Kuro no Sapateiado/ Zapateade de Negro

Author: BELNE
Imprint: Ship Fresh Comics
Publisher: Studio Ship
ISBN: 4-88315-183-2

Reviewed by Jeanne

The Japanese have a love affair with style for its own sake, and I have a love-hate affair with the Japanese love of style. I like it, I do, but it can send the French rationalist in me up a wall. Take any illustration collection by any mangaka you care to name, though Ozaki Minami is a good place to start. Lovely pictures, mysterious poses, arrangements that hint at something if you could only define it... Suggestive, always. But it does little more than suggest. It doesn't give you anything concrete to hold on to. 'Watson, there's less here than meets the eye.' I like the suggestiveness of a dream landscape as much as any other 60's child, but real dreams are actually packed with meaning, while too much of Japanese illustration seems there only to look good. It's like one of those Japanese meals that consists of a dozen tiny little dishes, with everything cut and folded and arranged just so. It looks exquisite, and it leaves you starving.

But every now and then something comes along that strikes a lovely balance. Mostly image and attitude, but with enough behind it that I feel that I've actually had a large bowl of rice to go with my two filigree slices of lotus root and three curled rose petals of sashimi. Zapateade de Negro is one such, very much to my surprise.

It happens in a fantasy version of Spain, full of cantadores and toreadores and gypsies and fortune tellers. There are women around, fiery and passionate, but the focus is very much on the men. We have Vicente, the young innocent who frequents a certain café and whose life becomes entangled with that of the other denizens. Jaen, an apparently blind gypsy musician and fortune teller. A.W. (and no, we're never told what the initials stand for) a mysterious man in black who is something more than mortal, because his wounds heal at once and his powers of tarot divination are eerie. There's El Aldo, a dancer and toreador, with his long blond ponytail. Lastly there's the flamboyant Juan, with waves of rippling Eroica curls, who tempts fate by calling himself El Duende, the demon. Dancer, singer, adventurer, and fated lover, El Duende propels the plot forward to its predestined and mysterious end.

A.W., El Aldo and El Duende have a history with each other that we get suggestions of but never learn fully. Usually this drives me bananas- I want to know, *everything*, now, preferably with flow-charts and diagrams. But with this story the rationalist in me doesn't care. The hints we're given are quite enough to heighten the present undercurrents of attachment and passion and rivalry among the men. Nothing is ever stated or shown explicitly, and the result is an atmosphere of thickly pervasive homoeroticism that people like me find much more arousing than any yaoi couple going at it furu chin. (That's 'full frontal' in Japanese.) A kiss under these circumstances is more than enough. Symbol and expression of the high-testosterone feel is the dance itself, which the men carry out solo, on a table top, as both an exhibition and challenge aimed at the other men. (Zapateado is the sound of flamenco boot heels striking the floor, and you're supposed to hear them, and the thrum of a guitar and the high-edged cry of a flamenco singer, backgrounding the whole work.) Only at the very last, when the tragedy is satisfyingly over, do we have a dance between two partners.

Happening in and around the evenings at the café is a ghost story involving Argentina, the Silver One, a woman who appears on moonless nights and dances to the damnation of any man who sees her. "I have been dancing since the last century. On moonless nights, on starless nights, I have danced from Alcazar to the Cathedral. For a hundred years I have been dancing." Vicente is caught in her spell but saved somehow by his own innocence. El Duende however, who long ago brought the ghost into the body of a human woman who was then murdered, attempts to destroy it now, with tragic results. The ghost story has a very satisfying ending, which segues into the highly romantic ending of the book itself. For the suggestion exists that these three men are like the ghost of Argentina, fated to perform their three-sided dance in various forms through eternity.

But then there was this mysterious little atogaki from the author, who said that Kuro no Zapateade was intended as a kind of film for three characters: Belne appears as Duende, Gardie as AW, and Aldow as El Aldo. A little search under Belne comes up with the whole story. Anyone interested in more details can check out the website at http://www07.u-page.so-net.ne.jp/gf6/kanzi/belnehome.htm And I wish we'd had websites when I was in Japan, because I kept coming across Belne's works in bookstores but could never quite get a handle on just what Belne was.

Belne in fact is both the mangaka of and the main character in a series called Belne's Love. (FWIW Belne might be the Japanese version of Verne, as in Jules Verne, since the original series has a strong French background. OTOH it might just be Belne, because that's how it's written in romaji.) Belne is the stage name of a famous chanteur, Jaques aka Souvenir d'Alexandrie, who retires suddenly and passes the name on to his friend and student Gaarudorudo. That's Gardie for short, whatever the original was meant to be. We hope, with no confidence, that it isn't Gertrude, but we have Belne-sensei's statement somewhere that 'it's usually a female name.' Be afraid; be very afraid. He's the short-haired one who was modelled on David Bowie (the young David Bowie) and who appears here as the demonic A.W. Gardie in turn passes the name on to the series' Belne, born Henri, our El Duende. Still with me? Belne looks rather like Eroica's Dorian drawn right. Belne has one of those tragic family pasts so beloved of mangaka: son of a woman and her lover, he has what seems to be a bullet in his brain delivered by the woman's husband, which may kill him at any time. Belne meets an artist called Aldow and falls in love, with much angsting and complication because of Belne's ties to Gardie. Plus further complications from Belne's band members and so on and so forth. The series is set in the early 70's, and I strongly suspect has some of the same Led Zeppelin influences as Eroica, quite apart from its Bowie hommages. The figure of Robert Plant is really hard for a certain generation to get away from.

Well, that's it, basically. Zapateade de Negro is a Belne A/U. Fine by me. It's not yaoi of any description, naturally. It's the most satisfying of shounen ai/ June, heavy on the operatic love and passion and light on the sex. The art is shounen ai-ish of course, with its love of a nicely defined chin. But the style is no more (or rather, no less) artificial than Nitta Youka's voles, and certainly a lot prettier by me. Highly recommended for those wearying of yaoi fast food-- office workers, phantom penises, gratuitous sex-- who'd like the sensation of having eaten a large bowl of rice and a little sashimi occasionally.