30Days: Endless World, Man of Tango
Sorry for the lateness; life got in the way!
Title: Endless World
Artist: Jaryuu Dokuro
Warnings: Explicit sexual content, drug use, rape, disturbing content, incest
Status: ongoing, scanlated by Vices and Devices
Description: A series of interconnected shorts, Endless World revolves around the acquaintances and life of Toshimitsu, a two-bit druggie/hoodlum. Toshimitsu eventually ends up (and dies) in prison, leaving his cousin Ryuu to pick up the pieces and reimagine his life through Toshimitsu's best friend, Ikki.
Reason for recommendation: Wooo boy. Let's start with the easy stuff. Jaryuu Dokuro's artwork is not entirely off the beaten track, but it is weird, full of slanted squinty eyes, large noses, narrow lips, and most of all, this sort of desperate apocalyptic air, like you're watching the first few vibrant moments of a gangster movie before the big boss dies and it all goes to the hell and the main character finds his true love kidnapped and tortured. With Endless World more than any of the other works, there's this fascination with seeing the ghost of someone, the remains of someone as seen by someone else. Ryuu comes to Ikki to see Toshimitsu, or, well, to see "Toshimitsu", as Ikki knew him, but in Ryuu, Ikki is able to bid farewell to what you could argue was his first love, even though I'm sure Ikki would never say as much. And that's part of the power of Jaryuu Dokuro, that you're carried way on this wave of reality that is more than reality. Jaryuu's art is the closest I have come to finding "cinematic" in black and white comic art. It is wonderfully kinetic and active.
Then the more difficult stuff: the writing is sharp, sharper than razors. For instance: the second chapter which begins with a list of drugs. Chapter three, which ends in the beginning of the story, with Toshimitsu. Chapter five, which, well, is like all the horrible and beautiful things of Requiem for a Dream, Fight Club, Bret Easton Ellis, and Shunji Iwai's Picnic all rolled into one. Jaryuu Dokuro has a finely tuned ear for mixing monologues with dialogues, with multiple narrators, no less. I'll admit that I don't like the way the chapters are paced or cut off (and what in the world is that prologue supposed to add to the story?), but if you read them as if there were no chapter breaks, they're wonderful.
Finally, the most difficult stuff. Endless World is a story about violence, losing yourself in drugs, mindless sex with a minor, the kind of love that takes apart a person and puts you back together. It's about the darkness that's inherent in relinquishing control, and the brightness that happens when you realize there's someone to give that control back to you. It's about grieving together, and grieving apart. It's not pretty. It's sometimes deeply disturbing. (I mean, just look at those warnings.) But life is not always pretty and is sometimes deeply disturbing. There is this strange decoupling of romance and sex in this story that manages to be more touching than I ever bargained for. This is not the manga I would go to if I just wanted my brain to hang out and veg. But there is a whole world out there of deeply emotional and deeply moving stories to tell, and that world exists in bl manga too, and god if Jaryuu Dokoru isn't one of the best. I promise you, if you want that from your bl manga, Endless World will deliver in spades.
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Title: The Man of Tango
Artist: Okadaya Tetuzoh
Warnings: Explicit sexual content
Status: completely scanlated by Nakama
Description: [from baka-udpates] Angie, though hailed as "The Man of Tango," had never truly felt the deep, fiery passion of Latin dance. That is, until he met Hiro, a man born from a Latin mother, who was under his Japanese grandfather's custody and now lives as a Japanese citizen. Now, a slow, seething desire begins to rock his body and soul! At first feeling a nostalgic familiarity toward the Latin dancer, Hiro finds himself drawn into the seductive beat of a Latin dance, opening his body and heart to the smoldering heat of his tango partner.
Reason for recommendation: So perhaps this is outside of the beaten track because, uh, it's bara, and not really bl manga anyway. And perhaps I only like it because i think est em and Okadaya Tetuzoh and basso/Ono Natsume should battle it out for nontraditional stories with European/Latin flair. And maybe I just like people waxing lyrical about dancing.
Or maybe The Man of Tango really is just that good. Let's just assume it's this last reason.
I admit to having recently been dragged to see Eat, Pray, Love, the movie. I didn't really like it. (Actually, I kind of... hated it...) But I did come away with it thinking, oddly enough, of The Man of Tango. Specifically, in two parts: the first, where Julia Robert's character Liz is being seduced by James Franco's David, who is a second-rate actor but manages to charm Liz simply by looking at her and then slowly circling her in a bar. The second, when the ever lovely Javier Bardem as Felipe lays the Brazilian charm thick and heavy on Liz. Angie, of The Man of Tango, is both of these men. In fact, I'd hazard to say that the key to loving The Man of Tango is to let yourself be pulled into Angie's love, just as Hiro does. Without this love, it is impossible to understand the charm of The Man of Tango--or rather, to see it as anything more than a meandering bara manga with too much tango terminology.
