Yuichi Yokoyama: Travel

The Japanese manga artist Yuichi Yokoyama's latest work, Travel, is a wordless journey into the contemporary Japanese psyche. It takes the not unfamiliar plot backdrop of a train ride and turns it into a psychological meditation on the vehicle's architecture and passengers (rather than focusing on the usual narrative-driven concerns such as destination, distance or landscape). Bookforum has characterized Yokoyama's style thus: "Concerned with phenomena rather than character and narrative, his comics resemble the output of a drafting machine: sequences that present multiple views of an object in action and look like exploded product diagrams. Yokoyama seems to enjoy the resulting images as much for the strange shapes that are generated as for what they reveal."
Yokoyama began his career in 1995, and has developed a body of work characterized in part by an omission of dialogue and speech (usually an indispensable part of manga storytelling); he relies instead on the power of his graphics and occasional onomatopoeia. Introduction by noted cartoonist and comics scholar Paul Karasik.