Rerun post: If a picture paints a thousand words

This is a rerun post from my (Jo's) old blog - I wrote this in 2012, planning to read more manga. I've picked up the odd thing since then but I'm suddenly craving new manga reccs so please let me know if you have any. 

When I looked at the post on my old blog, there was a comment from Maili aka @mcvane who used to blog as The Fancy Reader. She was a brilliant blogger and I really miss her voice. She wrote a post for me on her blog in response to this with a bunch of reccs but when I clicked on it, I found it doesn't exist anymore, which made me sad.

Miss you, Maili ❤

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I'm very much a manga novice and for that reason, I've been reluctant to blog about the few manga romance books I've read. You can simply read these books, of course, but the fact is that there's a very involved cultural lexicon to navigate (see for example here). It's hugely fascinating, and, to someone who's only scratched the surface, somewhat intimidating in terms of writing about the pretty complex and difficult-to-capture reactions I've experienced reading such books.

I'm going to talk here about one of the 20-or-so manga novels I've read (all on Kindle), a Yaoi novel called Tired of Waiting for Love. See the English language cover above and the original below.

Ok, so first, as a romance, I liked this book quite a bit. It features what appears to be a number of staple components on certain Yaoi reads. Ex-Yakuza hero Sawaragi (the tall one) meets male prostitute Shuuya in prison. Though drawn to him, he refuses all intimacy with Shuuya and, determined to go straight on his release, even to meet up with him when they are both out of prison. However, fate throws them together and when Shuuya is in trouble and needs a place to stay, Sawaragi reluctantly offers him one. Gradually Sawaragi comes round to the idea of a relationship with Shuuya but not until Shuuya changes his self-destructive way of life.

The first part of the book - which is set in prison - is quite explicit and some might find it offputting, particularly in a romance given the action doesn't happen between both heroes. The remaining two thirds of the book is a quite sweet romance between the main characters in which each comes to see their own value through the feelings of the other protagonist - admittedly one of my favourite forms of resolution.

Like other Yaoi novels I've read, the words are few, the characters laconic. Even the internal narratives of the characters are very sparing - yet the words that are used are often very illuminating. Not in the least bit reserved either. Sentimental - mawkish even, some might say. The book begins with with Shuuya stumbling along a dark street after being beaten up and musing: I have always lived my life the way that I wanted to live, but the water that I was led to drink that should have been sweet was always bitter. Hey God... Just once won't you let me taste that sweet water too?

Of course, this doesn't give you the full sense of the impact of the words which requires the marrying up of text with artwork, and specifically the timing of the pictures to the text boxes (the quoted passage covers two pages, several artwork panels and four text boxes. On the first page - which takes us up to always bitter in the section quoted above - we see Shuuya walking along a dark street. Up ahead, a man is smoking in a doorway. On the second page, a close up on each protagonist as their eyes meet and they recognise one another. It made me think a lot about gaps and timing and pauses, on which I've mused before here).

I loved the artwork in this book. The whole tone of it is quite melancholy until close to the end and that's reflected in the characters' expressions. See the panel below which was, unfortunately, the only panel I could find online - it wouldn't have been my first choice as a sample but it's reasonably representative. You can see what I mean, I hope. This is quite early on in the book and when I first saw this panel, I wrinkled my nose at the absurd cutsiness of it. However, I ended up liking what the author did with it - the two heroes debate through out the book how you should treat a stray cat, with Sawaragi arguing that it's unfair to take a stray in that you can't commit to (You are not supposed to hold a lonely cat) and Shuuya arguing that even one night's kindness is better than nothing (I'd be fine with a temporary kindness. It's better than not ever having known kindness).

What I liked most about this book though - or actually not really about the book itself, but about reflecting on it for this blog post - is how much is going on when you 'read' a graphic novel. How smart the artwork is. Look at that panel below. You see how internalised Shuuya is in the moment; you read his thoughts not just through his revealing comment but through the body and facial language. Then Sawaragi below him. You don't need to be told that he's looking at Shuuya with the cat - you know that intuitively. The expression is quite flat and guarded yet very telling. I see in the very precise droop of his eyelids many things: understanding, reservation, a sense of things already having gone too far to stop, reluctant compassion.

Conclusion: I enjoyed reading this and want to read more manga romance. I found that I used different parts of my brain to process the material but felt like I got the same ultimate pay-off that I get from prose novels. The delivery of the story in a different way (for me) made it feel fresh and exciting. Also, having read a few manga novels now, I'm getting excited with the new concepts and ideas it offers. The lure of learning a new genre-language is powerful.  So, reccs pls!