hakuji
summary: 24-year-old manabe akiharu is an artist well-known for his dreamy and innocent works. 16-year-old ichou seika is a high school student living in the same apartment complex, whose white skin has totally captured his attention. one day, akihiru’s childhood friend and manager, koushi, suggests that he ask seika to be his model. seika accepts, readily enough, but akiharu can’t paint anything without knowing it well first; he has to touch his subject to feel its composition and warmth…
commentary: this story is quite beyond what i would normally see under the hana to yume label… and it makes me wonder how it even made it to hana to yume.. until, i read the author’s liner notes… in which even she was surprised that the publisher had asked her to write to the theme of “fetish”… and, she definitely succeeded in writing just what the publisher wanted. the story is quite interesting for me, just because it still falls under shoujo, but is still quite different.
akiharu is almost childlike, and has been kept that way by all the people who have surrounded him.. knowing that keeping him innocent keeps his art innocently dreamy. he knows nothing about high school students, having been sheltered by his mother and made to leave school (his mother pretty much made it sound like you learn/experience all kinds of bad things in high school). being around seika, though, his feelings start to change.. and he starts to feel like he’s going to dirty her; innocence is pretty much out the door. i was rather surprised to see how easily seika accepted to be a model, and how easily she accepted being touched… but this is a story, and i suppose the story can’t progress if she didn’t agree… so let’s just suspend all kinds of belief around that for now. just from the opening of the story, it’s easy to see that they’re already acquainted with each other – which isn’t far-fetched, considering they live in the same complex. it’s even easy for me to believe that she may have been interested in him already before the story even began. per morie-sensei’s notes, it seems that her parents are ok with this since they themselves had been a student-teacher couple… so perhaps the attraction really isn’t that odd for seika as well.
the story is told fairly simply, from akiharu’s pov, as he stays mostly within the complex, if not just within his own room, with seika and koushi coming and going. most things are left to the reader’s imagination as the scene goes off the borders, and we are left with thoughts… mostly akiharu’s fears and apprehensions. he really is extremely sensitive and he’s very scared about dirtying her or damaging her… because, to him, her white skin represents perfection. i could go on some more about this story, but it would probably all be spoilers. this volume is labeled as “1″, so i’m hoping to see more.