Sunny

Star Kids is a children's home in a provincial Japanese town. Its residents have been placed there for different reasons — a parent who cannot cope, a parent who will not, a parent who visits and does not take them home — and they are waiting in various states of hope.

An abandoned Nissan Sunny in the yard is where they go to be somewhere else.

An abandoned car in a children's home yard, which is where they go to be somewhere else.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Matsumoto spent part of his childhood in such a home, and the series is his most directly personal work.

The material is handled without self-pity and without the shape a memoir would impose. There is no arc and no lesson, and the specificity of the detail is what carries it.

Chapters follow individual children in rotation, each a self-contained episode about an afternoon, a visit, a lie or a disappointment.

Nothing accumulates into a plot. The series is a set of portraits, and its effect depends on the accumulation of small observed moments rather than on any development.

Sei, Haruo, Kiko, Junsuke and the others are written as actual children: cruel to each other, self-deceiving about their parents, and capable of sudden tenderness.

Matsumoto never makes them symbolic. Their behaviour is specific and frequently unattractive, which is why the sympathy the series generates is earned.

The staff are decent, tired and insufficient, and the parents are drawn without judgement — people who are failing for reasons the series does not adjudicate.

The refusal to condemn the parents is notable. Several are plainly inadequate, and the series leaves the assessment to the reader.

The Sunny is the series' organising image: a vehicle that cannot go anywhere, used by children to imagine being elsewhere.

It is not laboured. The metaphor is available and the series mostly just lets the children sit in the car, which is considerably more effective than explaining it.

Matsumoto's style here is softer than in Ping Pong or Tekkonkinkreet, with delicate linework, watercolour-influenced colour pages and considerable attention to provincial Japanese landscape.

The drawing of children is exceptional — proportions, posture and the particular way a child occupies space are all observed rather than stylised.

1970s Japan is rendered through specific objects: toys, television programmes, snacks, cigarette brands, the texture of a provincial town before it was developed.

The nostalgia is concrete rather than atmospheric, and it does not sentimentalise the period. Matsumoto has said the objects are drawn from memory rather than reference, which accounts for the particular specificity and the occasional inaccuracy.

Six volumes, slow and quiet, with very little incident and no urgency of any kind.

Readers who need narrative will find it inert. Those who settle into it generally describe it as one of the more affecting things they have read, which is a wide range of response for a book with no plot.

The children's relationships to the possibility of going home are the series' real subject, and each manages it differently: denial, performance, rage, careful low expectation.

The series is precise about the difference between a child who has stopped hoping and one who is pretending to have stopped.

Between Tekkonkinkreet's violence, Ping Pong's distortion and this book's quiet, he demonstrates a range few authors in the medium attempt.

Readers who know him only through the more aggressive work will find this almost unrecognisable, and it is frequently named his best. Sunny is also the work he has spoken about most directly in interviews, and the reticence elsewhere makes that unusual.

Readers who want observation rather than story, and who are interested in childhood written without nostalgia or moral.

It is complete at six volumes and is among the quietest things in this section. Readers should approach it as a set of portraits and not expect it to resolve into anything.