Gaijin!*
Luigi Bernardi e Onofrio Catacchio
Black Velvet • 2006
Alfredo Colitto
Translation: Cristina Johnston
Which of us, tortured on a train by a fellow passenger inflicting
long, loud mobile phone conversations on those around them, has not
found ourselves contemplating how we would happily stab them in the
stomach with a kitchen knife? And which of us has not, at least once,
been stopped by a beautiful girl asking for directions, only to be
dragged away by the gravitational force of our own life, with its
previous engagements, its buses that arrive at the most inopportune
moment, its errands that demand urgent attention, just as the fantasies
on the possible evolution of the casual encounter are taking shape?
Luigi Bernardi's stories, in the first half of this book, explore
just such moments, elaborating liberating digressions, at times dreamy,
often bloody. They are very short tales, each only a page long, with
an incisive illustration by Onofrio Catacchio on the opposite page.
The Gaijin is the foreigner, the stranger, who uses irony
or rusty blades as arms that illuminate the stupidity, the sleepwalking
laziness, with which we often face the collection of banal instants
that composes our day.
The second half of the book contains
the script of Gaijin!,
the play, again with words by Bernardi and drawings of the set provided
by Catacchio. Thirteen episodes in which the Gaijin metes
out justice with passionate cruelty to clichés and those who
embody them. And in the final monologue, she even takes away from
the spectators the illusion that they might be able to remain, indifferent,
in their seats, as though they were watching something that, at the
end of the day, was of no relevance to them.
Gaijin! both attracts and repels, continually giving the
impression that we find ourselves before something that is at once
refined and dangerous. Refined, because both the stories and at times
the graphics demonstrate surgical precision, integrating themselves
into the proceedings without ever sounding a wrong note. Dangerous
because you never know, when faced with these tales, whether you
are the gaijin or the sleepwalker.
* The
term ‘Gaijin'
is taken from the Japanese where it is a derogatory term used to
refer to foreigners.
