Review: AWKWARD SILENCE

No mangaka, however great they may be, can churn out hits forever.  Sometimes they're going to miss, or in the case make something that is decidedly mediocre.

AWKWARD SILENCE (Bukiyou na Silent), by Hinako Takanaga.  First published in 2006 and first published in North America in 2012.

PLOT:

Satoru is not just you usual introverted teen.  He's so shy and stone-faced that he's all but incapable of physically demonstrating his emotions.  That makes it terribly hard for him to communicate just how badly he's crushing on the class baseball star Keigo.  Amazingly, Keigo is able to see through Satoru's extreme shyness and confesses his own affections for Satoru.  Everything seems to be hunky-dory for them...if not for the bouts of jealousy they feel when a bubbly new girl and one of Satoru's old friends join their class.

STORY:

I do consider Hinako Takanaga to be one of my favorite BL mangaka, but her career has seen a lot of up and downs.  At her best, she's able to balance great character writing and even a touch of humor alongside the smut.  At her worst, her manga is derivative and charmless.  I'm sad to say that Awkward Silence leans more towards the latter than the former.

Satoru being super-shy is a fine place to start, but making him all but physically incapable of emoting feels a bit too ridiculous for what is otherwise a fairly down-to-earth story.  He literally gets the vapors if he yells!  Even Komi could make faces, and her series is a lot sillier than this one!  I also think that Takanaga jumped the gun a little with Keigo's love confession.  Since the two get together so quickly, there's no romantic tension to draw out.  Further more, Keigo and Satoru aren't particularly deep characters and together they form a rather mild-mannered couple.  Thus, Takanaga was forced to keep things going by lobbing new rivals at them and making Satoru jealous.

So much of the plot depends upon Satoru being both gullible enough to jump to conclusions on the slightest of evidence and too dumb to just talk to his boyfriend.  That's why he initially presumes that Keigo will leave him for the bubbly baseball team manager Machida.  Luckily, she hasn't an antagonistic bone in her body and is more than happy to be friends with both boys.  More troublesome is Satoru's old friend Yu.  He basically tries to gaslight Satoru into believing that Keigo isn't all that he seems and that Yu would be a far better partner.  Setting aside the fact that this is just a complete, friendship-ruining dick move, I can't help but feel that this would have been more effective as drama if it had happened BEFORE Satoru and Keigo got together.  Yet without him, this story probably wouldn't have lasted more than a chapter or two.  Takanaga is already struggling with stretching out this story - I can't imagine how she's made it last for multiple volumes.

ART:

As much as I like Takanaga as an artist, she is absolutely guilty of reusing character designs in her manga.  Keigo and Satoru don't look that much different from all the other skinny, haystack-haired, pointy-chinned pretty boys she's drawn, save for maybe some hair color changes.  Still, they are quite expressive (save for Satoru, of course).  Honestly, I wish she didn't draw the boys' bangs so long so the reader could better appreciate those emotions, or that she didn't shove in reaction shots of Satoru so often as it messes up the flow of the panels.  She's also quite even-handed with the sexual content, spreading them out evenly over the course of the book and keeping the scenes reasonably brief.

RATING:

Awkward Silence is well...kind of awkward.  It's well-meaning enough, but its core concept is so slight that the longer Takanaga tries to stretch it, the more ludicrous it gets.  There are definitely better BL by her out there.

This series is published by Viz via the SuBLime imprint.  This series is complete in Japan with 6 volumes.  All 6 have been published and are currently in print.