Wow "sleeping_bunny", what a coincidence because I didn't realize it is you up till now ╮(￣▽￣)╭ . Yup, sorry, I have been really busy and this the fourth or fifth time I check my mangago account since September (￣∇￣").
I am glad that you're very enthusiast about this kind of work (by the way, I haven't read it yet but I am encouraged to do so based on your review), and I don't mind at all that you're being prolific in expressing your thoughts (●￣(ｴ)￣●), and I like chatting with you ⁄(⁄ ⁄·⁄ω⁄·⁄ ⁄)⁄ .
I tend to agree with you that Hagio Moto's Zankoku is a masterpiece and among the best mangas ever. It took her almost 10 years to finish it. By the way, Moto is one of the three authors who contributed to the development of the "Boys Love" genre. However, I still believe that no matter what the circumstances are, an author must finish her work. Let's take for instance Motoni Modoru's "Shiiku Gakari Rika": dropping this title makes it void of sense because there are still some questions which were left unanswered. The story hasn't been fully unfolded yet and without this crucial process, it is possible to describe it as being a nonsensical mess.
I don't compromise in this regard because writing/ drawing a manga is a craft after all (=・ω・=) ... and yes, she dropped it because she was motivated to write/ draw a non-BL (sorry I don't know why I wrote shoujo, it is more like a shounen in light of the demographic group which it targets, with a BL sequel). In case you're interested they are Kousoku Angel Engine and Kousoku Angel Engine BGH .
Wow, fantastic. I like this genre of plots, something similar to Hagio Moto's stories which are full of symbolism and impregnated with some of the Freudian concepts. I specifically liked this sentence "I have come to deeply love & care for those miserable characters. And I don't want them to be stuck in a time hole for eternity without a definite closure".
It is like with Motoni Modoru's "Shiiku Gakari Rika". She dropped it to work on a shoujo - which has a BL sequel (or an extra) as it seems! - I believe that it is very cruel to leave a story without an end. If a work is meant to be left unfinished then the author shouldn't begin with it in the first place. Albeit fictional, characters become made out of flesh and blood as the plot progresses and the story unfolds. Dropping a story is tantamount to betraying them ... and the craft of writing. A writer should always know beforehand where his/ her work is going. It is the end, not the beginning which triggers the whole process of storytelling. If everything is left to the circumstances and to the author's mood then this isn't a craft anymore. It becomes something else. This is however just my opinion because I am not forgiving when a work is dropped. By the way, I liked your review. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
haha I bet you do like that username of yours ╮(￣▽￣)╭ .
Oh well I like "dark" and complicated stuff, but I am just going to proceed reading it after I finish the crime novel I am reading right now.
Yes, it took her that period of time and she did a lot of research about cases where children or family members are being abused by another family member. Her work in this manga was triggered by the fact that she wanted to know why mothers keep quiet in cases of child abuse?
Actually some writers attribute the dawn of yaoi in Japan to Mori Mari, the daughter of Mori Ōgai, who was a writer and a prominent medical scholar. Her novel Koibitotachi no Mori (The Lovers' Forest) is considered to be the first homoerotic novel written by a woman in Japan. Some consider it to be the ancestor of yaoi because it contained many of the tropes which were going to be yaoi staples later on.
Her novel is a love story between a nineteen-year-old Japanese man from the working class and a thirty-something Japanese biracial scholar.
Hagio Moto wrote after that a manga entitled Pô no Ichizoku (Tribe of Poe) setting the stage to an intimate friendship between two beautiful boys (one of them is a vampire in the body of a fourteen-year-old boy and his companion who was the same age as he is - or his body to be more accurate LOL).
Takemiya Keiko produced after that Kaze to ki no uta which is more blatant as a homoerotic love story than that of Moto's.
However, those three aren't the only ones who gave a boost to the development of yaoi. Other equally important writers could be cited notably "the 1949 gang": Ōshima Yumiko, Yamagishi Ryôko and Aoike Yasuke.
(The information comes from my scribbled notes - just in case you're wondering - as I did a mini-research about some of the manga genres before. The parts about Yaoi are from Akiko Mizoguchi's research paper). (●￣(ｴ)￣●)