After School Nightmare, Setona Mizushiro
Mar. 9th, 2008 06:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraAfter School Nightmare, Setona Mizushiro. v1-3 (scanlations), v 1-5 (Go!Comi)
Mashiro Ichijo, a student at an elite boarding school, is told he must attend a mysterious class required for graduation – a class that takes place in the shared dreamworld of those students involved. Each of the attendees appears in the dreamworld in a form that reflects their true self and wears a cord with three beads on them. Each bead can be shattered by physical or emotional violence, and when the last bead shatters they wake up; if, before that, they can find a key – usually hidden inside the altered body of one of the students – they can instead graduate, leaving the dreamworld behind them. But the classes are terrifying, bloody and cruel, and the students who graduate fade from everyone’s memories, leaving behind empty desks and nameless lockers.
Ichijo’s participation is triggered by his own carefully guarded secret – he is not entirely male (he describes his body as only male “from the waist up”), and he’s just started menstruating; when he appears in his dream form, he is (unlike the other students) identical in appearance to his everyday self, but wearing the girls’ version of the school uniform. His fellow students, however, are less recognisable, their forms often horrific reflections of their own secrets, and their motives unclear.
This is beautifully disturbing and very very good: revolving (possibly unavoidably) around issues of identity, particularly gender, it’s hard not to sympathise with almost all of the characters, and yet impossible to see how they can all get what they want. I also like the art, which is recognisably shojo without being annoyingly frilly, and the Go!Comi editions are very nice. V1-4 have the colour opening pages, as well, although they're missing from 5.
Graduation looks deeply creepy, and it’s not helped by the loss of everyone else’s memories, afterwards; Shinbashi’s sacrifice is all the more poignant for being completely unrecognised. The black moon is, I think, only seen by those who go on to graduate, although I don’t know whether the phase of the moon reflects some other plot-relevant clock. I also get hopelessly distracted by the kendo scenes, especially as I recently got back in touch with the friend of mine who got me into kendo and who points out that if she can find a dojo in Tel Aviv I could certainly make an effort to try here. Currently I am stalling until it’s cooler weather.
Anyway. Gender construction is, as I said, a key issue here, and it’s interesting to see where this is going – there’s a tendency for the characters to make statements of absolutes, while their own actions undercut this, but it’s difficult to know how it’s all going to fall out at the end. Ichijo says he wants to be male, but behaving as he thinks a man should (and his current role model for this, Kurosaki, the kendo captain, is also problematic) is getting him into more trouble. He protects Kureha, who was raped as a child and appears as her younger self in the dream, and begins a cautious relationship with her, trying to get her to trust men again; it works too well, though, as she begins to want things he’s not prepared to give her, more than the fairytale prince she compares him to (and the splash page for one volume has Ichijo as Cinderella, rather than the prince). The end of volume 5 – the Romeo and Juliet sequence – still has Ichijo trying to give Kureha what she wants (“I’ll help [her] graduate”) rather than work out his own desires.
His relationship with Sou also turns on conflicting behaviours and statements about gender – “I’m the guy,” Sou says to Ichijo, after coming into his room, “what do you think I want?” – but other panels reveals that whatever else he wants, Sou needs someone to save him, and thinks Ichijo may be the one (although, man, Sou really does behave atrociously most of the time, and I do think Ichijo needs to call him on it without trying to just deny everything else in the process).
What it means to be female is also referenced, although Ichijo spends a lot less time thinking about it (when he does, he says he’s too ugly to be a girl). Shinome, however, tells Ichijo he’s not strong enough to be a girl, and the female characters in the series are strong, and also complex. Kureha, in school, is a cheerful and attractive schoolgirl, although insecure; in the dreamworld, though, what she also has is a furious and destructive anger, enabling her to strike back at anyone with all the power she lacked earlier (when Ichijo first meets her there she impales him with umbrellas). Sou’s mysterious sister is certainly effective, in her own twisted way, and then there’s the nurse never seems to be telling the exact truth about anything in the dreamworld.
There are some gorgeous moments here, particularly those ones where the dreamworld cuts through into reality: the descent into the mysterious basement; the scene where Ichijo finds Kureha sellotaping the torn paper giraffe back together; the struggle between Ichijo’s male and female selves in the birdcage that is the school’s logo (and the key to graduation). The art is very much part of the atmosphere of the series, shojo but with a relative spareness, and the horror components are never gratuitous but always disturbing.
I was hoping writing this would result in the arrival of volume 6, but although it is out the place I ordered it from ordered me volume 5 instead, thus dropping them to the bottom of my list of the three suppliers I'm currently experimenting with. The Go!Comi website has a sort of trailer thing here (for some reason, I can't link to the series page - look for the list on the right) to give an idea of the series and checking release dates with one hand over the screen to avoid accidentally reading any of the blurbs has a relatively quick schedule, with volume 8 (possibly the final? I’m pretty sure it’s finished in Japan) out in August.
