Tag Archives: Nana

Nanananananananananananananananana

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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.

Nana #5

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This review first appeared in The Comics Journal

Every volume of Ai Yazawa’s shojo manga series *Nana* has at least one sequence that will break your heart. In #5 it occurs towards the end. Ditzy protagonist Nana Komatsu is about to have a one-night stand with Takumi, a rock-star on whom she’s had a long-standing crush. While she’s in his hotel room, she gets a phone call from her roommate, Nana Osaki. Up till this point, Nana K. has been trying to convince herself that she’s got the situation under control, that she’s fine with NSA sex, and that the whole thing will be a fun and memorable experience. But while on the phone she realizes she doesn’t want to tell her friend what she’s doing. We cut from a cartoonish Nana O. laughing airily to a more realistic close-up of Nana K.’s stricken face. She seems to become fully aware of her sense of shame at the same time as the reader does, and under the pressure of that recognition, the narrative slows down. The buttons of the cell-phone loom incongruously, and images of Nana O.’s eyes drift and dissolve into scenes of Nana K. in bed with Takumi. Nana K’s self-consciousness, her helplessness, and her dreamlike alienation from her own actions all seem frozen or crystallized by an overwhelming but ambivalent longing: for the rock-star Nana K. is having sex with, for the roommate she’s just lied to, for an abstract, unachievable love. It’s a gorgeous moment, blurring the boundaries between prose and poetry, pop and art, with a surety that’s rare in any medium — and one that is, alas, almost unheard of in comics, at least on this side of the Pacific.

Update: Perennial Hooded Utilitarian commenter and fine-writer-on-his-own-hook Tucker Stone has a comixology column up about Nana and my other favorite manga series Parasyte. Check it out.

Nana #7-#8

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I’ve reviewed various volumes of Ai Yazawa’s Nana before, so I thought I’d keep it up. (There are going to be spoilers, incidentally — be warned.)

I just read #7-8, and they seem to be something of a watershed for the series. The series has always followed on both Nana’s (Nana Komatsu, or Hachi, and Nana Osaki), who live together and have recently become close friends. Up to this point, though, Hachi has been the narrator and we’ve been more inside her head. In 8 though, Nana O starts to give the earnest (and somwhat irritating, I’m forced to admit) voice overs. More importantly, she starts to reveal more of herself. It’s been clear for awhile that Hachi has an enormous crush on Nana; she’s fascinated with her music, with her confidence, and with her general hipster vibe. Nana has always seemed very fond of Hachi, but it’s been leavened with a bit of condescension and amusement — certainly she hasn’t appeared to be infatuated. When she kissed Hachi earlier in the series, it was a way to freak her friend out, not an actual expression of borderline desire.

But in 7 and 8, the perspective shifts slightly, and the relationship between Hachi and Nana is subtly but definitely upended. As we get more inside Nana’s head, it becomes clear that her occasional coldness towards Hachi isn’t because she’s aloof, but because she’s shy. While Nana has a long-term boyfriend, and seems very capable of dealing with male friends, her intense reaction to Hachi has completely befuddled her. After a moment of toying with the idea, the book sets aside the suggestion that Nana’s emotions are sexual, but they are certainly possessive and seem in some ways to be more powerful than what she feels for her boyfriend. She rather desperately tries to set Hachi up with Nobu, who is Nana’s childhood friend and bandmate, because she hopes to keep Hachi in her circle permanently. When (and here’s the spoiler) Hachi spoils that by accidentally getting pregnant by another man named Takumi, Nana quietly but completely freaks out.

What’s particularly heart-tugging here is that, for all her sincere depth of emotion, Nana is (as she seems to fear) too wrapped up in her own anxieties and self-doubts to actually help Hachi — who, it seems quite possible, wouldn’t have been sleeping with Takumi if she hadn’t felt that things with Nana were quite so unrequited. And when she hears about Hachi’s pregnancy, Nana basically runs away. It’s up to Hachi’s friend Juno (little seen since the first volume) to provide advice and reassurance — which she does in one of the most amazing scenes in the series. Juno’s completely ruthless (“This is what you get for sleeping around and being carless! Do you understand that!”) but also loving and helpful, offering actual clarity and insight rather than bullshit platitudes. She, too, seems freaked out (“I can’t believe she’s having a baby…I’m so worried I could puke.”) But she puts her own shit aside for her friend. Nana can’t do that — which is heartbreaking, not just for Hachi, for for Nana as well.

The art is, as always, amazingly subtle; Juno’s stricken expression in particular just kills me, and the layout and design couldn’t be much better. This is the bestselling manga in Japan, and no wonder — it’s just about perfect.

My Romance Is Your Romance — Nana review

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A shorter version of this article was published in (I think) June 2006 in the Chicago Reader.

My Romance Is Your Romance

Romance novels are popular genre fiction written for women with literary credibility just north of People Magazine. Comics are a mostly ignored medium which, despite increasing aesthetic bonafides, are still often thought of as being aimed at under-12s. Put them together and you get…romance comics! Air-headed picture stories designed for young girls, which nobody actually reads, but everyone can sneer at.

