The best author in the two-volume-roguelike business has returned! Akiyama Haru hits the ground running (over women; I'm sorry women) with this one, and her characterization of the big shitty city as a sort of infinite concrete digestive tract that eternally melts and churns and squeezes people together and apart continues to be on point (its like if Prometheus had to pay electricity bills and rent for that stupid mountain). The only permanence in Akiyama's settings lies in transience- fidelity, employment, dreams, homes, moralities and stories themselves seem as prone to slip through your fingers (I'm sorry women) as the air itself, and the only joy lies in the hope that your fiftieth roll only the obligatory trauma gacha shall net you an SSR kinda dame who'll traumatize you in a kinky or beautifully tragic sort of way instead of just telling you to close your eyes and think of Sunday.
Coincidence is a key concern in this piece (himejoshi goblins?), and I'm quite sure Akiyama knows exactly what they're doing when they use gemstones, so often formed under immense heat and pressure over time, to represent abrupt and striking explosions of action and tension that bring together people from different walks of life (historical materialism is a prized tool in every yuri artist's arsenal). Under capitalism, and especially the concentrated forms it takes on in urban spaces constructed around flows of productivity, the clear and systematic segregation and compartmentalization of organs and resources in the cyborg body economic, a coincidence is almost an act of sabotage, a misplaced shoe gumming up a cogwheel. People miss meetings, damage capital, pause working, scramble records, and make the machine bleed from a thousand tiny nicks replacing steady ticks. In that regard, Kon's inability to be normal-as-productive certainly positions her as an inadvertent liability to any structure, a line of failures threatening to send her spiraling down the cracks below respectable society, but also then allows her to connect with people outside the spheres she would've moved in if she did have the ability to be "employable"- the romantic meetcute as social inevitability.
Inversions, displacements and a general playing-about with masks and roles have been a staple in the history of what one may call love stories, and especially so in stories about love in the stratified and supervised networks of roles and functions in the big city, where the gods-as-authors of love must necessarily work some mischief to overcome the obstacles to coupling. In Akiyama's tales, their devices are phone calls and intersections and train lines, queering quite literally the trajectory of transmission, the liminality between here and there creating a space where people might enjoy being nowhere and nobody together, differences melting away for brief blessed moments of peace. Where Kon's bogged down by her inability to keep all the roles straight and a sense that she has none to play (there's a low-hanging fruit here; c'est moi), Ai struggles under the weight of entirely too many- drifter, hostess, lover, seeker, runaway, mommy (shut up, Kon), and the beauty of the setup is that they're both fields of coincidence- Kon's numerous accidents and reversals scrambling the flow of spacetime and pulling women into her failgirl orbit, and Ai's superposition of identities as multifaceted as a gemstone (and as perilously implicated in the frenzy of acquisition), a co-incidence of coincidences that is naturally sparked off by Ai mistaking Kon at her lowest for someone else and so making her day (blue garnets are also known for changing shades under different types of illumination, much like a girl's, er, wardrobe). "And they were gradient neighbours-" statements that would make for an excellent Steven Universe joke if I had actually ever watched the show.
In addition to the usual expertise Akiyama brings to wrangling romance, there's also a fascinating air of mystery about this whole setup? The title of a deeply symbolic gemstone (plus the one that Ai's wearing), the ghost of a past lover hanging over the narrative like my obsession with Brides of Iberis, the sinister client at the hostess bar, the femme fatale who seduces our gullible and innocent heroine with such cunning wiles as Basic Human Decency, two murders plotted ("I'll kill that person and I'll die too) and one cold-bloodedly carried out (Kon's heterosexuality), the overhanging question of whether or not the first meeting of our leads was a coincidence... Akiyama seems to have a vision here, and I for one am looking respectfully.
