Nanananananananananananananananana

I just picked up Ai Yazawa’s Nana 11 and 12, started reading them, and realized that I had totally forgotten the story (who is that sleeping with Reira? Is that a woman? What’s going on?) So I went back and reread 9 and 10 too. So now my head is filled with Nana. Various random thoughts:

Takumi is George
I hadn’t really grokked this before, but musical mastermind Takumi is totally another iteration of the brooding, ambitious, self-centered genius meme that Yazawa used for fashion-mastermind George in her earlier series Paradise Kiss. Like George, Takumi is very sympathetic — he had an unhappy childhood, and the fact that he’s generally such an unfeeling dick only adds poignancy to his more human moments.

What was great about George was that, though Yazawa was clearly into his whole brooding bad-boy anti-hero schtick, she never exactly let him off the hook for being such a jerk. He didn’t, for example, get the girl — instead the protagonist ends up with a nice, boring guy, who it’s clear is a much better person (in some sense) and will treat her a lot better. I guess I’m hoping for something similar to happen in Nana. Hachi (one of the main characters) is at the moment planning to marry Takumi in large part because she’s having a baby which is probably his. Takumi seems to care about her to some extent…but he’s also a control freak: he seems to have decided to marry her less out of love and more out of a jealous desire to keep her away from Nobu (who is the other possible father), and from Hachi’s roommate Nana. As if that’s not creepy enough, Takumi’s also way too committed to his hit band, Trapnest, (he tells Hachi that 90% of his brain is devoted to the band, not her…points for honesty, but not what you want to hear from your fiancee, I don’t think.)

Takumi is kind of a more complicated character than George, I think; there seems to be some room for the former to change, anyway. But I suspect that he’s going to get dumped by the wayside at some point, and end up the tragic lost love who lends a patina of romance and nostalgia to a more stable, more boring, and all-around better relationship. I’ve got my fingers crossed, anyway.

Losing Pot in Translation
I just have to say that Yazawa’s treatment of pot and the music industry is hard for me to follow. Everyone in the book seems really upset that Ren, the guitarist for Trapnest, smokes a lot of pot. The concern seems to be that it will interfere with his playing. This is bizarre: I mean, I think at this point there are probably more great musicians who smoked pot than those who didn’t. Every reggae star ever, and every rap star for the last ten years to start with. Louis Armstrong spent his entire life high, as far as I can tell. Pot certainly has downsides, but interfering with one’s musical abilities just isn’t one of them.

I guess that may sound nitpicky, but it connects to what has been one of my main stumbling blocks in the series, which is that the whole band milieu just doesn’t ring right at all. This really bothered me in 9 and 10 when I first read them; it seemed like Yazawa just didn’t know what she was talking about. Upon going through them again, though, I think that a lot of this must be cultural difference. For instance, Takumi actually says that if the press found out about Ren’s pot use, the band would be finished. In an American context, this would be laughable on its face, right? Rock Guitarist Smokes Pot! — who would be surprised by that, or even care? Similarly, the band is all worried that if Ren and Takumi get married at the same time, their female fans will be disappointed or angry. I just have trouble imagining that that would be the case in the U.S. — marriage just doesn’t seem to be any kind of barrier to being a sex symbol here (Brad Pitt? Angelina Jolie?)

Maybe it’s just me…but I really find this sort of thing fascinating. Everything with the rock star world is just slightly off. In the first place, in the U.S., Trapnest and Blast, which are huge pop successes for a young audience, would probably not even be rock; they’d be dance bands like N’Sync or something (not that there aren’t hugely successful rock bands, but the demographics just seem slightly off.) And while the media scrutiny would be intense, the things that would cause scandal (smoking pot, getting married) are just all wrong. And the band-members’ relationship with the label is weirdly deferential, almost like they’re employees — Ren and Nana even ask the label for permission to marry. And the label people are always telling Nana that her singing sucks, and everybody treats it as a joke — I don’t know, I just have trouble believing that this would happen in the U.S., even with a newly signed band. There’d have to be significantly more of a pretense that the artist was at least vaguely in control. (I’m not saying that press and labels and scandal aren’t huge motivating forces in American pop as well, but I just don’t think they’d play out quite this way…)

Fanboy Gushing
I think my favorite moment in these issues has to be the conversation in 10 between Hachi and Shin. Shin is a 15-year old gigolo whose mother abandoned him; I believe at one point in the series he wishes he hadn’t been born. Hachi, who’s pregnant, asks him for advice on how she can avoid the mistakes Shin’s mother made with her own child. Then Shin tells her he wishes he had been her child. It gets the full Yazawa tear-jerking treatment — giant close-ups, stricken expressions, beautiful washes of grey in the background. Made me choke up. (Second favorite moment: Nobu telling Nana to hurry up and apologize so he can go to sleep.)