Hiro is everything you want from a man who gets seduced by Angie. He is innocent in that lovable "junjou" kind of way, slightly repressed, completely hapless, and yet smoldering underneath with a passion that attracts Angie. Angie, on the other hand, is the mothering, solitary, sexy, feminine and masculine, wholly artist, partial guru that you wish could sweep you away just as he sweeps Hiro. And the way they meet, the first time they have sex, in fact the entire story, feels like some sort of stolen pleasure, a kind of love affair that you don't want to explain to anyone else. Hiro and Angie circle each other, then meet in the middle, then pull away, then reach an emotional climax. There is plenty of wine and dancing in between, and Angie's good friend Bene (who is drawn so muscular and so broad and so well-built that I almost did a double-take when I saw her breasts), and shoes, and tango music. It is a strange story in that there is almost no discernible beginning nor end. It is a little slice, a little cutaway, of Angie and Hiro's coexistence. You don't get to see all of it, because it's their life, not yours.
What strikes me as fascinating about both Endless World and The Man of Tango is this constant flirtation with narrative consistency in both. Endless World paints Toshimitsu through Ikki and Ryuu, and yet fleshes out Ikki through Ryuu's stories of Toshimitsu and Toshimitsu's memories, which are conveyed in brief flashes of Toshimitsu to himself. Who is the story really about? Who gets to tell it? The Man of Tango is the same way. You discover Hiro through his own experiences with his grandfather, but then you find Angie in them when Angie helps Hiro mend. Angie finds Hiro through an explanation of the hunger inherent in tango, but it's tango that explains Angie to Hiro. And there's that extra, of Hiro's gym friends, which is a whole other side to Hiro that merely hints as his relationship with Angie (well, that is, until the viewpoint switches back over to Hiro). Is it a sign of lazy writing? Or just showing you playfully the facets of the story you couldn't get just through Hiro or Hiro's friends or Angie or Bene?
The Man of Tango (and Okadaya Tetuzoh always) is full of sensuality, lips and hair and articles of clothing pushed up or pulled down, and Angie's face, so knowing and a little bit smug, the curves of a man's spine when pushed against a knee. And tango, of course. If est em wrote about dance (including, of course, tango) as a raw force of melancholy and high tragedy and sacrifice and sometimes calculated cruelty, Okadaya's tango is warm and intimate and body-pressed-against-body, searching for affection and kindness and inspiration. It is pure happiness. And it wants you to join along.
Title: Endless World
Artist: Jaryuu Dokuro
Warnings: Explicit sexual content, drug use, rape, disturbing content, incest
Status: ongoing, scanlated by Vices and Devices
Description: A series of interconnected shorts, Endless World revolves around the acquaintances and life of Toshimitsu, a two-bit druggie/hoodlum. Toshimitsu eventually ends up (and dies) in prison, leaving his cousin Ryuu to pick up the pieces and reimagine his life through Toshimitsu's best friend, Ikki.
Reason for recommendation: Wooo boy. Let's start with the easy stuff. Jaryuu Dokuro's artwork is not entirely off the beaten track, but it is weird, full of slanted squinty eyes, large noses, narrow lips, and most of all, this sort of desperate apocalyptic air, like you're watching the first few vibrant moments of a gangster movie before the big boss dies and it all goes to the hell and the main character finds his true love kidnapped and tortured. With Endless World more than any of the other works, there's this fascination with seeing the ghost of someone, the remains of someone as seen by someone else. Ryuu comes to Ikki to see Toshimitsu, or, well, to see "Toshimitsu", as Ikki knew him, but in Ryuu, Ikki is able to bid farewell to what you could argue was his first love, even though I'm sure Ikki would never say as much. And that's part of the power of Jaryuu Dokuro, that you're carried way on this wave of reality that is more than reality. Jaryuu's art is the closest I have come to finding "cinematic" in black and white comic art. It is wonderfully kinetic and active.
Then the more difficult stuff: the writing is sharp, sharper than razors. For instance: the second chapter which begins with a list of drugs. Chapter three, which ends in the beginning of the story, with Toshimitsu. Chapter five, which, well, is like all the horrible and beautiful things of Requiem for a Dream, Fight Club, Bret Easton Ellis, and Shunji Iwai's Picnic all rolled into one. Jaryuu Dokuro has a finely tuned ear for mixing monologues with dialogues, with multiple narrators, no less. I'll admit that I don't like the way the chapters are paced or cut off (and what in the world is that prologue supposed to add to the story?), but if you read them as if there were no chapter breaks, they're wonderful.
