Daily Chatter

As we all gear up for the Fumi Yoshinaga Manga Moveable Feast, I must ask the inevitable, almost impossible question. What’s your favorite Yoshinaga work in translation?

Every time I try to come up with an answer, another title clears its throat to reassert its worthiness. And Kodansha hasn’t yet let me read What Did You Eat Yesterday? How can I possibly make a fully informed choice until that title is available in English?

But you might be more decisive than I am, so feel free to hold forth in the comments!

While it’s never a bad time to consider Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket (Tokyopop), the fact that this feast has fallen on the calendar shortly after the opening of the final movie in the Harry Potter series offers some other possibilities for thought. J.K. Rowling’s novels are at least partly about breaking traditional and abusive cycles, as is Fruits Basket. Rowling builds that around a rivalry between a naïve outsider (Harry) and the person who represents the worst extremes of a flawed system (Tom Riddle). Takaya does the same, positioning Tohru against Akito.

Tohru goes fairly quickly from knowing nothing about the curse to recognizing its profound destructiveness. This gives her something of an advantage over Harry, who takes roughly forever to consider the larger implications of his grudge with Voldermort. It could be argued that Tohru displays an improbable degree of altruism, and that argument isn’t automatically wrong, but most of Tohru’s qualities appear to an improbable degree – her maternal concern, her optimism, her faith in the essential goodness of others, and her belief that things and people can change for the better.

With a few exceptions, I found Tom Riddle to be a very boring antagonist. His behaviors were certainly frightening, but I very rarely recognized anything in his point of view. In this sense, Akito has the advantage as a “villain.” The leader of the Sohma family is certainly unpredictable, powerful, and frightening, but there’s a very evident level of emotional damage. Akito isn’t the progenitor of the cycle of abuse so much as just another partial victim of it.

This highlights another interesting contrast between the two properties. Harry may briefly feel stabs of sympathy for the young Tom Riddle when he learns of his circumstances, but that never translates to an attempt to save the adult Voldermort from himself or to stop him through reformation. As Rowling constructs things, that’s a ludicrous notion. It isn’t in Takaya’s narrative, and it’s entirely credible that, in spite of Akito’s cruelties, Tohru can see Akito as a victim in need of rescue.

There are other points of comparison. Like Harry, Tohru has some untrustworthy mentors. Shigure is a weird fusion of Severus Snape and Sirius Black. He manipulates Tohru for his own ends, but he cares for her as an individual, not unlike Dumbledore does with Harry. Those ends will benefit all, but Shigure has no way of knowing how Tohru will end up when his aims are met. Tohru’s allies sometimes find her as frustratingly naïve as Harry’s companions do him. And both Harry and Tohru are fixated on absent parents.

I couldn’t possibly pick a favorite of the two sagas. Fruits Basket has a more nuanced villain, but Harry Potter conducts a volume of world-building that’s almost impossible to match. Takaya really nails a lot of complex emotional truths, perhaps at the expense of chapter-by-chapter momentum. Rowling excels at building things to a crescendo, but she’ll blunt emotional nuance along the way. Basically, I’m just glad I live in a world where I can enjoy both of them, over and over.

As I pondered this week’s Manga Moveable Feast, my thoughts naturally turned to poor old Yuki Sohma, one of the lead characters of Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket (Tokyopop). I can’t help but think of him as “poor old Yuki,” even though he has as nice an outcome as just about anyone in the manga. So why is that?

Well, it’s partly Takaya’s fault. For roughly the first half of the series, Yuki is enmeshed in a fairly intense love triangle with his outcast cousin, Kyo, and Tohru, the good-hearted orphan who’s changing the family’s dark destiny. At the midway point of the series, it becomes clear to readers (and Yuki) that he’s out of the running in that particular contest.

Of course, Takaya loves her characters, no matter how vile they may be, and, since Yuki is about as far from vile as any Sohma gets, Takaya uses the remainder of the series to present a series of consolation prizes. Yuki isn’t really central to the breaking of the family curse, but he can live his life in ways that support the value of breaking that curse. As I mentioned in comments on a previous post, there are two subsets of anti-curse folk in Fruits Basket. There are the aggressive, special-ops types like Tohru, Rin, and Shigure who actually take steps to end the damned thing.

Then there’s the “lead by example” type, the “live your lives, go to Disneyland, buy a new car” breed, embodied by Yuki. He may suspect that the rest of his life will be dominated by Sohma sorrow, but for now, he’s going to live as much on his own terms as he can. This is perfectly admirable, though it removes Yuki from the most emotionally resonant part of the narrative. And it forces him into frequent contact with his school’s student council. I get the point of this group, I really do; they’re “real” people outside of the Sohma bubble who have things to teach Yuki. I don’t even dislike them, except for Kimi, who refers to herself in the third person and hence must be destroyed.

And when you learn about Yuki’s specific pain, you want him to keep walking and never look back, no matter how many Kimis he stumbles across along the way.

Now, just about everyone in the series aside from Tohru had parents, particularly mothers, who couldn’t hold it together. They were either too weak to deal with their children’s tragedies, or they were too craven to care. Yuki’s mother falls into the latter category, and, Ren excluded, she’s probably as horrible as a parent gets in Takaya’s fictional universe. The worst thing about her is that her values are the exact opposite of what her sons need to be happy.

