REVIEW - With the Light - volume 1 by Keiko Tobe (2007)

Keiko Tobe’s With The Light - Raising an Autistic Child was the first book I received from Yen Press and within seconds of receiving it, cognitive dissonance had well and truly set in.  This manga has confounded all of my expectations by being intelligent as well as worthy, up-lifting as well as sombre and genuinely informative as well as accessible.  It offers a neat insight not only into what it’s like to bring up an autistic child but also into Japanese attitudes towards conditions such as autism.

    

Aesthetically, this is an imposing piece of work.  Unlike many manga published in the west that come in the form of small paperbacks spread out over many volumes, With The Light is a two volume work and the first volume is a 500+ page monster.  It’s also printed with traditional Japanese back to front pagination which is different to the manga that I have read in France where, I think, they flip the negative so as to make the works fit the western front to back means of reading.  Yen press are kind enough to provide us with instructions as to how to read the book but it still takes some getting used to, particularly when Tobe starts getting creative with the framing of the page.  This can be surprisingly difficult to come to grips with.

Artistically, the book is beautifully drawn in black and white.  Only the child Hikaru and his mother Sachiko are drawn in the traditional big-eyes-small-mouth manga style, with the rest of the characters taking a more realistic shape.  The artwork is bold and nice to look at and, gaijin cognitive dissonance aside, it makes the story very easy to follow.  The artwork is also very much unified in its character and themes.  Unlike American comics, the characters do not evolve over time (aside from the aging process) and we have a number of visual motifs that return throughout the book such as a ticking clock, and more lightly drawn figures used to demonstrate what the characters are thinking about.  Tobe’s skill in drawing as well as breaking up the pages with different kinds of images and scenes also makes With the Light a visually pleasing read.  From an artistic point of view, With The Light is unimpeachable.

The book’s story is as you would expect.  Sachiko and Masato Azuma are a young married couple.  She is from a lower middle class background and worked as an accountant in the same firm as the more upper middle class Masato who is a busy salaryman.  Hikaru is born and Masato returns to work while Sachiko brings him up at home.  Initially all goes well until Sachiko starts to notice that Hikaru does not like being hugged.  The older Hikaru gets, the more obvious his differences from the other children born to Sachiko’s peer group.  It is not long before Sachiko is at her wits end; her husband is uninterested and even she can’t face the possibility that Hikaru might be autistic, she even vents her frustration by beating her child, thereby making things worse and herself feel guilty.  After a disastrous attempt at taking Hikaru to a remembrance service, Masato turns his back on his wife and child and his mother attacks Sachiko for her failings as a mother and how it must be all her fault if Hikaru is autistic.  Sachiko wisely leaves her husband and the two remain estranged until Masato collapses at work, prompting him to resolve to spend more time with his family.

From then on the book moves into a series of changes of setting as Hikaro first has to adapt to life among other autistic children in a special support group and then fit in with normal kids at daycare and then integrate a real school filled with normal as well as “disabled” children.  Each stage presents its own difficulties and challenges but gradually, Hikaru and Sachiko overcome them.  This cycle represents the main plot of the book and is arguably where Tobe is at her weakest.  Each section introduces a load of new problems and Sachiko is given an option that is frequently the equivalent of sending her child to a school where Hikaru would be chained to the wall and pelted with rancid fish guts before they stumble across a school full of well-adjusted kids, nice parents and fantastic teachers.  This simple contrast serves to demonstrate how wide an array of attempts there are to respond to autism but it’s clear that Hikaru leads something of a charmed life.  Mercifully, Tobe has the wisdom to recognise this by allowing Sachiko to catch up with mothers she has met before and who haven’t been as lucky in their choice of schools.

Where Tobe is undeniably at her best is in showcasing the social attitudes to autism that were still common in Japan when the book was written in 2001.  first and foremost, there’s the constant referral to autism as being a “disability”.  I’m not that familiar with the politics of autism, but I’m pretty sure that the families of the autistic prefer to call autism a condition.  The book also frequently uses what disability rights activists refer to as the Charity or Tragedy model whereby people need to be nice to disabled people because there’s something wrong with them.  Modern disability rights activists have responded to this form of thinking with the slogan “piss on pity” but Tobe frequently relies upon pity by having other mothers mutter about how poorly behaved Hikaru is only for them to leave him alone when they hear that he is a disabled person.  I draw attention to all of this not because I want to berate With the Light for its lack of political correctness but rather to draw attention to the differences between US and UK attitudes to autism and Japanese ones.

Parents of disabled children evidently are aware that the Japanese are less tolerant of disabled people’s needs and differences and for a book written less than a decade ago, the prevailing social attitudes Tobe draws attention to are genuinely shocking.  Sachiko is said to be to blame for Hikaru’s autism and at one point an older character suggests the child be taken to a temple so that he can be exorcised.  In the UK in 2001 such attitudes would have been beyond the pale, in Japan apparently they were common.  In fact, for all I know, they might very well still be common.  Despite this difference in social attitudes, Tobe seems quite aware of the debate as to whether autistic and disabled children should best be taught in normal or special schools and, refreshingly, Tobe comes down on the side favouring integration and socialisation rather than ghettoisation and relegation to a second class status.

Aside from its genuinely informative subject matter, With The Light is also full of little inserts including book recommendations and tips on how to deal with autistic children.  This is mildly informative for someone such as myself who has never had any contact with an autistic person but for a parent of an autistic child, it would be a wonderful way to not only pick up some nice hints and ideas (such as a 15 minute clock that you can use to help structure an autistic child’s day) but also to realise that you’re not alone and that however hard it might be, there is a better future if you keep at it and talk to the experts and the support groups.  To a parent with autistic children, I imagine this book would be heart-breakingly beautiful as it speaks directly to them in a quite aspirational manner (as I said, Hikaru leads a charmed life).

With The Light is not a book I would think to buy normally as it covers an area quite a long way outside my traditional fields of interest.  The book is also so astonishingly upbeat and joyously sentimental that at times this cynical old warhorse couldn’t help but roll his eyes.  However, I’m genuinely glad that I read the book and would warmly recommend it not only to people with an interest in autism but also to the people who tend to think that manga is nothing but pre-pubescent girls with big guns.


NB : This review is based upon a review copy provided to me by Yen Press.

Comments

[Serdar]

Just wanted to let you know I picked this up on my own dime based on this review, and will probably be writing my own review of it for Advanced Media Network (it'll be linked off of my own site). I'd been curious about it before, but to see this writeup really spurred me to grab it.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Well I hope Yen Press are listening... especially as my copy of the new Banks novel has yet to arrive and some critics have already finished it :-(

It's a weird read, but quite an interesting one. If you can get past the sentimentalism of the presentation and the fact that the Japanese are clearly still all living in the 1950's, it's a surprisingly good read.

[Serdar]

The sentimentalism and atavism are absolutely nothing new to me, so I'm sure it'll be a fascinating read :D

[Jacob Martin]

As an Asperger's person myself, I'll definitely pick this up if I can find the damn thing in Kinokuniya's insanely huge Manga shelf...