Have been catching up on Nana in the past few days

[petronia]

Due to one Renaud-Bray stocking the tankoubon I was missing (the French edition is up to vol.18). Actually, there's no gear shift in going from Libs fandom back to this: starts off as a story about sharing a flat with one's best friend, winds up in deepest frozen circle of Tabloid Hell. XD;; Whether that's an indictment of Yazawa Ai or reality... I used to complain about Nana's pacing in the latter stretch but it comes off much better in comparison, if only because fiction has the luxury of FAST FORWARDING until something interesting happens. For years, if necessary.

Notes on timeline: Hachi is five months pregnant in November 2001, meaning Satsuki is born in March 2002, i.e. the first flash-forward scene (in which she is six) takes place July 7, 2008. The next one takes place on Bonfire Night of the same year - November 5, 2008, those wacky Englishers with their fireworks out of season, whatever will they think of next - and Hachi and Shin receive the photos around Christmas. So the "future" storyline is progressing at the same pace as the "main" storyline, on schedule to wrap (I'm guessing) when "reality time" catches up, sometime mid-2009. It'll have run for nearly a decade. o_O Nana and Hachi are almost exactly my age, but I can't pin down how that affects my reading - my subjective experience of time was a lot more linear when I was a teenager than it is nowadays. ^^; From certain angles 2002 seems like an eon ago, from others it seems like the blink of an eye.

me: if you take volume 2 and volume 17 and look from one to the other, you're like what the fuck happened
oh, it's a total coincidence
but that's what one remembers afterward
this sort of obsessive retrospective focus on both Hachi and Nana's parts
on the symbol of the shared apartment
that's representative of the time in their lives they were the happiest
Sonya: which is sort of messed up
because they weren't actually that happy
me: 707 is far more salubrious than anywhere Pete and Carl ever lived, I have to say XD
Sonya: yes, and they had nice things
those glasses
all hachi's furniture from her job
me: even by the point they moved out of the place, though, they were already nostalgic for it
or had the sense that something had changed for the irreparable
they hadn't even lived there all that long
less than a year
Sonya: even while they were there, it felt like they were building a myth
me: yes, but only because the story was always narrated in past tense
Sonya: which makes sense on hachi's part (first city apartment, and she's the scrap-booking kind)

[skipping some unrelated talk about real life artists]

Sonya: ah for the days when producers actually DID suppress the interesting songs
and the bands didn't help them do it/suppress their own songs without being asked
me: all this stuff is in Nana
I was kind of surprised
but in one of the dust jacket free talks
Yazawa Ai mentions that the characters she actually has the easiest time writing and drawing are all ojisan
as in, Blast's manager, producer, record label bosses, the magazine editor
Sonya: well, i guess in the case of the establishment characters, they're all lawful evil!
so, just rationally out for what benefits them
so they aren't as hard to write
or maybe when yazawa ai was doing research, those were the people she talked to
me: it really does give an air of realism
although again, reading the first few volumes, you wouldn't have thought that this manga would eventually spend most of a chapter dissecting the exploitative contract and poor money management skills of a porn actress
Sonya: that and the militant fanclub
me: the uber-fans
shit, the uber-fans are awesome
Sonya: actually, that was the weirdest part for me
not that they were hardcore and worked with the band
but they were so /organized/
and, like, everyone /respected the hierarchy/
i guess you do get that with professional groupies though
like, you gotta give them props
at the concert tonight, yin's friend, a psych major, was commenting on the messed-up-ness of the fans who drive down from toronto
me: it's the usual order of things in Asia
Sonya: but psych majors define "normal" so narrowly

Half the old-skool fans drop out when Blast signs to a major due to insufficient punk-itude of production values, lol - not to mention the agency-backed media whoredom. Sometimes I think Libs fandom would be more interesting if it dealt with this stuff in fic as well as on news threads, but it'd be hard to do without taking a stance of some kind, and Yazawa Ai gets it to work by favouring descriptive over prescriptive. She's more like a seinen mangaka by nature, as aforementioned.

One comment to the original blog post about "Amazing Girls" draws a line between girls who are uncritically optimistic fluffheads and girls who are aware of their assigned place in the world and bitter about it. I'm not convinced those are the only two ways to go (there's at least one other category - girls who put off being girls in the social-construct sense until they're better equipped to deal with it), but Yuri and Miu broadly fit the dichotomy. As do the Nanas, I suppose. But really it seems to be a question of adolescent maladjustedness. There are corresponding types of male teenaged innocence: the wide-eyed dumb kid with ideals about what he wants to accomplish in life - God help him - and Holden Caulfield, who's grossed out by adulthood in the same way as some children are grossed out by any food that isn't pizza or chicken fingers. How the song goes, kick out at the world and the world'll kick back a lot fucking harder.

Comments

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

You left out the part about Asian fanclubs assigning seating at concerts! That was the best part.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I didn't know if the person reads my LJ, so. XD; (And it's not seating - it's standing. As in the moshpit.)

[motorbike.livejournal.com]

Just commenting to say I enjoyed this immensely. I'm actually really really tired of Nana, but on second thought perhaps I will read past chapter um ... 50? 60?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I was really tired of it too! But it reads better in large chunks, and there's not as much of Ren being crazee as I'd assumed there would be in the later volumes. Also my tolerance is way up. XD