Stigma

stigma.jpg Author: Minekura Kazuya
Publisher: Shinshokan
ISBN: 4-403-67007-5

Reviewed by Jeanne

An oddity here- a manga all in colour. Odd not merely in its form but in its violent and alienated story. A man with no name and no memory wanders a city under a perpetual grey sky. 'Whenever I think to notice it, I'm always looking down at my feet- maybe I'm afraid of catching sight of my past, or maybe I'm looking for that 'self' I dropped somewhere along the way.' (The language of a manga rarely makes me itch to translate it. This one does.) He hangs about in bars, he sleeps with a prostitute, she gets killed, her pimp laughs about it, the man kills him- all as casually as everything else happens in this world and to this man. Thus the first chapter.

His memories begin with himself lying on top of a garbage heap- 'buried in the remains of other people's past'- with nothing but a briefcase beside him, full of bills. He has scars on his hands he can't remember getting. He meets a boy, on his own like the man is on his own, carrying a pair of binoculars around his neck. The boy is looking to find a bird, even though there are no birds in this world any more than there are any blue skies. The boy's name is Tit- 'I'm named for a bird' he says- and he gives the man a name of his own- Stork. Tit and Stork hook up and go off looking together- for birds, for a blue sky somewhere that birds might fly in, for a place to be. All of which, in one way or another, they find, starting with the man- equally nameless- from Stork's past who brings his unwanted memories back.

tit & other stork.jpg

I don't want to call this an allegory, because it isn't. But it picks up some classic allegorical themes, about searching for one's self and meeting one's other self and what happens then. Stork arguably finds himself twice in this story; or he finds his good and evil angels; or he finds the two fractured parts of himself, both of which he lost when he lost his memory. He gets to be whole eventually, or at any rate wholer, but as in any healing process the first sign of that is that he can feel pain again.

I'm sure Minekura is a woman. Maybe I'm hallucinating but I'm sure I read an interview with her where she talked about how, when she was eleven or so- 'just about the time my breasts started developing'- she realized that she was no longer one of the boys that she'd played with all through childhood. 'From now on I could only look on at the boys' world as an outsider.' But boy, is her way of being an onlooking outsider satisfying. That woman has one neat animus working overtime for her (in Jungian psychology, the 'inner masculine' that all women possess.) It makes her write laconic male-type guys and depict their (often shattering) emotions in spare colourless language that delivers twice the punch of any weeping yaoi character.

There should be a word for how the relationships work in this story and in some other of Minekura's gritty works, like Wild Adaptor. It's not yaoi, because the sex isn't out in the open, and it's not UST because sex certainly seems to be happening. It just doesn't much matter that it's happening, because Minekura is looking at her characters' feelings more than their bodies. Sex takes a back seat to the other things that connect the people in her manga. This is in nice contrast to a lot of yaoi which gives the barest nod to the feelings while focussing on the sex, and to the brand of BL which gives you rather too much emotion, seen up waaay too close. Here connection is of the essence, and for that reason it can go beyond the sexual. It's what makes the relationship between Stork and Tit a far cry from the heart-warming Hollywood topos of the grim loner who becomes human by meeting a child. There's no word for the connection between Stork and Tit either, the man and the kid who hook up in their grim post-War world. I think the closest one we have for it is 'love.'