Hi hi! In the middle of writing something else, (you already know what I'm going to say) I've accidentally written an entirely different blog post. Happens! Following is an impassioned post regarding one of my favourite comic artists of all time, Hayakawa Nojico, and her recently released in english for the first time ever Strobe in the Dark.
So here’s the thing about Strobe in the Dark: is it my favourite Hayakawa Nojico? No. Did Tokyopop release my dream perfect vision of Hayakawa’s first ever english print manga? No. Do I think the story is outstanding or particularly moving? No! Did I, regardless of all of those things, cry basically through the first chapter because I was so overwhelmed at the very idea that I was holding this first ever physical copy of a Hayakawa Nojico manga in english? YES!!!!!!
(my copy of Strobe that I cried on, lovingly photographed in front of flowers.)
I realise that saying all of that does not imply a very impassioned recommendation for the manga itself aside from the volume as a concept, which I would now like to correct. To me, the true pleasure in reading a Hayakawa Nojico manga does not necessarily lie within her storytelling ability, but rather in the feat of her comicking as a storytelling medium. You will likely open up a spread and be met with a barrage of connected dialogue bubbles laid over smatterings of jagged cut panels and white space that at first glace seem messy and difficult to follow, and then at further consideration as you connect with the page, you will find that the dialogue leads you around the page, and when it does not, the panels do, and when they do not, you will be lucky to be treated to what may be spiraling, knotted, or clamorous use of shape; a fistful of ribbons, an unspooling roll of film, the bold hand-drawn clack clack clack of deafening train tracks, which will lead your eyes into understanding precisely what Hayakawa has intended for you to understand. And so it is not simply the images and words which are used to depict the story, it is the form they take as well. It is the idiosyncratic craft of her comics which make them so relentlessly compelling to me.
(in order: Yozora no Sumikko de, Strobe in the Dark, Endou-kun no Jikken Note. oh my god dude )
I almost, almost wanted to end that sentence with “regardless of the content of the comics,” but that would be untrue, because I believe that one could not be without the other. In Strobe, main character Arata is in frantic, flushed anguish sixty (perhaps seventy!) percent of the time, overwhelmed by his best friend Shotaro’s fearless affection for him; his anxious thoughts jitter down pages in sharp boxes, frenzied staccato dialogue is mirrored in form as frenzied staccatos of speech bubbles, pools of film developer drip down a page as if thoughts melting away. It’s never that you’re reading the text of the story accompanied by visuals, but that the story is being depicted through all aspects of the medium.
(arata freaking out)
Strobe charms itself to me particularly in its central metaphor of film as anxiety. Arata’s anxiety over the risk of homophobia collides with his desire both to reciprocate Shotaro’s feelings and his own private knowledge that he wants to alter their relationship beyond recognition, and he, as the son of professional photographers and a photographer himself, relates this to the idea of light hitting undeveloped film and overexposing it to the point of destruction—when your own perverse desires which you keep tucked and hidden in the dark are exposed to light, you risk the light becoming irreversibly tainted by those desires. I own and use my father’s film camera from the 1980’s and because of this I really connect with and enjoy the use of film photography as metaphor in Strobe, so I hope you’ll forgive me for this but I’m going to continue the metaphor here: Arata eventually finds that when given the time and care to develop his relationship with Shotaro, not only does the bright, quick light that is Shotaro’s presence in Arata’s life not become tainted by Arata’s desire, Arata comes to understand that when that light hits the darkness of Arata’s secrets, they become a kind of lightness too.
