Nana, Volume 7 Book

I'm completely addicted to Ai Yazawa's shojo manga Nana. Nana is the story of two young women, both from small towns, who meet on the bullet train and end up moving in together in Tokyo. Nana Komatsu (a.k.a. "Hachi") is a small-town girl who has big city dreams of romance and leaving her old life (and self) behind, while Nana Osaki has come to Tokyo to try to find success as the singer of her (psuedo) punk rock band, Blast. This all sounds like pretty standard fare so far, but once you throw in copious piercings, an underage bass-playing rent boy, art school friends, non-stop smoking, all-night parties, a cute sweety gothy fangirl, a deep romance between Nana O. and Ren (guitar player for rival band Trapnest), secret hotel trysts, crazy fashion, levels of girl bonding that are off the charts, and melodramatics like you haven't seen since you stopped watching Days of Our Lives, then you'll have a better idea of what you're in for in this series.

Yazawa does a few things really well in Nana. First, she creates characters that you can get attached to really easily so that you want to follow their stories. Once you're invested in the characters, the melodrama and gossip that mounts are unrelenting. Reading this manga kind of feels just like when one of your friends hands you some delicious, and perhaps slightly malicious, secret tidbit about a friend or acquaintance, usually prefaced with the phrase "Don't tell anyone." Yazawa is also frightfully adept at deploying a battery of shojo manga techniques used for the illustration of intense emotional states (startle lines, blushing cheeks, disembodied flowers floating in the air, smile octagons, etc.). This use of a secondary emotional language in illustration works in conjunction with the melodrama in a way that's far more affective than anything I can imagine in cinema. What Yazawa does best of all, however, is to deeply imagine the wide variety of affections, desires, and types of love that can run through groups of people without trying to simplify the complex emotional relationships that result. The (non-sexual, but definitely erotic) love between Nana and Nana is given more space in this manga than even the more traditional romantic encounters between the Nanas and their heterosexual partners. The idea of "love" that has managed to drop itself into the English language is severely inadequate to describe the types of emotional attachments that Yazawa instigates and investigates in Nana ' perhaps a more appropriate way to approach the relationships presented in Nana would be to invoke the numerous Greek words for love and use those varietals as a jumping off point.

For all its melodramatics and emphasis on young love and rock-and-roll, this series is hauntingly elegiac. The events told in the story itself take place in a past that's registered in the key of loss by the voice of a disembodied narrator that appears throughout the course of the narrative: "I'll still call out for you, Nana . . . no matter how much it hurts . . . until you answer me." I'm not sure what future traumatics are in store in this series, but my guess is that the series ends with the loss of something unrecoverable. Whether or not anything is gained in the tradeoff will be the point of interest to look out for.

The reason I give four stars to the series instead of five is that, as entertaining as it is, it's mostly a kind of pop entertainment. Sharply felt, deeply delightful, but finally not one for the ages.