Japanese Notebook: a Journey Into the Empire of Signs is a graphic novel by Igort. As the subtitle suggests (the reference is to the Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes), the book is a visual encyclopedia of semiotic fragments. The story covers different manifestations of the country’s culture in its diverse forms from Zen Philosophy to manga. In doing so, it produces a sort of visual meta-discourse in which semantic reiteration becomes a visual reflection on the drawing medium seen through the lens of memory.
