Last week, (or thereabouts, time seems to slip away from me quite easily and quite quickly, amazing what procrastination can do), I wrote my disorganized shtick on Shoujo mangas, highlighting some of my favorites from the traditional image we have of Shoujo, which is very romantic and with plenty of humor. This week, as I continue to put off editing my Kenzaburo Oe piece, which possibly contains too many spoilers, (albeit it’s the kind of novel where that shouldn’t ruin anything), I’m writing about Shoujo that blur the lines between mangas oriented towards girls and boys and have a slightly different, more subtle formulas.
I shall start with my favorite Shoujo manga of all (I don’t have an overall favorite, just a list, with reading, art, anything, I don’t like to compare disparate styles and say, ‘oh, this is the best’. With most, I even have differing lists, like, ‘These are the 3-4 books I consider the best written, these are the 3-4 I found most fun to read, these are the 3-4 I think are most important,’ etc): Natsume Yuujinchou.
In English this manga is only available up to Chapter 41, (with pretty good sized, meaty chapters though, none of these skimpy 15-16 page chapters you find in some mangas), but it’s really captured me and my imagination. In plot it’s relatively simple. A young teen, Natsume Tekashi can see Akayashi, (think specters, ghosts, kami, demons, etc), and has always felt alone and isolated because of it. His mysterious grandmother, was Natsume Reiko, who died young, and who was apparently so spiritually powerful that she wreaked havoc on the spirit world, bullying Akayashi for amusement and out of loneliness and anger at the humans who despised and feared her as a crazy woman.
Natsume Reiko collected the names of the Akayashi whom she forced to submit to her in a book called “The Book of Friends”, and having their names gave her power over them; she could summon them, force them to obey her, and, if she destroyed the piece of paper in the book with their name, she could destroy them as well. This book, the Yuujinchou of the title, was shuttled around with the family, and eventually came into the hands of the orphaned Tekashi who felt compelled to take care of it since it was the only important possession of his long-forgotten grandmother.
An undoubtedly Shoujo manga, and yet there is no romance going on at this point, and the main character is a young boy, albeit a definitely soft-mannered and feminine one. It’s in a Shoujo magazine, and is classified as such, and that is the sense I get from reading it, so I’ve tried to isolate the difference in style that makes it Shoujo. I’ve isolated it down to two main points: Tekashi is not obsessed with being stronger and using his strength to protect others; the message is fundamentally that we all need help and friends sometimes. There isn’t any training, nor is there much focus on the fighting that does occur within the manga. Two, the primary concern of Tekashi is helping others with their problems, even at the expense of his own safety and/or preferences, and doing so without violence if possible. What I love about this manga is how it creates figures whose hardened and evil outer appearances are broken down and the reader sees how people can come to do terrible things. Most of the manga deals with the struggle to come to an understanding with beings different from yourself and Natsume's struggle to free all those who ask him (he has the power to 'give' them their names back and remove them from the Book of Friends), and to find friendship and a place in the world.
It’s a quite often melancholic manga that appears to be going in a very interesting direction. I am often reminded of the popular and critically praised anime, Mushishi (also a manga, but not one that I have read), only it appeals to me much more. Yuujinchou deals with themes of anger and bitterness arising from alienation and being rejected for not fitting into the mainstream conceptualization of the world. The mangaka seamlessly and artfully uses supernatural themes, with wonderful artwork—in a field so packed she still manages to find and develop her own niche. I feel confident in making the highest possible recommendation for this piece to all those who haven’t already encountered it.
The second Shoujo is one a little closer to the norm, and definitely still romantic, Vampire Knight. But, while that’s true, even down to the love triangle, in Vampire Knight it's fucked up, to put it in a satisfyingly blunt manner. It’s perhaps closer to the Twilight style of vampires than traditional vampires, except that it creates genuine monsters, with “purebloods” (those who have no human ancestry dating back to the start of the mutation), being utterly unkillable without the special weapons of the hunters and having a vast and repulsing array of powers, including the ability to split their body apart and transfigure it into whatever they want. They’re not destroyed by daylight, but it does sap them of their strength and hurt their sensitive eyes, and let’s just say that for a pureblood, cutting their head off or staking them in the heart would only be a painful inconvenience.
The romantic triangle of this Shoujo manga is riddled with sadism and incest and yet somehow manages to pull it off without being creepy. I am attracted to it so much because it I never know what to guess with it; it always throws curveballs at me and the mangaka has a very complex interwoven plot with a great of mystery and suspense that make it a thrill to read and somehow complement the love story aspect of it. Vampire Knight never makes the mistake of other Shoujos (and it’s not always a mistake, sometimes that’s just the type of story they’re telling) and becomes a romance, rather it’s a supernatural mystery, with great plot twists and even more interesting characters, who just happen to, in the midst of all the action flurrying around them, have a romance.
It’s difficult to give a run down on the virtually any of the plot without giving away spoilers that deflate a manga built on the tension of mystery and suspense. So rather than try to navigate that tricky canal, I will just recommend you read it and be surprised (hopefully). A combination of great, interesting characters, and excellent, artwork that is often of surprising complexity and detail, I give this manga my coveted two thumbs up and, as with most mangas in this series, highly recommend it.
A good color pic of the main characters (from the anime however, though it's quite good and close to the manga):
The very last ‘Shoujo’ that this series will cover is Nononono, and I place it in parenthesis’ because if I read sports mangas, that’s where I would put it. In a way this is revenge of the Gender Bender, as yet another one pops up in my list. What can I say, I like the ability of a good gender bender manga to forcefully dislocate entrenched social roles and to create an underlying tension that makes the manga more compelling.
In this case, Nonomiya Yuuta is a teenage girl who, through difficult circumstances, has given up everything to bring her family back what it wanted so much: an Olympic Gold medal for ski jumping. The problem is that women aren’t allowed to compete in ski jumping, (okay, so the Olympic Committee just created a separate category for female ski jumpers, this manga started about 3 years ago, and can just keep that state of affairs in its fictional world), so she cuts her hair wears a vest beneath her clothes and gives up being a girl in order to win it at the next Olympics, which she knows will probably be her only opportunity as after that she likely won’t be able to pull off the act of a man.
This manga has very little insofar as romantic undertones go as well, and it’s also one of my favorite mangas. 112 Chapters in, (with unfortunately short, twentyish chapters), it’s a sports manga that actually manages to keep my attention. While the mangaka isn’t the most brilliant artist around, the artwork is solid and not distracting. More than that is the unusual combination of characters and how well the artist explores their motivations and dreams. With a main character that I truly want to root for, and an interesting and unusual sport being pursued, one wrought with danger and difficulty, but with the payoff of getting those few seconds of “flying” through the air, Nononono is an exciting sports manga that isn’t all about sports but has some real payoff, emotionally. Two thumbs up, and then a little some on the side.
Please talk about these mangas if you've read them. I'd love to share thoughts and opinions on them. And if you're interested in them now I'd love to know, and answer any questions you had. As always my fellow otakus (and the literature/political prognostication people who might be following me and considering whether to remove me from their feed), this is jw signing out. Oh, and please vote in the poll if you don't mind. I'm always interested in the results and the number of different users that read my post.