If you’re a BL fan, Strobe in the Dark does not necessarily tread new territory, or say what it has to say in a particularly profound or awe-inspiring way. However, if you’re a comic fan, a fan of manga as a comic medium, a fan of comics as a storytelling medium, etc, I absolutely cannot recommend Hayakawa Nojico’s works enough, and because Strobe is the first of hers to get an official english release, I implore you with all of my heart to check it out. Request it for purchase at your local library, check it out at your local library, buy the print version, the digital, whatever whatever, it doesn’t matter, I need you to see it. In fact, you should read everything of hers that you can: Yozora no Sumikko de is my favourite for its delicate and emotionally wrenching back and forth between its two adult main characters, I recently reread it’s sequel Yoake ni Furu and it made me cry despite what might read as a little bit of tedium. Read her unfinished and seemingly discarded stories because they’re beautiful and intriguing (Hana no Saku Koro is the one I long for completion the most,) her oneshots are really great (Ame Arare, Kari Karare is a single delicious bite of something deeply compelling, Ameiro no Toge is one of my favourites,) read it all!
If ever there is another official english release of a Hayakawa manga, I will be there. I hope after all I’ve written that you would like to be there too.
(a page each from Yozora no Sumikko de and Yoake ni Furu. do you see what i'm saying. you seriously see what i'm saying right. that page from yozora literally makes me catch my breath each time i see it. i'm not kidding around!!!!!)
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This write-up was intended to be a short one—for a quarterly round up post—but as I was writing it I found that I had much more to say about Hayakawa Nojico as a comic artist than I had to say about most of the other titles I had begun writing about (sorry other titles!) and I figured that just this was worthy of standing on it’s own as a single post. Perhaps at the end of the year I’ll be able to properly articulate my feelings on Descending Stories: Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu (of which I have so much they overwhelmed me and prevented me from articulating anything at all) or compose a thoughtful post comparing Harada’s Color Recipe to Hanasaki Manio’s Kitanai Kimi ga Ichiban Kawaii (which I strongly recommend reading if you’re a fan of Color Recipe.)
Other posts that I have promised are on the way (I say once again with never-failing optimism.) I hope you’ve read something good this summer so far. See ya for the next one!
Hi again! This is part 2 of 3 posts I have planned discussing iimo's 4 volume BL Akuheki. The first post, which mostly discussed my process of close-reading and note taking, can be found here.
Akuheki Part 2: Leaving the key on the doorstep / Letting someone unlock the cage — The innate desire to survive despite it.
Where I am, the songbirds have just about finished returning for Spring migration, and I find myself thinking, as I always do during this time of year, of a scene at the end of Kamatani Yuhki’s three volume manga series Hiraeth: The End of the Journey. It’s a moment when the pov character Mika, a grieving and suicidal teenage girl, has arrived to the entrance of Yomi with the intent to die alongside her two immortal companions. However, as she is finally stepping through the gate, she hears birdsong behind her, and she turns around. To her remaining companion still in the clearing outside the entrance, she says this: “I heard a bird sing, so I decided to keep living.”
Since I first read Hiraeth in 2023, that line remains probably the single line in all of fiction that is capable of making me burst into tears without fail each time I think about it.
I bring this moment up because, as I was about halfway through my close-reading of Akuheki, I found myself continuously making a note of a theme that affected me much in the same way as that moment in Hiraeth.
What struck me about Akuheki, a story wrought with violence and aching, is how it revealed itself to be ultimately about the desperate, clinging, human longing to survive. Despite it all; despite the fear, despite the shame, despite the grief, the torment, the pain: it insists that within the ache of being alive there is a voice in us that says, please let me find something worth surviving for.
Have you heard the songbirds in the morning recently? They're exuberant right now. They’re elated to have returned.
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I’m going to begin where it’s obvious: Kojima Youhei wants to die. Or, more specifically, as he says himself, he would like to be killed. We learn after a tumultuous first chapter sex scene that he’s been seeking a “monster”, a sex partner who is willing to take a sadomasochism scene to the point of ultimate finality, and in later chapters are led to understand that this desire stems from the idea of forgetting; of stopping existence where it’s at, bringing an end to the torturous childhood memories that haunt him.
He maintains this pretense to all characters who interact closely with him, and most excruciatingly, to himself. It is in incremental moments that we, as readers, might begin to doubt the veracity of that claim, but I feel that the moments it unraveled the furthest were in the uncovering of Kojima’s childhood.
