This time it's Sumiko Arai's The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy at All, AKA "the Green Yuri", based on its distinctive green covers and Arai's use of that same particular shade of green as an accent color throughout the comic.
Yen Press released the first volume of the series, which is now up to volume three, in 2004. I passed on it at the time for what probably seems like a weird, even random reason: I tend to avoid manga with really long titles.
Since then, a manga-reading friend mentioned that she was following it, Renee Scott posted about it having blown up in a post on Good Comics for Kids and, most intriguingly, I saw an interview in which Dave Grohl talked about it in conjunction with the announcement that the upcoming anime adaptation would use Nirvana's "Bloom" in the opening sequence...an unusual state of affairs, to say the least.
As to why a Nirvana song might be used for an anime opening, well, the manga's two protagonists Aya Osawa and Mitsuki Koga bond over their love of (mostly) '90s American rock music, and Nirvana is, of course, a favorite of the pair, and the first of the three chapters in the first volume is actually entitled "Teen Spirit". ("Kurt definitely would've loved this," Grohl says in the interview.)
The format is a bit unusual compared to most of the manga I read, although the premise is solid (and, for someone who came of age listening to "alternative" music in the nineties, the focus on the music of the era is appealing).
As for that format, beyond the use of an accent color over the mostly black and white art, the story unfolds in super-short, four-page stories or chapters, and thus reading it in a collection like this felt a little like reading a collection of an old-fashioned "continuity" comic strip, with the constant stops and starts and a hint of narrative feedback, as elements get restated (I don't know the exact origins of the manga, but in the thank you section at the end of the book, Arai writes "When I first posted the story of these two on Twitter, I didn't have the slightest idea that it would turn into something like this..." From what I read on Wikipedia later, it seems as if the comic was originally published online, which likely explains it's super-short chapters and comic strip-like feel).
As for the premise, well, popular, girly-girl Aya is a fan of Western rock music from 30-ish years previous, unlike her friends, who have more modern (and, presumably, Japanese taste). And thus the first lines of the book, which appear over a scene of her listening to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with ear buds in school, are "Music is best... ...when you listen to it alone."
One day, she discovers a CD shop—Do these still exist? In America, or is this a purely Japanese phenomenon?—and, attracted to the rhythm she hears, walks in, only to lock eyes with the young person behind the counter.
This person wears a black hoodie with the hood up, disguising all of their hair save for the black bangs, a black mask that disguises the lower half of their face and, although we can't see it in the four-page, full-color prologue that opens the books, pants. Despite the eye make-up and black nail polish, Aya assumes this person is a guy.
She's wrong. This person is a girl, Mitsuki, and not only is Aya mistaken about the CD shop employee's gender, shes also doesn't realize that she already knows her. Mitsuki, it turns out, is in her class, where she sits right next to her.
At school, of course, the shy, quiet Mitsuki wears the school uniform, complete with a skirt, and she also wears glasses and eschews make-up, even diligently removing her nail polish before school, not wanting to stand out in anyway at school.
In the shop, it's crush at first sight for Aya:
He' so stylish...
...and mysterious.
He's got impeccable taste in music too!
I LOVE NIRVANA!I CAN TOTALLY FANGIRL OVER HIM...!
Just watching him from afar gives me joy...
And then, when she gets her hair tangled in the headphones there so customers can listen to the music before they buy it, the "guy" comes over to help her, smilingly apologizing for touching her hair.
The next morning, she recounts this whole encounter to her two friends...mere feet away from Mitsuki, who is overhearing how her "flashy" classmate has a fangirl crush on a boy...who is actually her.
Well, as someone who has spent a lifetime enjoying Superman stories in various mediums, I'm obviously accepting of the idea that a pair of glasses can completely change someone's identity (Additionally, one of my all-time favorite movies is She's All That, a movie which would have us believe that the super-cute Rachel Leigh Cook of 1999 is barely worth noticing when wearing glasses, but a radiant beauty the moment she takes them off).
I could even buy Mitsuki being so freaked out at first as to want to keep it a secret of sorts, not introducing herself to Aya at the shop, or butting into the next morning conversation to admit that she was the guy at the shop that Aya was fan-girling over.
But this double identity plot gets pretty weird pretty fast, as Aya becomes a regular at the shop and soon, friends with The Guy At The CD Shop. Mitsuki's continued maintenance of a secret identity with a friend and classmate strikes me as...odd.
Arai's teasing about whether or not Aya is about to discover Mitsuki over the course of the stories is fun and cute (And, again, makes me think a bit of Superman...particularly from the stories where Lois doesn't yet know that Superman and Clark Kent are the same person).
But why is Mitsuki keeping a secret identity?
