When you're a kid, you agree to a lot of things like that. Adults say that something is really important, and you say "OK." Maybe it is important, maybe you actually remember it decades later - maybe a lot of maybes.
Brandt did remember. Probably because it was a good excuse to run away; his marriage with Alice is crumbling, now that he's in his early thirties, and the anniversary of his grandfather's death is as good a reason as any to head back to the rural Japanese landscape where he grew up.
Ghost Tree is about what he finds there. As the title implies, it's not just a tree - this is a book in which there are real ghosts, and some people can talk to them and interact with them. Brandt's grandfather is one, but there are a lot more - that tree is a place where they gather, and ghosts, as we all know, are unquiet spirits who have something left unfinished.
Brandt isn't fazed by the supernatural; maybe he'd suspected, or maybe this is just the kind of thing he always was hoping would erupt into his life. He's happy to talk to his grandfather, happy to talk to various ghosts and try to help them work out their problems.
But his grandfather isn't sure, now, if this was a good idea. He now thinks he wasted his own life with ghosts - neglected his wife, Brandt's grandmother, who is still there in their old house, now quietly taking Brandt to task for the same flaws her late husband had - and he's worried that Brandt will do exactly the same thing, will give up the world of the living for the simpler world of the dead.
Brandt has other things drawing him to that world: not just his breaking marriage behind him, but the ghost of Arami, his teenage girlfriend, the one who got away, who died not long after he left her and Japan so many years ago. The past is always tempting, especially when it hasn't changed. Even when it's a ghost you can't touch.
There are other elements of this collection of ghosts, other issues and problems and creatures. But that's the core of it: the question of how much energy and time to give to the past and the dead, and how much to give to the living and the future.
Brandt has to make that decision, in the end. Arami has to make a different kind of decision, because this is a cosmology where ghosts aren't trapped, aren't lesser or echoes - just people, later on, in a different way.
Bobby Curnow and Simon Gane (words and art, respectively - colors are by Ian Herring with Becka Kinzie and letters by Chris Mowry) tell this story well, in a mostly quiet mode. Gane gives the world a lushness and depth, and Herrings's mostly subtle colors add to that depth. Curnow's dialogue is real and his people realistic, and he doesn't turn any of his endings facile or obvious. There are a number of excellent moments near the end, in particular: a panel that pays off the "usually one a generation" talk earlier, and a stronger ending to the Brandt-Alice story than I expected.
This is a fine graphic novel: as it says, about "love, loss, and how the past never truly stays dead."
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