Reviews in Brief: Momoko Tenzen's Suggestive Eyes

Suggestive Eyes is another one of Momoko Tenzen's collections of related stories, this time taking place in a university setting.

Megumu Okazaki is a gradate student who works for one of the professors. He's been going out with a third-year student, Hisashi Kina, who caught him on the rebound. As might be imagined, this hasn't served to put a firm foundation under their relationship, and both men are wondering just what's going on. The first two stories follow them as they're trying to sort it out.

The third tale, "Don't Let It Be Light Yet," segues very nicely into the second couple featured in this collection, the aforementioned professor, Shibata, and the "professor next door," Kikugawa. They're obviously close, although with her usual reticence, Tenzen doesn't actually give us the full picture until much later. This story involves a stray dog and her litter of puppies, and the death of Kikugawa's cat, who died a year before, leaving him devastated.

The final story, "On the Road to Love," gives us a flashback to Shibata and Kikugawa fifteen years before, when they first met. Shibata has recently been dumped by his boyfriend, and Kikugawa finds himself intrigued by the younger student -- he comes down with a cold, and Shibata decides to take care of him.

These are quiet, reflective stories, particularly the two about Shibata and Kikugawa. They partake of Tenzen's elliptical storytelling style, with dialogue often seeming to run in a parallel track to the action portrayed. The drawings are typically Tenzen, not quite as spare as those in Seven (this one is later, originally published in 2006), but still beautiful and marvelously expressive. She's also lost that stiffness in the figures that I noticed in Seven and The Paradise on the Hill.

As always with Tenzen, recommended without a qualm: no major drama, no major angst, just charming, low-key stories, not particularly romantic in themselves, but somehow offering what is almost the essence of romance. She's hard to explain that way, so I suggest you just kick back and enjoy.

From Juné.