What do you think?
Rate this book
The Heart of Thomas
The setting: a boys boarding school in Germany, sometime in the latter 20th Century. Fourteen year-old Thomas Werner falls from a lonely pedestrian overpass to his death immediately after sending a single, brief letter to a schoolmate:
To Juli, one last time
This is my love
This is the sound of my heart
Surely you must understand
Thus begins the legendary and enigmatic Heart of Thomas, by Moto Hagio. Inspired by Jean Delannoy’s 1964 film, Les Amities Particulieres, The Heart of Thomas was nearly cancelled early in its serialization, in 1974, until Hagio’s first trade paperback, The Poe Clan, Volume 1, sold out in a single day, giving her new series a new lease on life. The result was a story more complex, less accessible, and yet so compelling it can be found near or at the top of any list of classic shojo manga. Translated by manga scholar Matt Thorn and packaged with the same loving attention to detail as Hagio’s Eisner Award nominated A Drunken Dream, The Heart of Thomas is already the most eagerly anticipated manga translation of the new decade.
To Juli, one last time
This is my love
This is the sound of my heart
Surely you must understand
Thus begins the legendary and enigmatic Heart of Thomas, by Moto Hagio. Inspired by Jean Delannoy’s 1964 film, Les Amities Particulieres, The Heart of Thomas was nearly cancelled early in its serialization, in 1974, until Hagio’s first trade paperback, The Poe Clan, Volume 1, sold out in a single day, giving her new series a new lease on life. The result was a story more complex, less accessible, and yet so compelling it can be found near or at the top of any list of classic shojo manga. Translated by manga scholar Matt Thorn and packaged with the same loving attention to detail as Hagio’s Eisner Award nominated A Drunken Dream, The Heart of Thomas is already the most eagerly anticipated manga translation of the new decade.
516 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1974
About the author
Moto Hagio
205 books193 followersMoto Hagio (萩尾望都 Hagio Moto) is a manga artist born in Ōmuta, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan, though she currently lives in Saitama Prefecture.
She is considered a "founding mother" of modern shōjo manga, and a member of the Year 24 Group (24-Gumi). She helped pioneer modern shōjo manga, modern science fiction manga, and BL manga. In addition to being an "industry pioneer", her body of work "shows a maturity, depth and personal vision found only in the finest of creative artists". She has been described as "the most beloved shōjo manga artist of all time."
Moto Hagio made her professional debut in 1969 at the age of 20 with her short story Lulu to Mimi on Kodansha's magazine Nakayoshi. Later she produced a series of short stories for various magazines for Shogakukan.
Two years after her debut, she published Juichigatsu no Gimunajiumu (The November Gymnasium), a short story which dealt openly with love between two boys at a boarding school. The story was part of a larger movement by female manga artists at the time which pioneered a genre of girls' comics about love between young men.
In 1974, Hagio developed this story into the longer Toma no shinzo (The Heart of Thomas). She was awarded the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1976 for her science fiction classic Juichinin iru! (They Were Eleven) and her epic tale Poe no ichizoku (The Poe Family).
She is considered a "founding mother" of modern shōjo manga, and a member of the Year 24 Group (24-Gumi). She helped pioneer modern shōjo manga, modern science fiction manga, and BL manga. In addition to being an "industry pioneer", her body of work "shows a maturity, depth and personal vision found only in the finest of creative artists". She has been described as "the most beloved shōjo manga artist of all time."
Moto Hagio made her professional debut in 1969 at the age of 20 with her short story Lulu to Mimi on Kodansha's magazine Nakayoshi. Later she produced a series of short stories for various magazines for Shogakukan.
Two years after her debut, she published Juichigatsu no Gimunajiumu (The November Gymnasium), a short story which dealt openly with love between two boys at a boarding school. The story was part of a larger movement by female manga artists at the time which pioneered a genre of girls' comics about love between young men.
