[Content warnings: this volume includes on-page sex, and there’s a deliberately disturbing sequence in which a children’s manga character is given an enormous penis, has sex, and is then killed and left to be eaten by birds.]

This volume picks up where the previous one left off. Yozo has survived his attempted double suicide with Ageha. The idea of being punished for her death gives him the sense of purpose he craves, but this is snatched from his hands by the police’s decision to set him free and deliver him to the hands of one of his family’s former servants. Yozo blames his father and stews in his own bitterness while essentially living trapped in the former servant’s home.

Yozo manages to escape one prison only to end up in another. Having no other place to go, he ends up living with his friend Horiki's editor, Shizuko. She dotes on him, seeing his pretty face and nothing else. Although outwardly things appear to be going well for Yozo - he now has a roof over his head, a job as a children’s manga artist, and somebody willing to fork over money anytime he wants to go out and buy booze - he feels stifled by Shizuko’s love and her young daughter’s wish for him to be her real father.

By the end of the volume, Yozo has finally found something like happiness. Will it last? Ha ha, of course not.

I think I’ve finally accepted that this isn’t so much an adaptation of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human as it is Dazai’s plot and Usamaru Furuya’s Yozo. Although I still end up comparing the two works a lot in this review. Sorry.

My interpretation of the original book and Furuya’s interpretation continue to differ wildly. Furuya’s Yozo is less sympathetic than Dazai’s (who, granted, tended to be pretty terrible), more likely to blame his father for his own problems, and more calculating. Rather than just sort of being taken in by Shizuko, he does his best to manipulate her into offering to take him in, making use of both his good looks and his abilities in bed.

Yozo isn’t a likeable guy. He’s prone to self-destructive behavior, doesn’t think things through, and then wallows in bitterness rather than accept the consequences. He was even more disgusting than Book Yozo when it came to life with Shizuko and Shiori. I remember Book Shizuko putting up with more from Yozo than I thought was wise, but I’m pretty sure the undressing scene was entirely invented by Furuya, and it was awful. The inclusion of Dazai’s “Papa is...too good of a person” scene afterward was bizarre, since both Shizuko and Shiori had just witnessed Yozo being very much not a good person.

In some ways, I’d argue that Yozo’s brief period of time with Mama at the bar was probably the best period of his life, even better than his “romance” with Yoshi at the end of the volume - this was vastly different from how I felt while reading the original book, by the way. I think Furuya’s Mama was a more fascinating character than Dazai’s.

Mama was an older woman who, for some bizarre reason, was fond of Yozo but also well aware of his problems. She didn’t expect anything from him, and her happiness certainly didn’t depend on him. There was one scene I particularly liked that I think Furuya invented (I don’t recall it being in the original book). Mama was acting as Yozo’s nude model and asked to see Yozo’s drawing of her. She accused him of being too kind and told him to redo the drawing, this time including her wrinkles. I loved that she not only refused to accept flattery from Yozo, but also that she seemed to genuinely love her own body. Here’s her description of her wrinkles: “These are my growth rings. Each stands for a love and a parting.” I don’t recall having any favorite characters in Dazai’s No Longer Human, but Furuya's Mama was wonderful.

Had Furuya broken free from the constraints of writing an adaptation, I imagine his Yozo could have stayed with Mama long enough to finally gain something resembling emotional maturity. Or maybe she'd have eventually gotten tired of him and tossed him out. At any rate, the story moved on and continued to follow Dazai’s original plot. This was another instance where I felt that Furuya’s changes to the original story were an improvement upon the original. Furuya’s Yozo was younger than Dazai’s Yozo, which meant that his Yozo was also closer in age (only 20) to the

As happy as he seems to be by the end of the volume, this series is pretty upfront about the fact that things do not end well for Yozo. If I hadn’t already read the book, and if it were just bad things happening to Yozo, I might be tempted to read on. However, I’m going to stop here.

I prefer main characters who inspire me to root for them, or who at least interest me. Furuya's Yozo, a loser who hurts and/or drags down most of the people around him, doesn’t appeal to me. That said, I did think this volume was better than the first.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

I don't have a full review for Schoolgirl, although I DO have a few sentences and some notes floating around in my head.  It's just a matter of putting them together coherently, though chances are, I might just include it in my June Package Review for all the books I probably won't publish an official review for.

Anyway, in the meantime, here are some quotes I highlighted while reading Schoolgirl that stood out to me for one reason or another.  What I was thinking at the time is questionable, but here you are:

For such a tiny, tiny book, 'The Boy in the Earth' takes a long time to develop, but when it does....

Our narrator is a taxi-driver in Tokyo, a job he fell into because he likes the solitude and lack of intimacy. He's depressed and his suicidal thoughts are getting worse and he has dreams of being swallowed up by the earth. His live-in girlfriend is similarly burdened with depression and alcohol dependency.

Its clear that there's something more going on here than quarter-life ennui, but Nakamura holds out for a slow reveal, making us follow our narrator through self-destructive episodes and disturbing childhood memories.

This was not what I was expecting, but I was pretty damn impressed by the end of it.

