Reviews in Brief: Momoko Tenzen's Seven

A special post-Christmas treat for you. I had considered holding this one, but I realized I was treating it like a special treasure, for me alone -- and after all, I have the book.

Momoko Tenzen's Seven falls under the category of "lucky find." It's one I snatched up on a whim, attracted by the graphics, which are superb, and not looking at the stories.

The title, as I eventually realized, is a play on the kanji character for two of the characters' names. Nana, which means "No Name," is a foundling who was taken in by a man who was both kind and cruel: about twelve years old, Nana had burn scars on his legs, nightmares in his past, and no memories of who he was or what his life had been. He was given a job in the man's bar, which was taken over when the man died by Ei, who allows Nana to live in a room on top of the building. Ei's friend Mitsuha wanders into town, and Ei tells him he can share the room for a few days. Mitsuha, an orphan himself, is a vagabond and a writer, not given to personal attachments. He had a brother, Nanao, from whom he was separated many years before -- the search for his brother is part of his wandering. The relationship between Mitsuha and Nana is the core of the first and last stories.

The middle story is about Nanao and his younger brother Hiromu. Nanao, as it turns out, is adopted; Hiromu suspects that he knew it, but they are both informed officially by their parents on Nanao's twentieth birthday. Given that this is yaoi manga, it's no surprise that their feelings for each other are somewhat more than brotherly love. Two things about this one: Hiromu has several books by the writer Mitsuha Kawase, and we learn that Nanao's name is written in kanji with the characters for "seven" ("nana") and "sound" ("o").

I mentioned the graphics. Wow. They are spare, sketchy, elegant, tremendously expressive, and fit beautifully with the mood of the stories, which is elliptical, poetic, indirect. (This is a case in which the cover art simply doesn't do the graphics justice -- the interior graphics are tremendously expressive, which doesn't come across on the cover at all.) It's the sort of thing where you finish reading and realize that you've just witnessed something very beautiful. These are not stories that hand themselves to you -- they demand attention and effort, and reward it. There's a certain amount of power here that resides below the obvious levels. Characters are the same: motivations, personality traits are not obvious, but they're there -- Mitsuha, in particular, goes through a transformation that's both subtle and unexpected.

Like I said: Wow. This one is very, very good. From Juné.