Awesome 70s Shoujo: A, A'.

[starlady]

Awesome '70s Shoujo Week continues! marshtide has served up Gender, Sexuality and 70s Shojo Part Two: Psycopathic Lesbian Sorority Girls. [I totally have to read Oniisama E, seriously.]

Hagio Moto. A, A'. San Francisco: VIZ, 1996. [1981]

In these four interlinked stories Hagio explores a future solar system in which "unicorns," a rare subspecies of humanity genetically engineered for great computational and technical prowess and a minimum of external affect, mingle in isolate with the rest of their fellow humans, misunderstood and frequently vulnerable due to their difference.

I think I liked the first story, "A, A'," the best; it tells of a young unicorn researcher whose "original" is killed while posted to a remote research station and who according to company policy is cloned from genetic samples taken three years earlier, before her dispatch to the station, and sent out to replace herself. Naturally Adelaide has trouble reintegrating into the life of a group that remembers her old, three-years-their-comrade self; she particularly has trouble with her lover on staff, who can't accept that she's not who she was. The ending is weirdly hopeful and hopeless at the same time.

The other three stories, "4/4" and the two halves of "X/Y," follow the teenage and then young adult teek Mori, whose control over his psionic abilities is precarious--unless he's in the presence of a unicorn, as he learns when he meets the girl Trill at the space station where he lives. Trill, however, has a difficult relationship with her scientist father, and with the outside world, and Mori finds himself drawn into a fraught relationship with all three of them.

In "X/Y" Mori is living on Mars, where he meets a unicorn named Tacto, who is on Mars as part of a team from Earth proposing a revolutionary method to terraform the red planet. Mori finds himself drawn to Tacto, despite the fact that they're the same gender. Or are they? And does it matter?

I'm not entirely comfortable with the way Hagio handles transgender characters and stories about them--"X/Y" needs a warning for a trans character's suicide--and there's something a little off-kilter about her portrayal of gay characters, too. But I think on some level most of her protagonists aren't entirely comfortable in their own skin, or at least with the way society describes that skin, and on that level I imagine they have something in common with their creator and her fellow Shôwa 24 manga-ka. Which is another way of saying Hagio's reach sometimes exceeds her grasp--or the visual structures and language of her manga can't keep pace with her ideas--and reading her work is a fascinating exercise in trying to tease out all the implications of what she does and doesn't do. And it bears repeating that Hagio and the Shôwa 24 exploring these concerns at all in shoujo manga was revolutionary, and path-breaking; there'd be no Ôoku, or a host of other contemporary shoujo and josei manga, without Hagio Moto and Ikeda Riyoko, that's for sure.

Comments

[snarp]

You do totally have to read Oniisama E. It achieves incredible levels of melodrama.

A, A' is my favorite manga one-shot ever. I can't read it without crying.

[marshtide]

Mm, that's the thing, isn'ẗ it... even where they don't get it exactly right they're still doing really important stuff that leads into all sorts of interesting threads going through other people's work later on. I love that.

Having read this I think I might've only made it have way through A, A' before we had to give it back. Right. That one's back on the list, then!

[rushthatspeaks]

Oh, man, I need to reread this, I haven't read it since it came out. I do remember liking the first story, though.

[dancing_moon]

Thanks for an interesting review - I pretty much agree in all ways! I'd love to read more of Hagio's later works too, because I hope she's matured as a writer. And, perhaps, that she can see better ends for her noncomformist characters too?

It's also important to remember that the bleakness of 70-ies shojo is pretty much all over the place. Stuff like Lady!!, Candy Candy and boy's manga like Galaxy Express 999 were all for young children, yet get _very_ dark in some places... And of course, the generation of happy, rather depthless (from what I've been told, never read them) girl's manga from the decade before - those were all drawn by men, btw.

[starlady]

Yeah, a lot of what was going on in the 1970s in general is really interesting! There definitely is a more nuanced worldview than in some earlier manga (like Tezuka, because he comes to mind first).

[dancing_moon]

Tezuka at least has some interesting issues (especially as he gets older, I think he was also influenced by the seventies?) But I was shown some of the early girl's manga, Comet-san and... something about some little witch (based on some american sitcomish series). Anyway, they're really bland - even compared to Astro Boy, which at least tries to talk about war and saving the animals and whatnot - so the level of revolution this generation brought to girl's manga must be really hard for us to grasp.