MOON CHILD (Tsuki no Ko), by Reiko Shimizu. First published in 1989, and first published in North America in 2005.
PLOT:
Art is a struggling dancer in New York who gets in a car accident. He's saved by a mysterious and beautiful young man with amnesia, who is quickly dubbed "Jimmy." Art takes the boy in, and the two start to bond. Then strange things start to happen: Art exhibits telekinetic powers, strange fish-like beings start to appear, and a boy from hundreds of years in the past comes looking for Jimmy. His past turns out to be tied to a a species of intergalactic merfolk, witch hunts, and the story of The Little Mermaid, and the more he remembers the more his life is in danger.
STORY:
Moon Child is a story that is truly all over the place. It's a drama about a dancer struggling with poor self-esteem and a shitty ex! It's the story of a young person trying to rediscover their identity and come to terms with a complicated gender identity! It's a proto-BL story between Art and and Jimmy! It's a sci-fi story about aliens on Earth and psychics! All of these things are true, and it all blends together about as well as trout and ice cream.
The biggest hurdle for me with this series was not the lore around the alien merpeople, but the fact that Art is such a selfish, unlikable jack-ass. Art was a teen dance prodigy, but now he feels like he has peaked and his ex-girlfriend Holly has stolen all his thunder and it mostly leaves him in a pissy funk. Combine that attitude with an explosive temper that verges upon abusive and you get a person whose story I have no desire to follow. I certainly don't want to see him fall in love with Jimmy, because while the story does not make their relationship explicit it does fall very much in line with the story of quasi-queer relationships that we see in contemporary series like Banana Fish. Let's not even get into the reveal of Jimmy's true identity, which involves switching sexes and when taken in conjunction with the other merfolk gathering to spawn could go in some uncomfortably biotruth-y directions.
Maybe it's for the best that his story gets well and truly overshadowed by the midway point as Jimmy's past catches up with him and all the drama and spookiness goes away while the supporting cast drops a metric ton of LORE upon the audience. I confess that the premise is intriguing, although the influence of Please Save My Earth and some of the more esoteric works of Moto Hagio are pretty obvious. While it does stop the story dead in its tracks for a while, it does allow it to change course and transform itself into more of a love triangle between Jimmy, Art, and another merman in hiding named Shona. Shona more or less becomes our protagonist at that point, which finally allows all of the story elements to start all tying together into something moderately cohesive and far more compelling.
ART:
The influence of Hagio is really obvious in Shimizu's art style. While Shimizu's characters have the noodley proportions and sharp angles of 80s shojo art, they have the clear, plaintive gaze of Hagio's art. If there's anything that doesn't work, it's the choices she made for the mermaid elder known only as Grandma. She's drawn to resemble an aged Ndebele woman, complete with bald head, neck rings and elongated pierced earlobes, but her faces in drawn almost in broad caricature. It's an uncomfortably racist touch to what is supposed to be an important supporting character, even if that was not Shimizu's intention.
On a completely different note, Shimizu's linework is incredibly precise, far more so than what was usually seen in 1980s shojo art. It lends the art a sense of solidity that makes the more dream-like imagery all the more surreal. There are the occasional moments of shojo flourish, but befitting the mermaid theme there's just as much use of aquatic touches like pearls and wave-like flowing hair and screentones versus bursts of flowers and sparkles. There's also more effort made with the backgrounds, as there's clearly a lot more emphasis on rotoscoped images of real buildings versus screentoned voids. Overall, the art helps to ground what is otherwise a very fantastical story in some sense of reality.
RATING:
Moon Child is ambitious, beautiful and an utterly wild ride. There's some uncomfortable elements that are largely artifacts of its age, but it has the potential to become something unforgettable. If you can get your hands on it, it's definitely worth checking out.
This series was published by CMX. This series is complete in Japan with 14 volumes available. All 14 were published and are currently out of print.
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