Makiho- Kizuna

Author: Sonehara Sumiko
Imprint: Hakuya Comics
Publisher: Hakuya Shobou
ISBN:4-257-98242-X
vol 2: 4-257-98532-1

If you want explicit sex along with your weird tales, have a look at Makiho-Kizuna, first in the three volume Makiho series. This one is an oddity- it's unlike anything else I've ever seen, and unlike the other two volumes as well, alas. Barely two pages in and we have a little boy and his mother taking refuge in a snowy house, and Mom lying dead in a pool of blood, and a phantom snake, and the phantom snake sliding down the little boy's throat. Then wham, we're in the present with Makiho, our beautiful long-haired hero, who can't keep a job because his predatory wicked stepfather keeps revealing to his employers that Makiho murdered his mother. Our unemployed hero is taken in by a genki younger guy, Kojima, and soon is nursing unspoken feelings about him that he can't tell him, as BL guys are wont to do when they first fall in love, so he goes back home to stepfather's bed, and the younger guy comes running in to save him, and then-- the whirligigs of time bring in their revenges and Love Conquers All.

So is this a supernatural horror story or a run-of-the-mill bit of 'first love' BL or a perverse piece about obsession and shota? And the answer is-- all of the above. The first three stories in the volume are all complete and deftly plotted umm ghostly love tales, hair-raising in the Edgar Allen Poe tradition. (The fourth is a deftly plotted and all-stops-out piece of sexual Grand Guignol. Chains, bondage, raping females, castration for love... Tohjoh Asami, eat your heart out.) Through them all Makiho's relation with Kojima proceeds on its romantic BL path, overcoming little things like Kojima's father's attitude and Kojima's own uncertainties, adding a note of the ordinary (well, ordinary as we define it) to these tales of sexual and psychic weirdness.

The weirdness gets a distinct boost from the artwork. Sonehara began life as a ladies' mangaka and only later followed her bliss into the realm of BL. I haven't read much of the ladies genre, but what little I've seen has a heavy and overpowering sensuality/ physicality to the artstyle that makes the sketchy outlines of BL art look chaste as a 19th century nude. Sonehara is not only not afraid of wasting ink on dramatic chiaroscuro, she's happy to include female characters in her stories, usually women who have suffered for love. In Japan women who suffer for love don't pine beautifully away so you can shed a sentimental tear on their graves. They become fearsome and destructive powers in their own right, and a sensible person treats them with caution. The best of them meet a wandering monk and get to relive and transcend their suffering through the music and poetry of a Noh play. As a good second best they meet someone like Makiho who understands their suffering because he's suffered so much himself. (Oh yes- and there's lots of Ohh the poor sweetie in the book too. Live with it. Pathos is as basic to Japanese culture as cute.)

Equally the weird tales theme reinforces the ongoing perverse obsession and morbid sexuality. This is a world where fabulously rich men turn their stepsons into sex slaves, where women rape men for reasons related to money, where even the artistic are prone to twisted love. Naturally, one feels, it's also a world where spirits return to exact revenge in horrific fashion. All the m/f relationships we see are depraved and dangerous. The one normal thing in the whole mix (besides Kojima's rambunctious country family) is the refreshingly BTNs angsting of Makiho for Kojima and Kojima's eventual realization of his feelings for Makiho. Of course, this love finds its ultimate expression in that over-the-top female rape scene in a glorious apotheosis of blood pain and self-sacrifice. But after that we return to business- quite literally- as usual, and Makiho deciding that after all he doesn't *mind* inheriting his stepfather/ tormentor's fortune, since it will make Kojima comfortable. How much more mundane can you get?

Return to Sapphire review.