What makes short stories memorable?
Optic Nerve is a sneaky for making answers for this question. Creating diverse stories that stuns the reader for a few seconds, not for something appears on the surface, but because it's... human. It's sad, strange and real.
I guess with Comics it's much easier to introduce your short stories, because you get to reflect the connections you want to make with the readers almost immediately, so through the layers of Tomine's stories... he reaches out the unreachable nerves in us, that will crack us, to pieces, to "A wave of sadness" when you feel that the closest people to you, you feel unattached, unreachable. When you just think of words to say, you literally can't.
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Stories of part (1)
The first stories were kind of interesting if I can say, or the points .. I felt that I can hold them in a way. It triggered the isolation & emptiness in the characters, this is what we feel when other people we think they're so close to us, but they don't understand us.. not a single word, like we're not even talking.
But to me personally... certainly "Lunch Break" touched me the most, it started with an old woman closed her annoying TV and then prepared for herself a sandwich, put it in a bag and left her home to enter the passenger seat of an empty car and start eating. I thought the story ended with no words, because the next page is different, in the 50s or 60s, (maybe) .. a woman stepped out of work for her lunch break, and her man waiting for her, so they drove somewhere and talked about their plans & future. Then the next page we go back to the old woman to just understand what was that all about. And the panels? I just ...
She return to her home, throwed the bag and sat to watch TV. Nostalgia ... will kill me one day.
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Stories of part (2)
Started with "The Connecting Thread" which's simply a story about a strange & lonely woman thinks she's being followed, and become obsessed with that... at the end, she just stopped caring. I guess this is how we sometimes with things, we care too much, we give too much thoughts and time, only to make ourselves miserable with each minute.
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This part ended with a pretty good story too, the story followed a man with waves of sadness hovering above his head. "Layover" with a man missed his flight, and the other one will be in the next day, so he's stick with a day of waiting. And waiting.. well, I believe it doesn't do us usually any good, he start telling all the awkward relationships, his simple isolation around them that he feels he can't simply connect with them, to spend a whole day by himself, just ...
"A wave of sadness came over me as I switched off the light, I really wondered if I was going to miss anything or anybody at all while I was away."
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Stories of part (3)
The first story began with two sisters, different but close, they know each other but they actually don't. Like a lot of relationships between members of a family, so close to each other that they don't have the ability to connect properly, to help. I think most likely because when we know a person so well for so long, we genuinely have a previous expectations to what they'll say, so we shut our doors in their faces before they even have the chance ...
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"Supermarket" is superbly one of the best stories to me. A blind man always asking for help in the store through a specific person, a girl who's gladly doing it everytime, they had so lovely conversations... but, one day, she saw the blind man from a distance in a random place, and lowered her voice so he won't be able to know her.
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"Hostage Situation" was like that kind of stories, the ones that people (actually we, all of us) are not able to say something to others when it's TOTALLY appropriate. This is actually a normal psychological feeling most people in daily lives will experience frequently in public. When we analyze our actions and their results, and the caption of right & wrong when it's so obvious to us, we think a thousand times before doing the right thing... that's the modern world we're living in.
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Stories of part (4)
As the main theme of Tomine's stories, best story for me about a sad & a lonely kid, who seems holding a lot in his chest, but he can barely bring himself to say them... even to us.
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