vignette00's manga / #salaryman(26)

Two (or three) longer stories and one true oneshot to close out the volume. The first is probably Kusama Sakae at her atmospheric best (c.f. Carnivorous Animal's Table Manners), about two soldiers learning to cope with the effects of the war ending. A two-parter about isolation and reintegrating into society, it lets the perfect amount of introspection remain unspoken, and the effect is heady, humid, and affecting. More disturbing if you compare it to the real life story of Hirou Onoda, but the privilege of fiction is that you can take and leave what you like of history. And then, the Between 1 and 2/ 0 and 1 stories. Between 1 and 2 is a classic "bl chara doesn't understand that childhood friend is a dude, not a lady" story, and skims lightly across the hinted-at dark sea of, essentially, childhood sexual trauma. Kusame doesn't do much with the implied sexual predator in the story, and so the effect is simply froth (well-executed froth, but still froth). As for Between 0 and 1, though, the rape is explicit, textual, and disturbing, made worse by the fact that the characters don't really address it. It's a little like that Ono x Tachibana dj for Antique Bakery that Yoshinaga drew herself, the one that breaks open their sexual tension, only Kusame doesn't make the characters sit down and talk to each other afterwards like Yoshinaga does. Instead both of them get lost in their own heads and then they yell at each other and then they start a relationship that mostly consists of goading each other on. I don't mean to be disapproving, and I think Kusame's liner notes at the end show what she's trying to do (the characters are a mended lid to each other's broken pot). It's thematically consistent with the first story and the last oneshot -- to wit, a broken thing becomes stronger and more beautiful when it is mended with love. Whether or not you buy it depends on how you feel about the use of rape in stories. I wouldn't say that Kusame is condoning the rape, but it's certainly not treated with the weight I would think it deserved. Overall, though, worth it for the first historical oneshot.

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.