Review: SUKI: A LIKE STORY

 Well, it might have gotten off to a slow start, but it's January, which means it's time for yet another CLAMP Month.  This one is going to be a bit bittersweet, though.  We're running out of CLAMP manga to review, which means this will very likely be the last CLAMP Month here at the Manga Test Drive.

It's also going to be a bit bittersweet because there's no way we can avoid some of the dregs of CLAMP's library of works, such as this one.

SUKI: A LIKE STORY (Suki dakara suki), by CLAMP.  First published in 1999 and first published in North America in 2004.

PLOT:

Hinata Asahi is a sweet-natured, ditzy high school girl who loves everything.  Even though she lives by herself with only a pair of teddy bears and the neighborhood cats for company, she approaches each day with joy in her heart and a song on her lips.  Her world changes when a new teacher moves in next door, and more and more she finds her thoughts consumed by ones about Asou-sensei.  Hina's not sure what any of it means, while her friends aren't sure that Asou-sensei's motives are entirely pure...

STORY:

How can a CLAMP manga be at once so slight and yet so troubling?  This is something that I kept asking myself while reading Suki.  I can kind of get what they were going for with this.  Suki is meant to be more of a contemplative mood piece, soaked in Hina's spacey brand of sunny sweetness.  It's meant to explore and evoke that fragile, fleeting feeling of that point where you not only learn what it feels like to fall in love for the first time, but what the concept of love truly is and how it differs from just liking someone.  You don't need a lot of plot or characters to explore those kinds of ideas.

Sadly, CLAMP's fondness for age gaps and teacher/student romances strikes again with this series, and this time it is the entire focus of the story.  Even discounting the huge gap in age and the power differential, there is just something that is just plain off in their interactions.  Asou doesn't humor her like a child.  He doesn't creep on her either.  He mostly comes off as cold and mechanical in his interactions with her.  He's almost trying to push her away, but Hina is too oblivious and focused to pick up the clues.  I know that CLAMP loves finding strange and new ways to explore the boundaries and definitions of love and demonstrating how it can overcome all sorts of obstacles, but they've really set themselves up with a doozy of a scenario and it's one that frankly I don't want to see overcome.

A lot of CLAMP heroines are naive to a fault, but Hina feels outright infantile in an almost uncomfortable way.  We're told that she does well in her classes, but her language, her interest in teddy bears and picture books, and her understanding of relationships all comes off like that of a girl half her age.  She's clearly lonely and the novelty of a new neighbor, teacher, and friend is simply too much for a curious and sunny girl to resist.  Some of her weirdness is explained in-story as the result of her being very rich and very sheltered, but it's not enough to ease my mind.  All too often I found myself acting like Hina's friend Touko: looking on in concern from the sidelines, unable to stop the inevitable.

ART:

This is one of the first CLAMP series where the art was handled by the group's character designer Tsubasa Nekoi.  As such, the art here isn't as elaborate as that done by the group's main artist Mokona.  Still, the lin ework is fine, there are some lovely, free-form layouts and Hina's design is incredibly charming.  That being said, it has also has some of the faults of Nekoi's early work.  The men are these long, hulking things with tiny heads.  The backgrounds are shockingly plain.  She also pads things out a little by basically making the reader read Hina's picture book alongside her.  Even compared to works like Legal Drug, this is kind of rough.

RATING:

Despite what the title might say, Suki is not very likeable.  It's built around a sketchy premise that no amount of shojo sweetness can completely offset.  It can't even coast on good art like some other lesser CLAMP entries.  As such, this one is definitely only for the completionists, and even then I wouldn't make it a priority.

This series was released by Tokyopop.  This series is complete in Japan with 3 volumes available.  All 3 volumes have been published and are currently out of print.  This series is currently available digitally through Viz Media.