Aw, ain't they sweet?

Amputees describe a condition where they feel an itch where the limb used to be. It is a phenomenon known as the “phantom itch” and is thought to occur when the brain doesn’t recognize the loss of the limb and continues to interpret signals from the missing limb even though it is no longer there. I bring this up because We Were There protagonist Nanami Takahashi suffers from an emotional variation of the phantom itch, having lost contact with her boyfriend Motoharu Yano under mysterious circumstances after he moved away to Tokyo. The failure of the relationship and her failure to find closure has resulted in this persistent itch she struggles to scratch, continually obsessed with discovering what happened to Yano and learning the reasons why he stopped contacting her. We Were There, Volume #10 continues the work begun in Volume #9 where a chance meeting between Takahashi and Akiko Sengenji at a job interview in Tokyo triggers a series of revelations and ultimately a flashback told from Sengenji’s point-of-view that relates the tale of Yano’s life after he arrived in Tokyo. Volume #10 is entirely dedicated to this flashback and provides some tantalizing clues to Yano’s fate.

Volume #9’s final chapter revealed Yano in Tokyo as a new transfer student from Hokkaido being introduced to his fellow students, Akiko Sengenji amongst them. We see Yano and Sengenji quickly becoming friends, Yano’s mother struggling to provide for her son, and Yano diligently maintaining his long distance connection with Takahashi back in Hokkaido. Volume #10 continues the flashback, quickly revealing Sengenji’s deepening attraction to Yano. She secretly resents Yano’s persistent devotion to far-away Takahashi, particularly his single-minded goal to earn enough money to visit her, even at the expense of his studies. Sengenji’s efforts to bond more intimately with Yano are further complicated by the sudden (and somewhat creepy) arrival of Yuri Yamamoto, sister of Yano’s deceased middle school girlfriend, with whom he had a brief liaison. Pressures on Yano mount when his mother is diagnosed with cancer, the time and expense of her care further compromising his studies and thereby jeopardizing his plans to attend the same university as Takahashi. Even his meager effort to restore some sense of normalcy by having his dog Lalami sent from Hokkaido only adds to his troubles, thanks to a disapproving neighbor. In the end, all Sengenji can do is offer to be a firewall for his ever-expanding roster of troubles.

There is a moment in the opening pages of Volume #10 where Sengenji laments how the simplistic and sincere nature of Yano is attracting her to him despite her better judgment. That observation rather succinctly summarizes my own feelings toward this series as a whole. It smacks of a picayune reality show or a facile soap opera, and yet transcends both with its disarming sincerity. It can be frustratingly trivial in places, yet is ultimately an effective human drama because of the real-life complications compounded by obdurate personalities. The characters are as conflicted and myopic as actual people. The dialogue is a double-edged sword; it can be fresh and reinforcing the pervasive sense of realism one minute, and then coming across with an artificial platitude that lands with a thud the next minute. And unfortunately, the tent pole premise that is supposed to hold up the whole, this idea that Yano inspires the passions of all these girls, is weak on merit because Yano himself is a hard character to like. I feel sorry for Sengenji and these other girls devoting themselves to this dope, tragic figure though he is. There, I said it — but that’s just me.

Obata-san is an efficient storyteller. Her page layouts are clean for the most part — some cluttered pages are to be found — and the story moves well from panel to panel. This straight forward layout may sometimes lack energy, but it never dissipates it either because of superfluous over-design and it fits the story’s languid pace. The characters are attractive and expressive and not overly stylized, a transgression often found in other shōjo offerings. There are also mercifully fewer chibi moments in Volume #10 than in other volumes in the series. Surprisingly, Obata-san makes some pleasing use of high contrast and tonality here and there, which seems to fly in the face of the usual shōjo conventions. My biggest gripe is with the uninspired use of screen-and-tone, which sometimes borders on sloppy, and the failed attempts at texturing. Some poor choices in this area compromise the otherwise clean and well-rendered illustrations. The story has a number of logistical challenges that can be difficult to render visually — timeline/geographical shifts, cellphone calls, text messages, e-mails — but the author manages to keep all her balls in the air and the final product is a solid read.

We Were There is a manga with a message; a trite, hackneyed message, but a message nonetheless. The more cynical among us will see a book peppered with fortune cookie phrases and dismiss it as another manga title trying too hard to be relevant in a genre glutted with greeting card philosophy. But if you give We Were There the benefit of the doubt, you may find the relevance of the work hiding in plain sight. Yes, the message of Volume #10 can be distilled down from it’s obtuse language into essentially carpe diem, but that belies the fact that there is real honesty in its phony wisdom. The characters in the story are of an age where they are largely products of external ideas force-fed them by school, media or church, with little life experience to give those ideas any context. Like everyone else, they figure it out as they go. So I’m willing to overlook the street corner punditry and take the story and its actors at face value. What we’re left with is a well-presented, well-meaning work with a few pimples that shouldn’t detract anyone from appreciating it’s genuinely good qualities.

ComicsOnline ranks We Were There, Volume #10 3 text messages out of 5.

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