(Guilt at being who you are, what you did, and what you created, all intermixing for a lonely path)

The Summer You Were There is a story about a single, prolonged cry into the literary night that came dangerously close to getting lost in the wind. Hoshikawa Shizuku was the author of that cry, but shortly after having completed her first novel, she cannot bear the thought of it staying online anymore. Perhaps even egged on (however intentionally or unintentionally) by the online commenters that are baffled by the novel’s content and can only respond the way commenters sometimes do on sites of that nature, she deletes a year’s worth of work and seeks to discard the manuscript. Her apprehension is the result of a brutal, crippling self-loathing, the sense that she is simply better off completely isolated and forming no connection with anyone. With a heart and disposition as brittle as hers, there’s dramatic logic to this. It’s not just that stories serve as the bridge between understanding feelings, but that for Shizuku, the thought that the story could potentially bridge the gap between someone else’s heart and her own heart is something that cannot be allowed to happen.

She’s in for a rude awakening, clothed in a sunny disposition from her next-door seat neighbor. Dropping the manuscript on the street, Shizuku gets what seems like the worst twist of misfortune as Asaka Kaori quickly scrounges it up and takes it home to read for herself. Expecting the worst, Shizuku prepares to confront Kaori and say that it’s okay if she throws it away. But Kaori has the complete opposite reaction, fawning over the novel and asking what Shizuku’s next one is going to be. But Shizuku’s cry in the night was meant to be final, as she doesn’t plan to make anything else. Kaori, finding the notion unthinkable, thinks that Shizuku’s next novel should be in a happier direction, so she proposes an idea – to pretend to go out so she can understand making a story like that.

Both in its title and as the end of the first chapter so signifies (see above picture), The Summer You Were There is operating on a clock that’s counting down quickly. Because time is of the essence, it gives the story an acceleration that avoids a lot of unnecessarily-frilly extras to cloud the plot and pussyfoot around. Yet even in the short time given, it manages to put to the page just how aware of Shizuku Kaori truly is – Shizuku’s story was, in essence, her baring her soul before an unknown audience, but the manga wrestles with the idea of what happens when the unknown audience becomes the known. It is not like Annie Wilkes in Stephen King’s Misery, that of an obsessed fan whose fascination and complex about the work or the author begins a spiral of effectively horrifying brutality; Kaori, perhaps in almost too saintly a fashion, does not have any ill will within her.

And it is precisely because of that metaphorical glow that Kaori has the ability to so get under Shizuku’s skin, but without pushing her away. There’s always a question of to what degree of interference, passive or active, is needed in order to get someone to open themselves up when there’s a part of them that they’ve shut away. No matter how begrudgingly it ends up coming to pass, the time they spend together increases, and Shizuku’s confusion about what Kaori is trying to do builds to the point where Shizuku makes her ultimate confession about where her self-loathing comes from. Both in telling her published story to Kaori (as an unknown reader) and her own real-life story to Kaori (as pseudo-girlfriend), it completes the soul-baring that Shizuku thought she had finished when she published her last chapter and deleted her novel.

In reality, the novel Shizuku published online is only a small taste of what actually laid beneath. Through Kaori’s devoted persistence, she offers Shizuku a chance to at long last say or do what she has needed all along: reconciling and being candid about her own regrets. While girls’ love may be the vehicle that gets it all moving (it happened to be the subject of Shizuku’s novel, too), it’s not really about girls’ love specifically. Rather, it uses girls’ love as a character study through confession rather than playing itself as a ~~straight~~forward romance. Every dialogue and conversation between Shizuku and Kaori is centered around Shizuku’s own personal redemption, not necessarily of what she did (though it does take that route), but because of what she did ultimately did to herself.

Though Shizuku is the main character, Kaori’s own heart has its share of woes and worries. It is only fair that the girl that insisted upon Shizuku’s honesty likewise be honest herself, even if it comes at times that she doesn’t want it to be so. The Summer You Were There manages to pull some of its most brutal punches not through what specifically happens in the plot event-wise, but rather in some of the character interactions that generate directly because of it. A normally innocuous comment gets reframed as being unintentionally insulting, even if everyone involved knows that no offense was meant. Much of the actual drama itself is telegraphed rather blatantly, but due to its trajectory of Shizuku and Kaori transforming before our eyes piece-by-piece, it smooths out any rougher edges the narrative might offer.

(Once you catch on to the manga’s sense of storytelling, there are few surprises it offers. Its strength lies in its more-muted melodramatic tone and consistently life-affirming exchanges concerning guilt and forgiveness, both from within and without)

The Summer You Were There began as a story about a single, prolonged cry into the literary night that came dangerously close to getting lost in the wind. It was pained, wounded, and rough-edged. But it took one single arm and hand reaching out to caress that cry until it could finally begin the long, arduous, and necessary healing. It’s entirely possible that in the midst of sadness, you’re convinced that no one cares, or that no one hears. I cannot be the judge of that, and you know yourself better than I.

But a voice or person that offers you help is worth believing in, I think.