The Ox Herder

A boy loses an ox. He follows the tracks up the mountain. They are his own. Nine hundred years ago, Chan master Kuoan drew ten pictures of a boy searching for a lost ox — the most enduring map of awakening in Zen. Nobody ever drew the story between the pictures. This book does: 111 pages of ink and colour, told almost entirely without dialogue — a farm, a family, a green persimmon, a bell stuffed with straw, and a market sixty years later. The complete graphic novel, all ten gates.