vignette00's manga / #college(12)

Of Jaryuu Dokoro's stories, probably the sweetest. The title story, Yakozen, puts its main character Monji in a friends with benefit situation with his friend Chiba and then surrounds Monji with unrequited love -- his best girl friend Chie is in the same situation, and eventually it comes out that another character has an unrequited love for Monji. There's a really important lesson to learn here about balancing selflessness with self-love. Monji puts himself second and Chiba first, and soon becomes beholden to ever one of Chiba's heartless and selfish whims. It's not that Chiba is sadistic or likes making Monji miserable -- it's just that he's not even thinking of Monji's feelings, and there's a great line where Monji asks Chiba if Chiba thinks Monji won't be hurt no matter what Chiba does. The great "twist", as it were, is that Monji's friendships save him, through two conversations that tell Monji that his happiness is just as important as the happiness of the people he loves (and, as a corollary, that true love is wanting to see the person you love happy). Cue Rupaul: "If you can't love yourself, how the hell are you going to love somebody else?" A sensitive and realistic story about learning to love yourself, whose happy ending for everyone involved genuinely makes the reader happy as well.

In both style and writing, incredibly similar to Shoowa's "Non Tea Room" (http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/non_tea_room/), which is also about a love triangle where all participants are hiding more than they are revealing (and where some of the participants are in a band!). Here, Miki's childhood friend Keisuke introduces Miki to his current crush: a kouhai named Chiba. Miki, who has had a crush on Keisuke for a while, sublimates his feelings into seducing Chiba. What he doesn't expect is for Chiba to 1) fall hard for Miki and 2) to decipher Miki's real feelings about Keisuke. All the characters end up finding themselves torn between selfishness and their better selves: Miki wants to make things work with Chiba (who he sees as the epitome of everything he'll never be -- earnest and cute and a good kid) but can't seem to really commit, Chiba lets his doubts about Miki's feelings (which are well-founded!) inspire him to put Miki and Keisuke's friendship in danger, and Keisuke doesn't know how to prioritze his crush on Chiba and his friendship with Miki. There's a woodness to the placement and body language in the art, but in some areas the construction really shines. Chapter 2 is a particular stand-out: the bookends of "you sure are loved," the speech bubbles of Chiba and Miki as they talk about first names, the thread that goes from Miki's monologue to Keisuke's childhood memories. Despite Furutsuji's lack of titles to her name, there's a deftness to the characterization and writing. Keisuke feels straight despite his crush on Chiba, and he plays "straight, devoted friend" to Miki in a way that makes their friendship real, fleshed out with concrete, unique details that many other manga forget to add. Miki is the more experienced of the three, and starts off the story with a wicked streak, but he has a vulnerability that draw you to him like it must have drawn Keisuke. It's not that he's helpless, but you can tell when he's going to make a bad decision or let a bad decision be made on him. And Chiba toes the line of victim and victimizing. I don't buy the other readers' comments that sympathize with Chiba, who was, it's true, used by Miki in the beginning. Miki puts in a good faith effort to make right by Chiba's feelings. It's Chiba who uses Miki in the end, and I think his exit from the story is both poignant and fitting. He's not villanized, but Furutsuji doesn't want to vindicate him either. In the end, it's a story that feels really modern and young, but not immature. The resolution is kind to everyone, even Chiba, who has friends that will pull him out of his heartbreak, just as Keisuke is there for Miki's heartbreaks. A solid read all around.

When I first read this manga as a wee-child, this seemed the height of emotional and sexual mannerpunk, but upon rereading, Motoni Modoru's characters reveal themselves to be, well, Motoni Modoru characters. Jeanne of Aestheticism.com once wrote an insightful look into the kind of modern melodrama that Koi ga Yurusu Hani represents, but suffice to say, the crux of the plot revolves around the way the main characters Yamazaki and Fujio have twisted themselves into knots trying to justify their feelings for each other in spite of and because of their reluctance to sleep with each other. When their girlfriends (Reiko and Miku respectively) finally goad them into a sexual relationship, the thing comes to a head, in part because the characters keep arguing over whose feelings have been "raped" the most. Fujio and Yamazaki are less fully realized human beings than walking examples of overwrought ~feelings~. I have never once been able to follow Fujio's chain of thought, and it took meeting Imagase from "The Cornered Mouse…" before I was able to properly appreciate Yamazaki. Miku and Reiko fare slightly better as real human beings, though it's telling that because we see more of Miku, she also engages in the same emotional gymnastics that Fujio and Yamazaki do, whereas Reiko comes off as more "real" simply because we never have to scratch her cool, uncaring exterior. Equally telling is what happens to Katsumi, Miku's boyfriend on the side, who is introduced as an anchor but then rapidly becomes a deus ex machina for Motoni. He spends most of the latter chapters shouting at various characters and thus explaining the story to the reader, and without Katsumi, I have a feeling most of the last arc of the manga would be inexplicable. So, in the end, Koi ga Yurusu is more Tori Maia than Miyamoto Kano. A better comparison might be Nitta Youka's "When a Man Loves a Man" series, though directly comparing the two, I think, shows off Nitta's more even-handed, subtle approach to her characters. It's a fascinating enough melodrama, if you're into that kind of thing. If you're asking me, my final verdict is that all the characters would be too exhausting to be friends with in real life, the kind of people you'd always be texting, "for the love of god, go home, you're drunk."