Since yesterday we started off the week by discussing a manipulative twin sister plot, let’s talk problematic narratives again today!. Momono Moto and Sakuraya Yukino’s Ame to Kimi no Mukou (雨と君の向こう) is a good choice for oh so many reasons.

Kanou Yuka is a middle school home room teacher. She has no boyfriend and is feeling the pressure of being 27 unattached.  Medarame Aki is a student in her classroom whose dead eyes and romantic overtures to her teacher scream “sexually abused” to this reader. 

Yuka and Aki’s relationship is not a healthy one, not from the very beginning. Aki is manipulative and uses things like Yuka’s virginity as a weapon against her, which is just gross. Yuka tries going out with a guy and just finds herself going back to seek Aki’s company. When she and we see that our guess that Aki has been abused is correct, it still doesn’t make anything that’s happened okay. 

Possibly worse, the two are given a happy end in which we see Aki older, them living together and presumably happy, but I think I broke a tooth grinding my teeth. Of course I understand that fiction is not reality, and I have even been able to enjoy a problematic teacher/ student narrative before, but there were just so many things wrong here. Yuka’s abject misery at being not desirable, Aki’s obvious struggle with physical, probably sexual abuse, their age differential. It was not okay, even when I saw that the story was meant to be tied up in a ribbon of okay.

I love Momono Moto’s work, but she may well be one of the most problematic artists I like. I nonetheless like her art, and damn, if she didn’t capture Aki’s dead eyes far too well for me to ever feel comfortable with her as a romantic anything.

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 3
Characters – 5 No one would get a lunch invitation. Well, maybe the guy who goes out with Yuka, he seemed okay.
Yuri – 8
Service – No visual service, but the whole concept of an adult being attracted to a sexually abused child is a level of creepy I am unwilling to accept as anything other than criminal. 

Overall – 5

I didn’t enjoy this book, but then I didn’t expect to. Now I’m putting it out of my mind and waiting for Liberty (リバティ) to come out next month. ^_^;