Kind of Blue: The Josei Manga of Nananan
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on April 25, 2006 Sign up now!
by Kai-Ming Cha, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 4/25/2006
If Sex and the City took place in Tokyo, if chick lit was less chick and more lit, and if falling in hate could be as captivating as falling in love, then somewhere in this mix you would find the work of Kiriko Nananan.
While the manga market is dominated by shojo (girls' comics), Nananan sets herself apart stylistically by aiming at an older female reader. Nananan is a Japanese manga-ka (writer and artist) who creates josei manga, or titles geared toward young women rather than teenage girls. Her work is virtually unknown in this country. That may soon change. Her first book, Blue (Fanfare/Ponent Mon), was released earlier this year and is distributed to the retail market by Biblios. Two of her short stories have been posted on the manga scanlation site lililicious.net. This month, Nananan's newest release, Sweet Cream and Red Strawberries, from Central Park Media, may bring the artist out of obscurity.
"It's life in the city," says CPM director of marketing Ali Kokmen of Sweet Cream, "but it's not Candace Bushnell. It's realistic and melancholy but life-affirming in a certain way." Nananan was introduced to American readers in Secret Comics Japan, an anthology from Viz Media released in 2000. The stories central to Sweet Cream focus on two women growing to hate one another, although a good part of her popular work deals with women falling in love.
Set in modern-day Tokyo, Sweet Cream and Red Strawberries is a series of vignettes, presented as episodes in the lives of four women. Touko and Chihiro are roommates in a one-bedroom apartment. Akiyo pines after her college friend while making a living as a prostitute. Suzuki lives alone and wanders through her daily routine wondering about love. Except for Touko and Chihiro, the characters in these stories don't intersect. Instead, their lives unravel independent from one another in isolated sections of the city. Themes like emotional strength reoccur throughout the book as the women suffer from jealousy, loneliness and unrequited love. Despite their close quarters, Touko and Chihiro keep their feelings to themselves, quietly coming undone behind their calm smiles.
Blue, about two high school students who fall in love, is considered Nananan’s best yuri work. The book was published in Japan in 1997 and adapted into a live-action film in 2001. From there the book was picked up by Fanfare/Ponent Mon, a Spanish and English company that pioneered the nouvelle manga movement, as defined by French cartoonist Frederic Boilet (see "Novelle Manga Comes to the U.S.",PWCW Jan. 17). Fanfare/Ponent Mon specializes in "slice of life" manga, and when Ponent Mon publisher Amiram Reuveni first saw Blue, there was an immediate connection. "Just looking at the cover and the images, I thought, 'I must publish this book,' " recalls Reuveni. "It's an innocent love story between two young women. It's beautiful and it's emotional."
 Nananan (c.), flanked by Frédéric Boilet (l.) and Corinne Quentin |
Stylistically, Blue also stands out from other josei titles because of its graphic simplicity. "It's got an understated, sublime cover," says Christopher Butcher, manager of The Beguiling, a comics bookstore in Toronto, Canada, and a popular comics blogger (comics.212.net). "You can tell from the design that it's going to be something different. [Nananan] doesn't use any screen tones, it's blacks and whites and delicate lines. The work is really well balanced. It's very different stylistically."
Butcher says he's reordered Blue a few times, and the book sells fairly well. Nevertheless, most Fanfare/Ponent Mon titles command hefty prices, and at $23.99, Butcher says Blue's pricing is "prohibitive," perhaps explaining why Nananan’s work is still largely unknown among most mainstream manga readers. "It's as expensive as three Shojo Beat books," Butcher says. "So far, Blue has done well, but it would do so much better at $10."
CPM plans to price Sweet Cream at $9.99, but is running into other difficulties in marketing the book. "The challenge has been how to position it within the manga category," says Kokmen. "It's still a manga, but its appeal is different from traditional shojo." But Kokmen is excited about the title. "It's nice to do something that will challenge Western perceptions of Japan as being just Pokemon, schoolgirls, samurai and geishas. All that stuff is great, but it's nice to broaden that perspective."
