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never ending manga posting
Journal with Witch/Ikoku Nikki (2017-2023), Yamashita - The dominant metaphor in my mind right now is "ach, I've been poisoned!" Like, ah I read the news… poisoned! This metaphor of poison feels appropriate for an age of active hostility… anyway let's move this back to manga
I find most stories about parenthood to be tiring or depressing to read, whether they're happy narratives or sad ones. The relationship we have with our parents holds enormous expectations on both ends and at every stage; failure is both inevitable and memorable. And on top of that, it's not even particularly instructive?!
Ikoku Nikki covers three years of Makio and Asa's life together, starting when Asa's fifteen and about to graduate middle school to her high school graduation. Makio is a reclusive writer; Asa is cheerful, outgoing, and gets lonely easily. She is the daughter of Makio's beloathed older sister. Makio hated her older sister in life and continues hating her in death, and I find the petty mercilessness (and eventual tempering) of her hatred excitingly honest. Makio's a lone wolf, the kind of character who's easy to like: uncompromising, passionate, bad tempered, off-beat, minimally sociable. In other words, an unconventional weirdo people find hard to get along with in real life.
The three metaphors of Ikoku Nikki are language (everyone speaks their own), personal loneliness (everyone's loneliness looks different), and being a side character (everyone else has something going for them but me). These themes are almost always addressed directly in narration or in commentary; in that respect, it's a manga that keeps its reader on a fairly short leash.
The first two parts are easy enough to address, but I think the third is more complicated in the way it's enacted and addressed in the story… let's get to the first two.
One of my favorite sequences comes from Asa reflecting on her mother's diary about a year after her parents' death. Asa, reading through the diary for the first time, yells, "You're lying!" at the page where her mother's written about why she chose Asa's name and how she hopes Asa will be loved by the world. Asa reads it and freaks out: the words could be lies or half-truths, and she has no way of asking her mother what these words, which tenderly expresses a mother's love for her child, really mean. Asa sees herself staring into a hole facing a horrible fear: what if her mother never loved her? Crazy good!
A related sequence, also top notch: not long after, Asa's hitting up Makio for some writing advice for her song lyrics, only to get, well, writing advice… "Long after that, I realized everyone speaks in the language of their own foreign country," future Asa says in the narration. On the next page, we get a frame full of close ups of Asa's best friend Emiri, a classmate, and Makio with speech bubbles in foreign languages.
On the next page, the page is split into two rectangular panels. The top panel takes up a third of the page and shows Asa in the present day, yelling, "I don't get it!" The bottom panel, in all black, has Asa's mother, saying the words, "Asa, your mother loves you"—but the words are mirrored, just as hard to understand as the Danish or Korean.
The next page: the top third's taken up by a rectangular panel of a close up of Asa, still yelling. "My aunt's a writer, my parents are dead, and I've got it soooo hard, so why aren't I any good at music?!" Then, in the white space, we see some narration: "That's what frustrated me most of all" halfway down the page. A little lower: Asa's first year of high school, winter. End of chapter.
Just a great sequence of Asa being embarrassed and frustrated about how bad her lyrics are, to Asa being lonely (my parents are dead!) and scared that she doesn't understand anyone in the world anymore, to Asa being mad that her lyrics suck and that she hasn't been able to turn her circumstances into cool art, and then bam: don't forget! She's fifteen!
There's something a little funny about Asa's frustration with not having "obvious" talents. "I've got it soooo hard, so why aren't I any good at music?!" Asa's a good singer and a member of the light music club at school, but she never makes it to the main stage. What's with that?! She looks around her friends and sees all of them as talented, special individuals distinct from herself; meanwhile, the "thing "she "has" is her dead parents. Is that selfish of her? Immature? I don't think so… I guess this perspective is a bit of an oblivious donkhead move from someone who got a ton of outside affirmation of my particular talents in my teenage years (my ego's crazy huge!) but I think this moment has a parallel to Akane Banashi, when Akane confronts the root of her father's style and realizes that, fundamentally, her father is a weak person—but do weak people deserve to be without friends? And that messaging runs counter to the unspoken philosophy of many shounen manga: love, gentleness, and friendship are the rewards of the conquerors, the kings of the world. To be talentless and decent is to be unremarkable, the passive thing to be protected, a fate worse than being talented and wicked, where you have at least the possibility of being loved. Having talent is proof that the world might or will love you, someday. Who needs parents if you have talent?
Asa feels this more acutely than the characters around her because, within the myth of the nuclear family, having living parents is meant to guarantee you a particular spot in someone's psyche; being special to someone, for better or worse, is psychologically stabilizing. But that feeling, or the illusion, of psychological stability keeps her from examining her relationship with her parents and the world until after they're gone. And this fundamental problem, the gap between the stories we tell ourselves about what family should be and how families actually act, is the world that Ikoku Nikki explores most deeply. The act of taking care of someone and love are separate in the world of Ikoku Nikki. Failed relationships between parent and child are everywhere. Did her parents really love her? Does anyone's parent really love them? What kinds of things do we get from our families, and what do we owe them? Most importantly, does anyone in the world really love her?!
I've written a lot about Asa here in part because I do feel like it is more of Asa's story, even though we enter her world through Makio. Makio and Asa both get a share of the present day narrative, but a future Asa, some ten or twenty years from today, butts in often, sometimes to wax nostalgic about her time living with Makio, sometimes to inject commentary from the future on what she's learned since high school. Usually, I find this kind of cheesy, but I think it's nice here… Asa's portrayed as a self-absorbed teenager for much of the manga, and it's nice to hear from her adult self occasionally.
The relationship between Asa and Makio is deeply affecting in part because of how strict Makio is about what kinds of relationships she finds tolerable. She can't stand meaningless intimacy, the sad, vacuous cliches and routines of familial and romantic affection, but those same vacuous cliches and routines were once proof of those feelings' reality for Asa. Asa gradually comes to understand Makio's way of seeing the world, even if she never inhabits it fully; the separateness of each person's experience is something Ikoku Nikki really loves and respects. Maybe we are really alone with our own separate loneliness, but the relationship you have with others is particular to your two-person bond, a universe of its own. And even within that universe, you may never find a way to say what feels obvious: being with you makes living worth it. I need you in this world.
This manga made the This Manga's Amazing! list a bunch of times, and I think it's also won some other awards, too—deservedly. I've been reblogging gifsets in my tumblr tag, too. I think this manga is super amazing, really amazing… like, amazing amazing! I almost don't want to check out Yamashita's other manga in case lmao I get fucking bodied like thirty times while reading those, too.
In the process of writing up this review, I also finished one of Yamashita's earlier BL works, Night Beyond the Tricornered Window, which has an amazing first six volumes and then kind of peters out for me… I also wanted to do a little write up of Selfish Chie-chan by Shimura as an example of another manga about a family member dying when the protagonist is young, but summarizing took like two or three paragraphs just to work through the initial premise alone and I decided you know what… I'll write that up. some other time.
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