River's Edge

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If you found an abandoned corpse, would you come stare at it whenever you needed to feel better about your life?

River’s Edge is the kind of manga I love to find. While Okazaki Kyoko is one of manga’s foremost and greatest josei authors, she’s tragically under-known in English-speaking communities. Her stories capture a kind of realism that’s both tragic and comedic. People suffer, are victims of their own self-imposed complexes and worries, self-destruct, and yet there’s always a sense of nihilistic levity. To worry too much about the horrors before them is to take life too seriously.

Even then, out of the stories of hers that ... I’ve read, River’s Edge is the darkest. Pink was gleeful and flippant in its slice-of-life portrayal of how much easier life is when you don’t worry too much. Helter Skelter was a grand tragedy, of a larger-than-life celebrity whose facade began to break as she flew too close to the sun. And River’s Edge is grounded, focusing its tragedy on ordinary people, with an air of realism inhabiting every way in which they hurt each other. Unlike those other two, River’s Edge is a study of a larger ensemble cast.

The protagonist, Wakakusa finds herself torn as her reckless boyfriend Kannonzaki bullies the secretly gay Yamada. In helping him, she becomes embroiled in the web of relationships with Yamada’s unsuspecting girlfriend, Kanna, and the young bulimic model Yoshikawa (who you may remember from Helter Skelter). There isn’t a singular goal to this narrative — they carry on with their lives, have conversations, and clash for reasons that feel natural.

Is it really realistic? That depends. No story truly can be, but River’s Edge shows one side of how Okazaki views reality, and I think it’s an interesting one. Most high-school manga are written to embody certain fantasies of that era of life. Okazaki is here to explore its flaws, not in the system, but in the people themselves. There’s certainly a realistic flair to some of the dialogue, in Yoshikawa’s eating disorder, or in Yamada’s sexuality. There’s a great conversation where he calls Wakakusa out for thinking that just because he’s gay, it’s appropriate to ask him overly sexual questions.

It’s the same kind of drama that might seem like it could be fully resolved if everyone just communicated, but this is not your shonen or shojo where they fail to do so just to force conflict. River’s Edge’s characters wouldn’t feel like themselves if they truly told each other how they felt, and that would probably make them hate each other more. It captures the imperfections of people who don’t understand what they really want.

You want to see Wakakusa call out her boyfriend. You want a climactic confrontation where she breaks up with him, pledges to never have anything to do with him again. You don’t get it, and it’s not because this manga is realistic. It’s because Wakakusa is a teenager who was never quite aware enough to realize that would be an option, much less go through with it. That’s not to say it’s a tragedy. In the end, her life goes on in a way you can accept, no longer affected by Kannonzaki’s behavior.

The end is woven surprisingly tight, though, for a story of this nature. Every plotline weaves together naturally, in a way that would betray the sense of realism if not for how well it’s done. It doesn’t feel like an ending Okazaki envisioned and contrived her story toward. It feels like the simple result of who the characters are. That’s the whole appeal of this manga. You won’t get the drama of heightened reality, but the characters are interesting, and they find themselves in interesting situations. It’s more about the people than the message, but the message is as simple as how important it is to treat each other kindly. What hooks you isn’t that simplicity, but the complexity that arises when people fail at that.

On a technical level, Okazaki is as competent as ever. While perhaps off-putting to those used to the stylization so common in the medium, with its simply outlined eyes and mouths, there’s still a careful aesthetic, and plenty of great composition and visual storytelling. The story can be a little more text-driven than it needed to be, and the flow of dialogue bubbles was sometimes unintuitive — flaws I didn’t find in Pink or Helter Skelter. But like those two manga, I would put River’s Edge on a list of great character studies that anybody should read if they’re interested in such a thing, in exploring josei, or in exploring what great manga can be found beyond the mainstream.

First I want to warn you that there will be spoilers, not much but there will be, I am not a native English speaker, and I am sorry for any mistakes I make. We started.


River's Edge, Netflix passed me by and recommended his film, I was going to start watching it but I realized that it's an adaptation of a 1993 manga, although it's not the eighth wonder of the world either.


Story 8/10
Well the story is “innovative” in the 90s because well... this kind of plot was very interesting and touches on taboo subjects for the land of the rising sun (knowing that they are ... very conservative), like homosexuality, I would have liked Yamada's homosexuality, Haruna and Kannozaki's relationship and other characters to have developed a little more (I will talk about this later). I also want to emphasize about the corpse, this had some symbolism or what?, what I understood was that 2 crazy people found a corpse and when they need to calm down, they go to the corpse and relax, WTF? Well, as I said, two crazy people, what can you expect? And about Haruna's reaction to the body... I don't know, she's just another crazy person like the two of them. Take a step back, don't let them know you're leaving and run to the police, I don't know if what I said makes sense but that's the way I see it.


Art 7/10
Well, I'm not much of a critic of animation and this kind of thing because, well, I don't know anything about drawing but I can identify when it's a bad drawing and when it's not. This style of drawing is not the best but I like it, a simple and fresh drawing style for the year the story takes place and when it was published.