In learning, at first, that Kojima was groomed and scheduled next in a series of child murders by a mysterious woodsman in the isolated mountains, you may understand Kojima’s suicidal tendencies, wrought by betrayal and a honed desire to reject any who sought to earn his trust.
In learning further that what truly haunts Kojima is his inability to square what he felt earnestly as a child from the woodsman (safety, trust, and, crucially, love) with what had then been ingrained in him by those around him (the woodsman was a vile, evil man, and, aligned with his intentions without knowledge, Kojima was his toy) you may then understand his belief that only a “monster” could love him; and thus his belief that the only natural conclusion to a monster’s love is death at the hands of that monster.
But then, after it all, after the rejection, the running, the fearful weeping acceptance, it is revealed that there was no monster. That what Kojima had felt from the woodsman was true; there was nothing to square at all. It was just love—you may believe that it was that feeling that he craved, and the question he couldn’t ask because he believed he knew the answer already: If I survive, will there be love?
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The dissolution of one monster was foreshadowed by the same thing occurring to the other much earlier. It is clear, maybe even from before the disclosure of his family’s manipulation in his grandmother’s death, that Daimon Touya was never the monster that Kojima believed he wanted him to be. (You wonder then, if Kojima’s gut-interpretation of Daimon was wrong after all, right from the start—or if, on the notion that Kojima was subliminally seeking someone who would be able to convince him life may be worth surviving, that he selected Daimon quite perfectly.)
But as Daimon’s assuredness in his desire to see Kojima live intensify, Kojima’s own feelings of trust and affection for Daimon butt against his fear of betrayal, sluicing into a painful mess of contradiction. In the scene that I think exemplifies this best, Daimon offers one last time, in what on reread felt like a desperate bid to appease Kojima and keep him by his side, to kill him. In this moment we see Kojima, for the first time thus far in the story, hesitate. He doesn’t agree, he doesn’t express relief, or enthusiasm—he pauses. You can read the painful contradiction in his face before he asks Daimon, “Is that okay...?”
Here is where he realises that this isn’t what he wants from Daimon, he wants something else. Here is where he tells himself no anyway. Here is where he runs, again, to lock himself away in a cage that can’t be opened without a key, and where he, very bravely, I think, leaves that key in Daimon’s palm.
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It is then that we see Kojima clinging to yes in the cottage. Daimon is going to be happy without him, he’s going to lead a normal life without him, but yes, he has the key. He hasn’t, and he shouldn’t, but if he comes back, there will be a key in his hand and yes, he will be able to turn the lock. He shouldn’t. It would ruin everything Kojima planned, but if he does...
And of course, he does. Daimon returns to him, key in hand, and unlocks the door of that cage, and Kojima can barely put up any resistance because Daimon is finally, finally, finally doing the exact thing that Kojima is finally unafraid to admit that he wants. Later, after learning that yes, it was love, and not monstrosity that haunted him all along, the answer to that once forbidden question is resounding.
“If it’s with you, then I think I can believe in a future.”
I’m going to survive, and there will be love.
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The conclusion of Kojima’s character arc, and largely what Akuheki as a story comes to is just that: there will be something worth surviving for: the sincere heart of another person, the moment you realise that you can forgive yourself, or perhaps that there was never anything to forgive at all, the freedom that comes with unbinding yourself from expectations, the birdsong in Spring.
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Phew! That outro made me cry LOL. Akuheki is good huh. Thank you guys for your patience as I surpassed the time frame that I optimistically suggested I would post this within lol. I’ll admit I was very pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm for Akuheki that I received on the first post only because I haven’t seen it discussed very much in my circles like I have for similar titles, but that enthusiasm made me fret a little about my own writing 😅 But I persevered! I hope my thoughts and ideas could live up to everyone’s expectations and passion for Akuheki that I evidently share.
The upcoming and final post about Akuheki is [rubs my hands together] about Daimon & one of my favourite topics to think about re: BL and other fiction writing at large: deviancy!!!! I’m really excited with what I have planned and written so far.
