L'étranger de la Plage

So as a late New Year’s resolution I am going to be trying to publish some kind of writing piece at least once a week. This will hopefully keep me more organized of what I have done, as well as depending on the exact topic promote my own media-literacy. Unfortunately, the first topic is not going to promote any kind of literacy. Being illiterate and reading picture books from time to time is still fun, however. So to kick off my resolution, I begin with a review of the L’étranger series.

Plot (Not-So-)Summarized

L’Étranger de la Plage

The story begins in Okinawa, which for context is the southernmost prefecture of Japan and consists of many islands. On one such island lives Shun Hashimoto, a novelist who was disowned three years prior because he came out as gay on his wedding day. In this (largely self-imposed) exile he lives with his grandmother in a small seaside town. His best friends on this island are Eri and Suzu, two women in a relationship. Attending a high school on an island is Mio Chibana, an introverted boy whose parents died. His dad at sea, He feels no connection with his guardians and avoids them, sitting on a bench looking out toward the sea most of his afternoons.

Shun notices Mio sitting on this bench and views him as eye candy that he worries about. Despite the cold, Mio would still sit alone. Persistently, Shun watches Mio in the afternoons and occasionally attempts to get closer to him, which is brushed off at first. Eventually, he succeeds in giving Mio some food to take home, and the icy shell is broken. In return, Mio gives Shun flowers from his mother’s favorite plant and begins to sit with him on the bench.

Mio opens up to Shun, explaining that he does not want to be at home and that he is not really lonely cause Shun is always watching him (a creepy accompaniment). Shun interprets Mio’s knowing as a sign that his gay identity is no longer a secret, reminding him of past trauma. When Shun lets Mio know that he views Mio with selfish desire and not the pity that everyone else seems to show, Mio’s view shifts and he becomes closer and closer with Shun.

Over time, Mio finds enjoyment he had not known before eating with Shun, his grandma, and his lesbian friends. However, the good times would come to a pause when Mio would have to leave Okinawa for an orphanage. When confessing this, Mio indicates that he likes Shun, telling him to wait for him. With no means of long distance contact available, they go three years with no contact.

When Mio returns he brings a hurricane of activity to Shun’s life. Eri moves out and Mio moves into Shun’s home. While he does not consider himself gay, he professes love for Shun, and Shun is reluctant to return it after such little contact. The Mio of the now is very different from the meek one of three years ago, showering Shun with love. Shun feels guilt for Mio’s love, feeling that he inadvertently robbed Mio of his chance to live a “normal” life. Tension grows and wanes between Shun and Mio as they learn to live with one another.

Eventually, Sakurako, Shun’s ex-fiance comes to the island to retrieve Shun so he can see his sick dad before he passes. She has a one-sided love for him and both hopes for the best for Shun and hates him. Shun upsets her and she flees into town at night, pursued by Mio who strongly believes Shun should see his parents while he still can.

A flashback shows her supporting Shun’s love endeavors while clearly shelving her own interests. Returning to the present, she can voice her selfish desires to Mio, urging him to be selfish as well.

Sakurako makes to depart from the island after another day, and tells Shun she will not pursue him anymore. As a parting gift, she asks for one last kiss from him. Seeing this, Mio interrupts to prevent this from even being considered by taking Shun’s place. Afterwards, Mio retreats to his room, upset and believing that Shun would have indulged Sakurako.

Shun follows Mio and comforts him, attempting to return all at once the love that Mio had been showering him in since he returned to Okinawa. Upon peacefully resolving the situation, Shun is reach the decision to return to his parents. He decides to bring Mio with him, who requires no convincing.

L’Étranger du Zéphyr

Making up four of the five currently released volumes of the L’étranger series, this summary will attempt to be much more concise.

Originally attempting to fly to Hokkaido, airplanes do not agree with Mio. In Tokyo they go to Shun’s workplace and the Tokyo Skytree. Mio, lost in amazement, strays from Shun and quickly becomes incredibly anxious. They encounter people who comment on their holding hands, which makes Mio aware.

Taking a slow path to Hokkaido to avoid making Mio sick, they stop at places along the way. At once such place, Mio encounters a man who fell over on the beach and is reminded of his own mother’s death. He helps the man back to his home and finds that the man was Shun’s father. Shun arrives and finds he has a young brother (Fumi, 7) he did not know about and is overwhelmed by how much is the same and how much is different.

They come to find that Sakurako lied and Shun’s father was fine. His mother is glad to see him again, and his father is reluctant to show him affection again. It is revealed that Fumi and Sakurako conspired to get Shun to return, both for their own intentions. His mom convinces them to stay.

Eventually, Mio believes he should begin to look for part-time work. However, he was unprepared for the cold of Hokkaido compared to Okinawa, so Shun’s mom gives him some of Shun’s dads old clothes. Shun’s family gives Mio a birthday celebration (on Christmas). In the middle of that night Fumi walks in on Shun and Mio having sex when trying to show them a gift.

