Otherworld Barbara Vol. 2 by Moto Hagio

Otherworld Barbara Vol. 2
by Moto Hagio
translation by Matt Thorn

Moto Hagio is one of those writers I've been slowly working my way through, but as is so often the  case, much more slowly than intended. I read volume 1 of Otherworld Barbara back in December 2017... I got to the second and final volume exactly six years later!

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2003
Read: December 2023

This is definitely to the book's detriment. Otherworld Barbara is one long, complicated story, about a girl dreaming of an imaginary island in the future, scientists studying life on Mars, adoptees and surrogates swapped with one another, cannibalism, people who dive into dreams, research into immortality, the coming of a genocide, and much more, and all I had to go on was a couple recap pages in the front and my vague memories of the first book. If I was smart, I would have read this right after volume 1!

Still, I enjoyed this a lot, even when I wasn't totally sure what was happening. There's a lot of cool science fiction concepts here, and Hagio actually manages to pull them all together in a coherent way. On top of that, this book shows her mastery of the grammar and rhythm of the comics form, with some really emotional beats forming around the reveals here. I particularly liked the stuff about fatherhood, and the twists at the end are surprisingly good. Maybe someday I should reread the whole story in one go and then actually understand it, but for now I will focus on the Moto Hagio I haven't read yet. The Poe Clan here I come... in probably six more years!

Review: Otherworld Barbara Vol. 1 by Moto Hagio

Comic hardcover, 378 pages
Published 2016 (contents: 2003)
Borrowed from the library
Read December 2017

Otherworld Barbara Vol. 1
by Moto Hagio
translation by Matt Thorn

I've been meandering through the translated oeuvre of shōjo manga master Moto Hagio for several years now; my latest read is the first half of Otherworld Barbara. It's interesting-- my introduction to her work was a series of short pieces collected in A Drunken Dream and Other Stories (1977-2008), and from there each book I've read has been longer than the last: A, A′ (1997) was four short stories, but they were linked; Heart of Thomas (1974) was a single 500-page story.* Otherworld Barbara will run over 700 by its end, I think.

I mention this not (just) because I love trivia, but because it's hard to judge Otherworld Barbara as a story on its first 378 pages. There's a lot going on here: a dreamworld where cannibalism is a normal practice that leads to immortality, a real world where people can dive into dreams, a father estranged from his son, an old woman pining for youth, a conference about the mysteries of Mars, a funeral, a line of robot dolls, an island that appears and disappears. It was a little tough to orient myself at first (not aided by the fact that I still struggle to recognize characters in manga consistently), but once I started to get a handle, I was drawn in. As always, Hagio's storytelling is prone to hugely dramatic emotions, gloomy tragedy, traumatic backstories... and goofy farce. I have no idea how it's all going to integrate, but I'm beginning to grasp the connections, and I'm on the edge of my seat to see how she pulls it off. Bring on vol. 2.

* You will note this is my progression through Hagio, not her progression, as I haven't been reading her work in its order of publication. Note also that I read her short story "They Were Eleven" (1975) between A, A′ and Heart of Thomas, which breaks my supposed pattern.

Review: The Heart of Thomas by Moto Hagio

Also: take a look at Unreality SF to read my review of Big Finish's first UNIT audio, Extinction.

Comic hardcover, 516 pages
Published 2012 (contents: 1974)
Borrowed from the library
Read May 2016

The Heart of Thomas by Moto Hagio
translation by Matt Thorn

The Heart of Thomas is the most recent English translation of a piece of shōjo manga by Moto Hagio, and reading it means I've finally read all of Hagio's work available in English. (For a brief period, anyway; there's a translation of Otherworld Barbara coming out this fall.) It's the first long-form work by her to be translated into English; previous volumes have collected her short fiction. It's also her first piece of realist fiction in English, with no fantasy or science fiction elements.

Hagio's layouts are typically dramatic and emotional.

Heart of Thomas is about a boy at an all-boy German boarding school who commits suicide; from what I had read, I expected to be because of homophobia. Heart of Thomas is a very different book than that, though, and much more complicated. Thomas actually dies right in the opening chapter, and the book chronicles the effects his death has on the community, especially Juli, with whom Thomas wanted to be involved, and a boy named Erich who comes to the school just days after Thomas's death and looks a lot like him. Many of the boys at Schlotterbach are interested in other boys; there's no hint of homophobia, and the male-male romantic and sexual relationships are diverse in their types.

