The magpies appear in the first scene of “Cannon,” in a darkened restaurant littered with broken furniture and plates. I count twenty-one birds, perched and staring. Two figures, the titular Cannon and her best friend, Trish, also look around. They’re rendered in a clean, strong outline against a watercolor background. Only the magpies know who caused this mess. In East Asia, magpies—crow-shaped, in the same Corvidae family, but tailed with brilliant streaks of sapphire and white—are signs of good luck. But is this wreck of a restaurant a happy scene? A progressive closeup of Cannon, sweating and flushed, culminates in a wide-eyed portrait straight out of a Tokugawa-era ukiyo-e print. “One for the road?” Trish asks. Cannon hurls a last plate against the wall. Fwish! Smash!

From there, the graphic novel zooms out and back in time. It’s structured cinematically, with voice-over, pans, and quick cuts. Each page is gridded into four rectangles, like the frames of a film. Cannon’s given name is Lucy—as in “loose cannon.” Trish coined the nickname, which is funny because Cannon never spouts off. She absorbs; she contains. (The nickname, with its masculine overtone, also fits her gender nonconformity.) Cannon is a twentysomething Chinese Canadian in Montreal, decidedly not of that city’s white Francophone class. She works as a cook in a hip but poorly managed restaurant. Her boss, the owner, is a jerk, a caricature of an entitled Québécois man.

Outside the kitchen, Cannon is going through a lot. Her once fearsome Cantonese-speaking maternal grandfather is shrivelled and ailing. Her mom is in denial and won’t return her calls. Her long friendship with Trish, who’s also Asian Canadian, is skidding toward indifference. And she can’t tell if the girl she likes, a new worker in the front of the house, genuinely likes her back. As a means of escape, Cannon jogs to the soundtrack of guided meditation: “Begin to notice if you’re holding tension in certain places of your body.” Then, the jogging itself becomes a betrayal: sores, soreness, plantar fasciitis. Why, her physiotherapist (ah, Canadian health care!) asks, is she running to the point “that the body starts breaking down?” Cannon: “I guess it feels like a relief.”

Trish is on her own frustrating journey. She’s a fiction writer who feels pressure to follow up on her early success. An older lesbian mentor talks her through some draft material that she plans to submit for an artist’s grant. (I thought, here, of the Canada Council for the Arts, whose public largesse has sustained “Cannon” ’s author, Lee Lai, and thousands of others.) “To the funding board, you’re a piece of a cultural niche,” she tells Trish. “They want a young, queer, Asian voice.” Trish, with her hypothetical, stereotypical diasporic novel within the novel, becomes a double for Lai. But “I’m not the kind of Asian that they want,” she responds, a cheeky swipe at the imagined Western reader. “They’re probably looking for, like, some intergenerational immigration-trauma shit.” Trish is freshly out of a relationship, and fills the space vacated by her ex-girlfriend, and by Cannon, with a heterosexual fuck buddy from the gym. When the guy (who’s quite hot, for a black-and-white drawing) tries to get to know her, she replies, “I’m emotionally unavailable.”

“Cannon” is the second graphic novel by Lai, a thirty-two-year-old Australian who lives in, and makes art about, Montreal. Her first book, “Stone Fruit,” applied a similar visual style (characters in strong outline, hatch marks, soft gouache landscapes, film stills) to similar themes of gulped-down feelings, queer romance, and caregiving. Both books, but especially “Cannon,” are studies of rage in the context of familial (chosen, biological) obligation. For Lai’s characters, and for many of us, home is the place most resistant to real emotion. And moving on from the past doesn’t mean giving it up altogether. In relationships, there’s no such thing as a clean exit.

It’s the mid-aughts, at a public high school in Lennoxville, east of Montreal. Two blond mean girls are bullying Cannon in the cafeteria, and Trish, who’s as loud and uninhibited as Cannon is pent up, intervenes in the most embarrassing way possible. This is their meet-cute. Soon, the two are besties, and Trish is at Cannon’s house every day, eating dinner with Cannon and her mom. “I guess Cannon’s, like, my family person,” Trish tells her fling. In their youth, Cannon and Trish crush on each other, though never at the same time.

They move to Montreal after high school, where they can each afford to live on their own. (This is still somewhat possible for cooks and writers in that city.) Their standing date is dinner and a movie—Australian horror films such as “Howling III: The Marsupials,” whose bloody scenes Lai re-creates in red. (The book is mostly gray scale.) On the couch, in the summer swelter, their sticky bodies are inches apart, even as their souls drift. Trish talks a lot, and talks over Cannon. She later asks to spend more time together—but only to mine Cannon’s life for literary material. Lai draws their exchanges as colliding speech bubbles. Trish’s words efface Cannon’s, which slink off the page. Elsewhere, the meditation tape Cannon listens to on her runs plays over a rapid montage of her life. “Thoughts, after all, can be invasive and preoccupying,” the voice intones, as she and her grandfather eat in silence, a vampire goes in for the kill, and her co-workers panic at the restaurant. “Mindful breathing . . . in . . . and out . . .” I find these intruding speech bubbles more rattling, more effective at conveying failures of communication, than voice-overs onscreen, or ellipses and dashes in a traditional novel. Lai has described comics as a form that “nestles itself between prose and film-making.”