Shin in general gets a lot of the best moments here; his secret relationship with 23-year old Reira is incredibly sweet, and soon he’s going to be 16, apparently, so the ick factor will be somewhat diminished (okay, maybe not.)

Nana continues to freak out at the prospect of Hachi marrying Takumi, who Nana hates. The way Yazawa has tilted that relationship is really masterful, and kind of at the core of the series so far. Originally, Hachi was portrayed as the little puppy-dog, following the more mature Nana around. Now it’s almost reversed; Nana wants Hachi to be hers (in a not completely platonic way), while Hachi is getting on with her life. It’s done very believably (Yasu has an off-hand remark where he notes that Nana has abandonment issues up the wazoo), and you really feel for Nana even as her desperation leads her to be more and more of an asshole basket-case. In some sense, the logical result here is for Nana and Hachi to get together and live happily ever after, since there’s is the most intense and central relationship of the series. Yazawa is fairly gay friendly — but not quite that gay friendly, I don’t think. (Though Nana and Hachi do get to sleep in the same bed in the bonus pages.)

Oh, and I love the “Days of Future Past” opening to volume 12, where we see maybe Hachi’s daughter in 6 years time interacting with all her friends. It’s not introduced at all and is completely disorienting — I couldn’t figure out what was going on at first. But what’s notable about it is how little you find out, and how low-key it is. I really liked that…it’s more like a quiet dream than a revelation.

In line with that future scenario…one of the great things about this series is that I don’t know what’s going to happen. Hachi really could marry Takumi; she could get back together with Nobu; she could end up with somebody else altogether, she could have the baby, she could have a miscarriage, Nana could marry Ren or Yasu or even Nobu, really….the story is complicated enough and thoughtful enough that it never veers into cliché or predictability. It’s also nice that I feel like I can trust Yazawa not to betray her characters for the sake of an idiotic plot twist, or just because she doesn’t know any better. That sort of thing happened all the time in Buffy, for example, and it happens constantly in super-hero comics. It’s the curse of serial drama, actually — the crushing of character beneath the remorseless wheels of plot. It’s why series tend to get worse and worse as they go along. But somehow, magically, Nana just gets better. (More or less…I still pledge my undying loyalty to volume 8….)

More Hooded Nana-blogging here and here. Oh yeah, and here.

0 thoughts on “Nanananananananananananananananana

  1. First off, I know that Chow Yun Fat is not Japanese, and that all asian cultures are not interchangeable. That being said: Chow Yun Fat apparently kept his marriage secret for multiple years, and the story goes that when it was busted out in the tabloids, three young women committed suicide.

    Again, what’s supposedly true for Yun Fat does not equal what’s true for Japanese pop stars. But it’s not the first time that sort of private life sublimation has come up in depictions of japanese pop celebrity–from what I remember, it was a big part of Perfect Blue.

    Either way, there’s somebody who knows whether what you pointed out–which bothers me too, the pot stuff especially–is a cultural thing or a lack of knowledge on Yazawa’s part.

  2. My other favorite is that China, as in the entire country, sold out of the trench coat and sunglasses he wore in the first Better Tomorrow almost immediately upon it’s release.

  3. Your constant boosting of this series has made me give in and order the first 2 volumes, despite my longstanding suspicion towards girly manga. It helps that the art I’ve seen looks gorgeous.

  4. Yay! My secret goal is to get enough people to buy it that some studio decides it’s worth it to release the movie here. And the anime. And the art book. And the CD. (Okay, I don’t really care about the CD.)

  5. You can get the Nana movies on DVD from Netflix — Viz put them out. The movies also had limited runs in Seattle. I wouldn’t be surprised if they popped up as a midnight screening or some such in your neck of the woods.

  6. Noah, you have to bear in mind that Japan is still a very rigid society when it comes to scandals and illegal drugs, even something like pot. In real life, a lot of celebrities have had their lives and careers destroyed when they were caught with marijuana. It’s still a huge stigma there, and Aizawa is consciously reflecting that.

  7. First I think I like more George tan Takumi, George might have been an ass to Yukari, but at the end when she told him she wouldn’t go with him because she wants to make dream to be model come true, he is genuinely happy for her. He was able to accept he wasn’t the best thing for her and they ended in peace. On the other side Takumi… well he took Nana too live with him because he doesn’t want her to let go, even if he won’t devote his attention to her, and Nana is kind of trapped in her decision not only because she feels she “loves” him, she doesn’t have a way to provide for her and her baby if she leaves him. Yazawa doesn’t glamorize this and one hopes Nana will dump him in the end and learn to take the bridles of her own life.

