Nana, by Ai Yazawa

Nana K, below

The proportion of great comics aimed at women by women is small in the anglophone market. I’ve found less of a sex gap in Japan, and read some very good comics aimed at girls or young women, and one I think is an absolute masterpiece.

Ai Yazawa’s Nana is perhaps my favourite comic ever now, and I thank my friend Cis for pointing me at it. It’s about two young women, both called Nana, who move to Tokyo for a new life. Nana K is sweet and rather naive – the punky Nana O calls her, in an exasperated temper, “puppy-dog-like”, and Nana K gets the happiest expression ever, before grasping that it wasn’t meant as a compliment. Nana O is a singer, and it’s her band and that of her ex that provide most of the other characters, and the two bands are central to the developing story, which so far runs to 21 translated volumes of around 200 pages each.

I love everything about it: I could happily read another 10,000 pages about any of the major characters, and I feel for them very deeply, their joys and pains. This is partly because she creates them so superbly, with depth and multiple facets and unmistakeable feelings, capturing their speech beautifully, sometimes capturing them breathtakingly precisely with one line. She also develops their stories carefully, giving them good and bad times mostly from what they do rather than anything external happening to them, and including unusual techniques such as increasing use of flashforward sequences. I have a particularly strong attachment to the relationship between the Nanas: it breaks my heart when Yazawa keeps them apart for long (sometimes she separates them for hundreds of pages), and I feel as if I could happily watch them together in their flat, at the table in the bay window, forever.

The Nanas in bed. Don't forget to read from right to left!

Besides the intelligence, sensitivity, maturity and honesty of the story, what turns this from a superbly written comic into an all-round masterpiece is her art. She switches styles from one panel to another: one might be gorgeously stylish, which comes partly from her fashion illustration background, and sometimes looks like Jaime Hernandez’s work with a touch of Guido Crepax; then the next might be broadly cartoony, somewhere between Osamu Tezuka and Charles Schulz. In around 4,000 pages, I don’t recall once thinking that she chose the wrong mode for a panel. I also don’t think any two pages have the same layout of panels: in this, she makes even Crepax look predictable. Every page seems as if it has been designed without preconceptions, to fit the needs of the story at that moment, and she never seems to put a foot wrong. I think she’s the best page-layout artist I’ve ever seen.

I can’t think of another comic I have ever read that is so strong in every area: character, story, dialogue, drawing, layout. It’s formally original and masterful, and a joy to read, very funny and immensely moving. I don’t think comic books get any better than this. I’ll also note that it is a huge hit in Japan: a recent book collection broke records by selling almost 800,000 copies in its first week there. The latest is volume 21, and it is a rotten place for a new reader to start, partly because it’s 4,000 pages in, but mostly because it’s the most depressing volume: the whole book is the cast reacting to an important death at the end of #20. I can’t imagine its emotional impact would be remotely as huge for someone reading it in isolation.

I’ll also mention the other series of hers available in English: Paradise Kiss is a 5-book story of a schoolgirl getting involved with some fashion students. It has a lot of the same qualities, though you do feel you are reading a single story rather than a serial starring some characters, and I think she has got much better in the later Nana.