Review by Ian Keogh

This elegantly produced small hardback concludes the experiences of Dan Wells teaching English in the Japanese village of Tōnoharu. His has been a lonely life over the previous two volumes, and he ended the previous book quitting his job, but we don’t yet know why.

Lars Martinson picks up with Dan still on a four week sabbatical, and not greatly seeing the benefits of two days of silent meditation. However, it’s given him some time to contemplate his relationship, which he breaks off on returning to Tōnoharu, where a fair amount has changed. As the volume progresses some bombshells await.

This has always been a quiet, contemplative series characterised by Martinson’s neat and precise art, which from a high starting level has become ever better. Dan is largely impassive, but Martinson achieves a lot with very little, just adjusting eyes or eyebrows, or adding a little extra shading, and Dan also reflects the attitudes of those around him. Martinson’s also already proved a master of conversational scenes featuring very little movement from panel to panel. As before, there’s no skimping on backgrounds. Even when Dan’s just wandering around contemplating life, Martinson fills the backgrounds with detail such as ornate housing.

Martinson creates a portrait of someone just about holding things together when almost every certainty of his life is falling apart. Perhaps it was very much what he felt considering three volumes of Tōnoharu took him thirteen years to complete. Yet this is a work to be proud of, one that holds together, surprises and provides an emotional pull.

A final revelation leads to an appropriately abrupt ending, and it’s followed by a series of small epilogues, noted as appendices as a full epilogue follows them. We see Dan several years later back in Japan, and some truths are revealed about other members of the cast, some at odds with what’s believed. The actual epilogue focuses on Dan’s successor in the school English department, conveniently also named Dan, and it’s cleverly written to both fill in more gaps and enlighten about the original Dan.

From a first volume that was a little too slow, Martinson has forged forward to create a work of apparent simplicity, yet with considerable depth and subtlety. It’s excellent.