Review by Ian Keogh

MariNaomi moves to San Jose to be with a new boyfriend, and soon discovers the city has a Japanese style hostess bar. She’s always intended to explore her mixed race heritage a little more, and sees working there as an opportunity to learn Japanese while enjoying herself where drinking on the job is positively encouraged. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out that way as  Japanese customers don’t feel like helping anyone learn their language, but she becomes more enthused with the idea of moving to Japan for a more thorough experience.

At 242 densely packed pages Turning Japanese is extremely immersive, featuring numerous detours, flashbacks and cultural explanations. The core element is MariNaomi being in Tokyo and how she copes there, but it’s almost a hundred pages before her flight leaves, before which there’s been a considerable exploration of hostess culture in California. More generally relevant is the family background, especially the reluctance of MariNaomi’s mother to have passed on the Japanese language, and while the hostess experience is an easing into Japanese culture it doesn’t dislodge the nagging idea of this being two books crammed into one. At this point the origin as a web comic is apparent from every page being self-contained, which makes this a graphic novel where dipping in and out can be encouraged.

That changes when Japan is the location and there are more obvious sequences, still in bite-size pieces, although MariNaomi never masters the art of trimming what’s not necessary. It makes Turning Japanese a document that diligently acts as a personal travel journal recording the minutiae of her memory, while also being capable of dropping from fascinating to moments of tedium within a couple of pages. An example would be meeting MariNaomi’s Aunt Noriko, then visiting her hostess bar, where little of dramatic consequence occurs.

MariNaomi and boyfriend Giuseppe’s personal experiences are largely not as captivating as her detailing cultural differences. The Californian hostess bar sequence drops some, but in Japan they’re more fully detailed. The sample art shows police bowing to the DJ whose activities they’ve come to stop, and moments such as these are priceless, but there’s not enough of such observations among the day to day experiences. In other such projects the art can compensate, but here it’s not without charm at times, but simply functional.

There are gems to be found in Turning Japanese, but reaching them requires digging very deep.