Have you ever had the sensation of living in a fairy world, a little supernatural, where the actions of everyday life are actually the result of a symbolic transposition of altered perception? A dream world resides around us all, we simply have to know how to grasp it to recreate and conceive a new and variable daily dimension. With The Second Goldfish the Japanese author panpanya (the use of the lowercase letter is intentional) creates in the comic strips a world parallel to ours, in which one documentary and autobiographical dimension becomes the space to represent everyday life under a new perspective: what transpires is a deliberate metaphor of the beauty of small things, of the need to dwell on small gestures to give value to the repetitiveness of our life and of not being able to stop even for a moment to savor every moment, even if insignificant.
- Original title: Nihikime no kingyo
- English title: The Second Goldfish
- Japanese release: 2018
- Italian release: January 12, 2022
- Number of volumes: 1 (complete)
- Publishing house: Star Comics
- Gender: slice of life, fantastic, seinen
- Drawings: panpanya
- History: panpanya
- Format: 12.8 × 18
- Number of pages: 192 pages
We reviewed The Second Goldfish via press volume provided to us by Star Comics.
A comic to learn how to exercise gratitude, which arrives in Italy thanks to the beautiful edition of Star Comics, which publishes it four years after leaving home: despite everything, the issue is still relevant, especially in this period of global pandemic the need to dwell on every daily gesture is essential. Panpanya gives us back a amorphous world, a compendium of small everyday stories that symbolically show his childhood, in an almost distorted and fantastic world (recurring animal and alien figures replace real people), which is nothing more than the fruit of the slightly faded memories of ‘author. A sensory journey that turns into a metaphor for life.
Through the pages of the manga we delve into the past of panpanya little girl, between games, discoveries and lived experiences. The author, deliberately anonymous, is known in Italy for other works such as An invitation for a crab, Animals And Pillowfishalso published by Star Comics, for its metaphysical representation of everyday life and for its pencil drawings and ink-outlined backgrounds.
The dream version of everyday reality
The Second Goldfish passes through numerous aspects of the common life of many children and adolescentslike playing hide and seek, raising a fish, making the journey from home to school and always dwelling on the little things that escape an inattentive gaze.
The story is directed towards the symbolic representation of the author’s past in a vortex of sensations and metaphysical references that are very reminiscent of the cartoon paintings of Shaun Tan for their visual variety and for the dreamlike and distorted settings. panpanya wants to show her symbolic vision of a now gone reality, an ancestral world that is loaded with meanings when it becomes memory, her childhood memory and that can take on different forms based on the references that her mind suggests in the moment in which it represents these moments of daily life in the comic strips.
Daily life seen from another perspective: The Second Goldfish is a collection of simple and light stories that tell the reality of panpanya, an eclectic author who represents her everyday life through the metaphysical and symbolic lens. A dream world characterized by distorted settings and characters with strange features in which the author’s life is intertwined with everyday life.
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The Second Goldfish it is the metaphysical representation of a symbolic and suspended reality, a metaphor for a condition of existence in which even small things are charged with a hidden and at the same time mystical meaning. All this is expressed not only on the narrative level, which despite everything seems to approach a fairly realistic representation of everyday life but which in some cases takes on a grotesque connotation, but above all on a visual level, with the delineation of a recurring hybrid character with one eye. . This distorted view of reality, which is then also expressed through a graphic deformation of the settings that seem to collapse into a converging vortex, is a symptom of a metaphysical condition of the little everyday things. Each gesture is enhanced by a story, a small narrative that in some places differs from the realism that should be typical of that conception. And it is here that the power of the symbol manifests itself: the strange one-eyed figure that “personifies” every anonymous inhabitant of the protagonist’s small theater, her anthropomorphic friends who have very little human, but above all her childhood friend , the only human of all and who at the same time seems to be the point of reference for the author, her mentor, her teacher of life.
The suspension and re-appropriation of life
The Second Goldfish it takes on a truthful connotation when it encounters the handwritten pages of panpanya, which brings back on paper his memories and impressions of a certain aspect or symbol. The narration in images is a construct of his past life, as if it were a memory that is fading and that must necessarily be filled with some imaginative inserts to take on a real and realistic value again.. In doing so, the metaphor becomes a memory, the symbol becomes a dream. panpanya is able to recreate a perfectly functioning setting in its temporal and spatial limitation, which does not become monotonous in its simplicity, and coherent in its fragmented indefiniteness.
The drawings are particular in their simplicity: the edition edited by Star Comics, with very thick pages, allows the graphic rendering of a peculiar, objectively rough stroke. This does not allow an overwhelming of the visual part over the narrative, which thus becomes the fulcrum. And this seems to be the author’s intent: not to postpone an obsessive attention to drawing, which is still there, especially in the backdrops. The protagonists must be sketched, to make theidea of being amorphous forms in a larger visual and metaphorical universe that is everyday life. This must be the center of all diegetic convergence: every single aspect of The Second Goldfish it must refer to the importance of dwelling on what surrounds us, it must transport the reader (thanks also to the good rendering of the inking of the Italian edition) towards a visual flow concentrated on the background and not on the central figures who inhabit it. A background that is distorted, thanks to skewed and atypical shots, from below, from above, in subjective and vertically, which must convey the idea of disorientation and at the same time of total immersion of the protagonist, but above all of the reader. All packaged in a glossy dust jacket that is somewhat reminiscent of a photographic magazine of yesteryear, with brushstrokes that render the gray field that is also taken up in the internal tables as shading combined with the hatching given by the nib inking, thus replacing the aseptic screens. The Second Goldfish it imposes itself for a non-stereotyped vision of daily life, through total immersion in a dream world which, if we observe it carefully, is our own. It is enough simply to live it fully.
Who do we recommend The Second Goldfish to?
This manga is suitable for those who want to take their time. It does not have many pretensions, it simply shows the daily life of a little girl who lives in a monotonous and calm town, where time is marked only by the small daily activities that are repeated and that fill the calmness of each day. Anyone looking for action or anyway one slice of life atypical can remain displaced by the extreme slowness of The Second Goldfish, but this does not mean that reading is boring or inconclusive: it leaves a fullness of soul thanks to its ability to create a suspended space between reality and dream, a new world in which to get lost and then return after a moment with down to earth. A read for anyone who wants to daydream.
- Metaphysical settings mixed with everyday life
- Sketchy drawings that make the manga metaphor even better
- Little stories of everyday life
- An overabundance of balloons that sometimes weigh down the tables
- The edition would have deserved a larger format
The Second Goldfish
An immersion in the symbolism of panpanya
Already known for her delightfully dreamlike visual poetics, panpanya he manages to recreate a new world in which to insert his common characters who perform everyday activities. At the same time this choice, if apparently it may seem obvious or inconclusive, aims to enhance the little things that happen to us every day, without us apparently noticing it. The expressive charge of his drawings, deliberately layered in which the upper part of the sketched characters collides with the detailed backdrops, expresses this metaphor: appearances deceive, the true essence of reality lies beneath the surface layer of everyday life. With The Second Goldfish the author wants to teach us to reflect: we finally give importance to everything that surrounds us, and our life will be fuller and more satisfying.
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