In 1974, Hagio developed this story into the longer Toma no shinzo (The Heart of Thomas). She was awarded the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1976 for her science fiction classic Juichinin iru! (They Were Eleven) and her epic tale Poe no ichizoku (The Poe Family).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 144 reviews
May 27, 2020
“To Juli, one last time
This is my love
This is the sound of my heart
Surely you must understand”--Thomas
A classic shojo manga, maybe the first written expressly for women about an m/m tragic romance. I call it shojo because it was written and illustrated by a woman, for women, but it is also categorized as yaoi, or shonon-ai, or boy-love. Before this book was released in the seventies, making such stories would have been difficult or impossible. So this was the first, and became a long story, serialized, finally translated into English for a 2013 release.
The Heart of Thomas was inspired in part by Jean Delannoy’s 1964 film, Les Amities Particulieres, but in that film the main character is called Thomas Werner and the story takes place in an exclusive private boys’ school in Germany. It would also seem to bear links to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Both feature suicides, or what would appear to be suicides.
Richard and Linda Thompson, “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WWVB...
Anyway, both are full of suppressed emotions and wild desires, much of it unexpressed in words, but revealed in typical seventies manga artwork.
A boy by the name of Thomas commits suicide (or did he fall??) very early on in the beginning of the story, leaving only a suicide note (see above) to a character named Juli, Thomas' unrequited love interest. And after Thomas dies, an almost identical boy, Erich, appears in the school. Yes, English Majors for 200 [from an American TV show named Jeopardy]: Doppleganger! There’s an Oskar (yes, yes, Oscar Wilde, duh, English majors for 300) who loves Juli, too. And more little literary images/refs sprinkled throughout.
But girl readers of male queer romance? Yes, it's very much a long tradition, and not just in Japan, as it turns out. Something about this reminds me of Ranma ½, which is also a kind of gender switching story. In this one boys don’t actually become girls, but they appear feminine and may have given or still give girls/women an opportunity to explore sexual/romantic issues from a different, psychologically safer angle? I dunno. But it has some deeper undercurrents in it that are interesting.
So: On the one hand, it’s a swirling romantic period shojo manga featuring boy love, but really, almost nothing physical even happens, it’s chaste to fit the time in which it was published. I don’t love that period/style art, but it is accomplished, especially if you see it in the context of that period. And some of the artwork connects us to other literary/cultural queer work. If you like lots of action, well, there's not all that much that happens beyond emoting in the story, so I might just in terms of my interest in the story give it at the most 3 stars, but it gets an added point for being the first, a classic, that paved the way for others. It's over 500 pages in this one collected volume!
This is my love
This is the sound of my heart
Surely you must understand”--Thomas
A classic shojo manga, maybe the first written expressly for women about an m/m tragic romance. I call it shojo because it was written and illustrated by a woman, for women, but it is also categorized as yaoi, or shonon-ai, or boy-love. Before this book was released in the seventies, making such stories would have been difficult or impossible. So this was the first, and became a long story, serialized, finally translated into English for a 2013 release.
The Heart of Thomas was inspired in part by Jean Delannoy’s 1964 film, Les Amities Particulieres, but in that film the main character is called Thomas Werner and the story takes place in an exclusive private boys’ school in Germany. It would also seem to bear links to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Both feature suicides, or what would appear to be suicides.
Richard and Linda Thompson, “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WWVB...
Anyway, both are full of suppressed emotions and wild desires, much of it unexpressed in words, but revealed in typical seventies manga artwork.
A boy by the name of Thomas commits suicide (or did he fall??) very early on in the beginning of the story, leaving only a suicide note (see above) to a character named Juli, Thomas' unrequited love interest. And after Thomas dies, an almost identical boy, Erich, appears in the school. Yes, English Majors for 200 [from an American TV show named Jeopardy]: Doppleganger! There’s an Oskar (yes, yes, Oscar Wilde, duh, English majors for 300) who loves Juli, too. And more little literary images/refs sprinkled throughout.
But girl readers of male queer romance? Yes, it's very much a long tradition, and not just in Japan, as it turns out. Something about this reminds me of Ranma ½, which is also a kind of gender switching story. In this one boys don’t actually become girls, but they appear feminine and may have given or still give girls/women an opportunity to explore sexual/romantic issues from a different, psychologically safer angle? I dunno. But it has some deeper undercurrents in it that are interesting.
