This marks the second year in a row that I've ended our holiday reviews with a Ai Yazawa manga. It's almost like it took Viz way too long to figure out that there was a majorly pent-up desire for more works of hers beyond Nana!
Regardless, I'm always ready to celebrate when we get more older shojo titles on the shelves and what is Christmas if not a celebration?
LAST QUARTER (Kagen no Tsuki), by Ai Yazawa. First published in 1998 and first published in North America in 2024.
PLOT:
Mizuki was frustrated with everything: her dead mom, her dad's infidelity and remarriage, her new step-sister, her cheating boyfriend. She's willing to throw everything away to be with the handsome, troubled musician Adam...until it ends up costing her life.
Young Hotaru had an encounter with Mizuki while she was in a coma. Now she finds herself drawn to the house where Mizuki and Adam once lived, where Mizuki's spirt now dwells, unable to remember who she was and why she is there. Thus it's up to Hotaru and her classmates to solve the mystery of the ghost they dub "Eve."
STORY:
I wasn't sure what to expect from Last Quarter, but I certainly didn't expect to get a ghost story. It's about as far removed tonally as you can get from its predecessor, Neighborhood Story. That said, it's not as far removed from her better-known works than you might think.
There's a certain elegance in how Yazawa hands off the protagonist role from Mizuki to Hotaru. I haven't seen such a successful switch-up since the first time I read From Eroica With Love. Hotaru is much younger than your average Yazawa heroine, so that gives this the drama (and the manga as a whole) a very different tone. Maybe she figured that she got her teen drama quotient out of the way with Mizuki, who had a rather outsized amount of drama in her short life. There's also the fact that this ran in Ribon, which caters to younger readers.
So while there is some romantic drama as Hotaru navigates her first crush, this is basically a mystery series. In some ways it feels a little like the serialized children's mystery books that I read as a kid, albeit with a more supernatural twist. All the while, all Mizuki/"Eve" can focus on is Adam, the only thing she remembers clearly and the only thing keeping her tied to the house. Yazawa maintains a careful yet masterful balance of tone throughout the book. The scenes with the kids are decided more light-hearted and humorous (complete with a joke referencing the then-current game Parasite Eve), while the scenes in the house with "Eve" always have a sad, wistful quality to them. This is on top of the kids' own personal dramas, be it Hotaru's ongoing search for her (very much dead) cat or her crush Masaki's precocious maturity coming part from being a lonely rich kid still dealing with the fallout of a divorce. It's a real testament to Yazawa's skill as a writer how well she weaves this all together and I respect how much she respects her audience to understand some of the heavier emotions these kids are going through without talking down to them.
ART:
Last Quarter may have been targeted at pre-teens, but visually it's very much in line with Yazawa's later works. You've got her fine, dark linework; her gangly character designs (which is more evident on the older characters than on the kids); her attention to fashion and her the little comic reactions she squeezes in on the sidelines. The pages are largely uncluttered with screentones, heavy shading, or layered panels, which keeps the focus on the characters and in particular on the many sincere close-ups of the cast (both living and dead).
RATING:
This manga is published by Viz. This series is complete in Japan with 3 volumes available. 1 omnibus has been released and is currently in print.
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