrols. It seems like the things they see become more and more dangerous as the book progresses, and then it ends with a confusing sequence that acts as an epilogue, in which we see what may be an explanation of some of the strange things they came across. My best dreams usually involve me moving through some strange and unfamiliar space while looking at alien objects, much like the characters in Garden. I blame those dreams on video games. A big part of gaming is immersing yourself in weird environments--you move through a space and try to understand it, just like in this book. --Nick Gazin, Vice, May 18, 2011
Even though it frustrates ordinary expectations at every turn, though, Garden is thrilling and engaging--a page-turner, in its perverse way. --Douglas Wolk, Time, May 13, 2011
Sure, all the characters have no personality and there's no story to speak of. But that's beside the point: This architectural fantasia by the Japanese art-manga master looks like a geometry textbook from an alternate, 6-D universe. --Dan Kois, New York Magazine, May 2011
Yuichi Yokoyama's Garden is like looking at plans for an art installation that's too big to ever be made. This 300-page graphic novel takes some large risks with its storytelling, but those risks pay off big time. Garden has been translated from Japanese to English, but it kept the right-to-left, back-to-front style of book-lookery. The story concerns a group of friends who are denied access to a place called "the garden," but sneak in anyway. The characters exploring the space are nameless humanoids who are all pretty freaky-looking, which is fitting because the shit they find in the garden is pretty freaky-looking too. First they come across a waterfall with rubber balls instead of water and a bridge covered in swivel chairs. To cross the river, the explorers transfer from chair to chair, all while spinning around in circles. The things they encounter later are harder to describe, although they make sense when the confused characters observe and comment on them. The plot doesn't build like a traditional story. The characters explore, comment on beautiful and frightening things, and occasionally engage with or hide from security patrols. It seems like the things they see become more and more dangerous as the book progresses, and then it ends with a confusing sequence that acts as an epilogue, in which we see what may be an explanation of some of the strange things they came across. My best dreams usually involve me moving through some strange and unfamiliar space while looking at alien objects, much like the characters in Garden. I blame those dreams on video games. A big part of gaming is immersing yourself in weird environments--you move through a space and try to understand it, just like in this book. --Nick Gazin, Vice, May 18, 2011
Even though it frustrates ordinary expectations at every turn, though, Garden is thrilling and engaging--a page-turner, in its perverse way. --Douglas Wolk, Time, May 13, 2011
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Abstract, messy and hallucinatory,
By Sibelius (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Yuichi Yokoyama: Garden (Paperback)
Yuichi Yokoyama's "Garden" is an alt-manga with an undeniable, surreal and abstract bent. The book provides a great representation of the common dream experience where one finds themselves in a familiar but bizarre locale and while journeying through the landscape the environment constantly shifts and twists into an ever increasing fantastic setting. The narrative is as simple as a progression through this landscape or can be as confounding and unreal as one would like depending on the depth of interpretation you care to delve into.
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