So: On the one hand, it’s a swirling romantic period shojo manga featuring boy love, but really, almost nothing physical even happens, it’s chaste to fit the time in which it was published. I don’t love that period/style art, but it is accomplished, especially if you see it in the context of that period. And some of the artwork connects us to other literary/cultural queer work. If you like lots of action, well, there's not all that much that happens beyond emoting in the story, so I might just in terms of my interest in the story give it at the most 3 stars, but it gets an added point for being the first, a classic, that paved the way for others. It's over 500 pages in this one collected volume!
June 28, 2017
2017 update: refreshed review now up on hino reviews
I stopped reading most manga stories a few years ago, simply because I fell in love with those classic series which are like gold dust to find in English. However, when a friend told me earlier this year that Heart of Thomas was getting a much needed English release finally, it reminded me of just how much I loved this story.
Heart of Thomas is a beautifully tragic story set in a 20th Century Boarding school in Germany. A boy by the name of Thomas commits suicide very early on in the beginning of the story, leaving only a suicide note to a character named Juli, Thomas' unrequited love interest. But as the real story begins after this 'prologue' of sorts, Eric transfers to the school. Eric is a boy that has an uncanny likeness to Thomas in appearance, so much so that the other characters can hardly believe it.
The story is mysterious and intriguing, and the reader is left wondering much about the characters as they continue to read. However, questions are answered and you begin to find out more about these characters and their hidden pasts.
As if that wasn't enough, the artwork is beautiful and really adds to the feel of the story. It's that typical, seventies manga artwork, and Hagio's style is flawless as usual. A real enjoyable read, one that I would suggest to any manga fan, old school manga fan, or just someone who wants to enjoy a short story with beautiful artwork to match.
I stopped reading most manga stories a few years ago, simply because I fell in love with those classic series which are like gold dust to find in English. However, when a friend told me earlier this year that Heart of Thomas was getting a much needed English release finally, it reminded me of just how much I loved this story.
Heart of Thomas is a beautifully tragic story set in a 20th Century Boarding school in Germany. A boy by the name of Thomas commits suicide very early on in the beginning of the story, leaving only a suicide note to a character named Juli, Thomas' unrequited love interest. But as the real story begins after this 'prologue' of sorts, Eric transfers to the school. Eric is a boy that has an uncanny likeness to Thomas in appearance, so much so that the other characters can hardly believe it.
The story is mysterious and intriguing, and the reader is left wondering much about the characters as they continue to read. However, questions are answered and you begin to find out more about these characters and their hidden pasts.
As if that wasn't enough, the artwork is beautiful and really adds to the feel of the story. It's that typical, seventies manga artwork, and Hagio's style is flawless as usual. A real enjoyable read, one that I would suggest to any manga fan, old school manga fan, or just someone who wants to enjoy a short story with beautiful artwork to match.
May 28, 2020
A classic manga written and drawn by Moto Hagio, one of the founders of the Year 24 group and by many considered amongst the initiators of shōnen-ai manga, トーマの心臓 is a delicate and intense story set in an all-boys school in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century.
Reprising atmospheres that somehow made me think of Musil's The Confusions of Young Törless, the manga follows four main characters - Juli, Eric, Oscar and the now-deceased Thomas - as they try to come to terms with various forms of grief and abandonment.
Opening with the last letter left by Thomas to Juli:
To Juli, one last time
This is my love
This is the sound of my heart
Surely you must understand
the story tries to shed light on Thomas' sudden death and on the relationship that linked him with the cold and detached Juli.
Full of religious undertones and a creeping sense of violence and prevarication within the school's walls that although not as shocking as the one depicted in Keiko Takemiya's Kaze to Ki no Uta still manages to leave the readers wary of what might happen chapter after chapter, トーマの心臓 is a very engaging and moving read, populated by beautifully-portrayed characters, nuanced and rich with depth.
Eric - similar to Thomas in all but personality - finds himself at the centre of the events set in motion by Thomas' death whilst at the same time having to deal with his family issues and his increasing sense of frustration and confusion becomes the underlying thread of the story.