Yuichi seems like the most perfect guy at Wataru's high school. He gets good grades, has good looks, is good at basketball, and gets along well with everyone. However, a chance encounter at a water fountain shows Wataru another side of Yuichi, one that's cold and sarcastic. Wataru can't remember ever even talking to Yuichi, so why does the guy hate him so much?

The situation only becomes more awkward and upsetting when Wataru and Yuichi discover they've accidentally swapped rings. At their school, wearing matching rings and/or wearing a ring on your ring finger signifies that you're dating someone and, shockingly, Wataru and Yuichi's rings not only look exactly alike, but they also fit on each other's ring fingers. The matching rings are, of course, an indication that there is romance in Wataru and Yuichi's future.

Anyway, my first exposure to this series was via the manga adaptation of it. I remembered it being fairly sweet, if lacking in substance, so when I learned it was based on a 5-volume series of novels I decided to give them a try. Now that I've finished the first volume, I can say that 1) I prefer the manga and 2) the manga only adapted the first hundred pages.

This book had a couple big problems. One was the writing/translation, which was terrible. The other was how frustrating the characters were – they seemed to be determined to sabotage themselves.

I'll start with the writing. While I thought that Wataru's gradual realization that he was gay (not that the word was ever used) was pretty good, most of the rest of the book needed work. There were weird word choices, awkward phrasing, and one very noticeable lack of transition from one scene to the next. It was bad enough that I sometimes had trouble figuring out what the author was trying to say. This was particularly a problem during the last scene at Yuichi's cousin's shop, when confusing and contradictory emotions were added to the mix.

My favorite weird word choice example happened during Wataru's first encounter with Miho, a cool and pretty first-year student:

“She had a surprisingly small face, and her skin was so smooth it reminded him of raw cake batter.” (138)

This part was so unexpected and bad that I actually laughed until I cried. Who compares a person's skin to raw cake batter like it's a good thing? I suppose this was more original than saying her skin was smooth as silk, but sometimes originality isn't a good thing.

Now on to the characters' self-sabotaging behavior. At one point Kawamura, Wataru's best friend, said “Well, whatever, you guys sure are a stupid couple.” (134) I couldn't agree more. It was amazing they were still together by the end of the book.

Yuichi spent almost the entire first half of the book treating Wataru like garbage, even though that wasn't even close to how he felt. I wish Kannagi had toned that down, because it made it more difficult to believe that Wataru could fall for him. I could sort of go along with it, because Yuichi's mask occasionally slipped in ways that even Wataru was able to notice, but it was still a bit aggravating.

In the second half of the book, Yuichi and Wataru began to think about sex. Wataru was worried that things were going faster than he was comfortable with, so by the end of the conversation he and Yuichi had come to an agreement in which they would have sex if Yuichi ranked in the top thirty (in all of Japan!) on the exam he was studying for. Like Kawamura later said, this guaranteed that they'd see each other even less than they already were, because Yuichi would be too busy studying, which would probably only make things more awkward for them later on. While they were separated, Wataru got caught up in a jealous classmate's schemes and, instead of telling Yuichi about it at the first opportunity, he made things worse by lying about it.

Amazingly, Wataru and Yuichi's relationship survived their efforts to sabotage it, and now I have four more volumes to go. Here's hoping that, at the very least, the writing/translation gets smoother.

Extras:

Several black-and-white illustrations and two color illustrations.

Rating Note:

I never know how to rate stuff like this. On the one hand, the story was almost 100% non-rapey (there was one iffy moment that kept it from being 100%), which is something I always want to applaud in these books. So very many of them are rapey. On the other hand, the writing/translation was noticeably and memorably bad. Instead of being able to treat this book like fluffy brain candy, I occasionally had to struggle to follow along with the text.

If I could rate this book for multiple things, I'd give the writing/translation 1/2 star, the romance maybe 2 stars on a good day (don't be such a jerk to the guy you like, Yuichi), and the entertainment value 4 stars. I mean, how many books out there would dare to compare a pretty girl's skin to raw cake batter? Or have a main character try to hide the fact that he lost his ring by bandaging his ring finger? Ha!

But seriously, I hope the next book isn't as much work to read.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Schoolgirl chronicles a day in a life of a Japanese girl. It's a first person narration full of angst, snark and minute observations. From a casual mention of a war, it's fair to assume that the story took place in the early 1940s, but it really doesn't matter, because she could well be just another teenager from our time, from any country. The narrator has an acute self-consciousness not uncommon in teens and a degree of self-awareness that is more typical in someone older. And in a true stream-of-consciousness fashion, you'd get to see her contradict herself without any sense of irony, from badmouthing her mother to berating herself for being such a bitch to wishing that she could be a better, nicer girl.

For an introduction to Dazai, I think Schoolgirl is as good as any. It's short, and it gives you a good idea about his prose and the feel of his works. For me, it's just an OK book, but I suspect that's because I've read No Longer Human, which, some people believe, is his best work. But I'd recommend Schoolgirl to anyone, especially if you're looking for a quick read, and if you like angsty/moany youth confessionals like The Catcher in the Rye and Botchan.