Shortcomings

Ben Tanaka is a lapsed film studies grad student who runs a cinema on campus. He is anxious, angry, a bit self-hating, and conflicted about his desires, personal and sexual. Ben’s girlfriend, Miko, puts up with his unsupportive contribution to their relationship but her patience is wearing thin. His best friend, Alice Kim, is a grad student (they met as undergrads). She has her own issues. Her friendship with Ben is frank and, mostly, honest. She tells him when he is being an idiot, and he does his best to return the favour. Despite the ups and downs of their separate amorous relations, it is the friendship of Ben and Alice that persists.

This short graphic novel is both acerbic and sentimental. Ben is a difficult protagonist. Although show more he longs for love and sympathy, he seems, despite his age, emotionally stunted and immature. If it weren’t for Alice, who clearly sees something worthy of friendship in Ben, we might be inclined to give up on him. And it will take some serious growth for him also to not give up on himself.

Tomine’s graphic style is spare and patient but it is his characters’ self-scrutiny that stands out.

Gently recommended. show less

Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings focuses on Ben Tanaka, a movie theater manager in Berkeley, California who rejects the racialized identity that America proscribes for him. As a result of this, Ben never quite feels that he fits in with white America nor does he feel himself in spaces created by Asian-Americans and those of the Asian diaspora in the U.S. He grows increasingly hostile toward those around him, dismissing his girlfriend Miko Hayashi’s political art based on Asian-American identity and ignoring her both emotionally and sexually. Instead, he stares at white women, fetishizing them and spending his nights with pornography focused on white women. At the same time, he reacts violently when he sees white men dating Asian women, show more viewing them as sexual colonizers. Ben’s only friend, Alice, also struggles with identity as a queer Asian-American woman in grad school, trying to balance her own identity against that her parents, colleagues, and community expect of her. Though all three characters struggle to find a balance between internal and external pressures of identity, Ben fails to reach any form of comfort and catharsis while Miko and Alice find a way to move forward for themselves amid the uncertainty of the future.

The visual medium works particularly well as it requires seeing. Ben refuses to see race, but Tomine’s art shows how Ben is always observing the people around him and where they fit. He uses a security camera to watch a woman employee at the movie theater that he later tries to date. He watches pornography featuring white women, often of white women with other white women. He feels hostile when he overhears Alice with another woman since their activities are not for his consumption. Ben becomes hostile after Miko leaves when he finds out that she posed for another art student’s photography, so the she was seen by another man in the form of the photographer and subsequent men who viewed the picture. The visual style of comics and graphic novels render races differently based on visual cues, even using Japanese and Korean text for some of the word balloons, drawing the reader into the act of “seeing” race. Tomine’s graphic novel encourages the reader to sit with the discomfort of how we “see” race in the U.S. show less

Yes, you may not like the characters in Shortcomings. They may seem annoying, whining hipsters (is that what they are called in the bay area?) with racial hang-ups and immature college attitudes. But the dialogue and flow of the story is impeccable. Tomine has avoided some of the common mistakes in graphic novels today: Characters are not having unintentionally awkward and unbelievable conversations, neither are drawings seem unnaturally done to accommodate long monologues. In the end, you get a well-written and well-told story of a bunch of characters centered around the perpetually complaning Ben. Ben is not very likable, I admit. Nor his skirt-chasing lesbian best (only?) friend. Nor his inert girlfriend. But Ben is fascinating as he show more verbalizes the politically INcorrect stuff about race and about relationship dynamics. Perhaps because Ben is not so likable, we want him to be wrong about everything, but really, he is not always wrong, and he is not always just being an asshole. He is sometimes an asshole, and sometimes other people are assholes to him. He certainly has to figure some things out and clear his head a bit. show less

Sparse, but heavy. What this comic puts forth is cutting, what it holds back can be devastating. I can draw parallels with my own life and I’m sure others can too. It can be argued that the protagonist is unsympathetic (definitely) along with the rest of the cast of characters and they all don’t seem to evolve or change during the story’s admittedly brief presentation, but that, to me, adds resonance to a story that just feels so damn real. The dialogue, the setting, pretty much everything about this story feels like the not so pleasant slice of life from an average person’s life. Excellent and worth a read.

It's like an actual novel. Dialogue is realistic, characters are believable, but there's one big problem. It's Ben. At the end, he probably has the same shortcoming he started out with. I can imagine a sequel which ends identically, because he never gets it. His girlfriend explains that she stayed with him because she felt a lot of sympathy for him. We needed to have some of that sympathy. We need it to understand why she stayed with him, and we need it because, reading to the end, we're staying with him longer than we'd like to. Watching his loss isn't sufficient to reward us for reading to the end, because he'll never understand what's wrong despite Miko's spelling it out for him in explicit detail. It feels like it ended too soon, show more and yet never soon enough. show less

I'm kind of surprised by all the negative reviews here because I loved this one. Did I read a different book from everyone else? Did everyone not see the Asian American experience--the self-hatred, the hypocrisy, the over-exoticizing--written in such a wry and genuine way (did no one see the humor in this book)? Yes, I understand that on the surface, the main character makes terrible life choices and says really awful things. I get that. But his pathetic life feels so much due to his lack of self-awareness and his hyper-awareness of everyone else in his life. From the very first page, this book was a winner for me. Shrug. I guess this one spoke to me.

3.25 stars. this has a lot in it's pages, and he really manages to convey so much with his drawings. this is exactly the kind of graphic novel i want more of. he's tackling a lot here, with drawings that really enhance the story. i wish he was a better friend to alice, although i think the point of this is him being a better partner to his girlfriends, by knowing what he wants better. but i loved that friendship and i wanted him to be better to her, but he has so much to learn about how to be an asian man in the world, so hopefully he'll get there.