More Manga

[recognito]

I finished my three-part (or two and one three parts in three…?) review of Shimura thinking, "Wow, I've purged the demon! I can read other manga!" but it's really hard?? In the time that I'm writing this, I've flipped back to Sweet Blue Flowers to evaluate the Viz translation and, you know, I've done little partial rereads to get a good look at her panels and art evolution...

I have been able to tear myself away from Shimura's works to reread Yotsuba&!, a series with absolutely superb comic art decisions (visual complexity vs. simplification, the rhythm and arrangement of panels and images, constructing just enough of a narrative to give us the sense that time is passing without shoehorning a narrative that makes no sense for the story it wants to tell). I mean, we all know Yotsuba&!'s strengths as a comic. I feel like I don't have any urge to review it… I just like it and want to reread it all the time… Also reread/caught up with Skip and Loafer, which is somehow totally faithful to the emotion of being fifteen/sixteen. Also finished the fantastic Ikoku Nikki, which will be getting its own little write up and review later.

I still am reading other books, but reading and writing about manga's keeping the novel engine humming. This post covers three series: Yuria-sensei's Red String of Fate by Kiwa Irie, Run Away with Me, Girl and My Sister's Friend by Battan.

 

Yuria-sensei's Red String (2019-2023, I think?) - Shimura mentioned reading Yuria's Red String of Fate in one of the volume notes of Even Though We're Adults, and I figured she's probably into some pretty good shit. The scanslator for Love Glutton is currently working on Yuria, and there are 35 chapters currently available to read for the enterprising viewer.

This shit rocks. Yuria is a 50-year-old woman who, after her husband has a brain hemorhage, discovers her husband has been conducting an emotional and sexual affair with a younger man and an emotional affair with a much younger woman. Her husband, after the hemorrhage, requires extensive at home care, including diaper changes, visiting nurses, and a hospital bed installed at home. (We get an explanation of the nursing benefits his disability entitles him to in the style of a cute explainer you'd use to explain high school basketball tournaments.) Yuria has her husband's lovers (including the two children?!) move in with her to help care for their shared lover, and then goes on to have an affair of her own.

I really felt this moment of, WOW, you can really make manga about ANYTHING while reading this. Yuria's whole situation objectively sucks. She's stressed, frustrated, angry, and miserable… and at the same time, Yuria-sensei's Red String is very, very funny—not in a mordant or sad way, but in a classic comic manga way. It really feels like every three chapters reveals a new revelation about the secret life her husband had without her, a fresh betrayal that feels like the end of the world—then, two pages later, Yuria realizes that no, her life isn't over, it's just different. Quitting is for losers! Real cool guys stay in the game, no matter how much changes. And the reward for this is renewal: Yuria's life not only goes on, but expands. Everything is hard, everything is awful, everything is exciting and new again. She can adjust to Riku's annoying, misogynist ass. She loves Michiru's children and cares for Michiru as a person. She meets Ban, a younger man, and flirts with him, then slowly experiences the start of a new love for herself.

I really think it's an amazing feat of writing. The questions ultimately underpinning the series are really intense. What do we owe our spouses when we promise to love and care for one another? Who are we after a failed marriage? Is twenty years of marriage enough? People constantly encourage Yuria to leave her husband. She thinks about it herself: why should she have to change the diapers of a man who betrayed and humiliated her? Even as she starts her affair with Ban, she continues to care for her husband. The scenes where she stands over him and tries to understand what this man was thinking or is thinking now are among the most difficult pages in the series. The art makes it clear she's deeply angry with him and that he's helpless before her. Even though we know she won't purposefully harm him, the positioning makes it clear that she could. Yuria, at its darkest, is a portrait of the unfairness of their marriage and how sour and bitter it tastes.

For Yuria, the answer to all the questions is that the promises she made to her husband and the promises he made to other must be honored and respected, and the manga spins out the number of promises he's made to an absurd degree. It's funny and sad, stressful and exciting. It's totally unbearable, and she's making it work. It's a manga about and, and, and and. She's fifty years old, and she's taking ballet classes and dropping kids off at school. She's flirting with a man who likes her back and changing her husband's diapers. Her life is over, and it's never too late.

