La jeune femme et la mer, a graphic novel by Catherine Meurisse

For nearly ten years, Catherine Meurisse was the only woman on the permanent drawing staff of Charlie Hebdo. Trained at the Estienne school and then at the Arts Décoratifs, she turned to press illustration at a very young age, only to give it up following the attacks of 2015.

She then decided to devote herself to comics, taking inspiration from her travels, during residencies at the Villa Medici in Rome or the Villa Kujoyama in Japan. Her style is both poetic and sometimes bitingly humorous. She was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2020. She is the first woman to join the painting section. 

After La Légèreté (2016) and Les Grands Espaces (2018), La jeune femme et la mer is once again a foray into the realm of auto-biographical narrative and poetic evocation. The heroine, whom we assume is close to Catherine Meurisse, discovers Japan during a residency at the Villa Kujoyama. Like the author, she wants to "renew her bank of overly Western mental images", and meets several people who help her to immerse herself in Japanese nature. The latter is both majestic and prey to the violence of the natural elements. She also meets a painter in need of inspiration, and a tanuki (a forest spirit according to Japanese legends), who teaches her the rudiments of brush handling according to local traditions. 

Voluntarily contemplative, The Young Woman and the Sea is a graphic novel freely inspired by Japanese writer Natsume Soseki's novel Grass Pillow (1906). Other more contemporary influences are also expressed, whether by the director Hayao Miyazaki or his accomplice Isao Takahata, director of the mischievous Pompoko (2006), an animated film featuring tanukis, the iconic Japanese raccoon dogs, also featured in La jeune femme et la mer. Set mainly in rural areas, La jeune femme et la mer places particular emphasis on the delicate balance between respect for nature and modernity in Japan. 

La jeune femme et la mer is the result of a long gestation period that began with Catherine Meurisse's desire to discover the Japanese landscape. To do so, she visited several times between 2018 and 2019, as part of a residency at the Villa Kujoyama. After observing and sketching this country where she felt both strangeness and familiarity for a long time, she worked on the script in Paris, during the first lockdown. Although La jeune femme et la mer is full of wonder, it also contains traces of the anxieties of our time, through a questioning of the place of humans in nature.