One of the first BL I ever read was Same Cell Organism, also by this mangaka, and I was struck by her unique stories and soft artstyle. Having a lot more BL under my belt now, I was curious if I would still like her work. I can happily say that even after becoming considerably more jaded about BL, Yumeka is like a soft, fresh breeze in a world of lightsaber dicks, oversized hands, dorito chins, and rape tropes.
This is a shounen-ai one-shot compilation with six stories. The title story stars high schooler Uka, a boy who is secretly dying of an unspecified terminal illness, and hopes to be reborn as a butterfly in the next life. He grows close to another boy, Mikami, who is said to have a sixth sense. Uka is attracted to him but feels like Mikami can sense that he’s dying, and that he must feel that there is no point in forming a friendship – much less a relationship – with someone who will die soon. This is both a really interesting and really tragic premise for a BL story, and notable is Uka’s character design – he really looks like a girl. Like, not “girly” or androgynous, he really actually could be a girl due to his extremely long hair and soft features, and I actually wasn’t sure until he was referred to as a “he.”
Almost every story in this book is strong, but this one was my favorite. High schoolers confronting impending death while also falling in love seems to be a popular theme in manga (Socrates in Love and more recently I Want to Eat Your Pancreas come to mind), but this is the first BL I’ve read that takes it on.
The strength in this story lies not in the theme though, but how she chooses to show it – and this goes for every story in the book. The text is sparse and more abstract than explanatory, occasionally even profound. There’s a lot of quiet emotion in her art that rewards the slow reader. Her strokes are light and flowy, and she often relies on paneling and composition to suggest how a character is feeling rather than facial expression.
The second story, “You at the End,” was a bit more abstract and I actually read it twice. Unari is a brooding high schooler who wants to spread his wings and leave his town and possibly the world altogether, but he’s grounded by a mute boy named Masariya who he met while skateboarding. They’re a very sweet couple and although Masariya can’t speak, you see his inner thoughts a lot, and Unari seems to have a way of sensing what his silent friend wants to say. I loved the design of both boys and the subtle strength of Masariya’s facial expressions.
The next two stories are actually not even shounen-ai at all or even BL, they’re shojo, yet they somehow both fit in this compilation. Both share the same characters; one is about a girl who wonders if she and a guy friend can always be “just friends,” and the other is about that same girl’s other friend who dates men for money. One of these is a younger lonely man whose wife was in an accident and is in a vegetative state, and she wishes his wife would just die because she’s fallen in love with him. That story I especially liked, it was heavy and I really felt for every character.
The next one is a little silly and feels a little out of place amongst the more serious stories, but I guess it’s nice to have some variety so the whole thing isn’t such a depression fest. The last one I also had to read twice; it’s about an abused boy named Akira who learns to rely on his friends and be open to love. Damn, Yumeka just pelting us with these really serious themes, one after the other. It has a great line at the beginning I really liked too: “The past gradually grows ever more beautiful in our memories, and our dreams for the future gradually shrink and are reduced in scale by the weight of passing time.” I wonder if she ever wrote any light novels? She has a nice way with words.
Yumeka is a prolific artist that has done everything from BL to seinen to shojo, and also publishes under the names Sahara Mizu and Sahara Keita. We have at least two of her non-BL works in English, Voices of a Distant Star from the 00s, and the back-from-the-dead Tokyopop is actually publishing one of her more recent works, A Tail’s Tale which is a…comedy drama seinen? Her work often seems to defy neat categorizations I guess. I’m really glad her work is still getting attention though!
TL;DR: Yumeka excels at telling subtle and emotional stories with a gentle artstyle, unique compositions and paneling, and sparse text that is more philosophical than explanatory and occasionally even profound. Her work can be a little too abstract for me sometimes but it’s a nice artistic breath of fresh air in both a medium and a genre that often prefers to deal in well-worn cliches.