Review in Brief: Shoko Hidaka's Geliebter Freund

This is not really a review -- Geliebter Freund is just my latest translation project, a typical school-boy romance, childhood friends reunited variety. It seems to bear out my reaction to my only previous experience with Hidaka -- her stories are low-key and fairly uneventful, with a lot of psychological introspection. I'm having trouble getting into this one, but I'm not sure if it's the story or the circumstances -- I was doing these as fill-in for slow periods at work, and the powers that be decided I wasn't busy enough, so progress has been kind of patchy. I think, though, that the story itself doesn't have that much grab-power -- it's been kind of hard to get into.

One thing that attracted me to this one is that I like Hidaka's drawing style. It's a nice, clean, open style that I find appealing. One thing I noticed is that she is of those mangaka who renders faces in a sort of non-racial manner -- her characters could be Asian or Western. The reason this comes to mind is that I ran across a post at another blog way back when that asked the question "Do Japanese see manga characters as Japanese?" The question left me sort of wondering "WTF?" and as I remember the essay, it made a big deal out of the way characters in manga are designed. (I'm talking about those manga that fall within what I call a "comic realism" or bishounen style, as opposed to those that tend toward chibi renderings or highly abstracted character designs -- most BL manga as opposed to something like Sgt. Frog. Since that time my experience with manga and anime has expanded just a bit, and looking at that question now, it's pretty much moot -- even within one manga or anime, you can find characters who fit comfortably into either an Asian or European "type," if you care to classify them that way. I don't. (Just watching Samurai 7 -- again -- and noticed that there are a number of characters who come close to being caricatures of the Western conception of "Asian" -- of course, there are a number of characters who are caricatures anyway.) Frankly, it's a question that would never occur to me, since it completely avoids the reality of the thing, and takes no account of the history of manga and the influences on it.

By way of a footnote, I was fairly recently directed to an essay entitled "The Invisible Knapsack" as a means of educating me in the error of my attitudes about race. (Which, as it happens, are pretty much nonexistent -- I was raised to view people as people, not as stereotypes. It stuck.) Unfortunately, while a brilliant example of liberal guilt, the writer's experiences did not match my own in any way. Nor did her assumptions. Sadly, the person who directed me did not want to hear anything about the reality of differences in human experiences -- apparently, if I'm white, I must fit into a certain set of parameters that describe my life experience and my attitudes in a way that she finds acceptable. Thus, my last run-in with the PC left. I removed that blog from my bookmarks. They have nothing to offer me.

(And before anyone lands on me, I'm fully aware of the institutionalized racism in this country, hate the idea of it, and won't tolerate it in any realm where I have the power to do anything. That's not what this is about. This is about dealing with people as people.)