#yamashita tomoko

[cinemaobscura]

The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window | さんかく窓の外側は夜 (2021) dir. Morigaki Yukihiro

[spirit-of-anime]

The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window

[mapoeggplant]

ikoku nikki chapter 54 - the end // spoilers

“why can’t you just say that you love me?”

“those words wouldn’t be enough”

and whichever words i chose to write here, they wouldn’t be enough to thank yamashita tomoko-sensei for the story she created.

ikoku nikki is, secretly, a story about love and how silently loving someone can produce music so loud that it prevents us from speaking our truth. it’s a story about loneliness, about company, about being who we are. there was a lot that could’ve been explained in the final chapter, but sensei opted to insert us inside the narrative.

by not answering some questions (such as asa’s parents and what they thought of her), we’re immersed in asa’s future and how she’s slowly learning to live without answers. there are still so many questions to be made, so many answers to hear and so many people to talk to — but in the end, what it mattered the most for asa, in that moment, was knowing that she would never be alone and how love she is.

we, as readers, are both makio saying goodbye at the door and asa running for her future. we’re the ones inside the boat and the ones pushing it further. we’re makio, asa, kasamachi, minori, emily, touno and everyone around them, such as the time they still have to live.

for asa, we can only hope for the best and wait for her to come home and visit us.

as for makio's journey, what other beautiful way to say goodbye than with words other than "i love you"?

who would’ve thought that after years of repressed feelings, makio would finally understand what her sister felt half of her life? what she felt when she wrote the diary? what she felt when she said goodbye way too early? makio’s way of showing asa how much she loves her is showing how welcomed she is in her sanctuary. for someone who never saw herself loving someone, allowing asa to continue living there is the same as saying how much it hurts to let her go.

it’s more than love, more than she could ever feel for someone. while asa learned how to chase for a world of her own, makio learned how to build a safe space for her to come back to. it’s the perfect circle for a story that started with endings: a new beginning starting to form.

it hurts to say goodbye. it hurts not being able to open the door and seeing asa there, lying in the sofa. it hurts not being able to fall asleep with the sound of makio’s keyboard. it hurts to finally understand the meaning of having your heart broken.

the circle is incomplete, as it should be. even with the same words tying beginning to end, their lives isn’t ending, just taking a new perspective. for us, what remains is to say goodbye. for them, what remains is to live. and to love. unconditionally.

[communistsister]

Diary of a Strange Land

I’ve been rereading Ikoku Nikki again, an ongoing manga series written by Yamashita Tomoko (who you may perhaps know as the original writer of recent anime adaptation of the supernatural BL series The Night Beyond The Tricornered Window). It’s one of my favourite manga, largely due to the art and very considered, introspective writing, but also because I just empathise with one of the two protagonists a lot.

Some thematic if not literal spoilers will follow.

One of the two protagonists, 35 year old novelist Makio Koudai is wonderfully written; she’s awkward, somewhere on the neurodiverse spectrum, struggles to be around people and prefers solitude; she forgets things, hates phonecalls, struggles to clean up after herself; and she has a tendency to monologue on deep dives into the meaning of words, the uniqueness of everyone’s own feelings, and how it’s okay to hate your family. Much of the plot is her learning to live with her 15-year-old recently orphaned niece, Asa, who she adopts at the start of the series.

Generally though... she’s a rare kind of protagonist that I don’t really see written much, and is also directly relatable for basically everything I wrote above. I see myself in Makio a lot. I also think it’s easy to read her as trans; the author’s background in creating Boys’ Love manga means she tends to draw women with quite androgynous-to-masculine face shapes, and some imagery and subtext has cropped up so far through the series that can be read as supporting Makio as trans. She has at least one close nonbinary friend who she can joke about their junk with; she quickly clocks a supporting character as a teenage lesbian struggling with her identity; childhood flashbacks of Makio’s terrible relationship with her sister often show her in masculine clothing with short hair. It’s not textual but it’s an easy read for me.