 

 

Run Away with Me, Girl/Kakeochi Girl (2018-2020) and My Sister's Friend (2019), Battan - I keep thinking of Battan as the new kid on the block, but I think I'm just old??? Battan made her debut in manga in 2016. I feel like she got a lot of buzz in the English-speaking world with Runaway with Me, Girl, and her current series, Fatale Games, published in Kiss magazine, is getting a simultaneous publication in English. I've read the seven chapters currently available, and I will say that I was super disappointed when it became clear that no one was going to die…

I read Run Away with Me, Girl a few years ago and had vaguely neutral-to-positive feelings and thought I'd return to it now and see if it holds up. The story didn't do too much for me, but I had an immediate negative reaction to the art. Why are there so many sparkles and special effects? Why is she constantly breaking the frame with beams of light, smoke, and whatever else happens to be drifting by? WHY are big, splashy moments organized on the vertical????

This isn't getting into the strange choice of perspectives, which swaps from panel to panel, or the confusing placement of dialogue bubbles, which it difficult to understand what the action is across an entire page and to build tension over the course of multiple pages… I really felt like an old man reading her series because I was constantly thinking, "I can't see anything…"

Describing a page of Yotsuba&! in text is super easy to do, but the ease is in part because it's incredibly effective. Looking at the page, it's easy to understand the intent of each character, each change of perspective has a point, and we understand the importance of each image. It's odd because I think Battan's art and individual drawings are quite strong: fluid lines of different widths, interesting variety in the shape of characters' bodies, and good use of tone. But her stories and narrations are set up around people's faces, specifically their smiles: getting a smile from someone who's otherwise stoic, the falseness between words and expression, capturing a moment when someone looks really beautiful at a time you're not expecting it. I don't think Battan does great expressions, but that's not necessarily a barrier to that particular artistic goal, right? But the insistence on rapidly switching point of view from panel to panel makes it harder to understand the subtle changes she's trying to convey.

Thinking about what Battan's trying to gain from structuring her pages this way, it's high impact splash pages with lots of movement both vertically (image) and diagonally (ribbons, beams, sparkles). It's basically her flexing her art skills, right? But that kind of flex leaves me a little cold… I love a good drawing, but she's writing in a romance genre, where story and narrative construction are really important. Things like the quality of dialogue and narration also play into the evaluation; the depth of character and believability of the romance play into it. Thinking on it a bit longer, my feeling is that these moments (discrepancy between face and words, flash of light, a particularly singular moment of beauty) are meant to evoke the motion and movement of a moving image, animated or otherwise rather than focusing on the kind of effect you can get with comics alone.

Okay, let's get into the story. Makimura Momo (Maki) and Midori dated in high school. On graduation, Midori breaks up with Maki: these types of relationships are fine in high school, but they should move onto normal relationships. Ten years later, they meet again. Midori is pregnant and engaged, while Maki is a graduate student, single, and still a lesbian. Maki and Midori meet up, go on charged outings/dates, and it's not long before Midori invites Maki over to have dinner with her and her fiance. The fiance is a dirtbag. He belittles Midori verbally, makes her plan the wedding, and just sucks so bad. When he hits her face, Midori decides to run away with Maki: first to for a weekend vacation trip on an island, where Maki's friend lives, then a longer term escape. In the end, they tell off the fiance, break off the engagement, and reaffirm their love for one another with a photoshoot of the two of them in wedding dresses. In an interesting moment, the final chapter is set fourteen years later. Maki and Midori's daughter, Kon, gets into a fight with Maki and runs off to visit Maki's friend on the island.

