Powerlessness in the face of death, the guilt of the survivors, the rage of despair ... "My Broken Mariko", an upsetting manga published by Ki-oon -

© Waka Hirako 2020 / KADOKAWA CORPORATION

  • The manga

    My Broken Mariko,

    first work of Waka Hirako, released Thursday at Ki-oon editions

  • Young Tomoyo steals the funeral urn of her deceased best friend to pay tribute to her during a road trip to the sea

  • A simple but powerful tale, an inhabited trait of the energy of despair and a spiral of contradictory emotions make this the comic strip of this beginning of the year.

Between series sequels and new license launches, it is not always easy for a manga, which is moreover a one-shot, to establish itself among booksellers, then readers.

When Ki-oon, the publisher of the best-selling

Jujutsu Kaisen

and

My Hero Academia

, pushes a title like

My Broken Mariko

, there's plenty to stop there.

Well, we weren't ready.

Event on the web then in bookstores in Japan, this first work by Waka Hirako is difficult to describe as it deals with many subjects (rape, suicide, mourning, guilt…) and solicits different emotions (anger, helplessness, laughter…), the everything in a radical artistic gesture, a single movement of 150 pages.

A spiral of contradictory emotions

Young Tomoyo learns of Mariko's suicide from the news.

Her best friend, whom she had seen last week.

Upset, confused, she decides on a whim to steal her funeral urn from the hands of a violent father and to pay homage to him during a road trip to the sea. All in all classic, the story is as much about flight forward than diving into buried memories, and into a spiral of contradictory emotions.

How to explain the unthinkable?

Whose fault is it ?

Has Tomoyo helped her enough, loved her enough?

And now ?

A moment of emotion and suspension in the manga "Blue Period" by Waka Hirako at Ki-oon - © Waka Hirako 2020 / KADOKAWA CORPORATION

"A heroine always on the move, headlong"

Waka Hirako explains in an afterword interview that she was inspired by her mother, a victim of violence in her childhood, and a childhood friend, affected by a violent environment until adulthood.

And even to have allowed herself to be overcome by these difficult memories: “This creation helped me to digest everything that was not.

I had to look the truth in the face and get completely into it.

(…) I struggled not to collapse and go through with my work.

That's also why I drew a heroine always on the move, running headlong.

Tomoyo had to move forward so as not to tire of being crushed by the weight of the emptiness of existence.

"

It's exactly that.

The further the reading advances, the faster the reader turns the pages, the more he has the impression of not being able to stop, and this also applies to emotions.

“I was in the same state of mind as Tomoyo while drawing it, adds the mangaka.

When she got angry, I got angry too;

when she cried, I was in tears;

when she was running, I felt my breathing quicken: I was experiencing it all like a live broadcast!

At the end, the reader can say to himself that everything went too quickly, and yet there remains this feeling of a sublime portrait of women, as well as, casually, hollow, the reminder of the weight of a patriarchal society. , violent, insidious.

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