Manga Thoughts: Goodbye, my Rose Garden
Mar. 25th, 2021 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerI do keep reading “girls’ love” manga, even if I’m in a demographic where the motives for that might start mixing into something murky. (I have been willing to think it somehow helps inoculate me against wanting to see any character connection whatsoever in a story without much in the way of gender balance as “slashy,” then getting annoyed at “tease without committment.”) With Bloom Into You having finished a while ago, perhaps I’m casting around for something that can be held up. Not that long ago, though, I did reach the end of a three-volume series that had its own appeals.
Goodbye, my Rose Garden is set “early in the twentieth century” according to the back cover, when a young Japanese woman named Hanako voyages to England seeking out a novelist by the name of Victor Franks. (I suppose “the English-speaking fan so obsessed with Japanese pop culture they go around the globe” is ready enough to mind from more recent years.) When Franks proves enigmatic to the point of total elusiveness, an English noblewoman named Alice Douglas just happens to happen on the distraught Hanako, and with a quick authorial flourish Hanako is working as a maid to Alice. (I am certainly inclined to remember the years when “maids” in anime, at least, were a particular fetish too far for some rather vocal fans. There’s at least some exploration of class issues in the manga; what period English reactions to a Japanese woman might have been seem less played up, although saying even that might only betray assumptions of my own it might be better to avoid. Anyway, Oscar Wilde does get mentioned before too long.)
The story is familiar enough, but something about the artwork appealed to me, with both elaborate period fashions (although Hanako’s Japanese clothes always agreed more than her maid outfit, as sedate and period-appropriate as it was) and something about the character designs I can’t seem to articulate beyond wondering without success about similar-looking artwork elsewhere. (The manga is credited to the oddly yet amusingly named “Dr. Pepperco.”) After three volumes of understated melodrama and not much in the way of outright exploitative visuals, the open-ended resolution is about as happy as might be plausible for the time, even if it might be thought to hinge on a minor character permitting a resolution brought up only to be pushed away back in the first volume. Even as I finished this series, anyway, I do have several first volumes of new “girls’ love” series waiting to be sampled.
Goodbye, my Rose Garden is set “early in the twentieth century” according to the back cover, when a young Japanese woman named Hanako voyages to England seeking out a novelist by the name of Victor Franks. (I suppose “the English-speaking fan so obsessed with Japanese pop culture they go around the globe” is ready enough to mind from more recent years.) When Franks proves enigmatic to the point of total elusiveness, an English noblewoman named Alice Douglas just happens to happen on the distraught Hanako, and with a quick authorial flourish Hanako is working as a maid to Alice. (I am certainly inclined to remember the years when “maids” in anime, at least, were a particular fetish too far for some rather vocal fans. There’s at least some exploration of class issues in the manga; what period English reactions to a Japanese woman might have been seem less played up, although saying even that might only betray assumptions of my own it might be better to avoid. Anyway, Oscar Wilde does get mentioned before too long.)
The story is familiar enough, but something about the artwork appealed to me, with both elaborate period fashions (although Hanako’s Japanese clothes always agreed more than her maid outfit, as sedate and period-appropriate as it was) and something about the character designs I can’t seem to articulate beyond wondering without success about similar-looking artwork elsewhere. (The manga is credited to the oddly yet amusingly named “Dr. Pepperco.”) After three volumes of understated melodrama and not much in the way of outright exploitative visuals, the open-ended resolution is about as happy as might be plausible for the time, even if it might be thought to hinge on a minor character permitting a resolution brought up only to be pushed away back in the first volume. Even as I finished this series, anyway, I do have several first volumes of new “girls’ love” series waiting to be sampled.