First, I have a bias towards Fantagraphics books. Their publications feel good in the hand and I sometimes pause my reading to inspect the binding and imagine the books I’d want them to do. The volumes of Otherworld Barbara by Hagio Moto that I read were from them, so I may have enjoyed them more than I would if they were published by someone else.
There’s a lot going on in this story. There’s time travel and doppelgangers and identity switching, and it’s all dreamy.
A girl named Aoba has been in a coma since she ate her parents’ hearts. (Cannibalism is a big part of this story, but it’s not graphic.) In her coma dream, she lives happily on an island called Barbara with her caretaker and friends and goat.
A man named Tokio goes into Aoba’s dreams to wake her up or something because his job is to go in dreams and figure people out. He finds the people in the dream world are not keen on Aoba waking up since they would presumably stop existing. Outside the dream, Aoba is poltergeisting it up because she wants to sleep. Later, she does more traditional hauntings.
Tokio finds that Barbara Island is something his estranged son made up by tracing his hand. The island isn’t real and shouldn’t be in someone else’s coma dream. But then the island is found in the future on Mars. (There’s also a Martian war going on in some timeline.)
Then we also get dancing, old looking young people and vice versa, past life husbands, robots, cafe baby prophecies, and a kinda happy ending. I think. Like I said, there’s a lot going on.
If I had children, I suspect most of the story would trigger or recollect some parental anxiety. Children die. They have allergies (treated with cannibalism?). They get switched with other children. They get caught in fires and wars. And maybe they’ll eat their fathers. At least that’s the way I see parenting.
In summary, this was a good and weird story. But if it were less dreamy, it would probably be a lot harder to digest.