My attention span continuing to shrink for the past couple years, I've recently immersed myself in anthologies. I've had an unnatural aversion towards anthological works, but the likes of Kon Kumakura and panpanya have graciously rekindled the nostalgic flames and pleasure of reading Chicken Soup for the Soul and The Things They Carried years ago. From the two aforementioned mangaka, I suppose you could out my taste for surrealism captured in mundanity. And now, I add Natsujikei Miyazaki to that list.
___Try listening to post-rock or shoegaze while reading this
I'm typically deterrent towards the heresy of simultaneous indulging of music and reading, but Natsujikei Miyazaki has a sublime sense of tranquility fostered from the otherwise tedious balance of clueless surrealism and blunt mundanity that makes listening to these genres a great experience. More concisely, it's somewhat like listening to the powerline humming from Serial Experiments Lain. Which shouldn't be a difficult nor obtuse metaphor, considering how wonderfully denpa this anthology is. Packed with motifs of death, ostracization, disassociation and an overarching mish-mash of quaint surrealism and reality, There's Nothing Wrong with Me is something that works in perfect congruence with its anthological structure.
That is, the result is of lesser importance than the process (read as ending and story). The profound appeal of anthologies is their focus on themes and catharsis, than a well-structured story. In the case of Natsujikei Miyazaki, she fits somewhat quirky, somewhat dull, somewhat pessimistic, somewhat optimistic plots with delicate beauty in the span of a little-under 30 pages. Typically starting off with trodden protagonists situated with social disassociation and/or ostracization, they come to experience a cathartic shell-breaking by the end. One socially-reclusive girl by the hands of her grandfather breaks out of her fortified home with the words of a classmate-become-friend, one doll hobbyist husband is ostracized by everyone but his daughter encourages him, one reclusive apartment hermit bids farewell to the only other resident leaving. I prefer vaguely spelling out these stories' beginnings and ends, because it's more of a drastic spoil to tell the middle.
Lines that could break at any moment
Natsujikei Miyazaki's most defining trait is perhaps her delicate, minimalist art-style. Keen on lines, more like sketching whiskers, that appear drawn under the slight influence of alcohol. Though what I describe her art-style comes off like a dessin, there's certainly a polished sense in the midst of the the incomplete feel of it, as little sense as that sounds. Simply put, Miyazaki's art is all too easy to identify. A biased love for frail, pretty girls, Miyazaki oft puts the most attention-to-detail to their shimmering, glistening eyes, and may also at the same time amusingly cast off the male characters with dull, dotted ocular windows. Adding to the visual fragility, smiles or emotions are more oft than not absent on the characters' faces, as if they may break if an ounce of force was applied to raising the sides of their mouths upwards.
As if to compensate for her characters' husks of fragility, Miyazaki's climaxing page spreads breath color and life into these rather pessimistic, monochrome stories. I mentioned the surrealism in Miyazaki's style, but not to confuse it with a fantastical sense of surrealism. These page spreads best explain what I meant, with how picture-perfect, zealous, exaggerated they are, as if they were staged photographs or album covers. The beauty of Miyazaki's art-style is more than subjective than others, but it's one that I'm grateful to have stumbled upon in the recent times.
Conclusion
Natsujikei Miyazaki writes There's Nothing Wrong with Me with delicate and touching pessimism and optimism in the face of social disassociation and loneliness. Anthologies have a thematic beauty unique to their short-liveness and a range of stories, and Miyazaki plays them perfectly. Capturing her characters' quaint escapes from feelings of disassociation in only a couple dozen pages each time, the plot doesn't matter so much as the little, uplifting notes they end on.
Speaking more on delicacy, Miyazaki's art is like peering at the threads of a spider-web with the Hubble Space Telescope. Paying minute detail to the simple line-art, is much more appealing seen than thought. First glance may cast an unpolished, unrefined, lazy sense off the paper, but MIyazaki's inputs fragile beauty into her work. Inclined towards apathetic expressions, pathos is paid off moreso by the actions of the characters, predominantly by the highlighted page spreads indicating the climax of a particular story. "Actions speak louder than words", would be too cheesy of a line to spout, though.
There's Nothing Wrong with Me reads off in a similar vein as eating alone during school lunch at the start of the year and eating with new-gained friends later. 8 chapters capture an empathetic sense of social disassociation, perhaps through rather ridiculous analogies, but nonetheless felt to the core.