The Man of Tango by Okadaya Tetuzoh

Rating: 7
Sublime 2013 - Ohzora Shuppan 2013 (this edition)
Magazine serialisation 2008
1 volume
Translation: Ivana Bloom

"Che Tango Che
You drugged me
Confused me
Led me
Jerked me around
Excited me
Played me
You threw me away
You hurt me
And yet you were the only thing that truly loved me."

The story begins with a friend telling Angel "Angie" Almodóvar that he is a man very much like tango itself; he loves with passion, without deceit, and even if the affair is fleeting, his lovers are grateful for the memory of it. However, he gives so much of himself that there is nothing left at the end of the affair; the friend worries for his future. Flash forward many years, Angie is older, jaded, and simply feels nothing by the end of a relationship. He is a dance instructor in Tokyo and teaches his students that tango is like a conversation through dance; in private, he tells his dance partner, Bene, that his seemingly passionate dancing is just an act, much like his relationships, that it isn't the real him. Then he meets Hiro, a half-Japanese, half-Latin office worker, who ignites the true passion in both Angie's dance and heart.

The Man of Tango is a sexy seductive story, befitting of its tango theme. It's a pretty straightforward romance at its core but the dancing adds an extra dimension to the story. "Che Tango Che", the title of the prologue chapter, is the title of an actual song. In the mangaka's commentary, she recounts her discovery of the CD that sparked her interest in Argentine tango, and along with Che Tango Che she uses lyrics from another of the album's songs (Años De Soledad) in the manga. Although the story is split something like 80% romance/20% tango, Okadaya's love of the dance and its music colours the story and the characters, adding vigour to the basic romantic plot.

There aren't many characters that can pull off being seductive without sounding corny, but Angie is one of them. He's a smooth talker but sincerity rings through all his words so that you believe he means every word and there really is no resisting the guy. Hats off to Okadaya for making this character work and thanks to Sublime for the sympathetic translation. Apart from a few confusing passages, on the whole I thought this was a fluid lyrical translation which really benefited the character of Angie.

Beyond his buff muscular exterior, Hiro (the crew-cut guy on the cover) is actually a cute clueless uke. He's normally aloof and detached but he loses all his cool before Angie's advances and turns into a flustered comical character; most of the laughs in the manga come from his reactions to Angie's smooth moves. I'm usually not a fan of flashbacks or memory montages but there's a really good brief montage of Hiro's sad past which I think is actually the best sequence in the book. The prose throughout the volume treads the line between passionate and cheesy, no more so than the very beginning when the reader is thrown straight in at the deep end and is expected to embrace the ardent language, something I found hard to do initially; Hiro's montage was the first step in pulling me into the story emotionally, and from then on it became easier to accept the mood and rhythms of the story.

There's a lot I like about this manga (one of which is a rare likeable female character, Bene) but its biggest problem is that it feels incomplete. We're not told anything of Angie's past. The friend who appeared in the prologue chapter seemed to foreshadow tragic events but he never appears again in the remainder of the book. There's a huge gap in time between the prologue and first chapter that's not referred to at all. More importantly, though I can understand Angie's attraction to Hiro, we don't see how their relationship progresses beyond the initial hookup so there's nothing much to convince the reader that this might not be another of Angie's fleeting affairs; it doesn't feel like the long-lasting love that the story set out to achieve for Angie. It's not that the story feels rushed, I think the pacing is nice and steady, it's more a case of there being a lot of story left untold. This was probably not the fault of the mangaka, in her commentary she has profiles and back stories for many of the side characters that appear in the book (and a couple that don't), which leads me to wonder if there are other stories that weren't compiled in this volume? Or did she not have the opportunity to publish those stories? Whatever the case, the volume as it stands needs a lot more story to beef up the plot and background.

A few words about the art. Well, you either like the style or don't. It's not to my personal liking but I always put way more onus on the story than the art so I tend not to be fazed by much. I'd say that even if you find the style off-putting, the story is good enough to overshadow any aesthetic aversions. Having said that, there are some drawings where the anatomical proportions are a bit off, something I find more distracting than the style of the art itself.

Milva and Astor Piazzolla - Años De Soledad (Live at the "Bouffes du Nord" / En vivo en Paris, 1984)

Though Okadaya doesn't mention the name of the album nor artist of the CD that first got her into Argentine tango, I think, from what she does say, that this is the album referred to. Something to get you into the mood for the story!