Ten things I like about NANA, and several more that I don’t.

Although I am a huge fan of Yazawa Ai’s earlier series, Paradise Kiss, I’ve never been able to make much headway into NANA — I managed to force my way through thirteen volumes before giving up, reading the latest and then looking up what happens in between. I find the whole series terribly pointless and melodramatic, drenched in pathos; its self-destructive characters, trapped in repetitive shames and pains and basing their lives on bad films, seem to me to need a good slapping, and I don’t see why it has to take several years of external time to make a simple baby.

In a way, of course, I’m really complaining about NANA being too realistic. The characters’ constant vacillation, their shallow-acceptances-that-are-really-denials, the way they bullshit themselves, and especially the way their public reputations (they’re musicians) stem from brutal, ill-informed readings of their flaws, the cracks in their armor, and their entirely innocuous pre-fame decisions — it’s all so plausible that it barely needs to exist in fiction.

None of this is helped by the characters’ constant and very stilted use of slang. It’s just hard to take the story seriously when the pregnant character is rarely “pregnant” and far more often “preggers” (man). My guess is that this isn’t really the translators’ fault; it’s very slangy language in the original, and like a lot of Japanese honorifics and gendered language, you can’t translate that into English in a way that doesn’t sound stilted. I can’t say for certain, though.

However, this post is about things I like about NANA — I think it’ll do me more good to point out what’s interesting about this book than to continue to dwell on its failures.

1. Plausible depiction of where major-label music comes from (oh g0d).
2. Yasu, the shaven-headed punk lawyer and token mature member of Black Stones, who’s a believable and engaging portrayal of subculture type cautiously feeling his way to a place in the majority culture without compromising his ideals — much.
3. Perfectly captures the dynamic between middle-level bands and their hardcore fans, who may well actually hang out with the band, become employed by them or even stay with them for the summer, but still manage to hold their music and performance as an ideal.
4. I like the wide range of romantic and friendly relationships in the book — from Nana and Ren’s stormy passion to Yasu’s level-headed but still loving partnership, to the romantic friendship of the Nanas themselves, which may or may not be simply founded in the mutual need to idealize something, and may or may not eventually save them.
5. Tokyo is not the sole populated area of Japan.
6. Takumi, the bassist of TRAPNEST, is a great deconstruction of the shoujo hero (as was George from Paradise Kiss before him). His flippancy and not-quite-total disregard for others are both charming and creepy. I suspect that a lot of rock stars have traits in common with Takumi.
7. NANA‘s major events, few though they are, are always very striking and well-told.
8. What is it about Yazawa that her characters are often casually bisexual, and that’s very nicely done, but the gay ones are always heavily stereotyped and often unpleasant? Is this an impression that would improve if I read Gokinjo Monogatari? Anyway, Ginpei is turning into her first decent gay character, despite being both.
9. I like Hachi’s family a lot. They remind me somewhat of families in E.M. Forster: problematic and somewhat stifling people, but you can totally see how they share genes, history, in-jokes with the hero.
10. Good treatment of trauma. There’s a big chunk of it at the current end of the series, and I love how everyone reacts to it in a perfectly in-character way — especially Takumi, who’s profoundly disturbed by what he’s seen, plays it off in a self-absorbed way, and refuses to let anyone else look at the nightmarish thing even if they want and need to.

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