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From the Bookshelf: Bloom Into You Regarding Saeki Sayaka
One early review of the manga Bloom Into You advancing a somehow intriguing interpretation of its lead character added something more to the complicated mixture of interests I take in “girls’ love manga.” I read the story with enough interest and attention to post something about every volume and then, after it had concluded (scotching that first interpretation others had been pushing back against ever since, but indeed engaging something altogether different in that “complicated mixture of interests” just mentioned, such that I thought “the next best thing indeed”), I went ahead and watched its anime adaptation. (I’d known the adaptation wouldn’t get to the end of the story, but as it turned out it didn’t even get to the point in the story its last episodes had been coming to anticipate...) Then, instead of finding time alongside reading “new manga” to go back through the series, I went so far as to order three translated novels about an important secondary character, the “third girl” Sayaka.
That I did this might be some small sign of the story holding my attention. Over the years, I fear I’ve become a bit detached from “spinoffs,” whether “comics as an extension on movies and TV shows” or “novels as an extension on movies, TV shows, and comics.” Sometimes I wonder if manga and anime is produced and now translated in sufficient profusion I can just skip along from story to story (“core” stories, anyway) in “broad but shallow” fashion. In this case, too, I’d already noticed an unimpressed reaction to the novels, but I suppose I’ve grown familiar with “plodding through prose translated from Japanese.”
I do keep thinking back to how I’d started the manga so focused on Yuu and her own particular issues that I was sort of surprised to realise Sayaka’s own attractions and problems. Watching the anime, I had paid attention to a flashback where another girl told a younger, junior-high Sayaka something like “we were just fooling around, right?” Before sketching the path to that, though, the first novel also told (via first-person narration) of an even younger grade-school Sayaka, her home situation, and another girl in swimming class. I do have to admit all of this was weighed down by a peculiar yet now familiar skew to the sentences; I can suppose I don’t know an awful lot about how teenaged girls talk, but this doesn’t seem to bring me much closer to it.
The second novel covered the familiar high school setting of the manga. Its opening section did have Sayaka interacting with Yuu and wondering about her (and confirming the moment in the first book where she went into a bookstore to buy some novels recommended by her girlfriend and saw another girl a little younger was indeed, as you seemed encouraged to think, noticing Yuu). There’s a moment where Yuu is asked about her taste in reading and she answers “mostly mystery and sci-fi”; as much as I did remember with slight amusement all those old boasts about reading SF “stretching your imagination way beyond the mundane,” I also recalled those early moments of narration in manga and anime where Yuu is going though romances. There, though, it seemed a matter of “trying to get a feel for what falling in love ‘ought’ to feel like”; it wouldn’t necessarily be her preference. That opening was fairly short, however, and was followed by a flashback where Sayaka starts off alongside Touko, learning things I didn’t pick up on until well into the manga but settling into the conviction she just can’t confess the feelings that grabbed her at first sight. All of it might have made the novel feel like “marking time.”
With the third novel, though, there was a reward at last. The epilogue chapter closing out the manga had casually established Sayaka had found a girlfriend at college, which caught my attention; when other people dwell on pairing off a story’s fictional teenagers (not always in anime) with each other so that nobody is left alone, I very often just seem to shrug and suppose “they can meet someone new in college or something.” That new person Haru dealt with her emotions in a rather different way than the characters established so far, and that helped make things interesting. One part of this new setting was a significant moment depending on “booze” rather than a romantic setting, but afterwards there was another moment (or two) that managed to wrap back around to the first book. Yuu does show up a few times along the way and seems to be doing pretty well for herself; Sayaka just happens to notice more than once how she keeps staying overnight with Touko, a more elusive figure until the end.
The third novel might have done a lot to lift this series up out of the resignation I’ve slogged through much longer runs of translated novels with. In finishing it, though, I suppose I did come closer to “either finding the time to go back to the manga or just moving on.” (As I was putting this post together, sudden curiosity made me search out the Bloom Into You category on Archive Of Our Own. Reading just the blurbs and content warnings, however, was enough to remind me of how I’ve also become detached from “fanfiction as an extension on everything else...”)
That I did this might be some small sign of the story holding my attention. Over the years, I fear I’ve become a bit detached from “spinoffs,” whether “comics as an extension on movies and TV shows” or “novels as an extension on movies, TV shows, and comics.” Sometimes I wonder if manga and anime is produced and now translated in sufficient profusion I can just skip along from story to story (“core” stories, anyway) in “broad but shallow” fashion. In this case, too, I’d already noticed an unimpressed reaction to the novels, but I suppose I’ve grown familiar with “plodding through prose translated from Japanese.”
I do keep thinking back to how I’d started the manga so focused on Yuu and her own particular issues that I was sort of surprised to realise Sayaka’s own attractions and problems. Watching the anime, I had paid attention to a flashback where another girl told a younger, junior-high Sayaka something like “we were just fooling around, right?” Before sketching the path to that, though, the first novel also told (via first-person narration) of an even younger grade-school Sayaka, her home situation, and another girl in swimming class. I do have to admit all of this was weighed down by a peculiar yet now familiar skew to the sentences; I can suppose I don’t know an awful lot about how teenaged girls talk, but this doesn’t seem to bring me much closer to it.
The second novel covered the familiar high school setting of the manga. Its opening section did have Sayaka interacting with Yuu and wondering about her (and confirming the moment in the first book where she went into a bookstore to buy some novels recommended by her girlfriend and saw another girl a little younger was indeed, as you seemed encouraged to think, noticing Yuu). There’s a moment where Yuu is asked about her taste in reading and she answers “mostly mystery and sci-fi”; as much as I did remember with slight amusement all those old boasts about reading SF “stretching your imagination way beyond the mundane,” I also recalled those early moments of narration in manga and anime where Yuu is going though romances. There, though, it seemed a matter of “trying to get a feel for what falling in love ‘ought’ to feel like”; it wouldn’t necessarily be her preference. That opening was fairly short, however, and was followed by a flashback where Sayaka starts off alongside Touko, learning things I didn’t pick up on until well into the manga but settling into the conviction she just can’t confess the feelings that grabbed her at first sight. All of it might have made the novel feel like “marking time.”
With the third novel, though, there was a reward at last. The epilogue chapter closing out the manga had casually established Sayaka had found a girlfriend at college, which caught my attention; when other people dwell on pairing off a story’s fictional teenagers (not always in anime) with each other so that nobody is left alone, I very often just seem to shrug and suppose “they can meet someone new in college or something.” That new person Haru dealt with her emotions in a rather different way than the characters established so far, and that helped make things interesting. One part of this new setting was a significant moment depending on “booze” rather than a romantic setting, but afterwards there was another moment (or two) that managed to wrap back around to the first book. Yuu does show up a few times along the way and seems to be doing pretty well for herself; Sayaka just happens to notice more than once how she keeps staying overnight with Touko, a more elusive figure until the end.
The third novel might have done a lot to lift this series up out of the resignation I’ve slogged through much longer runs of translated novels with. In finishing it, though, I suppose I did come closer to “either finding the time to go back to the manga or just moving on.” (As I was putting this post together, sudden curiosity made me search out the Bloom Into You category on Archive Of Our Own. Reading just the blurbs and content warnings, however, was enough to remind me of how I’ve also become detached from “fanfiction as an extension on everything else...”)