It's all done neatly: protagonists, antagonists, happy ending for our main couple. I do like that Midori decides to keep running and then they decide they have to return to their lives and break things off with the fiance properly… I actually have a hard time articulating things that I truly like about it, because I feel like it's a little cloying. There's a moment at the end where Midori confronts her coworker, who has a crush on her dirtbag fiance and treats Midori badly because of it, and approaches her as though she's about to slap her, then says (paraphrasing), Was that scary? That's how I felt every day with him. Sorry, is that an appropriate way of dealing with your interpersonal problems? Pretending to slap someone and then passing it off as a lesson? Am I meant to find that satisfying or kind of sour?

The forces the fiance represents—misogyny, homophobia, the patriarchal control of women's bodies and minds through marriage—are conquered easily through the conviction of their love… I think that's fine, but I also don't really believe that Maki and Midori had a meaningful romance in high school, and I don't think they have a meaningful one in the present. Midori's backstory is one where she has a really, really strong need to be loved by others, so I can buy that, in distress, she'd run to Maki. I don't know if I understand Maki deciding to stay with Midori. The ten year gap between high school and your late twenties covers a period of time where you're constantly tripping over other people and a time for ditching your dumb high school self behind or doing your best to.

Maybe the best explanation for Midori's appeal to Maki is that she's closeted and deeply hurt by how Midori dumped her in high school. She's stuck, basically, in the pain of rejection and getting told that their relationship was nothing but practice for a "real" thing. The rejection launched her into ten years of something unreal and false until they met again… or something. I don't think it's wrong to have a story about revisiting your first love or having a story about a character who's fixated on their first love and can't really sensibly move beyond it, but the emotional dynamics here aren't t doing it for me.

I also read My Sister's Friend, a series about three women, Ruriko, Nacchan, and Kyouko. Ruriko is Nacchan's little sister; Kyouko is Nacchan's friend. The start of the series opens with Ruriko running into Kyouko, her sister's best friend. Kyouko invites Ruriko back to her apartment once a week and starts giving Ruriko gifts. One day, Nacchan sees the gifts and is furious: all of those gifts were things Natsuko had given Kyouko.

Nacchan is wildly envious of Kyouko. Kyouko has everything Nacchan wants: beauty, a career as a writer, an aura of coolness. Is it just envy? Nacchan buys things for herself and ends up giving them to Kyouko. When Kyouko accepts them, Nacchan can't help but feel like even though she's giving Kyouko the gifts, Kyouko is taking something away from her. Each thing she gives Kyouko is proof that Nacchan isn't enough. Nacchan uses a dartboard when she's tired of making decisions and apparently takes it quite seriously. The bullseye she fails to land means she can't be with Kyouko; the bullseye she hits means she has to marry Ryunosuke. She remains in love with Kyouko for years after.

We can see a few common beats Battan's works like to hit: triangular romance structures (most often with two women and a man; one of her other Kiss series is two sisters and a man), women feeling pressured into relationships with men despite their true desires, and sexual identity. And sldkfmn I do feel like ultimately Battan doesn't do much with the material: either one leg of the triangle is a total scumbag (Runaway with Me, Girl) or the triangle peters out into the ether due to being nonviable on multiple fronts…

The reason why the Ruriko-Kyouko-Nacchan triangle works is because we know Kyouko is intentionally leading Ruriko on to get to Natsuko. The age gap between them is salacious (Ruriko starts the series at fourteen while Kyouko is at least in her mid-twenties) and kind of pathetic on Kyouko's part. Ruriko's going through a romantic awakening but hasn't yet opened her eyes all the way, and Natsuko is furious with Kyouko but won't go to her, even as Kyouko finds other ways to worm into her life. Basically, it's a huge mess on every single leg of the triangle. The problem of some of the other triangles Battan creates isn't there because we can see plainly Kyouko's treating Ruriko badly, Natsuko isn't making it easier for Ruriko, and Ruriko is like, freaking out because she's fourteen and definitely does not deserve to get sucked into her sister's weird ex-girlfriend situation. Great! Full approval!

I don't think Battan's doing anything wrong, per se, but she hasn't done a romance that's really convinced me of its power yet. So… what I'm basically saying is… I think Battan needs to evolve a little more, still…