A Review of Moto Hagio's A, A PRIME

This review originally ran in The Comics Journal #269, an issue that focused entirely on the phenomena of shoujo manga. I scored my copy of A, A PRIME from James Sime at the Isotope in San Francisco who was generous enough to give me a book for which I would have gladly paid double the cover price. This review ran as an accompaniment to what may be one of the the only English-language interviews with legendary manga-ka, Moto Hagio.

X+X

A Review of A, A Prime
Moto Hagio, Viz Communications 1997

Of the many facets that manga present to the West for study and appreciation, none shine with quite the same glamour or mystery as shoujo manga. Unlike science-fiction, horror, adventure, or any number of other storytelling conventions, shoujo is not a genre. It is a distinction of approach, characterized by predominantly feminine values in both its narrative and visual streams. The recent boom of manga, shoujo and otherwise, in the West has facilitated the re-emergence of girls and women in the United States as a potent economic force for the first time in nearly fifty years.

While this has resulted in the availability of an unprecedented amount of shoujo manga in English, the true face of the form is yet veiled by the market pressures of bringing the newest and hottest material over first. There is so little that we yet understand about the evolution of shoujo out of shonen manga and the visionary manga-ka who, over time, shaped the irreducible distinction between them. For the diligent who actively seek them out, there have been, over the years, a few flares left on a path of better understanding shoujo that is otherwise shrouded by novelty. One such light amidst the darkness is Moto Hagio’s A, A PRIME.

A, A PRIME is a collection of three shorter pieces that blend romantic themes with the tropes of science fiction to create something strange and wonderful. In the opening story, which shares its name with the collection itself, the clone of a young Unicorn scientist who works as part of a terra-forming project is awakened to replace her precedent who has died. Upon her return to the team, she finds herself in an uncomfortable orbit with one of the human scientists who had been her lover before her death. The title, taken in context with this story alone, is evocatively revealed to be best appreciated as a mathematical glyph, expressing the eternal separation of that which was once in union, with a succinct precision that is made all the more haunting by the ambiguous ending.

Drawing from many of the themes established in “A, A Prime,” Hagio expands on the possibilities by giving them a progressively shonen-ai twist as the stories develop. In “4/4,” a young man studying at a telekinetic academy, finds his unreliable powers remarkably boosted by the presence of a Unicorn female. In contrast to the essentially heterosexual love story that she is telling, Hagio magnifies the gender ambiguities by presenting the male, Mori, as hyper-emotional and Trill, the female Unicorn, as cut off from her feelings by virtue of both her species and upbringing. While the leads of “A, A Prime” are noticeably androgynous,” the star-crossed lovers of this story are even more so. On the occasions that the girl’s nude form is shown, most often as a display of her innocence relative to the other characters, it serves only to highlight the physical similarities shared by the two leads, rather than the differences between them.

This muted sense of gender identity that is kept to the sub-textual level in “4/4” is transformed into the central conceit of the final story. Set four years after the tragic ending of Mori and Trill’s relationship, “X+Y” centers around a male Unicorn, Tacto, who is part of a Terran think-tank that ships out to Mars to help speed up the terraforming and colonization process. After his first and largely unproductive sexual encounter with a woman, Tacto is informed by his doctor that he is in possession of two X chromosomes and needs to have his body medically converted to that of a female in order to preserve his/her long-term health. Motivated by his fear of confronting the mysterious circumstances of his conception and the shame of his inability to sexually perform the night before, Tacto refuses to consider going ahead with the treatments and leaves Earth for Mars. Upon his arrival, the central love story is revealed as Tacto meets Mori, who has fled to the relative isolation of the Mars colony in order to recover from the loss of his resonant soulmate at the end of “4/4”.

Hagio’s transition here from heterosexual romance (if flavored with sci-fi elements) to shonen-ai, a genre of shoujo that is characterized by stories revolving around romantic relationships between young, typically androgynous men, is neither haphazardly constructed nor accidental. As the stories progress from a heterosexual orientation with characters that are clearly gender identified to an essentially pan-sexual orientation with androgynous characters, Hagio effectively scrambles gender awareness until little is left by which to prejudge the dynamic growth of the characters but the result. The resolution of the conflict, then, lies not in whether Mori will overcome his heterosexuality to recognize his biological resonance with the presumably male Tacto, but whether Tacto can remember and thus overcome his childhood experiences in order to accept love from anyone.

Hagio uses four different narrative approaches throughout this collection to tell her story in the least space possible, shifting the interior perspective often from female to male and then into the neuter of external captioning and back. Her consistent use of this combination of strategies brings a cohesion to A, A PRIME as a whole that suggests that the individual stories are more like chapters than completed statements. Due to the limitations of working in these shorter forms, the narrative can come off as a little clunky at times when precious space is spent delivering expository data rather than in the development of the supporting cast as plausible and differentiated voices of their own. The interior narratives, delivered from both of the lead characters, are lyrical by the standards of the shoujo tradition from which they emerge but also packed with thorny moral and ethical questions that engage the reader beyond the simple resolution of romantic tension.

More informative yet is the persistence with which Hagio alters her layout strategies to suit the dominant narrative voice on the page. When the characters are engaged in external, often expository, dialogue, the transitions from panel to panel become markedly sequential. Not surprisingly, these sequences are utilized more often to move the plot forward, emphasizing the linear qualities of the narrative.

As the narrative moves inward, the layouts become more distinctly shoujo, prioritizing the consumption of the page visually as a whole. The narrative stream becomes disconnected from its visual accompaniment as the text is fragmented into islands of discrete thoughts upon a borderless sea of emotional expression. The pages which lack an imbedded narrative (ie the silent ones) can be seen using both strategies depending on whether the function of the visual storytelling is to delineate kinetic motion on the page or to convey experiential states not best received by the reader through text.

Each story title in this collection obliquely describes a subtle relationship between two objects that are both the same and different. The phrase, ‘A, A Prime’ describes something discrete which yet occupies two positions, whether in a number set or in space. The two ‘fours’ in “4/4,” appear to be identical, save for the bar that sets one above the other and it is that bar (verbalized in the subtitle of the story) that defines their function as different. “X+Y” offers two discrete variables in an unresolved relationship around an addition sign, but leaves it to the reader’s imagination what their intrinsic values might be eventually be, to make no mention of their sum.

Extending this metaphor one step further, shoujo manga are first and foremost manga despite their many stylistic and narrative specificities. They are differentiated by both reader and creator from other types of manga that prioritize, both textually and visually, a hyper-masculine value system. Some have suggested that shoujo manga-ka have created the autonomous intellectual space that gives them the freedom to work from the criteria set by those values through the development of a contrasting visual aesthetic and narrative tropes repellant to their complement. Shoujo, as a tradition, is defined by this contrast against a prevailing and dominant masculine culture. Its female-ness is incalculable and omnipresent.

Rather than taking comfort in the knowledge that this difference exists, Hagio uses her narratives to question its very foundation, specifically, gender. By undermining the reader’s sense of gender and applying scrutiny to the interpretive structures related to it, she is calling into question the very conventions that define the work that they are reading. Interwoven into the traditional shoujo and bishonen romance narrative is an invisible but indisputable self-awareness masterfully satisfies the reader’s expectation but questions the role of the Other in which it has once again found itself cast. The difference, she seems to suggest, between shoujo and the rest of the manga tradition, is the distance between A and A Prime and, in the end, that value is as large or as small as we perceive it to be.