Before she was an internationally published josei manga-ka, Akiko Higashimura was a kid who dreamed of being a shojo manga-ka. In between those times, Higashimura was an over-confident high school student who was sure that her talents would let her into any art school she wanted, she would marry early for love and money, and then live an idyllic life, producing one-shots for the manga magazine Ribon whenever she felt like it.
But when she finds out towards the end of high school that art schools are NOT easy to get into, and that her art is nowhere near the level that any school would accept her, it’s time for art cram school as she frantically tries to figure out what is the bare minimum she needs to do to get away with in life.
Higashimura’s retelling of her intense journey to art school reads a little bit like a warning to other young artists not to over-estimate themselves but mostly it reads as a comedy. Normally with a series that deals with the minutiae of Japanese school life it would be chock full of translator’s notes at the end, but since Higashimura is in her 30s now the system has actually changed enough that she needs to explain what she was going through in the text itself, which was a rather nice change for once, and this only highlights how the universe itself seemed to be helping her slack. From tests where you could easily guess the answer through methodology without study (something they changed a few years later) to a year where the national college exams were rather odd and everyone did poorly, it’s actually funny to see that Higashimura didn’t completely dig the hole she finds herself in, just most of it.
That all being said, I would not have wanted to be friends with Higashimura at this time frankly and I’m not sure she actually had that many friends in high school. I’m not sure if it’s due to the selective focus of a memoir like this where whole parts of her life were likely excluded (possibly including some close friendships) but in Blank Canvas Higashimura has a (possible) friend who tolerates her, Futami, and introduces her to Hidaka Kenzou in the first place, but that’s it. And again, it may be due to the way she selectively focused on some parts of her life for this story but honestly, Higashimura seems like she would have been a huge pain to be friends with. She’s very self-centered, both in the sense that she has a very high, narcissistic opinion of herself and that Higashimura is also rather unimaginative and it’s very hard for her to consider any kind of life outside of her future “plans” of working little and being a famous shojo manga-ka. I’ve often felt like I would not like to be friends with many of the characters in her manga — I believe I’m on record as saying that Kuranosuke is one of the few characters in Princess Jellyfish I could tolerate being in a room with — and it’s a little unnerving to see just how similar some of Higashimura’s worst traits are to those of her other characters!
After just this first volume I can’t really tell why the Higashimura of today idolizes her teacher Kenzou so much. When I studied photography in college I had some very tough professors, like “if I don’t think you are doing well enough in this senior portfolio class I will give you a C instead of the C+ needed to pass and you will have to retake this class to graduate” tough. But, as tough as these teachers were, they communicated why they were having us do the work we were doing, whereas Kenzou just smacks people with a bamboo sword. It’s clear that it’s Kenzou’s relentless drive to have Higashimura improve that gets her college ready, and he does spend an incredible amount of time with her for very little pay, so perhaps her admiration is partially out of gratefulness, but his “gruff” attitude and lack of communication just makes him seem like a terrible person to be a teacher. I hope we’ll see a “better” reason for these feelings in the next four volumes but with Higashimura (presumably) getting into an art school and going away for college I’m not sure how major a role he’ll play later on.
I certainly plan to be here for these next four volumes in any case. I’m a fan of autobiographical comics in general and I do like how Higashimura does humor. In the meantime I may go and “spoil” myself and go look at Higashimura’s bibliography and see if she ever did get to do the shojo manga of her childhood dreams.