by Hagiwara Rei, published by Glacier Bay Books 2020.
102 pages, isbn: 9781953629005.

“Someday, I wish I could stumble across the memories of certain people that exist in the abyss by gazing at their pain, their sorrow, and the movements of their souls…”

This dream-like work dwells on memory and family, and follows ambiguous figures that stride through the snowy lands adjacent to the realm of the dead. Hagiwara Rei explores the processing of grief, and how cyclical mechanisms of human emotion map out a geography of memory inextricably intertwined with the natural world from which we spring. Prepare to be absorbed in a work unlike any other coming out now.

Translation by Anna Schnell
SFX Lettering by Tim Sun
Design and Editing by Emuh Ruh

Reviews

Manga Machinations
“…It’s like looking at paintings… it is so good… Ripples is awesome. It’s such a lovely looking book… It’s really about what you’re going to get out of it, it’s kind of personal… This is dealing with grief and loss. This is dealing with death…This book is really hard to describe, but we all like this a lot… it’s like looking at an art piece [when you look at a n art piece] you just get the feelings of what you see, and because there’s so much ink work.. you look at it differently than you do a commercial manga… sometimes commercial manga will do a page that looks something like this [more painted] to drive home a point or mood, but when you have a book that’s all this, it’s just all mood, and it just washes over you without you understanding what’s happening.”

But Why Tho [Olive St. Sauver]
“…A reflection on grief and memory, with beautifully distinctive art, Ripples by Hagiwara Rei is a manga like no other on the market right now. Glacier Bay Books has done a great job with this release, and if readers are comfortable taking a journey with no set destination, this might be a healing meditation for many this year.”

Broken Pencil [Graham Sigurdson]
“… Glacier Bay Books has another gem on their hands. Rei Hagiwara’s Ripples is a reflection on grief, emotion, and memory, all in manga form. It’s incredible.
Drawn in cold, dark watercolours, the characters and settings in Ripples are only distinguishable negatively, through their absence of shade…Unnamed figures wander through cold bleak environments, speaking of their distant memories and reminiscing on past events. “Where can I return these feelings?” asks one figure. ‘What do I do with this sorrow?’ Relationships are never explicitly spelled out, but Hagiwara is easily able to convey that the connection, whatever it may have been, was (and is) an important one.”

Comitia

Ripples (digital edition)

Tsukiko and the Satellite and other stories (digital)