Genre: BL/yaoi/drama
Age Rating: YA/Young Adult/16+
Price: $12.95
Whatever I find once I crack this walnut open... at this point, I won't be too surprised.
In the Walnut is a tricky title to review. It's been put out under DMP's BL imprint, June, and it does feature a gay couple as the main characters, but it's not a typical "boy meets boy" book by any means. Most of the stories in the collection don't focus on their relationship, and it's not until the short prequel stories at the end of the book that we find out how they got together. Rather, the main stories focus on the people who come to the art gallery named "In the Walnut" looking for help -- and finding it, though not in the form they were expecting.
Even the title tells us that something unusual is in the offing: it's a reference to Hamlet, albeit re-translated from a Japanese translation; the original is "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite spaces", which is rendered here as "Though confined to a walnut, I can imagine myself still king, to reign over this universe without end". Left unspoken from this quotation is the all-important last line: "were it not that I have bad dreams". Main character Tanizaki is indeed haunted by "bad dreams" in the form of a pervasive melancholy that never quite leaves him; the source and origin of this melancholy is left mysterious (perhaps to be explored in a later volume), but his relationship with aspiring filmmaker Nakai seems to be the only thing that can make it lift, even temporarily.
What makes my job as a reviewer even trickier is that two of the moments in the book that had the most impact on me are moments I'd rather not describe in too much detail for fear of spoiling them. There were moments when I said to myself "I can see where this is going... and it's going to hurt", and I was right; the story went exactly where I thought it was going to go, and it did hurt, just as if I'd seen a punch coming but been too mesmerised to move away. I was brought to the verge of tears several times, and occasionally I felt like I was being manipulated (the story "Lying Angel" features a small child with a sister on the verge of going blind, and that's just the start of it; he might as well have "Tearjerker Deluxe" stamped on his forehead). Of course, most fiction tries to manipulate the reader's emotions to some degree, but the trick is to do it without letting the reader notice it, and I was all set to dismiss Kawai as a puppetteer who can't hide the strings on her puppets -- and then came one of the moments I'm not going to talk about, and I didn't see it coming at all, and it was like a punch to the gut. In just a few lines of dialogue, she added extra dimensions to both Nakai and Tanizaki's characters, and to their relationship, and gave an extra significance to all that had gone before and would go after.
Kawai's art style is not the kind I normally favour -- it's heavy on screentones and big eyes -- but she's skilled enough to reproduce convincing fakes of paintings by Gainsborough and Paul Klee, and she's clearly done her research into the field of fine art. (She even includes references to books she consulted, in case you want to follow up on the subject.) In the Walnut is a moving and compelling read, not like other BL manga and all the better for it.
8