Manga A Day: Flower of Life vol 1,2,3

Amazon.com: Flower Of Life Volume 1 (Yaoi) (Flower of Life): Books: Fumi Yoshinaga ISBN: 1569708746 ISBN-13: 9781569708743

Amazon.com: Flower Of Life Volume 2: Books: Fumi Yoshinaga ISBN: 1569708738 ISBN-13: 9781569708736

Amazon.com: Flower Of Life Volume 3 (Flower of Life): Books: Fumi Yoshinaga ISBN: 1569708290 ISBN-13: 9781569708293

Yes, it's DMP and it's Fumi Soshinaga, but no, it's not Yaoi. Instead Flower of Life is a slice of life manga about Harutaro Hanazono (Haru), a student who started his freshman year of high school a year and one month late due to an extended battle with leukemia. I love pretty much anything Fumi Yoshinaga does. Her artwork is clean and her characters extremely expressive and well rounded. While the first volume centers around Haru, the series is really about his freshman class as a whole. The story is exceptionally well crafted with side comments made in some of the first pages of manga one becoming plotlines and stories in the second and third.

I actually read volume one of the manga a couple months ago, then earlier this week received 2 and 3 in the mail. I decided to re-read volume one so I could review them all together. I'm really glad I did! Having the second two fresh in mind I could really see where Yoshinaga was setting up all the jokes and storylines for the second books.

For example one of the teachers, Koyanagi, when finding out there is going to be a new student expresses disappointment that it's going to be a boy. Another teacher, Shige, chastises him and Kyanagi says "I don't touch 'em, not till they graduate." It's not until late in volume two that you find out Koyanagi is now having an extramarital affair with a former student. Commenst between two students exchanging books on page four of book one leads to a complete story of it's own in book three. 

The orchestration and pacing of the books is wonderful. At first it would be easy to write these off as a loose collection of classroom stories, but an overall mood and tension builds out of those little snippets that makes everything seem carefully placed and important. There's a surprising thread of melancholy and pain threaded through the story, poking up when you least expect it. But rather than push it in your face like many manga or slap you over the head with drama, it slowly reveals itself inside the little bits of everyday life.   

Fumi Yoshinaga's sense of humor can't be ignored either. Majima, the "Otaku of Steel" and a member of Haru and his best friend Shota's manga club, is more or less a running gag throughout the series. (Even though he does have his own important storyline.) His lectures on Moeh make him sound like a sophisticated and male version of Renge from Ouran Host Club. Yoshinaga seems to revel in poking fun of her Yaoi work with constant snide comments about the genre. Majima goes on a rant about making yaoi work attractive to women in volume 2 and in volume one sighs that he could make some good money off of selling pictures of Haru and Shota if Shota was just a thinner and more attractive. There's a whole running gag that some of the girls in the book look a bit mannish. It even goes so far that when one gets kissed in public there's a flock of thought bubbles from the crowd excited they'd just seen their first homosexual kiss.

This all covers only a small portion of the actual topics that are crammed into this title. When I was looking online for some information on how many volumes there are to this series (four, only these three are out so far) I found this great Flower of Life review. It covers a lot of the subjects I just glossed over, like the rampant manga-geek love threading through the book. It also has some excerpts and scans from the series, including my absolute favorite scene from book two where three very different girls go shopping. In case anyone is wondering, in high school I was the girl in glasses. (I want that lightbox!)

Yoshinaga's art is excellent, but I do have one peeve. The woman (I'm assuming) hates backgrounds! She has these wonderfully drawn characters, who mange to express an amazing range of emotions in the space of just a couple of panels, floating in a sea of white space. Hire some assistants already if you don't like drawing backgrounds!