Yuu Watase writes some notes the back of each book. At the end of volume 10, she noted the chilling romance at the beginning, and says, “I guess if you take the romance out of Genbu, it’s not that different from shonen manga… Heh. Nah, it’s definitely shojo!!”
I talked about this in an earlier review, and she is 100% correct. This manga is shonen to its bones, regardless if the romantic relationships are on page.
Written and lovingly illustrated by Yuu Watase
When schoolgirl Takiko Okuda attempts to destroy her father’s translation of The Universe of the Four Gods, she is instead sucked into the story, becoming the Priestess of Genbu in an epic journey to find the seven Celestial Warriors!
Takiko has returned to the Universe of the Four Gods! As the Celestial Warriors search for the scroll of the Four Gods, Takiko uncovers the truth about the prophecy that turned Uruki and his father into bitter enemies. But while they begin a new chapter in their adventures, Takiko struggles to conceal a terrible secret about herself from the Celestial Warriors…
This manga is all about relationships, but not just shojo romantic, and not just between the characters. Watase is building relationships between the characters and the reader. She does this by letting single characters look out from the page while talking and thinking aloud, practically begging the reader to be the one of the other end of that connection.
Watase draws pages around the faces of her heros. Sometimes there are more than one face on a page, and maybe they’re looking at each other or at a distant enemy. But most often there’s just a single face, which may as well be a portrait just for us, the readers, where we alone can peer into those large eyes reflecting the literal stars and showing the depths of their souls.
It’s the faces that define this comic.
I don’t know if this is a feature of all shojo, or it it’s a Yuu Watase special, but I’ve only just noticed it in this volume. To see exactly how Watase is using faces in Fushigi Yûgi: Gendu Kaiden, lets turn to my favorite art analysis tool: math!
There are 192 pages in volume 10 of Fushigi Yûgi: Gendu Kaiden. Once you subtract chapter headings and other non-story pages, we’re left with about 173 actual comic pages. To focus on faces, lets look for pages where a single face takes up at least full quarter of the page, which is a large amount of real estate on a comic page.
With this criteria, there are about 83 pages in this comic built around faces, or 48%. That’s a dominating number. Watase often focuses these pages even more, by dropping the background and letting the portrait shine alone.
This isn’t just a function of the manga medium, with its smaller page size. I opened out some other manga I love for comparison.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion Stage 1, by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, shonen manga, 38/160, or 24%
- Uzumaki Volume 1, by Junji Ito, horror manga, 14/200, or 7%
- Phoenix Volume 12, by Osamu Tezuka, perfect manga, 3/187, or 2%
(Fun note: the faces in Uzumaki are all to show how literally twisted the people have become. They are not for the readers to connect with the characters.)
Compared to those other comic creators, it’s easy to see how dominating Yuu Watase’s artistic speciality is. She concentrates her comic artistry on winning over the reader’s affection for her characters, and she does it easily, using our simple human love of seeing a human face looking back at us.
