Sakura of DOOM

So, um, I read vols. 16-18 so long ago that I don't even remember what happens in them anymore. I mean, my booklog says I read them back in 2005. I am a little embarrassed.

Needless to say, this write-up will be rather brief and vague.

( Spoilers )

(more general overview here)

I find that the more I read of this series, the more I like it! One of the really small things that I adore are Tsuda's asides in each chapter and the funny little figures she draws. Seems like she is obsessing over tea and classical music in the writing of these few volumes. I don't know.. I like the little scribbles, and it feels rather like small LJ posts interspersed in the midst of the main narrative.

The past few volumes have actually been focusing more on Yukino's friends than on Yukino and Arima's relationship, and I find this rather refreshing. Several of Yukino's friends are getting into relationships of their own, or are already in some, etc. While I don't think that this is out of the ordinary for most shoujo manga, I do think Tsuda is doing some interesting new things with it (er, or else I'm just reading waaaay too much into things).

Please also note that I have only been reading manga on and off for a few years, and I have in no way read a good deal of all the classics and etc. So I'm probably generalizing horribly and leaving out a lot of exceptions.

Anyhow, I've found that the genre (subgenre?) of shoujo manga that deals with ordinary girls and women falling in love (as opposed to magical girls or shounen ai or gothic narrative) tends to be very focused on the protagonist's internal narrative. Her voice informs the entire series, if you will. Off the top of my head, I'd say the fairly popular series in this sort of category in this decade (I have read very little from before the nineties) would be KareKano (Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou), Boys Over Flowers (Hana Yori Dango), Hana Kimi (Hanazakari no Kimitachi He) and pretty much all of Yazawa Ai's works. I throw in Yazawa Ai because she's my favorite mangaka. Heh. Although I think she is fairly popular in Taiwan and Japan, even though only one of her series (alas, one of her weaker ones) is out here.

I think typically these series focus on a young girl, usually in a contemporary setting that ranges from fairly realistic to glamorized. Even more typically, the story is from the protagonist's POV -- the love interest is usually portrayed as stunningly handsome but somehow unattainable and mysterious. And while the love story plays a huge role in the manga, the manga also focuses on the heroine's life and how she overcomes obstacles. I usually tend to draw comparisons between shoujo manga and romance novels because of the generally female authors and readers, along with the emphasis on the love story, but I think the more accurate comparison here would be with chick lit. (another caveat here... I haven't read much chick lit at all, just flipped through, so this is all horribly generalized)

Romance novels very rarely are written in first person POV, whereas many chick lit novels that I've read are, and more importantly, chick lit's focus seems to be on the ordinariness of the heroine. Romance heroines are often beautiful beyond belief and kind and sweet and blah blah, while the chick lit model seems to be how similar the heroine is to the reader. In the Bridget Jones model, she is slightly overweight, has annoying parents and embarrassing moments and is as such endearing to the reader (or meant to be). The hero is usually some unattainable handsome guy, and his attention is like some sort of gift to the somewhat frumpy heroine.

Anyway, my main point here was to emphasize the centrality of the heroine and of the story as the heroine's narrative, and I got somewhat sidetracked.

I've read manga where bits and pieces were from the love interest's POV, but it seems to mostly emphasize the sweet ordinariness of the heroine and to show off his angstiness and his conflicts. What I like about KareKano, particularly the last few volumes, is that Tsuda is undermining this narrative.

One of the things that seems atypical about KareKano is Tsuda's focus on both Arima and Yukino, on their internal monologues and on their personal growth and insecurities. I haven't read enough shoujo to know if this is an extreme exception or if she's taking the male POV farther than it usually goes in shojo, because I generally get the impression that the guy's POV usually emphasizes how traumatized the guy is or something, or to give the reader a look into how he loves the girl. I think I'm basically trying to say that in most romances and in chick lit, I get the sense that the guy's POV is put in to make the reader sympathize with the guy but not to empathize, while in shoujo and chick lit, the reader is usually led to empathize with the girl. She is just like the reader, while the guy is someone the reader would rather know instead of be. Instead, the focus on the manga is more on the distance between people and the false faces we put up and how that impedes our relationships with other people. It has to do with the love story, yes, but at the very bottom, it seems to be on how the characters relate to the world in general and how they try to overcome a rather existential loneliness.

I like how both Arima and Yukino have this similar struggle at heart, even though it manifests in entirely different ways. And I like how so far, while Arima has a Tragic Past and how Yukino is somewhat portrayed as the savior figure who rescues him from his Tragic Past, as many a romance heroine is wont to do, Tsuda hasn't been portraying said rescue from Tragic Past as Yukino's sole duty in life. Hrm. I forgot to add that as a rule for romance heroines. Yukino's main role in the manga so far has been to learn enough about herself that she can not only have a real relationship with Arima, but so that she can also have close friends and a social circle and everything, and learn to accept herself. (I think this theme must have been why Anno Hideaki, director of mecha anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, decided to direct the anime version of KareKano.)

The other thing that seems fairly atypical about this series is Tsuda's willingness to diverge from the main Arima-Yukino storyline into the stories of the secondary characters. This isn't a break from form necessarily; most shoujo manga (and most manga) will go into the backgrounds of the secondary characters, but in shoujo, those asides from the main narrative are usually only a chapter long or so and shoved into the back of the manga when it's published as a book, as opposed to serially. So they act like little appendices that aren't essential to the development of the main plot thread. Tsuda has been taking these side stories and making them into the main story for several volumes so far, and she even has a few asides talking about how she knows people want to get back to Arima and Yukino and how she knows these storylines are usually kept to the back of the books.

The storylines generally concern the love lives of Yukino's new girl friends, which isn't extraordinary, but Tsuda writes them so that they aren't actually from the girls' POV, which I don't think I've seen before. And not only that, she writes it so that it feels like shoujo manga, just from the guy's POV. She hasn't gone so far as to change the gender roles in the manga though -- usually it's the guy concerned with pushing the girl away for her own good. But I did think it was interesting how the stories portrayed the guys as the vulnerable ones, as the ordinary ones who were going after these rather mysterious and distant women.

The one case that I thought was interesting was Tonami and Sakura's romance, as it were, in which Tonami discovers that rather than resenting Sakura for childhood injustices, he has been in love with her all along. However, Sakura wants to be free and Tonami has to struggle to deal with her not appearing to be head over heels in love with him. It reads very much like a romance, except with Tonami in the typical heroine's role and Sakura as the typical intimacy-fearing, emotionally unaffected male. Sakura is also coded as being more traditionally masculine in the series, with her short hair and her love of beautiful girls. I think the latter is supposedly in a more aesthetic way, but there is a sort of homoerotic subtext. Anyhow, the focus is on Tonami and on his emotions and his pain when he realizes his emotions may not be returned.

The other two romances (or sort-of romances) aren't as atypical as the Tonami-Sakura one, but they are both from the male POV and they both seem to position the guy as the introspective and emotional one who is falling in love.

I also just liked this because it shows the secondary characters from a completely different perspective. Usually they're just seen as "Yukino's friends," and I've had a difficult time distinguishing between them at times, but once they get their own stories, they bloom into full-fleshed characters. It's also interesting that they're again seen from someone else's POV, because it almost negates Yukino and Arima's POVs, in which Yukino and Arima are the center of the world and of the manga. In these stories, they're only secondary characters who briefly interact with the now-main characters. I guess to me that this felt a little like the whole idea that every character is the main character in their own heads.

Anyway, I don't know if any of this is intentional, but it's still neat!