[ book tip by Incentives ] The backwards movement is the formal principle of tokio, rückwärtstagebuch, a collaboration between the artist Oliver Grajewski and writer Kathrin Röggla. Grajewski’s graphic novel is, as is customary in Japanese comics, read from back to front and Röggla’s diary also begins with the return flight to Europe and ends with her arrival in Tokyo. A diary that takes a “continual step backwards.”

Grajewski found the “construction of the book’s world of images flowed pretty much like Karl-May,” Röggla is plagued by doubts about the sense and form of such a travel book. The “usual indirectness” of Japanese society becomes the principle according to which Röggla shapes her words. She does not allow herself a chronological, traditional narrative or a rendering of the atmosphere. But it is exactly in the rejection of narrative and the portrayal of and focus on the narrative framework – and these are literary principles that can be found in all Röggla’s texts – that she nevertheless tells a story. For example:  “on this don’t forget to mention the earthquake standards.” Or Röggla lets people she talks to say:  “edwina told me how that’s done here, how you get around here.” Often she uses subjunctive II constructions: “i would jot down all the public fatigue that i see every day” or “i would definitely avoid the sound of the mori towers, from which one can see mount fuji on clear days.”

But don’t let yourself be fooled by Röggla: That which seems decomposed, is composed, is  literature for which only recording and retelling in an unexamined and overly familiar first person perspective is not enough.

“exhausted streets in exhausted cities”: Megacity Tokyo as an overextended system that has reached the limits of differentiation. Röggla and Grajewski are equally fascinated by the principles, difficult to grasp from a European perspective, according to which the rampant and sprawling metropolis of Tokyo functions.

Review by Peter Landerl, August 2009. English translation by Laura Radosh.
Complete version: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=7477

[ Favourite quote ]

[ book info ] Röggla, Kathrin: tokio, rückwärtstagebuch. Mit Zeichnungen von Oliver Grajewski. (original language: Deutsch) Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, Edition starfruit, Nürnberg, 2009 . ISBN: 978-3-922895-20-6.