Drawn & Quarterly has done manga readers looking for something off the beaten commercial path a great service. They've consistently released volumes by creators who, if not always precisely avant-garde, always offer something that you're not likely to find in the pages of magazines like Shonen Jump or Nakayoshi, or even those magazines' older-reader siblings. While most of their titles have come from the realm of Garo, Saito Nazuna's work never graced the pages of that magazine; in fact, she began her career as a newspaper illustrator in the 1970s before starting to create manga in the 1980s. Health reasons necessitated a break in the early 1990s before she resumed in the 2010s, but there is a truly timeless quality to the work collected here. They were all published between 1991-1992 and 2012-2015, but they aren't tied to any one place or time.

One very specific reason for that is the fact that Saito deals in a melancholy brand of nostalgia, which by its very nature isn't bound to any one period of human history. While there are a few markers of when the stories were written in terms of technology, the emotions and experiences explored don't rely on cell phones versus wall phones or the type of train that's running. They're all that we think of as “quiet” experiences when we look at them from the outside, the sort of thing that's only important when it happens to you. The best example of this is the story Upskirt, from 1992. The piece is told from the perspective of a middle-aged man lying on his back on the floor while his wife hangs the laundry. As he looks at her thighs under her skirt, he remembers an incident from his Showa-era childhood, when he and another boy were obsessed with winning a store raffle for a cheap insect collecting kit. While using it after they came up with a way to ensure that they'd win it (clever in the way of all devious children), they observe a woman hiking up her skirt in the tall grass. The boys are fascinated by their first view of a grown woman's lower body, and while it doesn't precisely become a formative moment, it does stick with the narrator. More than the fact that the other boy died young, more than sneak-winning the raffle, that one glimpse pops into his head, contrasting with the image of his wife stepping over him and giving him a full view up her skirt on her way to the phone. That which was extraordinary to him as a child has become mundane in middle age, one of any of a thousand moments we've all probably experienced.

The idea that the passage of time brings inevitable change is a persistent theme across the collection. Many of the pieces deal with the idea of aging and death, although not necessarily depressingly or grimly. It's more about acceptance, that life naturally ends in death. The two stories from 2012 and 2015 contrast this very well. In In Captivity, a mother with dementia is dying in a hospital, and her family has just gone far enough away in the car that they can't quite make it back when she passes. The story switches between the mother's anger and the strange things she's said and the family trying to cope with the knowledge that she's dying by laughing. But there's a bitterness, a sense that even when she wasn't in the grip of disease the mother wasn't a nice person, and that her children may love her, but they don't like her. The story deals with the way death can simply make you feel empty as if you can't quite figure out how to feel.

On the other side of things, 2015's House of Solitary Death follows the residents of an apartment building primarily occupied by the elderly as members of the community die. Each death is greeted with a sort of philosophical fascination; people come and people go, and the living isn't above gossiping and speculating about each resident. One of the points of view characters is a manga creator struggling to find a story, and her interactions with a resident she befriends over their love of cats leads to her learning about the old man they all call “Mr. Planet Purple” because of his penchant for wearing the color and his odd behavior. The work explores the idea that everyone has a story, it's just that most of them are mundane and people don't always care to learn them. But maybe those stories help us to care about the people around us, even if we never truly know who they are.

The volume, as you may have guessed, is bittersweet on the whole. Each story tells describes a small, ordinary moment in someone's life, and many of them deal with death, although not necessarily grieving. Several are influenced by Tsuge Yoshiharu (most notably Parakeet God), but they still all feel like Saito's own work, even if her inspiration is obvious. The art is simple but touching, and brightly painted lips are a particularly striking element within them. That we can see the red even though the volume is in black and white is impressive. As is the norm for Drawn & Quarterly's releases of this nature, there is an essay included in the back discussing Saito as a creator and providing some insight into a few of the stories; it also has excerpts from an interview with BL Metamorphosis creator Tsurutani Kaori and Saito – Tsurutani is a fan of Saito's work.

Offshore Lightning is one of those books that you find yourself thinking about long after you've finished reading it. Its quietly melancholic nostalgia is striking, and as it explores the everyday lives of ordinary people, it reminds us that there's value in what people might damn as mundane.