    And from the fandom, keep in mind that in Japan rockstars fandom are way more obsessive and sometimes they border on creepiness. When they adopt a band/artist they will buy all the record, all the singles, posters, plushies etc, but will feel entitled to believe the artist is the way they want him/her to be. They don’t accept when their idol decides to change music genre or career, as some singers who want to try acting sometimes don’t succeed, fans committing suicide also happened when Hide (X-japan, Spread Beaver) died, And in the case the artist of their choice gets a significant other they tend to see him/her as competition. In Nana’s , Nana and Ren relationship made public would have been a huge obstacle in Blast breaktrough, Nana would have been seen only as Ren’s girl, and Ren many fangirls would have been not only not interested in buying her records, they would have hate her actively treating her like a Yoko or a Courtney Love or in a twisted appropriately a Nancy Spungen.
    Nana’s manga is kind of a more jaded to the show business than most mangas are. Singers and bands once they get mainstream sometimes are changed in favor of getting a bigger audience, even the characters comment that. There is a point in a after a meet and greet with fans when one notices many if not most of their oldest fans are gone… forever, because now they are popular. Fame doesn’t make all your dreams true in Nana, having to uphold and image and trying everything to make the public not forget you is suffocating. Is no wonder Reira feels about to crack in any moment.

  8. Thanks for the Japanese culture insights, Adisakdi and Romanticide. The pot thing is especially interesting — though there must be some variation in bands too. I mean, if Ghost doesn't do just buckets and buckets of pot, I'd be pretty surprised.

    Tucker, the choke/fuck scene just isn't one of my favorites. S&M to connote dangerous relationship – eh. It's certainly been done more offensively (see Buffy), but it's not something that necessarily thrills me.

    Thanks for the Nana movie update Kristy; I will get it from Netflix! (and we almost have a quorum of comixology columnists on this thread to boot.)

  9. Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that I did, but I can see how wording it that way gives it the impression I do. That’s been my least favorite moment of the entire series. It’s the only time, short of those “bonus pages” where I felt yanked out of what is usually a delightful immersion.

  10. It was also weird when the Black Stones got signed and they were sent into the countryside to do team-building exercises.

    Also, (mild spoiler) later on Ren is shown with a few grams of unnamed pills (E? Special K? Oxy?), so his drug habit isn’t quite so ridiculous.

  11. True, for punk rockers Nana’s bunch are rather demure and retiring aren’t they? They don’t have that “Burn Thatcher to the ground” thing their British idols did. You know, I just finished watching Linda Linda Linda, a movie about Japanese high school girls who form a cover band and found out about The Blue Hearts. They’re supposed to be punk rock, but they’re kind of peppy for their genre (The movie is also peppy in a fun Jim Jarmusch way). Still, the song is kind of catchy and is apparently some kind of beloved classic.

  12. If you watch the extras on that Linda Linda Linda DVD, they explain that The Blue Hearts were banned on TV for a year for spitting into TV cameras. Also, when the drummer for L’Arc~En~Ciel(a band that has had their songs used for for video games and anime) got busted for drugs, CDs were pulled from shelves, their songs were replaced, etc. (I’m cribbing that info from Otaku USA and Wikipedia). So, yeah, Japanese band antics seem pretty tame, but bands face really harsh consequences.

  13. Thanks Kristy. That’s pretty fascinating.

    I have L’Arc en Ciel CDs actually. They are…not very good. And they’re not punk in any usual sense of the term. I think they’re actually what Blast, Trapnest, etc. are supposed to sound like, more or less. It’s all a genre called Jpop; sort of overproduced pop music yearning to be rock. I mean, there’s lots of awesome actual punk music in Japan (I think Melt Banana’s still around, aren’t they?) but I don’t know that it’s on the charts.

    And I’m still convinced that Ghost smokes lots and lots of pot.

  14. Yea J-pop is pretty damn intolerable, for the most part. I think, like here, most of the really great Japanese music exists outside the mainstream. I mean, I don’t think Ghost are very popular in Japan, are they? If you like them Noah, you should also check out Acid Mothers Temple if you haven’t already — really insane psych-rock freakouts. Of course, Japanese musicians also make noise like no one else in the world: Merzbow, Guilty Connector, Government Alpha, Astro. All pretty far from J-pop though.

    And yes Melt-Banana’s still around and still rule, as do the Boredoms, even though they’re more psych than punk these days.

  15. I'm a fan of Acid Mother's Temple and the Boredoms.

    I actually like mainstream U.S. pop more than indie rock at this point. Contemporary R&B is a ton better than J-pop. I make the case for it here if you’re interested.