The Little Aimless Library: Guyabano Holiday by Panpanya

It’s probably going to become apparent, as this series goes on, that I read more comics and manga than prose. Of course, I can’t predict the future. I have no way of knowing which books will stick out to me. Maybe I’ll never write about sequential art again. But the simple fact of the matter is I grew up in a home that didn’t discriminate. Not against comics, I mean. My father brought Aquaman into my world with the same reverence he held for Ivanhoe or Ray Bradbury. It was all literature to me.

        That being said, there is one major mark against both comics and manga: serialization. It’s not a problem for me as a fan; anyone who’s been to the comic shop with me knows how fat my pull box can get. But as a reviewer, I’d rather recommend standalone media, works that only necessitate a single purchase. I don’t want to saddle anybody with a subscription. So while I’ve been greatly enjoying everything from Absolute Martian Manhunter to Don’t Call It Mystery, they don’t belong in the Little Aimless Library. I’ve decided to stick with that name, by the way. Remembering I got Transit, the subject of my inaugural review, from a little free library really endeared it to me.

Anyway, as far as manga go, Panpanya's Guyabano Holiday is a perfect example of what I’d like to talk about. It’s under 200 pages long, isn’t a part of a series and I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything quite like it, even as a big fan of these sorts of pseudo-autobiographical indie comics. The back cover, printed in a gorgeous shade of turquoise, is mostly blank with a short description at the bottom. It describes what a guyabano is - a fruit from Southeast Asia - and tells you that this book exists, in part, to raise awareness of the fruit’s existence. It’ll do so, the cover says, by covering the fruit’s “origins, horticulture and gastronomy”. We end on the rather baffling note, “A collection of such stories are what is known in publishing circles as a Guyabano Holiday”. What a delightful little non-sequitur, I thought, and I couldn’t have opened the book any faster.

The table of contents made it obvious what I was looking at: a collection of short stories with the five-part “Guyabano Holiday” serving as a centerpiece. Flipping to the author’s commentary in the back, I learned that this body of work mostly originated from the web version of the magazine Rakuen, that most of it was penned in 2018, and from the copyright that it was translated by Ko Ransom. Quite well, too. Some of the stories here couldn’t have been easy to translate, either. There’s a lot of text, a very distinct narrative voice and one story in which all the text is on signs and billboards. It’s all done so seamlessly you hardly stop to think that this manga was originally in another language.

Like any short story collection, not every story held my interest equally. Some of them just didn’t appeal to me at all. Most of them, though, are right up my alley. The first is no exception. It’s all of four pages long and immediately introduces the reader to basically everything great about Panpaya’s style. Their sense of curiosity and wonder, their weird magical-realist sensibilities and their excellent art. The art is, in short, sorta like one of those old 2d animated movies where the backgrounds could’ve been Renaissance paintings but the actual moving pieces are a handful of cute scribbles. Panpaya delights in the kinds of vivid, realistic (and probably photo-referenced; some panels are just photos with cartoons scribbled into them!) settings typical of most manga, but inhabiting their worlds are a cast of adorable, surreal near-human sketches.

Their author-avatar character is a sort of androgynous human child, and one of their recurring friends is also human. Another is a bipedal dog. Most strangers are rendered as near-featureless white silhouettes with a kinda fishy head and a cute overbite. My favorite is this weird-lookin thing in a business suit. Their head is a spheroid with four stubby protrusions poking out of it. Two where the ears should go, one where the nose should be and one at the back. Each one ends in a hole, such that whichever one is facing the reader might trick them into imagining an eye staring right at them. When this being talks the tails of the speech bubbles trail off directly into one of the protrusions. I was left thinking of this character’s head as completely hollow, speaking in a whistling voice as wind passes through it. I fought with Google for a couple minutes trying to discover a Japanese cultural artifact this guy could feasibly be based on, but to no avail. At the end of the day I think I prefer not knowing. It’s just an inexplicable thing in a suit, and that’s perfect. 

Back to the first story, it actually doesn’t feature most of these guys. Just Panpanya on their own as they discover one of those build-it-yourself magazines that comes with one piece of the finished product per month. Except the product this time around is a house. The pieces get progressively more ridiculous every time they return to the bookstore, and the story ends on our hero discussing how they started seeing the finished house popping up all over Japan and now delight in spotting them on trips. Typing the plot out it’s kinda hilarious to me how the escalating scope almost feels like the same structure as a lot of horror stories. Invasion of the Bodysnatchers by way of encroaching suburbia; frankly there is something unignorably scary to me about DIYers building their own cookie-cutter homes using parts they got from a magazine. Wonder what Junji Ito would do with that. But the end result is just cute and whimsical. Apparently it was inspired by the author’s doorbell breaking, and their having to buy a new one. I love that.

Other highlights include an illustrated guide on canning tuna that ends with a half-page of text about the time Panpanya found a weird can of tuna at the store and none of their friends believed it existed. This one might be my favorite. It’s so unique, and the illustrations are great. It's fun, and too rare, for media to focus on the joy of creating anything beyond works in that medium. I can think of a million movies about directors, books about authors, comics about illustrators and so on. Comics about canning tuna are somewhat less common. It also serves as the clearest example in this volume of Panpanya’s fascination with machinery and the nitty-gritty of how mundane things function. The final story is also a great example of that; it’s mostly an extended sequence of two characters digging beneath a city street. The shots of infrastructure like subway tunnels and roadside guardrails, and the occasional cut-ins depicting random animals and objects they found while digging, are lovely.

Some entries feel like episodes of a cartoon I’d probably have loved as a kid. In one, they build a machine meant to automatically complete math homework and train birds to operate it. In another, they follow a rickety home-made chute through the city after noticing it’s being used to transport noodles. A favorite of mine, a rather long one, is just two characters running around trying to deduce why the pigeons on one side of town are bigger than on the other. The absolute freedom with which Panpanya inserts this avatar character into completely fictional scenarios as well as snippets from their own life is so much fun.

Which brings us to the main attraction here, Guyabano Holiday. The basic run-down of the plot is that Panpanya finds guyabano juice in an import store and wants to try the real thing. So they go on a trip to the Philippines, where they find their fruit and a couple other things too. I was really taken by the homemade motorcycle sidecars that served as taxis. Honestly, though I know it would’ve been impossible given this is a comic serialized in five nine-page installments, I wish this story had had more room to breathe. The curiosity and all that is still there, but there’s a sense Panpanya is playing this one a tad straighter. We still get some great detours, there are bits about stray dogs and those gross-looking boiled eggs that stand out. I loved the little bit about the culture shock felt due to the tight security around the first grocery store they visited. The atmosphere in the Philippines is captured admirably.

        But I can’t help wondering if another nine pages woulda made this one stronger. I dunno. It’s still great as-is. I love this collection and will definitely be seeking out the author’s other works. Hell, I even bought a can of guyabano nectar at Woodman’s because of this book. Not my favorite of the Asian fruits I’ve had, I’ll be honest. It’s good, but I wouldn’t fly to the Philippines for it. Maybe for jackfruit. Or lychee. I’d go to the Moon for a consistent source of fresh lychee.