Manga Rec: Fumi Yoshinaga
Apr. 27th, 2010 11:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluejeans07Right now, Fumi Yoshinaga is probably one of my favorite storytellers. I know I've talked about her manga a few times before in previous entries (mostly about food and cooking), but this is a more in depth entry about why I love her and why she's just awesome.
The great thing about her is that her manga transcends genre. While Yoshinaga is mostly grouped with yaoi (boylove) manga and shoujo (girl) manga, her stories are strong, honest stories about people who don't always succeed of have their life turn out the way they expect to, and how they develop and change because of that. Also, despite the yaoi manga labeling on most of her work, her stories aren't porn, they're complicated human life stories that have love scenes.
She's also clearly writing about the things she loves and interested in. Her love of food often shows up in her stories, especially in 'Antique Bakery' and 'What Did You Eat Yesterday', which involves not only recipes, but also thoughts on how food brings people together, and how different ingredients influence different outcomes. Also, her love of classical music and Mozart shows up in her manga 'Solfege'. But what she seems truly interested in is history, her manga series 'Gerard and Jacques' and 'Lovers in the Night' both take place in France, before and during the Revolution. As a huge nerd about the French Revolution myself, it was interesting to see her write such passionate stories about the love between the couples and how the different parts and people of the Revolution would change their lives. Most yaoi manga take place in the modern day with predictable couplings, but Yoshinaga dares to be different, gives her manga actual plot and meaningful characters, and throws them into real danger during a horrible civil war.
But her shining achievement to me is 'Ooku: The Inner Chambers'. This series is so, so brilliant. Basically, a disease spreads over feudal Japan that only affects young men, causing a huge drop of men for generations in a male dominant society. The storytelling in this manga series is phenomenal, it begins its focus on a single male character who enters the harem of the Shogun (who is a woman), then slowly starts to expand. The reader is then taken through the history of how a woman came to be the Shogun, but is also being shown glimpses of Japan with consequences of the disease, and how these consequences end up shaping Japan's destiny with the world. Historically, Japan remained isolation from the rest of the world for a very long time, which Yoshinaga weaves into her story and explains that the reason for this isolation is due to the disease and fear of attack from foreign countries.
(This plot could be compared to Brian K. Vaughn's 'Y: The Last Man', but I end up preferring 'Ooku' to 'Y'. Both of them are heavy stories about a severe drop in the male population, but Yoshinaga's main cast of characters retain their humanity and show to be a lot more intelligent compared to Vaughn's. Both casts are shown to have a reasonable amount of power in their respective worlds, but while Vaughn's lead character Yorick consistently persists in his goal of finding his girlfriend Beth (causing trouble and death to the people in his party), Yoshinaga's lead character Arikito channels his own selfishness and turns it into compassion for those around him, thereby indirectly making that version of Japan into a more peaceful place compared to the chaotic, war-torn world of Y.)
Speaking of characters, Yoshinaga never reuses her characters or character stereotypes in her stories. While a large majority of her characters are men (and a significant amount of them turn out to be lawyers especially in her more modern stories), each character she creates is unique, interesting, and flawed. And while there are a lot less lead women in her stories, all of her women characters are interesting and different, just as interesting as their male counterparts. She can write women stories and has, especially in 'All My Darling Daughters' which is excellent.
Okay, so I have to talk about the art as well because yeah, I'm an artist. Anyway, she is definitely a better writer than she is an artist, her characters do look very similar to each other that they can be categorized in terms of appearance. A lot of her characters have the same bodies, faces, and hairstyles, so personality becomes their distinguishing feature. But while her characters and backgrounds are simply drawn, she's very masterful about pacing in her comic. Her page layouts are wonderfully done and diverse, the amount of panels are used thoughtfully to make sure to convey and pace the story properly, from slow to fast, and she delivers the right amount of impact in the different panel sizes. I wouldn't call her comics 'cinematic' (which is a word often used to describe comics) because 'cinematic' implies motion, and Yoshinaga's comics are definitely more stagnant and controlled, but these aren't flaws at all. Rather, she's so good at what she can do that it's the reader who's the one in motion and goes through the journey that the characters go on.
The American comics industry has taken notice of her as well. She has been nominated twice for Eisners in different years, one in 2007 for 'Antique Bakery' in the category of "Best U.S. Edition of International Material - Japan", and one in 2008 for 'Best Writer/Artist'. But yeah, if you guys have read through this whole long rambling, I congratulate you all! If you are in the area and want to borrow any of her manga from me, I will HAPPILY SHARE AND SPREAD THE LOVE.
