Manga communicates diverse qualities of sound through visual effects applied to writing. Voices in spoken dialogue, thoughts, and voiceovers are often represented through different type fonts or handwriting. This serves as a narrative tool to differentiate between text categories but also gives each one of them a specific resonance in the reader’s mind. Manga employs a multitude of usually handwritten mimetic words to express sounds and other sensations. Among the various graphic shapes these words assume is a semi-materialization of the written characters, which can undergo physical effects of the represented phenomenon and enter the spatial depth of the storyworld. The Japanese writing system heavily facilitates the visual characteristics of mimetics in manga, be it with the expressive use of the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, the vowel-lengthening symbol, or the sonant mark.

In his review of Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), Henry James claimed the novel showed signs of its author’s ‘exhaustion’. In this chapter, Garrett Stewart shows, by way of contrast and rebuttal, the exhaustive catalogue of stylistic effects that Dickens energetically employs in his last complete novel. The chapter individuates distinct features of style from Dickens’s long-standing repertoire – including the dextrous use of adjectives and negatives, ingenuity of syntax and inversion, sound and word play, renovation of idiom and cliché – to show Dickens flaunting and holding up to inspection his own characteristic verbal and phrasal habits.