The Nao of Brown

A charmingly quirky and touching story with, yes, a too-pat ending.

Our heroine is Nao Brown, a hafu (half-Japanese, half-English) 20something who frolics in a life of pixie adorableness, full of Miyazaki-inspired toyshops and quaint London pubs and the local Zen center and general geekery.

Beneath the surface, Nao is wrestling with a pretty severe case of OCD - with sudden, constant, intrusive thoughts of violence and gore. She copes and half-copes with these thoughts by reassuring herself that “Mum loves me! Mum thinks I'm good!” and half-hearted attempts at cognitive “homework”. But mostly she just pines for the bearded-and-barrel-chested local washing machine repairman, Gregory.

Interspersed with Nao's hafu (half-good, half-bad) life is a comic-within-the-comic about a nut-headed boy named Pictor. It's a long story. And it's very Miyazaki and weird.

The drawings are beautiful, a tribute to author Glyn Dillon severely straining his hand to make this story a reality. Delicate watercolors, wonderful gesture. The story is generally smart and captivating; OCD is rarely portrayed realistically in the media (Jack Nicholson skipping over sidewalks, et al.), and yet Dillon captures the distorted prison for what it is, focusing on an under-represented and poorly-recognized form of the disease.

One of the smart points in the book is its thematic use of heads, especially “wrong” heads: Pictor has a nut for a head, Nao understandably hates hers, Nao as the washing machine-head, whizzing with thoughts, and - finally - Nao as the Zen Enso-cum-washing machine head. So clever!