The great thing about her is that her manga transcends genre. While Yoshinaga is mostly grouped with yaoi (boylove) manga and shoujo (girl) manga, her stories are strong, honest stories about people who don't always succeed of have their life turn out the way they expect to, and how they develop and change because of that. Also, despite the yaoi manga labeling on most of her work, her stories aren't porn, they're complicated human life stories that have love scenes.
She's also clearly writing about the things she loves and interested in. Her love of food often shows up in her stories, especially in 'Antique Bakery' and 'What Did You Eat Yesterday', which involves not only recipes, but also thoughts on how food brings people together, and how different ingredients influence different outcomes. Also, her love of classical music and Mozart shows up in her manga 'Solfege'. But what she seems truly interested in is history, her manga series 'Gerard and Jacques' and 'Lovers in the Night' both take place in France, before and during the Revolution. As a huge nerd about the French Revolution myself, it was interesting to see her write such passionate stories about the love between the couples and how the different parts and people of the Revolution would change their lives. Most yaoi manga take place in the modern day with predictable couplings, but Yoshinaga dares to be different, gives her manga actual plot and meaningful characters, and throws them into real danger during a horrible civil war.
But her shining achievement to me is 'Ooku: The Inner Chambers'. This series is so, so brilliant. Basically, a disease spreads over feudal Japan that only affects young men, causing a huge drop of men for generations in a male dominant society. The storytelling in this manga series is phenomenal, it begins its focus on a single male character who enters the harem of the Shogun (who is a woman), then slowly starts to expand. The reader is then taken through the history of how a woman came to be the Shogun, but is also being shown glimpses of Japan with consequences of the disease, and how these consequences end up shaping Japan's destiny with the world. Historically, Japan remained isolation from the rest of the world for a very long time, which Yoshinaga weaves into her story and explains that the reason for this isolation is due to the disease and fear of attack from foreign countries.
(This plot could be compared to Brian K. Vaughn's 'Y: The Last Man', but I end up preferring 'Ooku' to 'Y'. Both of them are heavy stories about a severe drop in the male population, but Yoshinaga's main cast of characters retain their humanity and show to be a lot more intelligent compared to Vaughn's. Both casts are shown to have a reasonable amount of power in their respective worlds, but while Vaughn's lead character Yorick consistently persists in his goal of finding his girlfriend Beth (causing trouble and death to the people in his party), Yoshinaga's lead character Arikito channels his own selfishness and turns it into compassion for those around him, thereby indirectly making that version of Japan into a more peaceful place compared to the chaotic, war-torn world of Y.)
Speaking of characters, Yoshinaga never reuses her characters or character stereotypes in her stories. While a large majority of her characters are men (and a significant amount of them turn out to be lawyers especially in her more modern stories), each character she creates is unique, interesting, and flawed. And while there are a lot less lead women in her stories, all of her women characters are interesting and different, just as interesting as their male counterparts. She can write women stories and has, especially in 'All My Darling Daughters' which is excellent.
Okay, so I have to talk about the art as well because yeah, I'm an artist. Anyway, she is definitely a better writer than she is an artist, her characters do look very similar to each other that they can be categorized in terms of appearance. A lot of her characters have the same bodies, faces, and hairstyles, so personality becomes their distinguishing feature. But while her characters and backgrounds are simply drawn, she's very masterful about pacing in her comic. Her page layouts are wonderfully done and diverse, the amount of panels are used thoughtfully to make sure to convey and pace the story properly, from slow to fast, and she delivers the right amount of impact in the different panel sizes. I wouldn't call her comics 'cinematic' (which is a word often used to describe comics) because 'cinematic' implies motion, and Yoshinaga's comics are definitely more stagnant and controlled, but these aren't flaws at all. Rather, she's so good at what she can do that it's the reader who's the one in motion and goes through the journey that the characters go on.
The American comics industry has taken notice of her as well. She has been nominated twice for Eisners in different years, one in 2007 for 'Antique Bakery' in the category of "Best U.S. Edition of International Material - Japan", and one in 2008 for 'Best Writer/Artist'. But yeah, if you guys have read through this whole long rambling, I congratulate you all! If you are in the area and want to borrow any of her manga from me, I will HAPPILY SHARE AND SPREAD THE LOVE.
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Date: 2010-04-28 04:19 am (UTC)