I mean, it's not like The Guy At The CD Shop is a superhero like Superman or Spider-Man, like she has arch-enemies in the criminal underworld who might target her loved ones. The mistaken identity turning into a secret identity is, at the very least, extremely awkward, and makes Mitsuki's actions seem questionable in the earliest strips in the book
(Also, I am not entirely clear if Aya just mistakes Mitsuki for a boy because perhaps she is a bit androgynous and elements of her wardrobe are more male than female coded, or if Mitsuki is intentionally dressing up as a boy for work, and that's why she hides her long hair under a hood and much of her face with a mask. Whatever the case is, after she hears Aya talking about her, she knows that Aya thinks she's a guy, and never does anything to disabuse her of this which, again, seems weird.)
What at first seems a little odd or weird gets downright ridiculous at the point in which they actually become friends, and Aya gets The Guy At The CD Shop's number. At that point, she puts "his" contact info in her phone, as "My Guy." That's right; she doesn't even know "his" name...! How does one get to the exchange-phone-numbers stage without first exchanging one another's names...? (When Mitsuki calls Aya for the first time, she introduces herself thusly: "Um... I'm the person from the CD shop in front of the station...")
If Mitsuki did want to continue the deception that she was some random guy that Aya met and not her classmate, she could have given her a fake name or, this being Japan, maybe just her family name ("That's weird," Aya might have thought, "There's a girl in my class with that same name!"). If she wanted to come clean, that might have been the point to do so. Instead, when Aya writes her number on Mitsuki's hand at the shop, Mitsuki neither volunteers a name nor does Aya ask for one.
Eventually, Aya discovers the deception and is rightfully pissed at Mitsuki. In an attempt to make it up to her, Mitsuki goes into boy mode to play and sing a song at the school festival; she doesn't wear the mask, but otherwise dresses up like she does at work, with her hood up and, conveniently, no one at school seems to recognize her. She's introduced as a "musician dressed in all black!!' and when kids in the crowd look up at her on stage, they say "I can't see their face against the backlight...Who is that?!"
Aya recognizes her, of course, saying to herself:
Even with so many people around... ...It sounds like she's playing just for me.
—Since...
...I'm sure no one here... ...knows stuff like Radiohead...
My guess is that Mitsuki was playing a cover of "Creep", as that's the name of the third and final chapter in this volume.
After that, the pair introduce themselves properly, and begin a proper friendship, one based on their love of old Western music, despite their different styles and apparent social statuses at school.
I'm not sure where things will go from here—there's a lot of kinda sorta almost flirting between the pair, and it is called "Green Yuri"—but by the end of this volume, they are merely friends getting to know one another, and Aya hasn't yet completely transferred her apparently romantic feelings for Mitsuki's boy mode to her real, female self.
I think now that we are past the weird dual-identity bit—which I don't think Arai handled particularly well, as we only see the characters' emotional reactions to this plot business, and never get any explanations for why they act the way they do and what they might be thinking—the series likely improves....or at least will annoy me personally less.
That said, the four-page format wasn't particularly fun for me to read, so I'm not sure if I'll pick up the next volume or not. We'll see.
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Can we talk about the music a bit...?
Despite Nirvana's prominent place at the beginning, essentially bringing the two together, I was kind of surprised at how...basic the two characters' taste was throughout. As I said earlier, their favorite Western music seems to be what we called "alternative" in the '90s, but from what I can see from kids' t-shirts these days and what I hear on the radio, this is essentially classic rock now.
In addition to Nirvana ("Smells Like Teen Spirit", "Heart-Shaped Box") and Radiohead ("Creep"), what other artists appear in the manga...?
Boy-mode Mitsuki (who, amusingly, finds herself falling into her "role" as Aya's crush, surprising herself by flirting with her and trying to act cool in front of her), lends her the new Foo Fighters album. I'm not sure which one this might be (um, the only Foo Fighters album I've ever actually listened to was their 1995 self-titled debut), but apparently, it's "based on a fictional band they created", as Aya tries to explain to her completely uninterested friends.
Later, Aya sends Mitsuki/her "guy" a playlist, which includes Blur ("Song 2"), Black Sabbath ("Paranoid"), The Strokes ("Repitlila"), Bon Jovi ("You Give Love a Bad Name"), Beck ("Loser"), Pearl Jam ("Alive") and what I believe is Royal Blood ("Figure it Out").
When Mitsuki's uncle, who owns the CD shop she works at, scans the stongs on Aya's list, he's shocked. "What the heck?!" he thinks. "This selection really matches my tastes... ...but given how cool these songs are... ...did some middle-aged dude put this together...?!" (He is relieved—and in awe—when Aya walks into the shop, and his niece says it's her playlist, and not that of some creepy older guy.)
But I don't know...Bon Jovi...?
A few scenes later, the school principal plays an Aerosmith song over the loudspeakers, one from their early days, and only Aya and Mitsuki seem to appreciate it.
Later, Guns 'n Roses and the Chili Peppers are mentioned, as well as a "Willow", which is the first time I've heard of her. I was a little disappointed to look Willow up, based on the song title on Aya's phone ("Coping Mechanism"), only to discover that "Willow" is Willow Smith, daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. Of course, it's probably not fair to her for me to judge her based solely on her celebrity parentage, without actually listening to any of her music.
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