[ DRAWN & QUARTERED ]
Graphic Arts As Literature
Bleak topics such as suicide and death fill the pages of "Confidential Confessions."
Death shatters
suicide’s allure"Confessions" packs emotional
trauma faced by teenage girls
Rarely does anything aimed at today's youth deliberately play up its controversial leanings, else it find itself on the hit list of disapproving social groups.
But Tokyopop's "Confidential Confessions" manga series by Reiko Momochi proudly proclaims that very nature.
While many manga are blacklisted for their blatant violence, "Confessions" tackles subjects more painfully scarring than simple violence.
Each volume has different characters and situations, focusing on issues faced by teen girls.
The first story in the series deals with Manatsu, a lonely high schooler whose father abandoned the family and whose mother still pines for her abusive husband. Manatsu is obsessed with the macabre, carefully peeling off and saving her scabs in a journal.
Manatsu has no real friends, does poorly in school and exists as a lifeless speck from day to day. She stays out late, going to a karaoke bar with party-hearty classmates who use her only to pay the tab.
Then Manatsu finds a kindred spirit in a shunned and bullied girl she nicknames and knows only as Asparagus, whose skinny arms are covered with scars. The girl shares her knowledge about cutting, showing Manatsu how to slit her skin to draw blood without feeling pain.
Inspired by the suicide jumping of a famous singer, the girls make a suicide pact, planning details down to what colors and music they want at their funerals. The plans make Manatsu feel more alive than she has ever been, giving her a grim goal to aim for.
But when Asparagus eventually gets a hold of cyanide pills and the two girls appear ready to cross over death's threshold, Manatsu balks.
It takes Asparagus' death for Manatsu to face some shattering revelations about the once-romantic notion of suicide.
The rest of the "Confessions" series is equally disturbing. Its situations of prostitution or sexual harassment are all the more horrifying because they are much too familiar, taking place beneath the well-polished veneer of so-called civilized society, where even the adults are often afraid to speak out.
The stories arouse in you anger at the way a male teacher assaults female students under the guise of "instilling discipline"; heartache at the girl slitting her arms because she has no other way of feeling emotion; helplessness at watching a loved one in denial, speeding to the dead end of the path of drug addiction.
They are powerful by showing how powerless the girls are as they cope with rape or homosexuality, often alone and in silence because everyone else is obsessed with keeping the status quo.
These books are not only for people struggling with the same issues, but also for everyone else, as a harsh reminder that there are still so many out there who are slowly being dragged into a downward spiral.
But most of all, they are a plea to recognize these failings in society, to speak out and reach out to those in need.
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