Finally, the most difficult stuff. Endless World is a story about violence, losing yourself in drugs, mindless sex with a minor, the kind of love that takes apart a person and puts you back together. It's about the darkness that's inherent in relinquishing control, and the brightness that happens when you realize there's someone to give that control back to you. It's about grieving together, and grieving apart. It's not pretty. It's sometimes deeply disturbing. (I mean, just look at those warnings.) But life is not always pretty and is sometimes deeply disturbing. There is this strange decoupling of romance and sex in this story that manages to be more touching than I ever bargained for. This is not the manga I would go to if I just wanted my brain to hang out and veg. But there is a whole world out there of deeply emotional and deeply moving stories to tell, and that world exists in bl manga too, and god if Jaryuu Dokoru isn't one of the best. I promise you, if you want that from your bl manga, Endless World will deliver in spades.
----
Title: The Man of Tango
Artist: Okadaya Tetuzoh
Warnings: Explicit sexual content
Status: completely scanlated by Nakama
Description: [from baka-udpates] Angie, though hailed as "The Man of Tango," had never truly felt the deep, fiery passion of Latin dance. That is, until he met Hiro, a man born from a Latin mother, who was under his Japanese grandfather's custody and now lives as a Japanese citizen. Now, a slow, seething desire begins to rock his body and soul! At first feeling a nostalgic familiarity toward the Latin dancer, Hiro finds himself drawn into the seductive beat of a Latin dance, opening his body and heart to the smoldering heat of his tango partner.
Reason for recommendation: So perhaps this is outside of the beaten track because, uh, it's bara, and not really bl manga anyway. And perhaps I only like it because i think est em and Okadaya Tetuzoh and basso/Ono Natsume should battle it out for nontraditional stories with European/Latin flair. And maybe I just like people waxing lyrical about dancing.
Or maybe The Man of Tango really is just that good. Let's just assume it's this last reason.
I admit to having recently been dragged to see Eat, Pray, Love, the movie. I didn't really like it. (Actually, I kind of... hated it...) But I did come away with it thinking, oddly enough, of The Man of Tango. Specifically, in two parts: the first, where Julia Robert's character Liz is being seduced by James Franco's David, who is a second-rate actor but manages to charm Liz simply by looking at her and then slowly circling her in a bar. The second, when the ever lovely Javier Bardem as Felipe lays the Brazilian charm thick and heavy on Liz. Angie, of The Man of Tango, is both of these men. In fact, I'd hazard to say that the key to loving The Man of Tango is to let yourself be pulled into Angie's love, just as Hiro does. Without this love, it is impossible to understand the charm of The Man of Tango--or rather, to see it as anything more than a meandering bara manga with too much tango terminology.
Hiro is everything you want from a man who gets seduced by Angie. He is innocent in that lovable "junjou" kind of way, slightly repressed, completely hapless, and yet smoldering underneath with a passion that attracts Angie. Angie, on the other hand, is the mothering, solitary, sexy, feminine and masculine, wholly artist, partial guru that you wish could sweep you away just as he sweeps Hiro. And the way they meet, the first time they have sex, in fact the entire story, feels like some sort of stolen pleasure, a kind of love affair that you don't want to explain to anyone else. Hiro and Angie circle each other, then meet in the middle, then pull away, then reach an emotional climax. There is plenty of wine and dancing in between, and Angie's good friend Bene (who is drawn so muscular and so broad and so well-built that I almost did a double-take when I saw her breasts), and shoes, and tango music. It is a strange story in that there is almost no discernible beginning nor end. It is a little slice, a little cutaway, of Angie and Hiro's coexistence. You don't get to see all of it, because it's their life, not yours.
What strikes me as fascinating about both Endless World and The Man of Tango is this constant flirtation with narrative consistency in both. Endless World paints Toshimitsu through Ikki and Ryuu, and yet fleshes out Ikki through Ryuu's stories of Toshimitsu and Toshimitsu's memories, which are conveyed in brief flashes of Toshimitsu to himself. Who is the story really about? Who gets to tell it? The Man of Tango is the same way. You discover Hiro through his own experiences with his grandfather, but then you find Angie in them when Angie helps Hiro mend. Angie finds Hiro through an explanation of the hunger inherent in tango, but it's tango that explains Angie to Hiro. And there's that extra, of Hiro's gym friends, which is a whole other side to Hiro that merely hints as his relationship with Angie (well, that is, until the viewpoint switches back over to Hiro). Is it a sign of lazy writing? Or just showing you playfully the facets of the story you couldn't get just through Hiro or Hiro's friends or Angie or Bene?
The Man of Tango (and Okadaya Tetuzoh always) is full of sensuality, lips and hair and articles of clothing pushed up or pulled down, and Angie's face, so knowing and a little bit smug, the curves of a man's spine when pushed against a knee. And tango, of course. If est em wrote about dance (including, of course, tango) as a raw force of melancholy and high tragedy and sacrifice and sometimes calculated cruelty, Okadaya's tango is warm and intimate and body-pressed-against-body, searching for affection and kindness and inspiration. It is pure happiness. And it wants you to join along.