This is an unflipped manga, i.e., don't forget that it will make little sense unless you read it right-to-left.

There are a lot of characters; in addition to Thomas, Erich, and Juli, there's Ante (a young manipulator who competed with Thomas for Juli's attentions), Oskar (a world-weary older boy who is Juli's only confidante), and many more. Hagio is impressive in the depth of her characterization: the 500 pages of this book are a slow unspooling of information about the characters, and situations that initially seem obviously are slowly revealed to be more complicated as time passes. Each and every character turns out to have a subjectivity that's not obvious when the book begins, but influences their actions and feelings throughout. In their ways, each boy here is damaged and hurt, and some of the sections where we find out what's going on are riveting and painful. It's over 500 pages long, but it never feels padded or dull; Hagio keeps things going at exactly the right pace.

If the book is summed up by anything, it's by this exchange between Juli and Erich:

Something that threw me about the coloring conventions used here at first is that even though Juli's hair is dark black, when there's a light shining on it, Hagio renders it completely white, like she does for blond characters.

There's no easy solutions here, because few of the characters are in love with ones who love them back; indeed, I think every love here is unrequited: but by the book's end, some of the characters have opened up enough to reciprocate and form real relationships, even if they're not necessarily romantic or sexual. It's a beautiful book, in both word and image, and Hagio even throws in a few jokes for good measure. I've really enjoyed everything I've read by her, and Heart of Thomas continues that trend. Here's hoping for more translations soon.

I really liked the comedy background students, though they do put paid to McCloud's notion that the central characters are the ones that are more cartoony, in order to promote reader identification.

Review: Four Shōjo Stories by Keiko Nishi, Moto Hagio, and Shio Sato

Comic hardcover, 263 pages
Published 1996 (contents: 1975-90)
Borrowed from the library
Read March 2014

Four Shōjo Stories

Story & Art: Keiko Nishi, Moto Hagio, Shio Sato

Translation: Matt Thorn
Touch-Up Art & Lettering: Mary Kelleher

My erratic journey through Moto Hagio's oeuvre continues with this volume, which collects her "They Were Eleven" alongside three stories by two other writer/artists. "They Were Eleven" was my favorite story in the book (also the longest), a science fiction story about ten potential recruits for Space University being put on an abandoned spaceship together-- they have to make it for fifty days without hitting the panic button (or any deaths). Most are human, but not all, and even some of the humans aren't what you'd expect. It's a great story: good conflict, good twists, good characters, great artwork (there's a seemingly simple page of the cadets floating over to their spaceship in spacesuits that's just gorgeous). I like tales of groups of disparate personalities having to overcome great odds, and this is a good one.

Keiko Nishi contributes two stories: "Promise" and "Since You've Been Gone." The former is kinda saccharine, but almost gets away with it in its deft portrayal of human isolation. The second is also a little saccharine, but less so, but also less engaging; there's a couple too many clichés, I think.

The other story, I also quite enjoyed: Shio Sato's "The Changeling" reminds me of Ursula Le Guin's Ekumen in some ways, with a lone explorer checking out a planet seeded by humans in the distant past. There are some great ideas here, about violence, about emotion, about racism. Saying it's not as good as "They Were Eleven" is damning with faint praise, as it's really good. I was struck by the protagonist being female-- because it was almost incidental. I don't think it would have been in the hands of another writer/artist.

The only thing to not like about this volume is the cover: "JAPANESE COMICS FROM A UNIQUELY FEMALE PERSPECTIVE" and "It's Not Just Girls' Stuff Anymore" would have each been horrible tag lines on their own, but together they don't even make sense.

Review: A, A′ [A, A Prime] by Moto Hagio

Comic digest, 207 pages
Published 1997 (contents: 1981)
Borrowed from  the library
Read May 2013

A, A′ [A, A Prime]

by Moto Hagio
English adaptation by Matt Thorn

This collection brings together three works of shōjo manga by Moto Hagio, whose work I previously enjoyed in A Drunken Dream and Other Stories. The works in that collection spanned her entire career (1977-2008), whereas these three all come from 1981, and are all set in the same future milieu, where Earth's colonization of the solar system was aided by a genetically engineered raced called "unicorns." Unicorns have a distinctive mane of red hair (hence, apparently, the name), as well as adaptations to make them good early settlers: they can see in infrared, for example, and they are also emotionally detached. The race is largely extinct at the point the stories in A, A′ occur, but they interbred with normal humans, and occasional throwbacks ("atavisms") exist.

