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Reviewed by Ysabet Reinhardt MacFarlane Viz's newest installment of NANA (arguably Ai Yazawa's best-known series in North America) brings readers to a pivotal point in the story, where the cracks that have been showing in the characters' relationships threaten to split wide open. For anyone unfamiliar with the series, NANA is the story of two girls who meet on a train carrying them both to what they hope will be new lives in Tokyo. Almost the only thing they have in common is that they're both twenty years old, and both named Nana. Coincidence brings them together as roommates, and the intense friendship that almost immediately springs up between them is at the heart of this story about people finding themselves, reaching for their dreams, and learning the cost of getting what they want. In this volume (keeping this as spoiler-free as possible, since the volume contains one of the most pivotal events in the series), Nana Osaki has already started to realize that she's paying a higher price than she's comfortable with to realize her dream of making it as a punk rock star; she's unable to back away from that dream, but trying to hang onto the other things that are important to her. Meanwhile, Nana Komatsu begins to lose control of the real happiness she'd started carving out for herself after a series of failed or destructive romantic relationships. I've said elsewhere that one of the key reasons that these characters feel so believable is that this is a story of a deep but profoundly flawed relationship, one that the two Nanas desperately want to maintain even as it slips away from them. This isn't the feel-good story of girls' friendship that it seems to be at the beginning of the series; it's an intense depiction of finding and losing something of incredible value, of feeling it slip away, and of trying to get it back. The sense of inevitability and melancholy is strengthened by the way the volumes are framed by wistful "voiceovers" from both Nanas, from some unspecified point(s) in the future. Those few lines here and there reveal another similarity between them: that they both regret the way their friendship changed, that they each blame themselves, and that their relationship remains one of the defining points of their lives. In terms of Viz's treatment of the series, this volume is a huge improvement on some of the earlier releases. During the first few volumes, the dialogue was distractingly slangy, overemphasizing the characters' youth and--for lack of a better word--coolness, at the cost of making the characters themselves accessible. (Nana Komatsu particularly suffered from this, in her initial role as the boy-crazy, materialistic "everygirl".) But at this point that weakness has almost completely disappeared, leaving a very readable script that doesn't interfere with their struggles and heartbreak. It's just them, the reader, and the box of tissues that those of us who're prone to tearing up over good manga might want to keep handy. Comment on this review of Nana v8 on the Manga Life Forums. |
6 October 2009
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