Cannon’s model of restraint (or repression), her mother, lives alone and works as a day-care provider at a Francophone garderie. Gung Gung, Cannon’s grandfather, sort of manages to live on his own, with help from Cannon and a part-time home health aide. He’s isolated, and for good reason. A flashback to his wife’s funeral shows him apart from the crowd, staring out a window. When Cannon’s mom approaches him—“Baba,” she says, touching his shoulder—he turns into a red, superhuman ogre and yells, “Get lost!” in Cantonese. Another long-ago scene suggests that he was physically violent. Having endured a lifetime of this—from stories, Trish has imagined him as a “thunderous tyrant”—Cannon’s mom can’t bear to tend to him, even as he shrinks into disability, “a little walnut man.” It’s on Cannon to cook him pork and mushrooms and rice (why can’t he remember to start the rice cooker in advance?), and to persuade the aide not to quit just because, in the aide’s words, “he’s disagreeable and aggressive” and “doesn’t speak English.” Cannon pleads, “Is this you resigning?,” but can’t seem to get angry at either the aide or her mother. It’s exasperating to observe Cannon’s unaddressed exasperation.

The sprinkling of untranslated Chinese characters and Québécois French is a smart touch, adding to the over-all sense of miscommunication. Cannon’s second and third languages become stumbling blocks for the reader, and visual shortcuts for emotional distance. But Lai isn’t interested in furnishing the kinds of gay-immigrant plot turns that Trish hopes to swipe from Cannon’s life. Whatever, exactly, is festering between Cannon, her mom, and Gung Gung goes largely unsaid. And so, as Trish starts to extrude fiction from reality, she hits a narrative limit: “Something a bit clichéd and sentimental with these family figures,” as her mentor puts it. The embedded diasporic novel fails.

Trish is only one of Cannon’s triggers. The restaurant is a generous font of distress, and takes up as much space in the graphic novel as a job does in real life. (A lot.) Guy, the boss, is the main problem. He seems to think that he owns not only the restaurant but everyone in it. He badgers the male employees, especially Benji, who’s Black and Cannon’s closest co-worker, and presumptuously flirts with the women. He constantly messes with their schedules. One night, the kitchen is slammed—he neglected to plan for a holiday rush. “Boss, I need to know if you open extra tables,” one of the cooks says. “We might not have enough food.” The fryer is packed, there’s a gluten-free demand from the floor, and the dirty dishes are stacking up. (I was reminded of that tragicomic scene from the TV show “The Bear” in which a printer emits an endless succession of online orders—zheek, zheek, zheek—that have no hope of being fulfilled.) Lai evokes this harrowing rush in a cramped, fragmentary sequence. The head cook yells. Arms flail. Speech bubbles in English and French crisscross and get cut off. The episode explodes when, from the kitchen side of the pass-through window, Cannon spots her work crush within kissing distance of the boss. Cannon’s agonized face fills the frame. “I . . . I think I gotta go,” she tells Benji. “I need to leave now.”

At moments of intensity, the magpies appear—to Cannon, at least. They also accompany her, overhead, on her runs through town. The birds aren’t quite a leitmotif but rather a signpost of inaccessible feelings. They are real enough that Cannon mentions them to Trish and Benji. Trish ventures, “They’re probably just looking out for you.”

I grew attached to Cannon; I wanted to shake her, to shake loose a scream. I remembered wanting the same thing for the protagonists of “Stone Fruit.” The two main characters of that book are a young visual artist named Rachel, and her partner, Bron, who’s trans and had an evangelical upbringing. Twice a week, the couple babysits Rachel’s preschool-age niece, with whom they lovingly escape into a woodland fantasy. In nature, the three transform into swift reptilian beasts who romp and belt out improvised songs. These animal forms, like Cannon’s magpies, connect the characters to what Rachel calls a “feral and screamy” plane of emotion. The presence of the child distracts from adult conflicts. There’s boiling—Bron ghosts Rachel for way too long—but not a boiling over. Lai’s approach in that book is more restrained, in terms of both narrative and visual technique. In their speech bubbles, for instance, the characters respect one another’s boundaries. I felt a distance from their psyches as well.

“Cannon” offers a deeper, tougher portrait—of an accidental caregiver in need of care. It isn’t a political novel, though it raises political questions: how to metabolize different forms of fury and grief; how to feel private pain (and pleasure) against a backdrop of larger suffering. (I had to banish my own guilt for reading comics during an acutely hideous news cycle.) Gung Gung’s mortality, Québécois racism, sexism and sexual harassment—these can feel like abstractions, too cosmic to provoke specific rage. What gets to Cannon in the end—what breaks her open—is the combination of physical exhaustion, Trish’s opportunism, and a co-worker’s bad faith. She destroys the restaurant in a satisfying, wordless sprint of red, feather-filled pages, but salvages her most important bond.

As Gung Gung is dying, Cannon and Trish take a trip and begin to reconcile. They’re back in Lennoxville, crying and eating mediocre spaghetti in a diner, then laughing about nothing in a humid motel room. When Cannon gets the call from her mom, at the hospital, she puts in her earbuds. “The Peace of the Breath,” her latest New Age soundtrack, unfurls in captioned bits across several panels. “Dear listener, . . . this is no small thing—the search for inner calm.” The magpies take flight. From their vantage point, we see the low-lying multiplex apartments of Montreal and the chaos of the trashed restaurant. Trish’s fuck buddy smiles from between the legs of a new girl, and Cannon’s mom helps a boy take off his backpack at the garderie. Cannon weeps into an expansive white space that only she and Trish inhabit. “Are you ok??” Trish asks. “I’m ok,” Cannon says. “I’ll tell you in a little. Promise.” ♦