By Imiri Sakabashira
Drawn & Quarterly, 128 pp.
Rating: not rated (Mature)

In this nearly wordless story, a delivery man and a kind of cat-kappa that hops onto his bike dodge a series of misfortunes while making sure to guard a box, very precious cargo, on the way to its final destination. Along the way, they pass through a surreal nightmare of police officers, urban jungles, and bizarre monster sex rituals.

I don’t know what I expected when I picked this volume up, but it really wasn’t this. This book is basically wordless, with the only exceptions being sound effects, signage, a single line of dialogue at the beginning, and a short apology at the end. The entire narrative is based on what you would like to read into it. There is no explanation or apology offered for the surreal ride that the box man takes you on.

There are a series of accidents, but what causes the little monster to fire on his bike? Why do the police chase him? Why do the contents of the box kill? And what on earth is that entire middle segment, where the man simply peeks into windows featuring bizarrely drawn monster orgies? I don’t really know, and I’m sure nobody but Imiri Sakabashira does, either. As a traditional narrative, it’s not good, and I think a lot of people won’t forgive it for that. But as a surreal exercise, it’s quite amazing. I loved reading my own stories into each of the actions in the book.

Obviously, with a complete lack of narrative, you would need some pretty awesome art to carry the book. Sakabashira has an interesting flat but detailed style that makes the sprawling landscapes seem very busy and alive, and there is plenty to look at to make up for the lack of words. The flatness comes as a result of a bold graphic aesthetic that is at odds with the detail, but the two go hand in hand in a strange way here. I just flipped to a random page, and the box man is falling a few stories through a mess of cables and corrugated tin roofs, past dozens of small square windows to the ground. This is a rather normal and less-detailed page, but even taking that into consideration, all the wires and corrugation are drawn into each panel in a sort of broad way, and it makes for an interesting look.

For the more surreal segments, particularly the center of the book with the peeks at the monsters, there is some truly original character and monster design happening. It made me think immediately of Suehiro Maruo with its gigantic chipmunk men and schoolgirls, but the parade of images also goes above and beyond even Maruo’s strange worlds. There are very few places you can see anything like this.

Ultimately, I think most people will want to give this a pass, but I think it’s an excellent look not only at a different type of gekiga story (completely different from any that has been published in English before), but also at the type of story one can tell in a comic. It’s cool. It’s art for art’s sake. I don’t know that it will appeal to the manga crowd necessarily, but it’s definitely great as an underground comic.

The Box Man is available now.

Review copy provided by the publisher.