The plot is rich with twists and turns, changes of allegiance and secrets hiding in the libraries and corridors of the school that are truly worth discovering.
Moto Hagio's drawing style is typical of the 1970s in its richness and almost Baroque attention to details. Symbolism, especially of a religious nature, makes the pages a feast for the eyes.
A mention to J-Pop that produced a wonderful translation into Italian.
Highly recommended!
Reprising atmospheres that somehow made me think of Musil's The Confusions of Young Törless, the manga follows four main characters - Juli, Eric, Oscar and the now-deceased Thomas - as they try to come to terms with various forms of grief and abandonment.
Opening with the last letter left by Thomas to Juli:
To Juli, one last time
This is my love
This is the sound of my heart
Surely you must understand
the story tries to shed light on Thomas' sudden death and on the relationship that linked him with the cold and detached Juli.
Full of religious undertones and a creeping sense of violence and prevarication within the school's walls that although not as shocking as the one depicted in Keiko Takemiya's Kaze to Ki no Uta still manages to leave the readers wary of what might happen chapter after chapter, トーマの心臓 is a very engaging and moving read, populated by beautifully-portrayed characters, nuanced and rich with depth.
Eric - similar to Thomas in all but personality - finds himself at the centre of the events set in motion by Thomas' death whilst at the same time having to deal with his family issues and his increasing sense of frustration and confusion becomes the underlying thread of the story.
The plot is rich with twists and turns, changes of allegiance and secrets hiding in the libraries and corridors of the school that are truly worth discovering.
Moto Hagio's drawing style is typical of the 1970s in its richness and almost Baroque attention to details. Symbolism, especially of a religious nature, makes the pages a feast for the eyes.
A mention to J-Pop that produced a wonderful translation into Italian.
Highly recommended!
March 14, 2018
Consider two articles published within the last week. In one, Marie Doezema explains the role played by the philosophers of 1968, who tutored several generations of intellectuals (including my own), in legitimizing pedophilia in late-twentieth-century France:
All of these questions came to my mind as I read a brilliant, thought-provoking, and troubling masterpiece of a graphic novel from beyond the borders of the U.S. or France. Moto Hagio's The Heart of Thomas is a manga that was serialized in the early 1970s and published in an official English translation (by Rachel Matt Thorn) by Fantagraphics in 2013. As a work of shojo manga, it was addressed to an audience of adolescent girls. A complex and melodramatic tale of love in a German boys' boarding school, The Heart of Thomas is widely credited with beginning the "boys' love" subgenre of manga, as this Atlantic article explains:
Along the way—and a long way it is, at a novelistically satisfying 500+ pages—a host of psychological and symbolic complexities present themselves, from Erich's oedipal attachment to his mother (he wears an engagement ring in her honor) to the cruel abuse Juli has suffered at the sadistic hands of the rebel-atheist upperclassman Siegfried (his Wagnerian name echoing the fascist racism of Juli's other abuser, his grandmother, who scorns him for his Greek patrimony and dark hair). While the narrative is melodramatic and theatrical, it also manages to be measured in pace, with languid adolescent yearning its dominant affect. Hagio creates a little world, an Occidentalist fantasia of European queerness, and lets her cast wander through it, and through their own psyches, on their own time; the effect is absorbing and mesmerizing.