In "A, A′ [A, A Prime]," Addy (one of these atavisms) has died after three years on a distant science outpost, and her clone is dispatched to take her place. She and a man there had been in love, and now they must negotiate what it's like for both of them when she doesn't have any memories of their relationship. It's the best story in the book, with a couple standout moments that are both beautiful and melancholy, such as when Addy alone can see a solar flare in the infrared. I'm not sure what to think of the ending, but I think it works in context.

"4/4 [Quatre/Quarts]" is about a teenage boy named Mori who has strong telekinetic potential, but can't seem to harness it except when in the presence of a very isolated unicorn named Trill. The two are drawn to each other, somehow creating a whole in union that neither of them can achieve alone, two emotional isolates who only respond to each other. It's a darker and more disturbing story than "A, A′," with much more tragedy. The unicorns are shown to experience emotions, just not in the way others expect, which leads to tragedy.

The second half of the book is taken up by one longer story, "X + Y," which focuses at first on a unicorn named Tacto and then a college-age Mori. Tacto seems to be male, but his genes indicate that he is XX, but he seems uninterested in his gender anyway. Meanwhile, Mori finds himself falling in love with this boy despite himself. The two face prejudice as well as their own uncertainties, and some dark secrets in Tacto's past. I liked this one, though Tacto's habit of talking in the third person took a lot of use getting used to. Again, much of the difficulty centers on Tacto's own emotional processes, which exist, but aren't quite like a baseline human's. There's some interesting stuff going on with gender here, as well as some beautiful moments involving kite-flying, which Mori has taken up as a hobby since "4/4." The last two pages are gorgeous.

Moto Hagio's art is great throughout, though I think I'm not quite enmeshed enough in the manga tradition to make the character distinctions that are sometimes required of me. Her sf works in a different register to the one than I am used to, and I am glad that I am getting to know it; I look forward to picking up more of her translated work in the future.

Review: Moto Hagio's A Drunken Dream and Other Stories

Comic hardcover, 256 pages
Published 2010 (contents: 1977-2008)
Borrowed from the library
Read June 2012

Moto Hagio's A Drunken Dream and Other Stories
translated by Matt Thorn

I read a couple stories from this collection of short-form shōjo manga in a class on graphic novels that I was taking, and I was sufficiently intrigued to track down the whole book. My previous experience with shōjo was pretty slight, and I imagined it as an entire genre of awkward high school relationships-- we can probably blame this on my experience reading Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. Hagio, who was one of the founders of shōjo, showed me with "Iguana Girl" that this was entirely untrue: "shōjo" simply means "girl," and these stories are simply stories designed to appeal to girls, which seems to basically mean that they have high emotional content.

"Iguana Girl" is one of the most touching stories I have ever read. It's about a girl who is born an iguana-- but only she and her mother can tell, to everyone else she looks human. She spends her life constantly ridiculed by her mother and her sister, and Hagio makes the story hurt. Rika's pain is every child's pain, the pain of the daughter who's never quite what her mother wanted. We follow Rika as she grows up and finally comes to understand her mother, though it's not enough of course. This was one of three stories excerpted for our class, making me want to read the book-- and on reading the whole thing, it's definitely the best one.

But this is praising with faint damn. A Drunken Dream and Other Stories collects ten stories spanning Hagio's career. I found the material from the middle of her career the strongest. Her early 1970s stuff is perhaps a little too slight and overly saccharine-- but though I say that now, flipping back through "Girl on Porch with Puppy," I recall the deep emotional shock of its ending, so maybe that's a lie to make myself feel superior to this deeply emotional and melancholic work.

Her stories become stronger in the 1980s, which includes "A Drunken Dream," a strange gender-bending sci-fi story about reincarnation and the cruelty of destiny. This is where Hagio begins including more fantasy motifs into her stories, which heightens their power. "Hanshin: Half-God," about a pair of conjoined twins, is another highlight. So many of these stories I felt like I shouldn't like-- "Angel Mimic" is about a college girl falling for her professor and has a bunch of cod-evolutionary theory-- but I did anyway. Hagio's writing is lyrical, not in her dialogue (which has, after all, been ably translated by Matt Thorn) but also in her beautiful illustrations, which put emptiness to amazing effect. Even when I didn't want to be moved, I always was.

I borrowed this from the library, but I want to buy it now-- and I definitely want to pick up more classic manga, both stuff written by Moto Hagio and stuff translated by Matt Thorn. Even better when it's both of them together again!