Fumi retreats to Sakurako the next day, avoiding both Shun and Mio. She explains some things to him, and tells him to ask them about their relationship and why Shun has not been home for Fumi’s entire life. To help Fumi understand that gay relationships are normal, they paint Sakurako (who he crushes on) as male. They come to an understanding and relationships are mended.

Shun finds out his father was diagnosed with depression after he left. At the same time, Mio is borrowing a laptop from Fumi to search for a love hotel. Shun’s father sees the search after Mio leaves for work. Later that night when eating dinner, he commends Shun for working so hard at writing. Shun is plagued by intrusion thoughts of low self-worth, feeling everyone around him is working harder than him and accomplishing things.

Fumi is able to relate to Mio, as he was adopted, and wants him to become part of the Hashimoto family. Mio confides that when he sat on that bench in the past and looked into the ocean he was thinking of drowning himself in it.

At school Fumi is goaded by a girl named Chiho about his brother and Mio. On another day, Chiho finds him on the way home and tells him how she saw them at her family’s hotel. She mentions jealousy of having two brothers, but behind his back says the Hashimoto family is weird.

On Shun’s birthday it is also parent observation day at Fumi’s school. Shun’s mom is sick, so Shun goes in her place and brings Mio. Anxiety eats at Shun at school when he sees an old classmate he used to have a crush on in the restroom. Chiho is frustrated that her mom could not come and takes it out on Fumi, calling him a fake Hashimoto and saying Shun and Mio are weird. In response, Fumi slaps her and begins bawling.

A flashback is shown that shows Fumi helped Shun’s father recover from depression and Shun returns from the bathroom at last. Both the Chiho and Fumi group depart school together, and the caretaker for Chiho is found to be the guy Shun crushed on, Wada. Wada and Mio become “tea buddies” and he tells Mio about how he helped Shun at school and knew he was gay but rejected him, wanting to still be his friend.

Shun finishes another novel which becomes incredibly popular. Reporters and similar figures stalk the Hashimoto household, including Mio. Eri and Suzu visit and drag Shun out of home to drink, bringing Fumi, Sakurako, Wada, his wife (Yoneko), Chiho, and frequenters of a gay bar Mio and Eri are familiar with.

A five-year time skip occurs at the point between volume 3 and 4.

Shun and Mio still live with Shun’s parents and have brought even more life into the home. In light of his success after several years, Shun paused his writing career and underwent apparent NEET-ification (despite still doing small writing jobs here and there). Fumi entered his teens and finds everyone (especially Shun and Mio) except Sakurako to be annoying.

Shun is extremely lacking in motivation and tries to find a will to do things again. At the same time, Mio finds himself to be extremely busy and further from Shun’s life than he has ever been. Mio sees others in relationships and feels that his own is lacking, resuming his old habits of hounding Shun. Mio gets a hair cut after five years of not having had one and this triggers a sakurako-related argument between Shun and Fumi. During this, Sakurako arrives to hear Fumi say that he likes her.

Sakurako indulges Fumi a little bit, but tells him she does not intend to be with anyone. Fumi laments this fact, coming to realize that he never had a chance.

Shun and Mio come across Chiho and another girl holding hands. Shun, Mio, Sakurako, and Shun’s mom go to a school sports festival to watch Fumi. During this, Shun and Sakurako reconcile. Fumi is forced to run a relay race with Shun, who attempts to encourage Fumi and get him to not give up on Sakurako.

All conflicts appear to be resolved, and Shun and Mio can rest peacefully until Volume 6.

Review

First-off, I have no leg to stand on reviewing a series like this. Everything I think is likely vitally incorrect and should be taken with a grain of salt the size of Himalayan Salt.

I found this to be an incredibly cute story with an adorable art style that miraculously does not fall into the pits that other similar stories tend to fall into. L’Étranger has its own problems, but they are mostly related to certain plot elements rather than plot structure.

To begin with, being a story that has thus far taken place over 8+ years there is a lot of information that has to be omitted. Trying to fit in details to fill those years with a reasonable number of events is unreasonable due to time, effort, and imaginative restrictions. Especially in a manga format, each new subplot adds an incredible amount of work with new artistic elements being necessary to consider. As such, itis impossible to fault L’Étranger for omitting a lot. However, the main structural gripe I have with the story is the beginning. The first volume clearly had different goals in writing than the subsequent ones, and as such it is significantly more rushed. This leads to there being very little development in the relationship between Shun and Mio. We go from a meeting to a confession of love to living together in the span of 23 pages (20-43).

 35→43 

While there is implied time to have passed in the pages prior to 35 in which their relationship would have grown, none of it is shown or referenced ever again. This ends of painting Mio originally to be a sort of Manic Pixie Dream Girl-type character in the beginning. He whisks Shun away from his boring and isolated life, existing for him. The character develops out of this trope, growing selfish after the introduction of Sakurako, but it is hard to ignore these origins.