Mashiro Ichijo, a student at an elite boarding school, is told he must attend a mysterious class required for graduation – a class that takes place in the shared dreamworld of those students involved. Each of the attendees appears in the dreamworld in a form that reflects their true self and wears a cord with three beads on them. Each bead can be shattered by physical or emotional violence, and when the last bead shatters they wake up; if, before that, they can find a key – usually hidden inside the altered body of one of the students – they can instead graduate, leaving the dreamworld behind them. But the classes are terrifying, bloody and cruel, and the students who graduate fade from everyone’s memories, leaving behind empty desks and nameless lockers.
Ichijo’s participation is triggered by his own carefully guarded secret – he is not entirely male (he describes his body as only male “from the waist up”), and he’s just started menstruating; when he appears in his dream form, he is (unlike the other students) identical in appearance to his everyday self, but wearing the girls’ version of the school uniform. His fellow students, however, are less recognisable, their forms often horrific reflections of their own secrets, and their motives unclear.
This is beautifully disturbing and very very good: revolving (possibly unavoidably) around issues of identity, particularly gender, it’s hard not to sympathise with almost all of the characters, and yet impossible to see how they can all get what they want. I also like the art, which is recognisably shojo without being annoyingly frilly, and the Go!Comi editions are very nice. V1-4 have the colour opening pages, as well, although they're missing from 5.
Graduation looks deeply creepy, and it’s not helped by the loss of everyone else’s memories, afterwards; Shinbashi’s sacrifice is all the more poignant for being completely unrecognised. The black moon is, I think, only seen by those who go on to graduate, although I don’t know whether the phase of the moon reflects some other plot-relevant clock. I also get hopelessly distracted by the kendo scenes, especially as I recently got back in touch with the friend of mine who got me into kendo and who points out that if she can find a dojo in Tel Aviv I could certainly make an effort to try here. Currently I am stalling until it’s cooler weather.
Anyway. Gender construction is, as I said, a key issue here, and it’s interesting to see where this is going – there’s a tendency for the characters to make statements of absolutes, while their own actions undercut this, but it’s difficult to know how it’s all going to fall out at the end. Ichijo says he wants to be male, but behaving as he thinks a man should (and his current role model for this, Kurosaki, the kendo captain, is also problematic) is getting him into more trouble. He protects Kureha, who was raped as a child and appears as her younger self in the dream, and begins a cautious relationship with her, trying to get her to trust men again; it works too well, though, as she begins to want things he’s not prepared to give her, more than the fairytale prince she compares him to (and the splash page for one volume has Ichijo as Cinderella, rather than the prince). The end of volume 5 – the Romeo and Juliet sequence – still has Ichijo trying to give Kureha what she wants (“I’ll help [her] graduate”) rather than work out his own desires.
His relationship with Sou also turns on conflicting behaviours and statements about gender – “I’m the guy,” Sou says to Ichijo, after coming into his room, “what do you think I want?” – but other panels reveals that whatever else he wants, Sou needs someone to save him, and thinks Ichijo may be the one (although, man, Sou really does behave atrociously most of the time, and I do think Ichijo needs to call him on it without trying to just deny everything else in the process).
What it means to be female is also referenced, although Ichijo spends a lot less time thinking about it (when he does, he says he’s too ugly to be a girl). Shinome, however, tells Ichijo he’s not strong enough to be a girl, and the female characters in the series are strong, and also complex. Kureha, in school, is a cheerful and attractive schoolgirl, although insecure; in the dreamworld, though, what she also has is a furious and destructive anger, enabling her to strike back at anyone with all the power she lacked earlier (when Ichijo first meets her there she impales him with umbrellas). Sou’s mysterious sister is certainly effective, in her own twisted way, and then there’s the nurse never seems to be telling the exact truth about anything in the dreamworld.
There are some gorgeous moments here, particularly those ones where the dreamworld cuts through into reality: the descent into the mysterious basement; the scene where Ichijo finds Kureha sellotaping the torn paper giraffe back together; the struggle between Ichijo’s male and female selves in the birdcage that is the school’s logo (and the key to graduation). The art is very much part of the atmosphere of the series, shojo but with a relative spareness, and the horror components are never gratuitous but always disturbing.
I was hoping writing this would result in the arrival of volume 6, but although it is out the place I ordered it from ordered me volume 5 instead, thus dropping them to the bottom of my list of the three suppliers I'm currently experimenting with. The Go!Comi website has a sort of trailer thing here (for some reason, I can't link to the series page - look for the list on the right) to give an idea of the series and checking release dates with one hand over the screen to avoid accidentally reading any of the blurbs has a relatively quick schedule, with volume 8 (possibly the final? I’m pretty sure it’s finished in Japan) out in August.