But what can it all mean? The Heart of Thomas in particular and boys' love in general has no corollary that I know of in contemporaneous American pop culture, comics or otherwise (and it should be said that American comics of the same period, mainstream or underground, offer nothing to my mind as long or complex as what Hagio accomplishes here). The aforementioned Atlantic article concludes that boys' love manga allows its young female audience a panoply of potential identification beyond what was customarily allowed girls:
All this classic queer iconography aside, though, The Heart of Thomas feels like a book of great chastity, a word several other Goodreads users have astutely used—a work almost of asexuality. It is Platonic in the most literal sense as Juli comes to understand his physical attraction toward the base and brutalizing humanist Siegfried as a fall into sexual degradation, while his love for the ethereal beauty of Thomas/Erich is in fact a desire for the good as such. Hence the book's denouement: he becomes a priest, espoused not to man but to God. In what I take to be an explicit allusion to the Phaedrus , Juli even describes what his abuse by Siegfried has cost him as his wings, and he moreover says that he sees all the children in the school as bearing invisible wings, just like the soul as Socrates describes it to his young disciple in the course of his caution against the consummation of desire between men, between tutor and pupil:
I am not the only critic to come to the conclusion of spiritual asexuality in the case of Thomas, according to Welker, by the way, and he diagnoses us as suffering from "lesbian panic":
The Heart of Thomas, therefore, is one answer to the question with which I began: how to address eros artistically, in all its gender and age complications, without either foreclosing complexity (like American puritans) or promoting exploitation (like French libertines). This masterful piece of fluid comics storytelling, visual beauty, and literary artistry, charts the middle way with consummate intelligence. Hagio's spiritual flight burns the unseemly out of the book; what could have been disturbing—an adult's erotic reverie over the entanglement of early adolescence, perhaps as commended by the philosophers of cultural revolution—becomes a hymn about the journey of every soul amid the violence of time, desire, and death. And because these latter inevitabilities are unflinchingly acknowledged in the story, Hagio's work is as free from puritanism as it is from libertinism. The Heart of Thomas is a book of and about love.
After May 1968, French intellectuals would challenge the state’s authority to protect minors from sexual abuse. In one prominent example, on January 26, 1977, Le Monde, a French newspaper, published a petition signed by the era’s most prominent intellectuals—including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, André Glucksmann and Louis Aragon—in defense of three men on trial for engaging in sexual acts with minors. “French law recognizes in 13- and 14-year-olds a capacity for discernment that it can judge and punish,” the petition stated, “But it rejects such a capacity when the child's emotional and sexual life is concerned.” Furthermore, the signatories argued, children and adolescents have the right to a sexual life: “If a 13-year-old girl has the right to take the pill, what is it for?”Meanwhile, Katie Herzog observes that an opposite but also repellent phenomenon transpired in late-twentieth-century America, the Satanic panic, a broad and largely baseless outbreak of social paranoia over widespread ritual child abuse, fueled by religious fundamentalism and pop-psychology:
In total, the recovered memories and satanic ritual abuse phenomenon lasted for about 15 years. At the time, Talmadge says, questioning the dominant narrative was akin to heresy. It didn’t matter that there was no evidence backing up these claims; everyone believed, and those who didn’t largely kept quiet.In these two episodes from recent history, we see an almost comic fidelity to national stereotypes: the French intelligentsia advocates troublingly amoral libertinage, while the American populace loses its collective head over the threat of witches' sabbaths and black masses. And both of these stories take on a new relevance today, with the just exposure of sexual abuses, and the potential for this exposure to overreach and become unjust, consuming so much of our cultural attention. Is there any way out of this impasse, any intelligent and humane approach to the complexities of desire, any safe course to chart between the Marquis de Sade and Cotton Mather?
Looking back on it now, it seems almost impossible that millions of Americans would blindly believe that satanic cults were stealing away with kids during the night, but this was not the first strange wave to hit the U.S., nor will it be the last. From the Salem witch trials to the Red Scare, moral panics, as they are frequently called, pop up.
All of these questions came to my mind as I read a brilliant, thought-provoking, and troubling masterpiece of a graphic novel from beyond the borders of the U.S. or France. Moto Hagio's The Heart of Thomas is a manga that was serialized in the early 1970s and published in an official English translation (by Rachel Matt Thorn) by Fantagraphics in 2013. As a work of shojo manga, it was addressed to an audience of adolescent girls. A complex and melodramatic tale of love in a German boys' boarding school, The Heart of Thomas is widely credited with beginning the "boys' love" subgenre of manga, as this Atlantic article explains:
The Heart of Thomas is, in fact, one of the seminal works in the boys' love subgenre of shojo manga (manga for girls). Boys' love manga are manga that feature male homosexual romance, written (mostly) by women, (mostly) for women. Today in Japan, the genre is well established and popular…The Heart of Thomas opens with the suicide of a student named Thomas Werner. He has killed himself due to anguish over his unrequited love for his classmate, the dark-haired prefect and perfect student, Juli; Juli is desired in turn by his roommate Oskar (a clear Wilde analogue), as well as by a host of underclassmen. Complications ensue when a transfer student, Erich, arrives at the school—Erich, it happens, could be Thomas's twin, and much of the plot depends on suspense over whether or not the tragic missed connection between Juli and a smitten classmate will replay itself.
