Author: Nakamura Asumiko
Imprint: Fx Comics
Publisher: Oota Shuppan
ISBN:4-87233-649-6
Reviewed by Jeanne
Why is this called Copernicus' Breath? I haven't a clue. It happens in a circus in Paris in the 1970's. 16th century astronomers don't even get a look in. There's a lot of talk about stars and how being on a trapeze is like being a star up in the sky, but it's still pretty far-fetched by me. Cocteau, now- there's quite a few visual hommages to Cocteau if you want them, one on the end papers with a line drawing of the hero, nude. (Nude, not naked. I'll tell you why in a minute.)
The obi around the cover (yes, obi are those annoying paper wraps around Japanese books that always tear in your backpack and come off) calls this manga 'the height of tanbi, a cauldron of the senses.' Truth in advertising. That's what it is.
Which means the thing is a drug dream mess. Much is made of the romance of the circus atmosphere, of flying through the air on a trapeze, etc etc. Think cirque here, not circus. We're doing Old World riffs on the romance and tawdriness of the ring.
There are no elephants in tutus walking on their hind legs; it's slit-eyed jugglers and daring death-loving trapeze artists and sad Pierrot clowns, even if the Pierrot clown- our hero, Torinosu, 'Bird's Nest'- has a false red nose. The tawdriness comes from the circus master pimping out his performers to anyone willing to pay. In the case of Torinosu this means a Japanese foreign diplomat who looks like a German grandfather. Grandfatherly, he says he won't sleep with Torinosu until the boy (still a teenager of course) can love him. This rather contrasts with the circus master himself, who screws Torinosu mightily and in great detail, while his pimply dwarf assistant stands outside the room peeking in and jerking off.
So yes there's sex- lots and lots, straight and gay, most of it kinky in one way or another, and some of it more kinky than even a hardened veteran like myself wants to remember. (The bit with the cake, oi vey...) And there's penises in sufficient profusion for those who like such things. And there's tanbi decadence- ghosts who wander into the action looking like teenaged girls even if they're the hero's brother, and abandoned neurotic women with a thing for inflicting pain, and buracon and possible murder and unspoken pining and a hero who looks about to perish at any moment from terminal angst. For what it's worth there's a plot that wanders happily in the wilderness for most of the manga in best WTF fashion. I suppose it continues to wander in vol 2, if there *is* a volume two. (And there's an awful lot of closeups of enormous shocked and staring eyes. That one gets a little old fast.)
So is this a hot manga? Well, hardly, as you've probably figured for yourself. The details may sound like the essence of one-hand reading but the art is stylized to the point that half the time you have to decipher the pictures rather than look at them. While this drove me bananas in Dynasty IV, here it's easier to take if only because Nakamura's aesthetics are not merely familiar, they're identifiably, well, aesthetics. This is a bravura performance in its way and fans of the visual will probably love it. I see strong stylistic and narrative similarities to The Funeral Procession of K. I might like Copernicus quite as much as that one except for those staring eyes. And the fact that the artist isn't aiming to be beautiful. She's trying for style, which is quite different, and means the art is very often ugly to the point of repulsiveness. Which makes it a kind of concrete expression of the circus world being presented- enchanting on the surface, repellant underneath. It's a nice intellectual conceit- for those who like such things.