Or so it was until a decade or so ago. But recently, romance comics have been helped enormously by the fact that they are no longer called “romance comics” at all — instead, they’re called “shoujo manga,” and they’re mostly imported from Japan. Under cover of the new nomenclature and exotic place of origin, femme heartbreak has been gaining in both popular and critical acceptance. Titles like “Chobits” have actually hit the Bookscan best-seller list for *paperbacks*, not just graphic novels. Last year the relentlessly snooty *Comics Journal* devoted an entire issue of mostly favorable criticism to shoujo. And a couple of months ago Columbia College housed a touring exhibit of shoujo manga, which was favorably reviewed in the Reader by art critic Bert Stabler.

Both the *Comics Journal* and the *Reader* focused mostly on the ways in which shoujo differs from occidental comics, Stabler, for example, pointed out that shoujo comics “aggressive search for perfection and macabre sexual energy subtly undermine superficial Western notions of the feminine.” I don’t disagree with that — with its gender-swapping, same-sex love, and ravishing imagery, shoujo can be both disorienting and other-worldly. But it’s also true that a lot of the appeal of these titles is due, not to their alienness, but to their familiarity.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the best-selling shoujo title in Japan, Ai Yazawa’s *Nana.* Nana is Japanese for seven; it’s also the name of the two main characters. Nana Osaki (nicknamed “Hachi”) is a ditzy, needy, materialist, transparent young woman who heads to Tokyo to shack up with her boyfriend Shoji. Nana Komatsu is an ambitious, aloof, street-hardened, secretive young woman who goes to the big city
to become a bad-ass rock star. Through a series of improbable coincidences, the two end up as first roommates and then friends.

Japan isn’t America, and there are many touches to remind you of that in the series. In the first place, as in most manga these days, the art has not been reversed for English translation, so the pictures scan from right to left, which can be a little disorienting at first. And, content-wise, there are lots of cultural references that don’t quite scan. For instance, Nana K. constantly namechecks the Sex Pistols, a reminder that, though punk is dead in the West, no one has bothered to tell the Japanese.

But these are little more than touches of exotic color; overall *Nana* makes perfect sense for a U.S. audience. Ai Yazawa’s designs are elegant, accessible, and always serve the narrative, rather than vice versa, as is sometimes the case in shoujo. Not that narrative is exactly the point, either. Instead, the storyline, while necessary, is not nearly as important as who the characters are and how they interact. As in porn or martial arts flicks, plot is just a way to deliver the goods: in this case, unrequited love, heartbreak, and tearful reconciliation. In short, if you like melodrama, from Georgette Heyer to the O.C., *Nana* should be just the thing.

That isn’t to denigrate Yazawa’s work; on the contrary she is an absolute first-rate romance writer, which is no small praise. *Paradise Kiss*, her first translated series, was a heart-tugging weeper about the fashion industry with a (mostly) lovable collection of idiosyncratic misfits, a fairy-tale ending that never quite arrives, and heaping dollops of bitter and sweet larded out with exquisite immoderation.

By those standards, *Nana*’s first two volumes were a little plodding, but the latest collection gets up to speed with a brutal love-triangle. Nana O.’s boyfriend, Shoji, is attracted by a new girl at his workplace named Sachiko. The set-up is pedestrian enough, but the execution is flawless. Even though Nana is the central character, Yazawa is careful to make both Shoji and Sachiko sympathetic as well: in fact, if anything, whiny, bi-polar Nana is the least likeable of the three. Sachiko, on the other hand, is thoughtful, sweet, and desperately trying to hold onto her self-respect in her role as the other woman. Shoji, too, is hard to hate; Yazawa is a vivid depicter of facial expressions, and throughout the comic Shoji’s face conveys, by turns, horror, despair, confusion, and numb resignation. His main sin is that he doesn’t want to hurt anyone; as a result, he methodically breaks everyone’s heart, including his own.

Great as the central drama is, it’s only a small part of what makes the volume so compelling. Yazawa’s story unfolds in a leisurely manner, but it’s filled with details, subplots, asides, and minor characters. The world she creates seem real, and new developments and emotional subcurrents have time to arise naturally out of what has come before. For example, we know from Volume 1 that Nana O. is so emotionally volatile that she falls for just about every third guy she sees. Her (mostly) platonic crush on the charismatic Nana K.in Volume 3 is, therefore, entirely believable. Nana K.’s response — a mix of exasperation, affection, and good-natured exploitation — is also in character. The scene where the two kiss is one of the funniest moments in the book.

There are lots of other great scenes as well, but they’re difficult to describe succinctly, in part because, like the kiss, they’re all as much about the slow build-up as they are about the climax. Attention to detail is a hallmark of shoujo in general, and of Yazawa’s work in particular. From her careful plotting to her lusciously painted covers, from her gorgeous renderings of clothing to her seamless transitions between emotive close-ups and cartoony slapstick, everything in Nana screams craftsmanship. And it’s this craftsmanship, rather than any nuances of content, that really separates shoujo from most romance on the market today — or, indeed, from most Western comics.

It is possible to find similar combinations of high caliber skill tied to affairs of the heart in the West if you go back a bit, of course — Jane Austen’s novels come to mind, or even the screwball comedy films of the 30s and 40s. Nana isn’t necessarily that good, at least not yet. But there are 15 volumes and counting in Japan, and the series has been getting better as it goes along. It’s certainly worth sticking around to find out. And if you just can’t wait till Volume 4, you can try tracking the story chapter by chapter; it’s currently being serialized in Viz’s anthology title ShojoBeat.