Hello blog readers…! In an exciting first-ever never-before-seen on the blog moment: I have a series of blog posts incoming all focusing on a single title. What occurred was an astounding and fortunate turn of events in which I read something that really thrilled me, took an alarming amount of handwritten notes on it, and conceived of three ideas from which to write about it with.
The first of these posts is the one you are reading right now, which is more an explanatory post than anything else: What did I do… how did this happen to me… It is also where will describe my process of note-taking (which I do for most things I’ve written a blog post about) and more specifically, hand written note-taking while close-reading (which is something I do much less frequently, and what I did for this yet-revealed title.)
But I won’t keep you in suspense any longer, (although if you follow my bsky I never really shut up about blog plans) I am here to discuss what happened to me when I read Iimo’s four volume BL Akuheki. No english publication currently, though there is, as there usually is, a french pub, published as Vices by Hana. It details the relationship between Daimon Touya, a total sex-freak pervert* (repressed), and Kojima Youhei, a total sex-freak pervert, and how they ruin each others lives and then gloriously, weepingly puzzle piece them back together into one another. Full of sloppy, sopping wet, miraculously written and illustrated sex scenes, most of which were page-long topics of discussion in my notes. My description of the series to my friends included the sentence “made me cry my eyes out twice near the end and another time in the middle i cried out of shock because i got scared.” No plot summary because I believe the ideal Akuheki experience is to get your shit rocked right off the bat without preparation. A couple warnings at the bottom of this post.
*I say “sex-freak pervert” with reverence and gratitude.
Akuheki is a little gruesome, pretty feel-bad at the mid-point, rather unapologetically indulgent read. And it is, I think, my favourite thing I’ve read this year thus far.
(my copies of akuheki that i purchased at 2am after finishing the third and fourth volumes in a frenzy instead of going to sleep. that volume 1 cover drives me wild i LOVE it lol.)
As said above, I often take quick notes mid-way through reading anything that compels me into doing so. Not so commonly with single volumes, but you bet I have 3000 words in a document on the ten volume Tricornered Window and another 2000 on eight volume Blue Morning. With Akuheki, however, I finished reading the first volume and immediately longed to do a handwritten close-read on it from the beginning.
I’ll explain the process of doing a close read: It’s like taking mandatory notes on readings in a literature class. Take notes to prove you understand what you’ve read. And so, largely what I’m doing is working out and explaining to myself essentially every single character choice and plot movement on the page. This character did this because he’s feeling this way/wanted to get this reaction/this reaction makes him feel this way because of this thing from his past, et cetera. It’s a bit like finding a loose thread on a frayed edge of fabric and pulling it until it becomes free from the weave; untangling characters’ motivation, their fear, their shame, what drives them and why they’re driven in the ways that they are. In between this, I’m elaborating on my understanding by making connections with either the text itself or with an outside text through my own interpretation: this is really interesting to me because…/obsessed with this idea because it calls back to…/this concept and the way it’s written makes me think of… etc. Between that I’m simply writing commentary on what I’m seeing/reading, not only on the events: crazy choice to have this moment here/ sick and twisted way to end this scene, etc, but also on the art itself, the panel choices, the comicking, th-the, um, Daimon in any of the sex scenes… And then in between that, I’m writing “FUCK MY LIIIIFEEEE” and “KILL ME!!!!!” and “SHUT UUUPPPP” and probably also “UKE RIGHTS!!!!!!!”
(open spread of my notebook on one of my forty three pages of notes)
You’ll notice an array of sticky tabs as well that make me look like an impassioned booktuber: these are purely for organisational purposes, they’re used to identify specific sections of writing that are coherent enough to be useful when I’m writing about or otherwise discussing what I’ve taken notes on, labeled with what sort of theme in the text that the section I’m making note of covers.
