I guess no-one here has much patience with other people’s mental health issues, then? OK, maybe I’m not being fair. Mitsuki does have issues, and her current avoidance of music might well be symbolic of some other kind of trauma, such as grief, if you want to read this as literature?
For myself, music is a huge part of my life, but it’s not always been plain sailing, to put it mildly, whether as a listener, a performer or as a composer. Music is clearly extremely vital to Aya, and it has to be a very specific kind of music, and in this manga her character has been defined by it from the start.
You feel what you feel, and of course you might want to express that. But for me I still have, so far, the patience to spend a little while each Sunday morning with first the Japanese and then the translated version of this. Of course I’ll be relieved when this arc is worked out, one way or another. I hope it will be something that teaches me, and nourishes me, but I’m grateful for what has often been a refreshing story, and one of the highlights of each week.
When it’s all compiled into a volume, my perception of the overall pacing will change, and this definitely dark phase might feel less insistently upsetting.
But there are things here that Mitsuki needs to work out. And indeed Aya, whose refuge in the bottle maybe needs some attention, not to mention whatever had her find it so necessary to put so much weight on particular music. In real life such things are rarely actually worked out, but just fall into place, across a lifetime. We want better than that from fiction, though.
I don’t think Arai-sensei has written herself into a corner, but I think she’s going to try to find an honest way to resolve her character’s issues; and that might take some time yet, even if we all just want Narita to fix it all, which was a bit of a cop-out early on, when we were all still charmed by the art style and the characters. We can all see the pieces of the puzzle laid out on the table, and we’ve maybe all come to the realisation that the Narita-fix hasn’t worked this time. There are some lovely stories waiting to be told there, but, yes, the 4 pages per week format is tough on not just the story and its readers, but likely on Arai-sensei too. Not to mention whatever she’s going through with fame, and whatever is happening with the anime adaptation.
