Saki loves piano. Or does she? She loves taking lessons with her teacher, she’s sure of that. But her teacher is leaving…

In Amayo no Tsuki, Volume 1 ( 雨夜の月), on the street, heading towards lessons, Saki bumps into someone. A lovely girl about her age, drops piano music. Saki helps her pick it up. The girl gestures at her, but Saki doesn’t understand. The next day in school  the girl turns out to be a transfer student, named Kanon. Kanon is hard of hearing, but can read lips and speak. Their teacher asks Saki to help Kanon out, but Kanon tells Saki to leave here alone.

Saki heads to the new music teacher her teacher recommended and the final coincidence drops into place. Her new teacher is Kanon’s mother, a veritable ogre of a teacher. 

Saki finds that she cannot leave Kanon alone and just keeps trying to be a friend to the new girl. There is a clique that is clearly out to bully Kanon, but Saki is not having any of it and protects Kanon. Kanon appreciates that Saki always turns towards her when she speaks, which helps her to lip-read. Slowly, Kanon opens up to Saki. When her impossible piano lessons are over, Saki retreats to Kanon’s room, the sound-proof music room behind the house. There, she learns, Kanon finally feels relaxed, without the mosaic of fractured background noises of daily life around her. There, if Kanon gets close, she can hear Saki. And there, Saki starts to rethink her love of piano….

As Saki finds herself thinking more and more about Kanon, and how intimate they are, she also starts to realize that it was never piano she loved, maybe, but it might well have been her piano teacher.

In school, while the bullies scheme, Saki’s friends join her and Kanon. Kanon is finding it harder to isolate herself, even as the effort of talking with new folks exhausts her. When Kanon makes an effort to go shopping with her, Saki decides to learn sign language to hopefully make that less stressful for Kanon…one day.

Saki is awakening to a new self, Kanon is awakening to a new self and this fact is the key strength of this series. Kanon is very clear that she does not need or want a hearing person to be her savior or her guardian, but she is becomingly less resistant to Saki as a friend. Saki is starting to get a hint that her feelings for Kanon are not just friendship, but she can see that friendship is more important. I actually want to know what will become of them and I kind of hope it’s not either/or.

This is the first new series by Kuzushiro-sensei in a while and I’m pretty pleased with the way it’s turning out. Her art is solid, she’s come a long way, with a recognizable style. The pacing is good, although I could lose the creepy bullies constantly threaten to make life hard for Kanon. But over all, I’m glad it neither fetishizes nor romanticizes deafness. Instead, it is a bit of an explainer manga, which gives Kanon a chance to speak for herself and to correct Saki’s mistakes and misunderstandings.

The volume ends with a few chapters of another Kuzushiro series that had too much screaming for me to enjoy it. Adults in an office just don’t scream that much… but Egao no Taenai Shokuba Desu., Volume 1 (笑顔のたえない職場です。) might be more your cup of tea.

I didn’t know what to expect with this series, but what I have gotten is a pretty solid series from a creator I really like.

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 7 Rough spots here and there, but it finds its own pace before the end of the volume
Characters – Same
Service – Implied only
Yuri – Implied only, but…

Overall – 8 by the end

Amayo no Tsuki is not a manga about DHH people, it has a character who is hard of hearing in a Yuri manga. If you are a DHH reader, and you have had a chance to read this manga, I would welcome your  opinion, which will obviously be from a different point of view than mine.