Well, Maybe LOVE Isn’t the Right Word…
Writer: Masato Inoue
Artist: Masato Inoue
Talk about false advertising. But I can’t even be mad at it because sometimes you read a book because it’s next on your list whether you want to or not. This is the trouble sometimes with systems. Next is next. But this book, …And I Love You, written and drawn by Masato Inoue was one that came up next on my alphabetical read of all Comixology series and I really didn’t want to. At 48, I’ve seen a lot of things, I’ve WRITTEN a lot of things, but this particular thing seemed like the kind of thing I wanted to avoid.
The product description tells the story of a man who loses his wife and is left to raise her son by himself. Ten years later, step-son confesses his love for the step-dad, and not just the kind of “you’ve always been there for me and I love you” love, this is the “I want you” kind of love and to this particular straight white man … hell I’m not even sure my daughters, one of whom is gay, the other of whom is bisexual, would want to touch that story with a ten-foot bookmark.
But, like I said, next is next.
Turns out the story is exactly as uncomfortable as you would think it is, but luckily it’s only 35 pages of this 164-page collection, and THAT, to me, was a welcome surprise.
See, I somehow missed the last line of the product description that said, “ and other sentimental love stories are contained in this bittersweet volume.” But once I got to the next story, I was a bit relieved.
And then a bit confused because the next story, Snowdrop Code, is about a man who, after a breakup, wakes up with another man in his bed. He’d met the man at a bar the night before and told him to come home with him, that the other man (look, I don’t remember the names here, the best way for me to tell the illustrations apart was one had black hair, the other was blonde) could stay with him.
The dark-haired one doesn’t remember any of this and is a bit freaked out by how rash he’d been, promising this to the blonde man, but a promise is a promise as next is next, so he is honor-bound, I guess, to let him stay. When the dark-haired man’s ex wants to get back with him, the dark-haired man realizes he’s in love with the blonde man and they live happily ever after? I guess?
Who knows, because before you know it, we’re onto the next story, My Master in the Bookshelves where two rival students make a bet. Whoever does the best on the next test, gets to tell the other one what to do, and what the winner wants is for the other one to tell him what he would have asked for had he won. And then he wants sex in the library. While it’s not a GRAPHIC depiction, I was reading at the break table in the very busy break room at work. That made me happy. If they don’t want to see what I’m reading, they should mind their own business.
Next is Frill Boy about a kid who is constantly told he’s so pretty he must be a girl, and the friend who doesn’t defend him, so he spends the next several years learning to defend himself, becoming a legend at school for beating people up, and then there’s a transfer student who turns out to be the old school friend who didn’t stick up for him and the transfer student is in love with the bully and promises to become the “prince” of his life. This was a very short story that went nowhere and said nothing, so we’ll move on to the last story, My Classmate Tateno about a kid who sees a classmate, Tateno, making out with another boy in the library. Tateno steals a kiss from the other boy, then swears him to secrecy about what he saw, otherwise he’ll tell everyone in school that he kissed him. Yadda yadda yadda, they fall in love.
I have a real problem with …And I Love You, and it’s NOT that the first story was about a stepson falling in love with his stepfather, although that was not a selling point. My problem is that all of these stories are plot-driven, and while I have nothing against a plot-driven story—have written enough of them myself—there’s just not enough here, in ANY of these stories, character-wise, for me to grab onto.
We go from plot point to plot point because that plot demands we do so, but there is little motivation, character or otherwise, to lead to many of these new plot points other than Masato said so. And that just doesn’t work from a reader perspective over the course of, in some cases, 12-13 pages. If your story is going to be that condensed, then those 12-13 pages better contain EVERYTHING important to that story. But these just don’t. They’re like characters meet, situation is established, characters spend a couple of pages denying their attraction to each other, characters have bland, by the numbers inner monologue about how much they don’t like the other person, characters kiss and the story is over.
Well, okay, that’s one way of telling a story, I guess. Another way, and hear me out, would be to see the characters explore their feelings toward the other in a more meaningful way where we get to understand their initial dislike of the other and what it says about them and for this to lead to some introspection and discovery and the revelation in the end that, for whatever reason they were rebuking the other, they actually DO like them and don’t want to live without them, no matter what the other kids will say Monday at school. I mean, you know, something more literary and well-done than that, but you get the point.
We can’t feel anything, happiness or contentment either way for these characters because THEY don’t feel anything, and if they do, we don’t see how they came about those feelings. All we know is on page one they don’t like the other one and by page 15 they love them, and whatever happened in the intervening pages to make them come to that conclusion, we the readers were not privy to that information.
Now, if you just want to go through this book and look at the wonderful art, that I can get behind. Masato’s art is pure manga, and comes with everything that entails, but there’s a reason manga is popular, and it’s not JUST the stories. This is some really beautiful art. Not Katsuhrio Otomo beautiful, but what is? They can’t all be Akira.
The layout of the text, however, is ANNOYING. I’m sure this is from the book being translated from Japanese to English, but the way the word balloons are placed on the page sometimes causes sentences to be interrupted in the middle and continued in the next balloon with no punctuation whatsoever to indicate a pause or anything; we’re just meant to read on as if our eyes didn’t have to jump from one balloon to the next. I’m sure this was unavoidable as the original word balloons were placed over the art in conjunction with the original Japanese text, but this was the first time I’ve read a manga and noticed something like this. It’s not enough to put me off manga, but it was very distracting.
I’m not sure if I can really recommend this book, if you’re a reader who needs fully fleshed out stories where we see the natural progression of events, but if you just want to see random anonymous Japanese men fall in love, this book’s right up your alley.
…And I Love You is a very quick read for being 164 pages, and is available to borrow through your Comixology Unlimited subscription.
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