You may have heard the dilemma of when to listen to sad music – if you listen to it when you’re happy, you’ll be sad, but if you listen to it when you’re sad, you’ll get sadder. Is sad manga the same? Hmm. Well, this one isn’t that sad, but even Yumeka’s happy stories seem twinged with melancholy because of her unique way of telling them.
I’ve been working through this one on and off for what felt like ages, I realized I really had to be in the right mood for it (I was trying to halfheartedly bowl through some junk Deux and Kitty titles at the same time, which was like going back and forth between church and a circus of drunk schizophrenic clowns). Then I wanted to re-read parts of it a second time, something I ended up doing with her work The Day I Became a Butterfly, because there’s so much subtlety in her storytelling that I missed stuff the first time. One hiccup of her exceptionally soft art style, preference for panel cropping, and more abstract dialogue is that it can be hard to tell characters apart sometimes. But on the second read-through I realized this didn’t actually bother me as much as I thought it did, and by the end I realized it didn’t even really matter. I just had to go with the flow and think about it more like flipping through a photograph album than like reading a book.
This is a book of four mostly high school pairings split into various one-shots. The first couple is students, Nakagawa and Yokota, who become best friends and then lovers, and eventually move in together in college. Not a lot really “happens” per se, it’s mainly thoughts and feelings about love and being in a relationship from Yokota’s POV.
The second story “Letter in the Attic” was my favorite; it’s about two boys who meet in the attic of an old school building and becomes friends. Thematically it is almost identical to a story in Butterfly, and even though it has an ending that I thought was heavier than was necessary it was pretty good.
The next one is sort of long and honestly, I had no idea what was going on in this one (the second read-through didn’t enlighten me any more). I *think* it’s about an angel coming to earth after falling in love with a human boy. Despite the fantasy angle it had a similar attitude and themes as the others, but it did feel like it was on the more extreme end of abstractness. She says in the back that it was unfinished, but since I was pretty lost virtually the whole time I probably could’ve read it backwards and it would have made just as much sense.
The last one is from the POV of a teacher who crushes on a longtime friend and neighbor five years his junior, and is convinced that it is one-sided love. It’s pretty short but just like all the other stories, it’s really gentle and sweet.
All the stories have a certain gravity to them despite being mainly slice of life, and a central theme throughout the book (also the same in Butterfly actually) is a strong sense of longing. Honestly, she is probably the best of any other BL author I’ve read at showing this emotion. What exactly the characters were longing for was mostly unspoken, almost as if they themselves didn’t even know. Love, affection, acceptance, or some other universal emotional need perhaps, or maybe something more simple – to give a name to their feelings, or to understand them.
Yumeka’s works are effortlessly expressive and beautiful and pretty easy to recommend. They’re sort of abstract and philosophical and force you to read slowly and contemplate along with the characters. Her character expressions are so intuitive too; she can convey strong emotion with such a few amount of strokes. Her panels are like flashes of memory or snapshots, and they breathe with a quiet energy that is sometimes nervous, sometimes happy, often both.
This is one of her earlier works and the second of hers I’ve read, but it will definitely not be the last – she’s worked in various genres and I’m curious to check out something other than her shounen-ai work for the next work of hers I read, because I don’t think the genre had much to do with my enjoyment of it – it was almost purely for aesthetic reasons and the mangaka’s technical talent.
TL;DR: A vanilla cake baked with fluffy, beautifully-drawn, contemplative shounen-ai stories. Yumeka is a unique artist with an effortlessly flowing, pretty art style…she’s really good at portraying the feeling of longing and leans into the abstract and philosophical in terms of story and dialogue, and has an intriguing composition style to match.