Storyteller: Ai Yazawa
Publisher: Viz
Year of Publication: 2000 (In Japan)
Page Count: Approximately 176 pages
What I learned about Writing/Storytelling:
1. This is a dual protagonist story, something I see more in manga than American entertainment. In this instance, it’s about two girls named Nana. One is more ordinary, while the other is in a punk band.
2. There’s an odd thing this volume has in common with Friends with Boys, in that in both books a female protagonist has a monologue at one point about how they were a bad daughter. In Friends with Boys, this involved guilt Maggie felt over the fact that she didn’t want to do “girlie” things with her mom, and this led to her mom abandoning the family as she couldn’t bond with her only daughter.
In Nana, punk Nana mentions she was falsely accused of prostitution and expelled from school. When her grandmother (who raised her by herself) learned of this, she died of a broken heart. The prostitution charge wasn’t true, and Nana regrets not contesting it for her grandmother’s sake (it seems she was too depressed to fight it for her own sake).
In both stories this monologue has nothing directly to do with the plot. (It is an explanation why the Mother is gone In Friends with Boys, I guess, but the mother never shows up again or anything, it’s just backstory.) In both cases, it adds spice to the story, but is not essential.
3. Punk Nana’s backstory is told through flashback recollections but also the device of Nana saying to her boyfriend “Hey, remember when we met?” (Image of that below) I’m not 100% certain whether that’s an acceptable use of exposition or not.
What I learned about Art/Storytelling:
Err… pass? The visuals are so different from American stuff that its hard to extrapolate anything.
Recommendation C
Notes/Reviews/Synopsis:
So, this is Nana. Here’s is it’s cover:
It’s an extremely popular comic among Japanese teenage girls and other people who are not male, with 22 million copies sold, according to the back cover. Both Nanas get their hearts broken, and will both move to Tokyo to seek their fortunes in love, careers, and life. They will apparently meet and become roommates in a future volume, but they did not meet in volume 1, which is kind of lame, though a note in the back explains that the author didn’t know if the book would be picked up for a series when volume 1 was made, so designed the stories to be standalone.
Here is Not Punk Nana crushing on guys:
Here is Not Punk Nana crying in a childish way because her friend is leaving to go to school in Tokyo without her:
And this is a sequence halfway through the trade, when the Not Punk Nana story ends and we switch protagonists to Punk Nana, who is singer for a band and is pursuing a music career:
That’s kind of cool, how she gets her own little title page, and although we start with Not Punk Nana, it’s Punk Nana on the volume 1 cover.
This isn’t the sort of comic I usually read, I don’t think anyone punches anyone at all. I wanted to use the 30 day challenge to try some stuff I wouldn’t try otherwise. I didn’t get all that into Nana, in part because I think the two boyfriend characters were rather lame, but I guess I can see why the book is important to a lot of people.
It’s about love, and relationships, and becoming an adult, and finding a job, and growing up. In comparison, mainstream American stuff is about, well, pretty much nothing.
Most readers of Spider-man will never find themselves wandering a hall in a wrestling outfit as a cop asks them to tackle a thief.
(This has never, ever, happened and never, ever, will.)
While many readers can be expected to one day find themselves having sexy fun times with a loved one:
So Nana would at least seem to be trying to be about something real.
30 I was tempted to give this a B rating, but it feels like a ripoff that the two Nana’s don’t meet until volume 2, so C it is