PORTRAIT OF M & N (M to N no Shozo), by Tachibana Higuichi. First published in 2000 and first published in North America in 2010.
PLOT:
Mitsuru is a stunning beauty from an accomplished family who is seemingly perfect and demure...at least, until she gets hurt. A lifetime of parental abuse has given her a masochistic streak, and the slightest injury leaves her in a daze begging for more. Her secret is discovered by her classmate Natsuhiko, who then confesses his own kink: he's a narcissist who has to wear coke-bottle glasses to keep himself from obsessing over his image in any mirrored surface. The two soon bond over their kinky lifestyles, but their tenuous relationship is threatened when a popular boy also discovers Mitsuru's kinky little secret.
STORY:
While Portrait of M & N may be using kink as a hook to draw readers, the dynamic between its leads is as sweet and delicate as the most safe, vanilla shojo romance out there. That being said, it's not without its issues.
The big one is how it connects their respective kinks to parental abuse and neglect. Mitsuru was literally whipped by her mother for the slightest underachievement, while Natsuhiko was so sickly and neglected that his reflection was the only human contact he had most days. That sounds maudlin, but the story treats in a manner that's half matter-of-fact and half joking. That being said, the suggestion that kink can only spring from abuse and other negative situations is not a very accurate or tasteful one, so real-world kinky folk may not be able to take that part of the story so much in stride.
What was tastefully handled was the romantic part of the story. I'm always a sucker for a romance where two broken souls find healing with one another, and there's plenty of that on display here. Watching these two little weirdos find confidence and start making their first shy moves with one another is legitimately endearing. That's why having it's all the more jarring to have that interrupted by the weirdly predatory Hijiri, much less having that plotline ended on such a goofy note.
We even get a good example of how badly this story could have gone with the inclusion of an unrelated side story. In it, a young girl falls for the class bully who verbally abuses her at every turn. Then she discovers his tragic past as a bullied fat kid who visited her at the hospital once, and that's supposed to make everything OK. It doesn't matter that their relationship is pretty much a textbook portrayal of an abusive relationship, because he has manpain! And his bullying is him just calling out others' shallowness instead of him projecting his anger and insecurity on others! It's legitimately disgusting, and it makes the main story look so much better in comparison.
ART:
Higuichi's art is a little flat and a little dark (although it's hard to tell how much of that is due to poor scanning on Tokyopop's part), but it's suitably cute to work for a shojo story. The character designs are a little odd, like Higuichi couldn't quite make their heads sit properly on their necks at all times. They're spindly little creatures with hair that's so darkly inked that it seems greasy and limp. The darkness extends further into the screentones, as there are a lot of dusky ones that show up whenever Mitsuru or Natsuhiko get themselves into fetish-induced moods. Maybe all that darkness is for the best since so much of this manga takes place in otherwise boring classrooms.
RATING:
The premise for Portrait of M & N might promise scandal, but it's really just an innocent romance between a couple of kids who are finding ways to cope and falling in love in the process. It's not quite focused enough to merit a green light, but it's interesting enough to at least merit a second look.
This series was published by Tokyopop. This series is complete in Japan wtih 6 volumes available. 4 volumes were published and are currently out of print.
No comments:
Post a Comment