For another, she's got an excellent feel for a good story, unlike many other yaoi artists who seem to think that plastering pretty art onto a kink/cliche-of-the-week constitutes plot development.  And she seems to be one of that elite group of artists who manages to publish something, somewhere, every month.  Editors salivate when they get their hands on an artist like this; her fans have to subscribe to five different magazines to keep up with her.

But she's worth it.  I loved an earlier work by this author, "Ichigenme wa Yaruki no Minpou" (reviewed a few months ago on this site), and so when I noticed a new book of hers available in the Cybershoppe, I took a chance and ordered it even though I had no clue what the story was about.  This turned out to be both a good and a bad decision:  good because the story is every bit as emotionally involving and realistic as "Ichigenme," bad because it's even harder for the Japanese-impaired to read.  Keep a kanji dictionary handy when reading this one.  On second thought, keep a fluent Japanese speaker handy, too.  Not only is the dialogue chock-full of musical terms in Japanese, English, French, and Italian (the latter three in romaji), but one of the characters tends to drawl in some kind of dialect (might be Kansai, but I can't tell for
certain) that I sometimes found unintelligible.  On the bright side, though, I think I learned maybe ten new obscure kanji, thanks to this book.

A "solfége," I learned from a bit of online research, is a technique used in music instruction to train the ear to recognize tones and pitch.  In vocal instruction, this means singing single-note syllables---"do," "re," "me," etc.  It's not as unimportant as it sounds.  A solfége teacher is a bit like a diamond cutter:  a good one can create a thing of beauty from rough raw material.  A bad one can flaw the material so badly that it will never be anything more than a rock. 

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