Flower of Life 1-3, Yoshinaga Fumi

[snarp]

My response to this manga is a string of little hearts.* My favorite is the chapter about the girl who has a crush on Yamane. I want more stuff with Yamane in it. She is perfect and I love her.

This particular Yoshinaga manga’s Horrible Relationship is so deep into horrible it comes out the other end. It’s like Edward Gorey or something. I can’t figure out whether to cringe or laugh at it. It’s very, very horrible.

* But I’m not putting them here because I’ve developed an anal-retentive habit of avoidance of special characters due to fear of problems with my WordPress database. Though I feel that this dysfunction has on occasion damaged the integrity of my writing, it persists nonetheless. There is a small fearful twinge close to my heart when I switch on the Japanese IME, an almost tactile thing, as if UTF-8 character encoding was a physical organ within my body.

(I have such awesome problems.)

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Comments

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Now join me in wondering when the fucking fuck volume 4 will come out.

Yoshinaga is pretty much the only manga-ka whose writing can stun me so that instead of running away from all of her Wrong Wrong Relationships, I stick around to read with appalled submission.

[snarp]

WHY HASN'T IT COME OUT WHY

(Though I deeply fear that it will contain a lot of Horrible.)

So does that mean you don't read Yuki Kaori?

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

In theory, I would, but I always end up buying something else instead. Whereas I will buy Yoshinaga books with my lunch money.

And when I read Kaori, I do enjoy her, but not the way that I enjoy Yoshinaga. Although she has so different in style that comparison is unfair, I think Yoshinaga is a much more skillful writer with an art style that hangs together much Kaori. Kaori's a lot more elaborate, but her tendency to go overboard with detail and layout sometimes interferes with her storytelling, which is so insane as to be a little difficult to follow to begin with; Yoshinaga's stringy-but-expressive minimalism perfectly complements the subtle layers of emotions in her stories, and holds my attention better.

You Higuri, a lesser writer than Yoshinaga, has gorgeous, lush, detailed art that supports her often silly-melodramatic-bizarre writing much better, I think, although she'd lose points against Kaori for the sheer ruthlessness of Kaori's crazy.

So I said they were so different that comparison was unfair, and then I compared them. Good job, me!

[snarp]

When you say it's unfair to compare two things, you are instantly compelled to compare them! This is a natural law.

On a basic prose level, Yoshinaga's definitely a better prose writer than Yuki - even taking account that they are in totally different genres and going for totally different things and not comparable. (Look, I just did it!) (I'm not qualified to judge about Higuri, because I haven't read enough of her stuff.) I've been (slowly) reading Kinou Nani Tabeta in Japanese, and she impresses me even more when I have to translate her myself. But in certain ways I think of Yoshinaga's as being a lot less ambitious. Part of what bothers me about her work - and why I'm half-way afraid to read Ooku - is the way she tends to focus in very tightly on individuals, small social circles, and short periods of time.

She'll slide in bits of social commentary on women's relationships and otaku culture, but only so far as it pertains to her protagonist's emotional lives.* She's certainly aware of the social context - a million little throwaway details make it obvious she doesn't write about social milieus with which she is not intimately familiar in one way or another - but deliberately chooses not to engage it. It feels like she's maintaining an artificial shallowness.

I've been trying to decide since I read it whether Gerard and Jacques is supposed to be a sort of self-parody in this respect. There are massive infodumps about the horrors of the French revolution in deliberately comically huge speech bubbles, existing largely to set up and cool down scenes where Gerard and Jacques engage in well-written Relationship Stuff. There's the scene where Jacques complains to Gerard that, though the heroine of his erotica is living through a time of great social change and change in her own life, "all she does is sleep with Colette!" That is an astute observation, Jacques. (Though since it's a Yoshinagi Fumi manga, Jacques also sometimes criticizes cakes.)

Also, her strength is clearly not in plotting. Which is fine, because her type of work doesn't require a complex plot to hold it up - but I wish she would give it a try sometime. (Which is why I half-way want to read Ooku.)

Yuki Kaori, on the other hand, doesn't really seem to know much about anything, but is enthusiastic about all of it and tries to get it all in there anyway. This frequently turns out very badly, but you have to admire her chutzpah. Looking at them side-by-side, there's a definite cynicism to Yoshinaga's work. She has a better knowledge of the worlds she writes about than Yuki, but she doesn't go too deep. She doesn't take risks.** (Q: Why don't her female protagonists ever get to enact great angsty dramas? A: Because some people might not like that.) A Yuki Kaori manga is like a big wad of risk permeated with nitroglycerin and placed gently on the hood of the car.

* This is what I think is the difference between Weak Bujold and Strong Bujold. Weak Bujold sees societies in relation to how bad they can mess Miles up.

** I don't see the Horrible Relationships as risks for her at all. They're what a lot of people read her for.

[severefun.livejournal.com]

I've been trying to decide since I read it whether Gerard and Jacques is supposed to be a sort of self-parody in this respect. There are massive infodumps about the horrors of the French revolution in deliberately comically huge speech bubbles, existing largely to set up and cool down scenes where Gerard and Jacques engage in well-written Relationship Stuff. There's the scene where Jacques complains to Gerard that, though the heroine of his erotica is living through a time of great social change and change in her own life, "all she does is sleep with Colette!" That is an astute observation, Jacques. (Though since it's a Yoshinagi Fumi manga, Jacques also sometimes criticizes cakes.)

That is fantastic.

[snarp]

That was a really long comment and not a very good response to yours, because I totally suck at art criticism; sorry about that. It's been sitting on a burner in my head for a while (I guess I have burners in my head?), and it exploded.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Non! It was good. It's not something that I was already thinking of--the extent of my musing on Yoshinaga has been "I love her comics like fire; god, she's twenty times better than most things I read" (which is still the case)--but it rings true.

Ambition or no, I enjoy Yoshinaga more than Kaori (maybe just because in her narrower ambitions, she produces very strong work), but this is a question of what I am looking for in each author, rather than a general comment on their individual contributions to li-tra-chore. It's like Neal Stephenson vs. Georgette Heyer: no one in their right might would compare them anyway; all they have in common is that I like them both, and that they are both skilled writers. I've probably gotten more pleasure, by the hour, from Heyer, who was prolific, but it has very little bearing on the quality of their respective works.

Oh, re: strong and weak Bujold: do I correctly interpret that as Bujold's stronger books vs. her weaker books? Or did you mean people writing like Bujold who are better at it vs. weaker at it?

[snarp]

Stronger books versus weaker books. I'm thinking of Barrayar and Memory as strong books and Diplomatic Immunity as a weak one.