On the flip side, as I am not a literary critic: manic pixie dream characters (MPDC) are fun. When considering the entire body of modern media (novels, manga, shows, movies, etc.) this character type is extremely common and can be considered beaten to death. However, there is a reason that characters like this exist and are common. Lots of people are simply bored with life and wish that some magical force would whisk them away from that boredom or dissatisfaction. The MPDC is an easy tool for doing that in literature. I believe this especially would strike a chord with people who identify in a queer-space who are more inclined to feel restricted or trapped in life (which could be an explanation for why so much BL manga tends to skip or underdevelop the relationship-building portion).

As in common in visual narrative media, like manga, characters tend to be overly expressive - especially in unrealistic ways. This leads to some iconic panels that capture extreme emotions or motifs. I believe that Kanna Kii has done a fantastic job at this, and that her art style is one part of why L’Étranger is one of the most currently popular BL series. I’m putting some below, but I don’t really have much to add to this point beyond more harping on it.

     

Beyond the expressive faces Kanna Kii paints, she also makes a large use of appearances as a way of conveying the state of the story at a certain point. She overexaggerates disheveledness and uses hair and its growth as a tool for marking certain transitions in the plot. For instance, when before traveling anywhere or doing anything meaningful Shun and Mio tend to clean up, showing their motivation return and their love renewed. Another obvious example, even mentioned in the text, is Sakurako’s hair being cut. It clearly symbolizes her finally getting over Shun without needing to explicitly say it. While this is kind of basic high-school level textual analysis, it is something that many manga authors do not utilize.

While the story omits a lot textually, there is still a lot of story elements kept in the art. For instance, it is never explicitly mentioned, but Mio is regularly incidentally shown to be good with animals - even abusive self-interested ones like cats. This could be seen as a metaphor for his ability to handle Shun, who like animals he cannot understand at times. When Shun reaches his lowest points of self-worth and becomes incoherent, Mio is able to recover him.

Another pitfall L’Étranger avoids is the lack of an overreliance and unrealistic portrayal of sex. The relationship between Shun and Mio does not need to be cemented with their having sex. This breaks away from common tropes in all romantic stories - not just BL manga. While Mio believes that sex is necessary (and starts as a hypersexual character), as the story develops and at the beginning of Volume 4 it can be seen that they have a strong relationship even without it. This leads to an actual focus on the social and psychological relationship between the two characters, rather than a focus on the physical relationship. This is a point that I have dislike or have been made to feel uncomfortable about in other stories, as they have otherwise okay romantic plots, but they always coalesce with lengthy, unnecessary, unartistic, and unrealistic sex scenes as a way of saying “yay, the story is done! Here are the fruits of your labor for reading:”. Maybe my expectation of anything but this is a desire for drama in a space an author intends there to be none, but I just find that structure boring.

On the point of realistic sex, L’Étranger does not make sex out to be some artistic ideal or maxim of erotic beauty. It is awkward, at times painful, and nearly always painted in a humorous light by Kanna Kii. It is a process of learning for both Shun and Mio, who have little or no experience with physical relationships between men. There is no magical “yaoi hole” that makes the process easy and require no level of mental or physical preparation. This is extremely uncommon in this type of story

On a personal note, I really like the character of Shun for the most part. There are a lot of neurotic characteristics that he describe him that I can relate well to. This harkens back to the brief MPDC discussion in which these characters exist because they bring forth a desire the reader is intended to relate to. While many parts of the story and characters are over the top, Shun’s attitude towards work and his view of himself are extremely realistic. As someone who recently began their first professional job, it is so easy to drown in your own work and view others through a distorted lens, putting yourself on the bottom when it may not necessarily be reality. Granted that my work is far from a creative role, I can still relate extensively to the character and his regular despairings.

Lastly, moving back to the one plot point that I felt was significantly problematic:

This story currently focuses on two romantic relationships. One that is formed and one that has yet to form or die (Shun & Mio, and Fumi & Sakurako). Both of these relationships involve large age gaps, which by themselves arent a problem (not to sound like a 16 yr old twitter user), but in these particular cases feel weird to read or think about. At the time of wanting to start a relationship with Mio, a high schooler of age 17, Shun was 24. Age gaps are fine, but when a developed adult wants to form a relationship with a high schooler it is a bit suspect. In the case of Sakurako and Fumi, it (at this point) seems like a less possible relationship to form, as she in her 30s and Fumi is only 13. It is understandable letting a crush like that go on for a very young child, but it feels weird for her to still be letting it go on for a boy of his age. Perhaps that indicates where Volume 6 would go (which would be, to me, a very weird direction), but only time will tell.

yea

This was a rough first review to write, as I find myself to be a perfectionist and I think this is very far from even being a good review. It more so feels like me simply going over the story providing little analysis or reasoning over it. However, most stories were not written with the intention that their work would ever be analyzed in a meaningful way. As such, I will use my cope for the long-winded and pointlessness of this review, and I hope that I will be able to better review media in the future if I keep with this resolution. I especially apologize for the terrible summation of the story, which reads more like a cut-down cliff notes rather than a proper summary.

If you managed to read to this point and read even 20% of this, I am amazed and thank you for your attention.