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September |
Keiko Nishi is a shoujo manga creator who mostly has made anthologies rather than long-running stories more commonly seen in the US. Her artwork is beautiful, filled with highly attractive-looking characters with very expressive faces. Her stories tend to be more mature than the usual shoujo story being translated today: intimate, thoughtful, touching, disturbing and somewhat dark, sometimes brushing on the supernatural, and often a bit weird (in a good way).
I think she is the first shoujo author who was translated in the US; certainly she is the first one who was specifically marketed as such. Unfortunately, that's probably why she has so little published in English, and why you've probably never heard of her. Viz printed a couple of her stories in a one-shot comic called Promise in 1994. It was successful enough (or Matt Thorn, a shoujo enthusiast at Viz, lobbied enough) that Viz then published a few more of her stories in the next couple of years in an anthology called Manga Vision.
The intent, with Viz publishing a few of her stories and a couple of other shoujo authors, was clearly to see if there was enough of a market in the US for shoujo stories yet. There wasn't. In the 90's, manga was a fringe comic-book category, and the little manga being translated was read almost exclusively by men who bought them in comic-book stores run by and frequented largely by men. It wasn't until the next decade that teenage girls would flock to the manga aisles of neighborhood book stores and shoujo titles would turn up on best-sellers lists.
For some reason, Viz (or any other company) has never returned to publish more stories from those early shoujo creators they tried out in the 90's. That's too bad because I think Keiko Nishi especially would sell quite well today. I can only hope some company tries again.
September was published in Japan in 1991, and is still in print last I checked. I'm providing the translation of the comic below, but not a scanlation. Buy the manga yourself wherever untranslated manga are sold. It's cheap, and you should support the creator.
As with most anthologies, the quality of the stories varies. I think the title story, taking up half the book, is especially well done. It's my third favorite story I've read by Keiko Nishi.
If you wish to contact the translator, Andria Cheng, she can be reached at -yup-n@gm-il.com. (Please replace the dashes with the first letter of the alphabet.)
By the way, in the mid 90's, publishing stories that had even remotely gay characters (especially male gay characters) would have still been a tough sell, to say the least, in anything mainstream. (Yaoi would have been beyond the pale.) At the time, it was only a few years after it was a big deal in the comic world that the writers of Alpha Flight were finally allowed to have a story in which Northstar came out. This was also a time before something as timid as Will and Grace or a lesbian character on Buffy would have had a prayer of getting on the air. Ellen hadn't even shocked the nation yet with her coming out being major headline news! So Viz was very careful to only publish hetero Keiko Nishi stories. You'll see a wider scope of relationships in September.
If you'd like to read more by Keiko Nishi, or learn more about her, check these pages:
You can send me mail at mic-h@mic-hworld.com.
(Please replace the dashes with the first letter of the alphabet. Sorry,
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Copyright © 2007 Micah Olsen
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