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

Abstract

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 of light 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.