Nawoko

Originally posted here at Yaoi Radius.

By all means, Voiceful is a story that shouldn’t work based on its premise and cast of characters alone. The main protaganist, Kanae, is a socially inverted girl who rarely steps outside the walls of her own bedroom, much less her house. In turn, Hina is a singer who only releases her music on the Internet and has her own personal issues that shine through her voice when she sings. The whole story relies on the coincidental meet-up of a lonely fangirl on one of her rare outside strolls and her virtual idol in real life, and the fact that they keep meeting up afterwards despite their different personalities and lifestyles. And yet, despite the odds being against it, this self-contained volume is an unlikely winner in every conceivable field. It is charming and heartwarming and yet has enough drama and emotional tension to make the reader really care about Kanae and Hina and hope their growing friendship will keep on growing into something beautiful (this is a yuri manga, after all). As far as entry-level yuri goes, you can’t go wrong with Voiceful as a personal introduction into the sweet world of girls’ love.

Anyone who has connected emotionally with a distant media idol will certainly understand Kanae’s story. When your real life sucks, sometimes you can find solace in the work and actions of someone famous who you will probably never meet or truly know – but what if you did meet them one day, and you became friends with them? That is Kanae’s unusual predicament when she meets Hina by chance one morning and the series handles tricky and sensitive issues – fan worship and the relationship between fans and their idols – with a light hand and much class. It also helps that Hina, although popular enough among her fan base, is not in such a lofty position of fame that she would realistically shun any of her fans during off time. To watch Hina and Kanae connect with each other – first as singer and listener, and then as two young women on equal ground – and feel good about their future together at the end is a sign of good, progressive development in a story; such successful character development, slow but steady, is always welcome when it is in a story with limited pages.

If there is one thing manga-ka Nawoko certainly excels at it is storytelling, something that shines through in both the main story for Voiceful as well as the extra one-shots at the end of the book. In the case of Voiceful, Nawoko has managed to create a subtle love story that is also a story of self-realization and also personal progress in both the shy distant Kanae and the lost lonely Hina, two people who have experienced deep losses in life and can find in each other the strength to move on. The short one-shot A Special Person in turn is extremely short and difficult to judge, but based on the few pages that makes it up, its story is not nearly as layered and intricate as the main story; it ends abruptly and doesn’t seem like a very good addition to the graphic novel as a whole. Following that is Opening, a sweet story that feels like it would deserve its own volume rather than being shoehorned into one-shot status. For people who enjoy some off-kilter student/teacher relationships, Opening is certainly a welcome addition to the genre with its pseudo-coupling of Onuki and Miss Kojima, but you have to wonder how the story would have continued had it been further developed on its own.

The art of Voiceful manages to be extremely pretty without being precocious and uses the difference between larger and smaller panels to its advantage; more dramatic scenes benefit from not being crowded into a smaller number of pages. That is something you can say about the book as a whole as well; despite being a single volume, it allows itself to flow and flower freely among its limited space and yet does not end awkwardly or non-conclude. It has an open ending, but any reader can hazard a guess as to how the Hina/Kanae relationship will hopefully progress after the author stops telling their story. The fact that I as a reader occasionally do wonder about how Hina and Kanae are doing post-book ending is a testament to the staying power of their tale. For those who love a sweet dollop of yuri in their everyday life, or are just dipping their toes into the girls’ love pool, Voiceful is an entry-level manga that will certainly snag more readers into the yuri genre of manga.… (altro)

Despite having originally appeared in a yuri magazine and being published under Seven Seas' Strawberry imprint, the stories in Voiceful aren't really yuri (a point that the creator acknowledges in the afterward). Instead of lesbian relationships, the stories herein depict close emotional relationships that form between young women. (Presumably one could choose to read a little more into the stories than actually appears on the page.) The title story relates the tale of a friendship that forms between an Internet pop singer and one of her reclusive fans, with their relationship serving to bring each out of their respective shells. The last of the three stories also deals with music, as a student teacher and one of her students find themselves locked together overnight in their school's music room. Creator nawako's art style is standard shojo, but she seems to bring a little extra to the proceedings, with a good sense of flow and pacing. Again I'm not the target audience here, but I found myself enjoying these stories that were charming with a tint of sadness.

Rating: 3 (of 5)… (altro)