vignette00's manga / #brothers(5)

One day we're going to have a long conversation about Toribito Hitomi's obsession with incestuous relationships but today is not that day. Main character Yuuji is drawn into a weird web centering around Anju, a classmate famous both for his beauty and his hedonism. Meanwhile we get involved with Yuuji's brother who has had a rush on Anju for years and the mysterious Kaoru no Kimi, someone Anju claims is special to him. The plot-twist of Kaoru no Kimi's identity is obvious to people familiar with Oniisama e..., though the joke is most likely a Genji Monogatari reference. On the whole, it feels like Toribito bit of more than she can chew, with multiple love triangles, a main character who becomes a passive narrator, and a plot that doesn't go anywhere. It's like sloppier Takaguchi Satosumi (Poet Was Not... or Pink, perhaps?) and is interesting if only for the comparison to Toribito's current work, which is much tighter and dramatically interesting.

A journalist and his friend take it upon themselves to try to solve a series of supernatural murder mysteries in the first year of Meiji era Tokyo. What they end up uncovering is a family drama that manages to make the main characters doubt not only themselves but the very nature of truth and causality. Think of this as a weird cross between Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress, Ishiharu Satoru's "So wa Reirei no Yukini Mai" (a bl-lite mystery, http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/so_wa_reirei_no_yukini_mai/), and the criminally underappreciated "Summer of the Ubume" (http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/the_summer_of_the_ubume/). The culprit's identity was oddly obvious to me very soon in the story, but the twist that comes in the end is uniquely and fundamentally a product of Japanese literature and sentiment. The atmosphere is the star of the story, with its particular mix of fantasy, folktale, and unambiguous anxiety about modernity. In the end, what it reminds me the most of is a more adult and less emotionally wrought version of Kaori Yuki's "Count Cain."