After failing to get into her back-up art school, Akiko (somehow!) manages to get into a different art college and it seems like her dreams of becoming a shoujo manga-ka are back on track!
But, once the immediate pressure is gone, Akiko’s usual, baseless self-confidence comes roaring back and forget becoming a manga-ka, it suddenly becomes a question of whether or not Akiko can even graduate college.
Higashimura continues to apply the same, harsh spotlight to herself that she applies to all of her leading characters and I feel as if I would have hated her when she was in college. Her “trying hard is uncool” attitude is the antithesis of mine (dear, you are at an art college, most of your classmates had to bust their butts to get in, you ain’t fooling anyone) and it must have been painfully obvious to everyone around her that she was adrift and really in need of some hands-on mentoring. I do have to wonder how “hands-off” Japanese college professors are.
Or at least how they were at the time, and if any of them did try to drag Higashimura in for office hours to try and get her back on track but gave up (Blank Canvas keeps a good pace so I can only imagine what parts of Higashimura’s life may have been cut). I sometimes joke that since I’m the oldest in my family, I’m the child that my parents “experimented” with and that many of the things they learned from raising me made things much easier for my younger siblings. Makes you wonder if a similar dynamic was in play in Higashimura’s household. Her parents seem rather unprepared to have a teenager at times (a child who doesn’t make the best of their roughly $90k college education, gasp!), although from the few glimpses we’ve seen of him I would bet that Higashimura’s younger brother gave them much less trouble.
Frankly, it’s kinda hard to be sympathetic to Higashimura! And that seems it was a deliberate choice on her part when creating this series; if she had obscured some details, and hadn’t approached the series as “looking back on my younger self with what I know now” she probably would have come off as a more relatable, though entirely too-stubborn, young adult. By clearly enumerating what she was, or usually wasn’t, thinking at the time Higashimura doesn’t take this “easy” way out to get sympathy from the reader. I of course have to wonder how many of these character traits still hold true for her today. I’m afraid if I was to ever met her I’d probably be trying to contain a lot of inner judgement based on this series! She’s a surprisingly tough character to like but at the same time that doesn’t mean that I’m any less interested in seeing how her story “ends”.
But it’s going to be a little longer before this series finishes and besides, she hasn’t become a world-famous shoujo manga-ka yet! After several false starts, Higashimura finds herself in a job so boring and stressful that it drives her into a corner and forces her to make manga to try and find some way of getting out of her small hometown. I wasn’t surprised to hear that she didn’t even know about the “proper” supplies to make manga at first (starting a new hobby with no clue how to do it is a very relatable feeling) and I had a real laugh when her extended family read her first published work, a one-shot about a young woman working a job very much like Higashimura’s, and they all assume it was an autobiographical work (and her relatives didn’t even know that Higashimura based the character’s lover on her own boyfriend!).
Now that Higashimura has “broken into” the manga world, it seems as if we might be in for a change of setting soon. I’d be lying if I wasn’t looking forward to how she manages to screw up her life this time around. As much as she gets on my nerves, I really do want to see how Higashimura continues to progress, both as an artist and as an adult!