Diego Alexander Vélez Quiroz - THE DRAGON’S SHADOW BEHIND MY BACK IS NOT DEATH’S EMBRACE - SYMBOLS OF FEAR, STRANGENESS, AND HOSPITALITY IN MIGRANTES BY ISSA WATANABE AND THE ARRIVAL BY SHAUN TAN

Aug 27, 2026

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A comparative study examines how Issa Watanabe’s Migrantes and Shaun Tan’s The Arrival construct meaning through wordless visual symbolism in representations of migration and death. The analysis highlights opposed symbolic cosmologies: Tan’s modern allegory of progress and integration versus Watanabe’s relational, cyclical conception of life, mourning, and reciprocity. Using symbolic hermeneutics and simboanalysis, the article interprets images as spaces where mythical, affective, and ideological dimensions converge, exploring tensions between universality and difference.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages15

Reading Time23 min

AccessFree to download

Comparative framework: wordless picture books and migration

Visual symbolism, fear/estrangement, and hospitality

Death as continuity and care versus progress and integration

Semiotic order and symbolic hermeneutics

Received: 16/10/2025 – Accepted: 31/10/2025 DOI: 10.4000/15rd7 THE DRAGON’S SHADOW BEHIND MY BACK IS NOT DEATH’S EMBRACE. SYMBOLS OF FEAR, STRANGENESS, AND HOSPITALITY IN MIGRANTES BY ISSA WATANABE AND THE ARRIVAL BY SHAUN TAN Diego Alexander Vélez Quiroz* The fabulous keys of Issa Watanabe’s Migrantes refract the fantastic trajectories of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. Both works pursue a certain universality—albeit one not free from tension—in their representation of the migratory experience. Thirteen years separate their publication, and a century seems to lie between their stories, Tan’s narrative advances toward the luminous horizon of modernity, while Watanabe’s sinks into the telluric substance of mourning and reciprocity. The movement unfolds from the comic to the tragic, from the idealization of estrangement to the disillusionment of the real. Through their visual symbols, the two books express opposing cosmologies of migration: one linked to the Enlightenment imaginary of human perfectibility (The Arrival), and the other rooted in a relational and cyclical conception of life (Migrantes) . This opposition defines specific aesthetic and ideological singularities and determines two distinct ways of understanding the symbols and imaginaries associated with the migratory experience, particularly those related to death. The article situates both narratives within the tradition of wordless picture books that, by renouncing verbal narration, transform silence into a form of meaning. It employs symbolic hermeneutics and Rodrigo Argüello’s simboanalysis to interpret the visual devices as spaces of condensation where mythical, affective, and ideological dimensions converge. The comparative reading explores how each work constructs a semiotic order of its own, Tan’s images, shaped by the modern allegory of progress and the moral pedagogy of integration, contrast with Watanabe’s nocturnal procession, guided by a cosmology that conceives death as continuity and care. By confronting two cultural regimes—the Eurocentric, governed by the ascending logic oflight and reason, and the Andean, sustained by reciprocity and the vital cycle between life and death—the study explains how the experience of mobility is imagined through heterogeneous symbolic grammars. Ultimately, both works expose the tensions between universality and difference and propose, through silence and image, a meditation on the fragile conditions of belonging that shape contemporary migration. Keywords: migratory narratives, visual symbolism, fear and estrangement, Issa Watanabe, Shaun Tan Thirteen years separate the publication of The Arrival (2006) from that of Migrantes (2019) . Other differences –diatopic, cultural, and ideological– are perhaps less evident. While Watanabe’s work merges Andean imaginaries of death * Università di Torino. Oltreoceano, 24. Iconotextes, 2026. with the consequences of the twenty-first-century war on migration, Shaun Tan, in his attempt to universalize the migratory experience of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reworks and validates the illustrated mythology of Western progress. Both books belong to a genealogy that, in recent decades, has turned to the narrativity of the image to construct stories that dispense with words in their exploration of migration, the so-called wordless picture books. These are not, in such cases, efforts to name the “unnameable”, in the sense articulated by Fernando Reati (1992) or Vladimir Jankélévitch (2005)–though they often do so–, but rather another form of textuality that renounces literalness and relies entirely on suggestion. Alongside Shaun Tan’s and Issa Watanabe’s works, this genealogy includes Migrando (2010) by Mariana Chiesa Mateos, Orizzonti (2015) by Paola Formica, and La valigia (2019-2020) by Angelo Ruta1. The Arrival (2006) tells the story of a man who, forced by a dark and nameless menace in his homeland, separates from his wife and daughter to embark on a migra

FAQs

How do Migrantes and The Arrival use wordless images to convey migration experiences?

Both works rely entirely on visual devices, turning silence into meaning and replacing verbal narration with symbolic suggestion to structure the migratory experience.

What key contrast does the article identify between Shaun Tan and Issa Watanabe’s approaches?

Tan’s images align with a modern allegory of progress and moral pedagogy of integration, while Watanabe’s work follows a nocturnal, relational, cyclical cosmology rooted in mourning and reciprocity.

How does the article explain the role of death in each book’s symbolic system?

The study presents death differently in each cosmology: as continuity and care within Watanabe’s framework, and as an element absorbed within the progress-oriented logic of Tan’s modern allegory.

Aug 27, 2026

Upload by Finn