vignette00's manga / #reencounter(43)

Two stories (high school boys discover each other's feelings, man is reunited and takes in his former classmate). Both have the same "yearning for something very close to me and therefore distant" feel to them. Nothing very dramatic happens, and there's a rather touching ending scene for the second couple that takes the "less is more" route you rarely see in bl manga.

Boy (Taichi) is adopted by an older man (Kanda) for sentimental reasons, develops his own sentimental attachment to the river bank where he was adopted, then meets a stranger (Zama) at the same riverbank who tells him the place will be the construction site for new housing. It's a story that's nominally about family and loneliness and, to crib from Evelyn Waugh, that moment you are looking for love and open that low door in the wall that others have found before you, that moment you realize other people in lives are just forerunners for the person you will end up falling in love with. But actually the story just is sort of disappointingly disjointed. Zama and Kanda's similarity never really goes anywhere. You never get a sense of who any of the characters are, especially not Kanda. Zama develops complexity in the last chapter only because of the plot, so who he was before the story and meeting Taichi, who knows? and Taichi develops a backbone of mysterious origin, so one can only Hand of God say that he learns and grows from his experiences. The art is fine, lovely and wispy, and it's not like anyone really does anything too stupid or unreasonable. It's just a story that has preemptively labeled itself as poignant, but doesn't really do anything but gesture in the direction of meaning.

Overdramatic and strangely shallow despite its weighty themes. Set in Meiji Japan, we follow the bad relationship between two brothers as it ropes in a third party -- a young duke who specializes in teaching ballroom dance. Things end tragically, though a love story does emerge and survive. Youka Nitta makes some very odd choices about when to summarize and when to introduce time jumps, resulting in a lurching, melodramatic ride with lots of deadspace where characters don't develop, change, or learn anything new, and the last scene ties up the whole mess in a deeply silly play for people's love of "until death do us part." Shoots for "Farewell My Concubine," with lots of nods towards real history and upheaval, but ends up achieving none of the gravitas. Still, an extra star for Youka Nitta's art, which is always pleasing to look at.