Characters 6/10
I have mixed feelings here... but of the bad
Well I would like to talk about each one individually but it would take too long, so I will do my best.
Yamada is a poor boy who is bothered, shy and quiet but surprise, surprise, it's GAY!... for me it's not interesting, I feel that he doesn't innovate much, I don't know if it's because this kind of characters are burned
Haruna is a normal girl, but she's got a screw loose in her head. Her friendship with Yamada is very rare for me, but she enjoys it, it's nothing big but GOD, when I say that this girl has a screw loose in her head it's because I say it with reason, first you have a boyfriend who likes to hit everyone who crosses him, he hits your BFF, possessive, he has relations with your other BFF, you say you don't love him, but they have sex and the worst, he rapes you and the 2 crazy people are watching that and leave her alone, that is to say, bad friends, with those friends so that enemies. Anyway, the hypocrisy. What kind of girl goes around with a guy like that?
Yoshikawa, a girl who didn't really make sense of the plot. A crazy girl who likes to see dead bodies like Yamada and kills cats too, what was the point of her being part of the main characters? That she turns Haruna into a lesbian? We'll never know.


Enjoyment 7/10
Like I said, it's not the wonder but it's not the swill either, it's enjoyable, you want to read something fast? This is for you buddy.


In conclusion, a good manga that could give more, had an interesting story but as long as we advance little by little it declines, either because of its characters that lack more development or because it's an open ending. What I did like about his epilogue is that as he makes it very clear. In life, we know thousands of people but there will be a moment when they will no longer be there, even if it hurts, it is the law of life.


Thank you for reading and have a nice day

When I first read this manga a few years ago, I thought it was terrible. I did not find any enjoyment in the themes explored, I struggled to relate to any of the characters, and overall I felt like the manga failed to make any kind of strong, powerful statement that would stick to me, seeing as this is the type of manga that appears to have something to say. However, now that I’m reading it again, I’m starting to see that maybe there is some merit to this manga after all.

Now before we delve into what made me reconsider my stance on ... this manga, let's first address what I still hold my grievances towards from my first read: the art. The manga's jarringly ugly art style, in conjunction with the unforgiving walls of text, makes the experience of reading this manga feel like a chore at times. This manga was not easy to get through for me, not because of the content itself but because there was nothing particularly inspiring with how it was presented. However, there are certain moments where you can see a lot of thought put into the timing of certain panels, such as the events that unfold in chapter 4. The juxtaposition of Kannonzaki's adulterous sex presenting itself as a symbol of life and pleasure with Yamada's dire revelation of his secret discovery and the pain he lives through everyday providing a somber contrast to that symbol.

I thought this was a nice analogy with quite brilliant, thought-provoking execution. It makes me think back to the way Haruna described her first time with Kannonzaki (“Sex without the purpose of reproduction holds many contradictions and mysteries”). In this chapter, we witness the first of many contradictions: sex for the “fun” of it. Many people, such as Kannonzaki, seem to strongly hold this idea of sex as an inherent act of love, yet those same people have no qualms having sex completely devoid of it. Whether or not sex implies love is a question outside the scope of this review, but it's certainly true that people behave in incredibly contradictory ways when it comes to love. The way this manga observes Kannonzaki's attachment with Haruna and contrasts it with how he continuously acts in contradiction to this supposed attachment serves to illustrate to the reader a wonderful example of this phenomenon. This was a compelling theme and I think it’s quite well explored within numerous other moments of the story as well. I would delve into more of the nuances, but I'd rather not spoil any more of the story than I have to.

Getting back to Yamada’s pain, I want to get into how Okazaki explores the theme of bullying in the context of romance. Kannonzaki’s merciless harassment of Yamada is nothing short of being utterly disgusting. Haruna does try to restrain Kannonzaki in some ways, but for some reason she chooses to preserve her superficial relationship with him instead of following her moral compass and protecting Yamada. Personally, this relationship frustrates me to no end. Sure, Haruna has poured a lot into this relationship, especially considering that Kannonzaki is the person who she gave her virginity to. Yet, after the horrific acts of torture that Kannonzaki commits against Yamada, why would she do anything other than break up with this asshole? It’s simply something that I don’t understand. However, perhaps that’s the point of it all. I believe that with this complicated relationship, Okazaki offers quite a somber reflection about the limbo state of prolonged futility that many relationships exist under. This relationship exists solely to benefit Kannonzaki’s own ego and to the sheer detriment of Haruna’s happiness. And yet, what is there to hold Haruna back from breaking up with him? It's a question that many of us struggle to ask ourselves. Maybe there's some deep-seated fear of abandoning the status quo, perhaps the social repercussions of a break up would be too much for Haruna to handle, or it could be some other reason that only Haruna could ever truly know. Clearly, it feels like there’s a specific target audience that this manga seeks to relate to. This is a story about trauma and grief. But also, this is a chronicle of our many vices as fragile beings. The things we do to seek attention, the things we do when acting out of our deepest insecurities. A lot more happens in this manga, but again, I'd rather you read the manga for yourself and reflect on your own about those parts.

This manga seeks to tackle a lot, and it does so succinctly. Ultimately, this manga is a statement about how bubbling emotions and our self-obsessed egos work hand-in-hand to foster tragedy. Yet, despite my praise of the themes that I found were explored quite well, I honestly believe it should've honed in on one or two specific themes instead of attempting the Herculean challenge of crafting a multidimensional masterpiece in just one volume. Ideally, it'd be the themes I mentioned in this review. I haven't even addressed some very prevalent aspects of this manga, like Yamada's sexuality, his girlfriend, and anything relating to Kozue because I feel that these aspects weren't nearly as compelling or well-explored. Nevertheless, I enjoyed what this manga was able to accomplish and I’m glad I gave it another shot. Overall, I think this manga does a solid job at bringing up certain issues about love, both the love towards others and the love towards oneself, but feels bereft of much of its potential depth due to its tediously zealous onslaught of ideas and a general sense of over-ambition.