TONOHARU: Part One, by Lars Martinson. Minneapolis: Pliant Press, 2008, 128 pp., $19.95 (cloth)

This account, in comic-book form, of an assistant English teacher's experiences working at a junior high school in the Japanese outback is not bad. Neither, however, is it as good as it might have been, or, indeed, as good as it might one day be — when parts two, three, and four are finished. It is disappointing not because it is poorly done, but because it is incomplete.

One can only speculate as to why the author, Lars Martinson, rushed this work into print, and though he gives us fair warning by subtitling this piece of Tonoharu "Part One," that doesn't make this quarter-of-a-glass any more satisfying or any less slight. A slow reader might take 30 minutes to get through "Tonoharu," and then, at the end of that half-hour, just when things are starting to get interesting (the sad-sack narrator's very constricted world has begun to expand), the book screeches to a halt.

That Martinson has sabotaged his work is particularly unfortunate for two reasons. First, both life in a small Japanese town and the experiences of a foreign English teacher who washes up in one are seldom visited outside of Japanese English-teaching circles. Second, Martinson draws so well that each page of "Tonoharu" is a pleasure to study. It is a shame that the price (nearly $80 for all four if subsequent volumes cost the same as this one) and the piecemeal publication of Martinson's work may deter potential readers from learning about an odd way of life in an out-of-the-way place. Worse, they may miss out on the pleasure afforded by Martinson's original and skillful illustrations.