In Just So Happens, Fumio Obata has created a visually elegant, emotionally rich semi-autobiographical graphic novel that examines the conflict between parental expectations and the cultural and social differences faced by Asian immigrants living in the West.
Yumiko Ono, Obata's protagonist, is a successful designer living in London, engaged to a Brit named Mark and fully assimilated into the hustle and bustle of London culture. During a gallery showing, Yumiko receives a phone call from her brother, who informs her of her father's death in a mountaineering accident. As Yumiko boards the plane and flies back to Tokyo to attend her father's funeral, she replays images of her last visit home--the weight of parental expectations for marriage and settling down in Japan, and her father's apparent disapproval of her career ambitions abroad--in dreamy flashbacks haunted by a Noh theater character she had seen perform in Tokyo. Yumiko endures the traditional death rituals with detached stoicism, until the moment she confronts her father's dead body. A physical touch to his face unleashes a torrent of grief, fueled by guilt and regret, and she escapes to the peace and quiet of Kyoto in order to reconcile her emotional struggles with the life that she has carved abroad.
Obata's fluid watercolors capture Yumiko's inner turmoil wonderfully. Like Yumiko, Obata is an expatriate himself; he left Japan for England in 1991, to study art. And he, too, has grappled with integrating two vastly different cultures. Yet he is able to show the beauty and richness of both cultures in his first major work of fiction. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant