Kikyou

"There are some things you can say, and some things you can't. I didn't raise you to be like this."

It's fairly obvious that the reputation and overall image of the LGBT+ community has always been mixed, even today albeit more widely accepted than before. In a conservative country like Japan, topics of LGBT+ can be rather taboo for some families, and some may downright alienate family members from just being one. This is what Go Fujimoto tackles in his short albeit emotional and nuanced one shot Kikyou.

Let me start with the art first before we go talk about the story, the art is beautiful in my opinion, maybe it's just me but I definitely have a bias towards the style Go Fujimoto draws in as well the facial expressions he draws with each character, conveying each and every bit of emotion of it's characters.

The protagonist of this short story is Masashi, a 29 year old gay man. We see him come out to his parents in the first few pages, but the result of that however leads to a bit of a strained relationship with his parents, with them not accepting him for who he is. The words of his parents hurt me too, more than I expected to, and each of the words his father uttered was like a sharp knife towards my own fragile heart.

We later learned that his father had passed away and Masashi is conflicted, to say the least, feeling somewhat more relieved than sad and It definitely hit home when I read this panel. We also learned that Masashi's mother as well as his father too is conflicted with her own feelings too in the later pages, as they try to understand their son, and in the end they wanted to make amends with him, but life is cruel isn't it?

What I like a lot about this one shot is how nuanced and realistic it was, from how human all of the characters are, from Masashi's feelings, the coming out scene and the very painful words of his aunt as well, it all felt genuinely real. The funeral part hit home in a lot of ways. Masashi's words is enough to describe it.

*"I found myself crying, my eyes were filled with tears, tears that wouldn't stop." *

The conclusion is amazing and powerful in my opinion, with Masashi sending a letter of all of his thoughts and feelings to his mother and his mother implied acceptance of him, I think it also captures the core theme of Kikyou. Understanding. Understanding of people we can't relate to, understanding of those whom we aren't familiar with and understanding of them and accepting with open arms, even if that process would take several days, week, even years but in the end, it makes us better people. It honestly baffles me how a one shot manga from 2003 depicts the LGBTQ community so realistically.

If there's a sentence that would describe Kikyou as a whole it would be the panel in the middle where Masashi said this.

"In the end, all of us are normal people, the kind that you see everyday and talk to everyday, the kind that need food to live."

"The only difference is that we're in love with the same sex. It's bad enough we're shunned by society but why must we also be cast by our own parents?"