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

[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.