As both an author and a neurotic person who largely overthinks things and lives inside her own head, Makio does display a lot of emotional intelligence throughout the series; but it’s generally a very analytical display of it that I feel an affinity with. She struggles with direct emotional outbursts, and sometimes fails to read how others feel until it’s said out loud; she explicitly says she struggles guessing people’s thoughts and emotions. But when able to take a step back and describe an emotion or situation in a more literate way, she expresses a real understanding of the nuances of a lot of difficult emotions, like waxing lyrical on the expression of grief when her niece Asa is thinking about her recently deceased parents, by discussing the use of tense in both english and japanese:

Makio’s a good protagonist to co-centre the story around; Ikoku Nikki deals with the obvious themes of grief that come from having an orphaned character, but keeps going into some other less familiar areas. Whether your parents love you; how and when it’s acceptable to be angry; being unable to relate to others’ feelings; breaking up with a partner because they feel too perfect and you feel undeserving of love; the struggle and loneliness of writing & creating art. Makio often takes a teaching role in chapters about these topics, conveying wordy thoughts to Asa as the latter struggles through processing grief & growing up through school. Makio’s own past is told through often-abstract flashbacks rather than spelled out, but it’s clear from how she acts in the present day that she’s developed a sort of detached, almost disassociative maturity around being a person, and her advice to Asa usually comes across as pained sympathy instead of lecturing. Coupled with a small cast of similarly well-rounded supporting characters and their own internal and external emotional dialogues, Ikoku Nikki both starts strongly and grows over its chapters to be a really thoughtful story about sets of complex emotions. In case you can’t tell from me writing a long post about it, I really recommend it, as a relatively uncommon example of manga with a well-fleshed-out adult cast dealing with the low, relatable stakes of trying to be happy.

[asnowperson]

I finished reading the side story to Sankaku Mado no Sotogawa no Yoru, which is aptly named Sankaku Mado no Sotogawa wa Yoru-Sono Ato (さんかく窓の外側は夜 その後). I'm talking about this book.

It has a 3-chapter side story with our cast solving another curse case, originally published in BexBoy in 2021, and short bonuses and illustrations by Yamashita. It's a rather short volume, but quite enjoyable for the fans of the series. And reading Yamashita dialogue always gives your brain a good language exercise and makes you feel insecure about your comprehension abilities. ❤️

I'll post Hiyakawa and Mikado because I've missed them.

I'm looking forward to her next series after the masterpiece that is Ikoku Nikki ended.

[drshartsmangaemporium]

Yamashita Tomoko • Ikoku Nikki • ch.1

[ichiharas-familiar]

Hiyakawa what the hell are you ever talking about

[iphisesque]

Her, Yamashita Tomoko (2009)

[soft-manga]

her

[hiranospiercing]

ikoku nikki is about to end and honestly i still haven't sorted out my feelings regarding how i experienced it, it's just i have read a lot and i keep reading a lot but there are certain storylines and characters that you end up forming a connection with and it's such a different type of grief once you know you have to part and well yes i can most definitely read it again and again and again but it will no longer be the same as it once was and i think articulating my thoughts and sorting out those feeling probably feels like goodbye and that's why i kind of don't want to indulge in that but at the same time this manga has affected me so much that i feel the need to talk about it and sort all those incoherent thoughts as a way to appreciate it, yes, i might do it soon, though not today.

[elmaxlys]

Read Yamashita Tomoko's works, guys. For health.

(the order is interchangeable)

[scratchp-boocks]

Ikoku Nikki- YAMASHITA Tomoko

[mapoeggplant]

i couldn't contain myself with the ikoku nikki anime news and finally decided to do something i've been waiting so long to do: i wrote two minifics in december of 2022, which i shared on twitter, but always wanted to move it to ao3 so i finally did it!!

rereading them right now after knowing the ending makes me a little emotional 💛

[jssicamandy]

NEW FAVORITE: IKOKU NIKKI

I just finished reading this beautiful slice of life manga, a real gem among so many of them. It gotten real hard for me to be able to find gem like this. This one feels like reading fairytale story in my youth and how at the last page there will be "moral of the story" in one or two short sentence and it always feel mind blown for me. I feel very soothed after finishing this.

Diary of a strange land or also called Journal with Witch told the story of how Asa, a junior in High School lost both of her parents suddenly to a car accident. Her estranged aunt, (the little sister of her mom) Makio, offered to take her in and so began their journey of living together. They learned about what it means of being a family is, dealing with words, feeling, and emotions. They found each other as strange, due to how they normally go with their daily things and their point of view of things quite differ from each other.

Makio suggested that Asa started a journal where she could write down everything she wants and how she could even writes some things that are not even real, hoping that she could unload her grief and other emotions down, and we could read bit of what she wrote there. Their dialogue, or sometimes internal soliloquy is beautiful, I love how the words make me feel. I will post some of them after tidying it up if I feel it though.

I am ecstatic after finding out that they will make a movie after this manga, and how the author will also be the screenwriter. I hope it turns out great.

If you have any slice of life manga/manhwa/manhua like this one please do tell me, and if you have site recommendations of where I could read gems like this please whisper it to me by message.

[antisocrates]

[drshartsmangaemporium]

Yamashita Tomoko • Ikoku Nikki • ch. 23