Flash Point

If we’re going to talk about politics, even if just in the context of the abstract idea of “political art,” we’re going to have to clarify what we mean by “politics” first. Ideally we’d be talking about the use of power as a means of improving the lives of people, as that has historically been the best place wherein people can find common ground and be persuadable. Things become dicier when we take into consideration interpersonal politics, the alliances of identification that immediately become difficult for an outsider to parse. In the twenty-first century, talking about politics also means dealing with the idea that people now live in wholly different realities, built by the media they consume, that are often conspiratorial in their worldview, and make communication about anyone’s wants or needs impossible to achieve, lost to labyrinthine paranoia about what is actually occurring.

Imai Arata, the author of Flash Point, is interested in making manga about politics. He’s also interested in inserting avatars of himself into the works of fiction he authors. Imai-Kun, the character in Flash Point, is unemployed, and his wife’s younger sister, skipping school, starts showing up at his apartment to play video games. This character, Mashiro, does much to dictate the tone of the book: It feels breezy, but tentatively melancholic, in that there is a vague sense that she is avoiding something, dancing around something self-destructive, in her presence in this grown man’s home. Something of the teenage girls in the works of Kyoko Okazaki is brought to the book by her presence, their sense of a frivolity performed on the brink of oblivion. We do not know why, exactly, this girl is skipping school in the first place, but we know that to compulsively play video games is to casually dissociate.

When we come to know Mashiro’s motivations, they are the closest the book comes to politics, definition two: A friend of hers got suspended from school for having a job, and Mashiro objected to this rule for being unfair. The school then put pressure on her supporters, and they backed down, but Mashiro is ashamed of herself for betraying for friend. This is the sort of story which could be used as a political allegory in a YA novel, pointing towards the importance of doing the right thing. It is also completely incidental to what Flash Point is about. In Flash Point, the question of doing the right thing is extraneous to the unforeseen consequences that arise from going about one’s business, the sort of events that make it so the best thing to do is to just lay low.

This is learned the hard way. First, Mashiro insists on shooting videos for Instagram Live when she and Imai leave the house. Doing a little dance where her body makes letters racks up the likes, encouraging her to keep doing it. Another parallel to Okazaki’s work is the presentation of a dark side to aspirational images. If teens in the time of Helter Skelter wanted to be models, now the dream is to be a streamer or Youtuber: Pointedly jobless, producing content inscrutable in its meaning or purpose to anyone over thirty.

The book is drawn in a much smoother style than Arata’s previous book F, which gave a scribbled texture to all its spotted blacks, and gnarled every line with little curlicues. The only hint of a rough edge remaining is the slashed line on Imai-Kun’s forehead, that indicates an eyebrow but flies off the face. With the expressionist qualities tamped down, the work feels cleaner and less abrasive. The digital greytoned look is less compelling, but it is a style well-suited for a tale of a young influencer, capturing the smoothness of the filtered interface with which she makes her image known to the world. We get a lot of vertical panels, occupied fully by Mashiro, and shots of Imai’s hand holding the camera focused on her in the context of a larger field. Sequences of the characters having conversations while playing a video game online where their avatars are designed to look like them are particularly fun and appealing.

One day in early July, Imai takes a detour to see a speech being given by Japan’s former prime minister. Mashiro does her little dance in the background. Seconds later, Shinzo Abe is assassinated. This is followed by a narrative fissure: Pages of empty space with brief captions, and then a section of the book where right and left pages present separate threads. On one side, news footage unfolds of Abe’s assassination, while on the other, Imai and Mashiro play video games and have casual conversations, haunted by the violence seen firsthand, which the media reproduces and spreads wide. Meanwhile, on social media, Mashiro’s proximity to the violence turns her into both a symbol and a subject of speculation.

The political content of Flash Point is not premised on it making a specific partisan point, but depicting the current world as a collection of isolated worldviews being projected onto strangers. It is not a comic about Shinzo Abe or his politics. It is not railing against the denial of Japanese war crimes in World War II, or nationalism more generally, nor is it making a case for or against political assassination. The facts of Abe’s assassination, as of so much political violence, seem more capricious and arbitrary than ideologically motivated. That Mashiro becomes an icon for being adjacent to Abe’s shooting only relates to Abe’s shooting in that both should be considered in the light of a widespread mental health crisis.

This then allows the book to go crazy, and move into a third act of suspense and intrigue. Still, there’s a line in the interview with Arata on the flipside of the book where, comparing his book to mainstream manga, he says Flash Point might lack something of expected entertainment value, as it aims to be thought-provoking. I think the book is plenty entertaining, and the only real issue a casual reader might have is that Arata’s caricatures of politicians, or older adult men, have a sort of amateurish blunt ugliness to them.

In the book’s last pages, Henri Rousseau’s painting Liberty Inviting Artists To Take Part In the 22nd Exhibition Of The Société des Artistes Indépendants, which hangs in The Tokyo National Museum Of Modern Art, is vandalized by the addition of a hot air balloon of Shinzo Abe appearing in its corner. This is set up in part by plot events, but still feels like something of a non sequitur, although it has an open meaning if interpreted symbolically. Earlier in the book, Eugéne Delacroix’s La Liberté guidant le peuple had been altered to include Mashiro in a meme appearing online. This is explicable enough, as it would be easily achievable via Photoshop. The Rousseau painting being changed is a magical realist way of reiterating what the plot has already stated: The world of the digital can easily turn into real life, and when it does it’s deranging. Our shared reality, punctured by the nonsensical, becomes increasingly confusing, and we as its residents have to accept such strangeness becoming our new history.

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