(excerpted section of my notes in which i'm reiterating a point to myself with the intent to fully understand it)
Some might say, “Ugh, close reading, I haven’t done that since my last literature class, what a slog.” And I wouldn’t disparage you for that feeling—it can take a long time and requires a pretty committed hand—if you’re not having fun reading you won’t have fun note-taking. But when you’re close reading something really fun it’s a blast lol. Taking the time to dig into the particulars of a story, especially one that’s largely character driven and full of complicated, messy characters is really satisfying. The last manga series I close read was CLAMP’s X, which ends (so to speak) at 18 volumes. I read it over a few months and handwrote 53 pages of notes. Akuheki I read initially over a couple days, close read while note taking over about ten, and I wrote forty three pages of notes. It’s 4 volumes. Eek!
If you’ve read Akuheki, you might understand how doing this sort of thing might be useful, and you might believe me when I say that I currently feel the like the premier expert on every machination within it lol. What compelled me pretty immediately into taking close-reading notes on it was the messy, character-driven writing and the impression that it would deliver some truly unhealthy and twisted dynamics, which it did. But I was lucky to be close-reading what became a story that asked its readers to roll the plot beats around in their mouths like hard candies until they started to stick to teeth, because I tend to crunch my hard candies (let convoluted plot points roll over me,) but this time I was paying very close attention, and they melted into total comprehension. And so, if you read Akuheki and didn’t understand one of the wild ride events occurring within, um, I could probably explain it to you lol.
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If, after all that, I’ve intrigued you: I recommend Iimo’s roller coaster BL manga Akuheki with the conviction of someone who has essentially drafted two papers on it purely out of frenzied weepy fascination. I will present caveats out of consideration and honesty: it does contain depictions of sexual violence that go beyond standard fare pseudo-rape BL scenes. They are presented within the text in a grey area which may interest certain readers the same as it may discomfort some. Aside that, you should allow yourself to suspend disbelief regarding some of the plot contrivances in the back half, because upon close inspection, and I’m not kidding, you have to trust me, everything holds up remarkably tightly. And anyway, I’m not writing a critique so that won’t be coming up.
Part one of my two-part theme analysis on Akuheki should hopefully be up by the end of the week, with the second also hopefully within the following week. Their working titles are, respectively: Leaving the key on the doorstep / Letting someone unlock the cage — The innate desire to survive despite it” and “Unearthed, untangle — After much deliberation: spitting in the face of normativity.”
but i don't LIKE being in a creative fallow period. i want to be an eternal harvest!!! i want to sow a little bit and then reap and reap and reap. waiting for the seeds to grow sucks.
Some pictures of my now completed To-Read manga notebook! Where I've collected various bookmarked tweets (a lot of them) and handwritten scribbled lists (a few of those) and my entire manga tbr spreadsheet (upwards of 100 titles lol) into this a categorised notebook! Forever! No more scrounging around to find something to read!
Every title is listed under a category of my personal choosing, labeled with year of publication, status of completion, volume count, english publisher, AND! short descriptive notes again, of my personal choosing. There are over 170 titles, which means I never need to be recommended a manga title again, for now, except I've added something to the notebook today already lol. But at least maybe I'm more likely to read it like this... probably.
This probably looks like a total vanity project but really I want to get off a messy spreadsheet and get more analogue (buzzword ik but I'm saying it quite genuinely) with my notekeeping! And it WORKS to get me to actually read something: having the short summaries/notes/themes that I've personally written to note what about a title interests me the most is unsurprisingly a very effective way to get me to start reading. I've already begun something I put on my FEEL BAD BL list that I've been putting off for months for no reason and it's really good lol. Turns out handwriting "crazy uke????" because it's tagged on mangaupdates with "crazy uke" is a sure way to make me go "I NEED TO READ THIS RIGHT NOW".
And finally, I wanted to do something fun w the cover/back so i used my scraps from my color/formatting tests and some of my actual handwritten tbr lists and glued them on, and i think it looks really fun!
yousharknotpass
tangentwithtanner
baratheonpilled
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
dailybridgerton
