Red Colored Elegy is officially out today in a new paperback edition. The book, originally published in Japanese in 1970-71, portrays the sparse world of a melancholy, disenfranchised couple, who struggle to get by and to relate to one another.


Seiichi Hayashi was inspired by both the underground Japanese comics of the time and French New Wave cinema, the result of which is a disorienting and achingly beautiful graphic portrayal of love, or something like it.