Fantagraphics 2012 - Shougakukan 1974
1 omnibus volume
Translation: Matt Thorn
www.fantagraphics.com
Matt Thorn 2004 interview of Hagio Moto
With the Fantagraphics release of Heart of Thomas imminent, I've been dithering over whether to write a review of it or not. It's considered a shoujo classic from a pioneer of the shoujo genre and, more pertinently to this blog, was one of the earliest examples of shounen-ai and widely credited with being a forerunner of the boys love genre. Frankly, I was rather daunted by all this pedigree and doubted whether I'd be able to write a literary critique deserving of the work, especially since I've read very little from that era, save a few shoujo manga. Well I've decided to blithely ignore all the history and instead have tried to answer the most basic of questions: is it any good? is it still accessible after thirty-odd years? is it worth recommending to a reader of modern BL manga? And the answers are yes, yes and yes, so here are my thoughts on it.
The story begins with the suicide of Thomas Werner, a German boarding school student, and the letter he leaves to a fellow student for whom he harboured an unrequited love; it reads,
To Juli, one last time
This is my love
This is the sound of my heart
Surely you must understand.
Juli is far from understanding and descends into a state of turmoil. On the surface he maintains his veneer as a cool, calm model student but this doesn't fool his roommate, Oscar, who watches over Juli whose mental state becomes ever more fragile. Enter a new transfer student, Eric, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the deceased Thomas, and Juli is increasingly pushed to the brink.
Heart of Thomas is psychological drama of the highest order of angst. It's intense, gripping and thought-provoking. Its themes are multitudinous and complex, every main character has a tragic past and is the stuff of psychiatrists' dreams; suffice to say there's a lot going on and you'd need an essay or two to do justice to it all.
It's very different from any BL being written today with one of the most striking differences being the nature of the love between the boys, which is non-sexual, platonic for the most part, chaste and pure; the story emphasises spiritual love, and the idea that love can serve a higher purpose, as opposed to the more earthly love familiar to yaoi. In that sense, it's quite refreshing to read because it's not tied down by the need for sexual gratification that's prevalent, often to a gratuitous degree, in today's current crop of BL. Instead, the story focuses more on exploring various themes and human character, and is a richer nuanced work for it.
One key theme in the story is that of life and death, and in connection to it, ideas of damnation, salvation and redemption, themes which are often explored through the use of religious analogy and metaphor. The eerie legacy of Thomas's suicide note haunts the main characters throughout the story. For Juli, it's a battle, both spiritual and emotional, to understand the meaning of Thomas's last words, to find out why this boy died for his sake, and ultimately, to accept both the love and sacrifice that Thomas offered. In an interview (linked above), Hagio has said that she wrote the story with the thought that, "how one lives is important, but how one dies might be important, too...In a sense, that mystery of why he had to die is never solved, and I think that unsolved mystery is what sustains the work". It's a romantic view of suicide that works well in the context of the story but the realist in me wanted a discussion of the rights and wrongs of the act of suicide itself, something not broached in the story; and so Thomas remains an ephemeral tragic figure, which I suppose is fitting for the essence of the piece, but remains a contentious point for me.
It's one of several divisive aspects to the story, another of which involves the religious dogma used in the plot and also as a metaphor for sex in some parts, religion always being an incendiary topic for most readers. However, although there is much that I disagree with in the story, I'm glad that the piece poses the questions, offers explanations or interpretations, and provides material that gets the reader thinking, something that is wholly lacking in much of the BL we see today.
The Fantagprahics website (linked above) offers a preview of the first chapter so one can get an idea of the artwork in the series, which can be hard to adjust to for readers who have not encountered seventies shoujo art before. The character design and certain techniques used are certainly dated to the modern eye but there is plenty of beautiful imagery and art that a lot of modern manga would do well to learn from.
There's so much more to the story that I haven't touched on and I would say it's very worth your while to check it out in all its glory. The passage of thirty-odd years has not made it any less compelling than it was when it was first published and for that I believe it justifies its reputation as a classic. It's certainly an interesting read by any standards but whether it's a must-read in terms of modern BL, which is nowadays so removed from its early shounen-ai roots, I'm not so sure, and a question that I'll leave for the individual reader to decide.
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