But, as I said, Yuki doesn’t let that deter him from pursuing his own values, even in the face of romantic disappointment. It’s perhaps appropriate that he breaks the curse cycle in a number of meaningful ways before the curse itself concludes, because Yuki is the type to do things on his own. That’s poor old Yuki’s burden, but it’s also his strength.

Natsuki Takaya introduces a whole lot of Sohmas over the course of Fruits Basket (Tokyopop). They come in all different emotional flavors – vulnerable, secretive, courtly, angry, bubbly, bratty, withdrawn, demented, you name it. Takaya gives them all a chance to move the reader, and they all pretty much fulfill that promise. There is one, however, who almost always broke my heart, mostly because he was so damned sneaky about it.

Momiji Sohma represents the rabbit in the Chinese Zodiac. Instead of going with the animal’s timidity, Takaya gives Momiji the rabbit’s bounciness. He’s the oldest child of a Japanese father and a German mother, so his speech patterns can sometimes seem a little formal, even precious. He’s older than he appears, a quality he uses to the irritation of his male cousins. When we first meet him, he’s all hoppity and adorable, landing gleefully in Tohru’s loving, motherly embrace. Like most wise-beyond-their-years cutie pies, there’s something a little off about Momiji, something a little creepy.

Of course, every character in Fruits Basket is a little off, a little creepy. They have good reason to be. And while most of the narrative is dedicated to revealing those reasons, Momiji’s reveal is the first, best example of Takaya’s sucker punch. “You think you’re looking at something cute, something maybe even cuter because it’s a little bit sad? I will give you sad.”

So the fluffy little bunny not only witnessed his mother’s mental disintegration and purposeful abandonment, he subjects himself to reminders of it as often as he can. This isn’t because Momiji is a masochist; it’s because he’s an optimist. Like Tohru, he believes that things can be fixed and connections can be restored as surely as they can be broken and severed. It’s not for nothing that, when Tohru is threatened, Momiji is right there by her side. They’re kindred spirits, and they’re both tougher than their exteriors and sweet natures would suggest.

For me, Momiji is the character who best embodies the truest nature of Fruits Basket: pretty on the surface but almost unbearably damaged beneath that, yet still possessed of the resources to make things work out in the end. I love a lot of the Sohmas for their sadness and their strength, but Momiji is my very favorite.

There are many evolving relationships in Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket (Tokyopop), familial and romantic. There’s the central love triangle consisting of brave and virtuous Tohru, princely Yuki, and black-sheep (or cat) Kyo. There’s the whole Sohma nightmare, with head of the family Akito trying to keep everyone’s relationships within and beyond the family under control, or at least unstable enough that they’ll never challenge the bonds of those who share the curse that helps drive the manga’s plot.

Of course, I’ve never been one to take sides in triangles. Few of them are especially plausible to me, because most of them require all choices be equal, which obviates the difficulty of choice (at least in a fictional context). In Fruits Basket, the putative triangle is so hopelessly stacked in the favor of one character that Takaya spends almost half of the series constructing consolation prizes for the odd man out. (It’s a generous impulse.)

But if the romantic geometry is a non-starter, there’s a different kind of triad that I love dearly, as illustrated below:

Love triangles may do nothing for me, but enduring platonic friendships put a lock on my attention as few other emotional dynamics can. That’s why I’m so crazy about Tohru’s never-say-die bond with former gang-girl Arisa Uotani and spooky psychic Saki Hanajima. Beyond being a nicely constructed blend of personality types – sweet, rambunctious, and eerie – Takaya makes their dynamic credible. It takes a while, but we learn how Tohru bonded with Uotani, and then Hanajima.

We also learn that Tohru’s mother, former gang-girl Kyoko, was central to these friendships. It’s a legacy of her loving bond with Tohru, that Tohru was able to extend those feelings to people who are so different from herself. It could be argued that Tohru’s ability to achieve such a rapport with Uotani and Hamajima proves that she can get through to anyone, even a creepy family that’s been cursed for centuries.

But that would diminish the pleasure of the friendship for its own sake. Takaya tries to insert a number of high-school mayhem into the narrative (when not expertly assaying family dysfunction), and very little of it works. Yuki’s fan club, the stupid student council, and so on… all of these aspects land with something of a thud, and it’s probably partly because Uotani and Hanajima are so eccentric and authentic at the same time, and their affection for Tohru is so sincere. Everything else that happens in the classroom feels like play-acting compared to this inseparable trio.

As I prepare for the Manga Moveable Feast featuring Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket (Tokyopop), one nagging thought keeps slightly tinging the pleasure of revisiting the series. I always felt that Fruits Basket was critically under-appreciated. Sure, the series always had its partisans who approached it with the seriousness I felt it deserved, but, on the whole, it seemed like it got dismissed as cute romance, which it stopped being about halfway through the third volume. That critical response might have been because of its demographic, and it might also have been because of its commercial success. (I think there’s a natural and often correct implication to look at an entertainment that makes a lot of money and be suspect of its likely quality. Still, there are plenty of examples of things that are both wildly popular and really good.)

So, for this random weekend question, which comics do you think are critically under-appreciated? What books do you think don’t get the admiration they deserve?

(As a reminder, the Fruits Basket Manga Moveable Feast will run from Sunday, July 24, 2011, through Saturday, July 30, 2011. If you’d like for me to host a piece here, I’d be more than happy to do so.)