Author: ASAGIRI Yuu
Publisher: BeBeautiful
ISBN: 158664955-8
Reviewed by Nora
Familiarity, apparently, breeds contempt.
I've been mostly elated about the current boom in Japanese and Korean manga being imported to the US and translated into English. And I've been mostly delighted about the fact that some of those manga have been unabashedly BL. They've already begun importing the well-knowns, such as Kodaka Kazuma's Kizuna, but clearly someone thought there might be profit potential in some of the series that weren't so popular with English-speaking audiences. Thus we get Golden Cain.
On the surface, Golden Cain was probably a good decision. Asagiri is a popular artist in Japan, clearly not some untested amateur. And Golden Cain is a rare one-shot tankoubon; no need to commit to a lengthy series which might not succeed. The story has enough smut to hook newbies, though not so much that it would alienate bookstores, while still satisfying the old guard who react badly to any hint of censorship or Puritan prudishness. So theoretically, this book should be a hit.
Maybe it is, among the newbies. But every member of the old guard that I've spoken to has had the same reaction upon reading this book: ewww.
There are several problems. First is the art. Granted, the overall effect is a matter of taste, but problems with accuracy and technique tend to be something everyone notices. For example, the cover. Cain, the devil-may-care wild child male model (who always looks serene and a little sleepy the way Asagiri draws him), is supposed to have one gray eye and one hazel; on the cover he doesn't. This could maybe be explained away by the fact that Cain wears contacts for some reason to conceal the difference. I would think that would be a selling point for both the book and the character. (It worked for David Bowie.) But worse, Shun's head is tilted at an angle that should be agonizing for him if not impossible, considering we can actually see the other side of his face. This kind of "ouch" momemnt is a commonality in Asagiri's artwork, occurring again and again throughout the book.
But that's a minor problem. We're all used to BL mangaka who play fast and loose with perspective, and the effect isn't always unpleasant. (Though I do wonder what the newbies will think.) A bigger problem is the story itself. It's chock-full of standard yaoi tropes: the mysterious aggressive seme, the emotionally stunted uke, the random strangers who decide to gang-rape the emotionally stunted uke, the shadow of the former lover, all the usual. Asagiri attempts to spice up some of these tropes with unusual twists, which don't always go over well. Cain isn't just half-Japanese; he's half-Japanese and half ethnicity unknown. He doesn't just whisper sweet nothings to Shun, he whispers them in Vietnamese. He doesn't just perform amazing feats of derring-do to rescue Shun from gang rape (twice); he leaps barricades to rescue Shun from his own screaming fangirls. He doesn't just come to find Shun because he knew Shun's dead brother, but because he knew Shun's equally stunted, incestuous, amnesiac brother.
There's more along these lines, each revelation and "romantic development" more groan-inducing than the first. But the factor which subtly makes all of this worse is an unexpected one: the translation itself. "Iya, dame, ahn," becomes "I don't want this! Oooh, yeah! Harder! Deeper!" And that's just the sex talk. All the other dialogue is almost as squinchy. Heck, even the sound effects make me cringe; in place of the delicate penji "gi gi gi" to indicate the sound of vigorous intercourse, we get typeset, all-caps, bold, and outlined: "THWAP THWAP THWAP".
I don't know if the problem lies in the way the translator (who hasn't been credited) chose to render the dialogue, or whether the dialogue was inane to begin with. Some of it is definitely the latter, because throughout the book Asagiri makes some storytelling choices that left me scratching my head more than once. I'm also not sure how much of the problem lies in Western cultural norms. The sound effects thing is probably the result of this; American comic books have rendered "action sounds" in big screaming bold letters for decades. (The fact that it's wholly inappropriate for a romantic/sensual moment doesn't seem to have occurred to the editor.) I'm also not sure how much of the problem lies in the English language itself, which in its plain, modern form tends to make even the most tender line sound cliche or cheesy.
But whatever the reason, it all comes down to a big problem. Now that I know what they're saying, I don't want to know anymore. I can tell that I wouldn't have liked Golden Cain any better if I'd encountered it in Japanese -- it's not my kind of thing at all -- but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have hated it as much.
Well, one tankoubon is not enough to judge a whole trend. I haven't decided to forego buying English-translated manga altogether, in large part because the translations of Saiyuuki have shown me that it is possible to 'port manga to English painlessly. But I definitely won't be buying any more translations of unknown BL manga. They're just too much of a crapshoot (pun intended).