Along the way—and a long way it is, at a novelistically satisfying 500+ pages—a host of psychological and symbolic complexities present themselves, from Erich's oedipal attachment to his mother (he wears an engagement ring in her honor) to the cruel abuse Juli has suffered at the sadistic hands of the rebel-atheist upperclassman Siegfried (his Wagnerian name echoing the fascist racism of Juli's other abuser, his grandmother, who scorns him for his Greek patrimony and dark hair). While the narrative is melodramatic and theatrical, it also manages to be measured in pace, with languid adolescent yearning its dominant affect. Hagio creates a little world, an Occidentalist fantasia of European queerness, and lets her cast wander through it, and through their own psyches, on their own time; the effect is absorbing and mesmerizing.
But what can it all mean? The Heart of Thomas in particular and boys' love in general has no corollary that I know of in contemporaneous American pop culture, comics or otherwise (and it should be said that American comics of the same period, mainstream or underground, offer nothing to my mind as long or complex as what Hagio accomplishes here). The aforementioned Atlantic article concludes that boys' love manga allows its young female audience a panoply of potential identification beyond what was customarily allowed girls:
The boys' love genre, then, freed Hagio and her audience to cross and recross boundaries of identity, sexuality, and gender. The reader can be both sexual aggressor and victim; both self and other; both gay and straight; both male and female. Bodies and character flicker in and out, a sequence of surfaces, tied together less by narrative than by the heightened emotions of melodrama—jealousy, anger, trauma, desire, friendship, and love in the heart of Thomas.Likewise, James Welker, in a 2006 article for the feminist journal Signs, theorizes thusly:
Nonetheless, through…the deliberate ambiguity of the beautiful boy, the reader is encouraged to see not just a girl but herself within the world of boys’ love and, ultimately, is encouraged to explore homoerotic desire, either as a beautiful boy or as herself, either alone or with others, either as her fantasy or as her reality.In support of these theses in feminist and queer theory, I note that Hagio draws on the traditions of aestheticism and decadence, especially in the decorative splash pages that introduce each chapter, each reminiscent of Beardsley, Mucha, and Jugendstil. Images of angels and roses abound; when Erich learns his mother has died, he is pictured, Sebastian-wise, with a breast full of arrows.
All this classic queer iconography aside, though, The Heart of Thomas feels like a book of great chastity, a word several other Goodreads users have astutely used—a work almost of asexuality. It is Platonic in the most literal sense as Juli comes to understand his physical attraction toward the base and brutalizing humanist Siegfried as a fall into sexual degradation, while his love for the ethereal beauty of Thomas/Erich is in fact a desire for the good as such. Hence the book's denouement: he becomes a priest, espoused not to man but to God. In what I take to be an explicit allusion to the Phaedrus , Juli even describes what his abuse by Siegfried has cost him as his wings, and he moreover says that he sees all the children in the school as bearing invisible wings, just like the soul as Socrates describes it to his young disciple in the course of his caution against the consummation of desire between men, between tutor and pupil:
Ten thousand years must elapse before the soul of each one can return to the place from whence she came, for she cannot grow her wings in less; only the soul of a philosopher, guileless and true, or the soul of a lover, who is not devoid of philosophy, may acquire wings in the third of the recurring periods of a thousand years; he is distinguished from the ordinary good man who gains wings in three thousand years:-and they who choose this life three times in succession have wings given them, and go away at the end of three thousand years.Juli has "the soul of a lover, who is not devoid of philosophy," i.e., an orientation toward the ideal, and so we can presume that his metaphorical wings are budding again by the novel's final sequence. The Heart of Thomas is in this way not about desire or gender or sexuality at all, but about eros at its most abstract, even eros at the very threshold of agape, give or take a stolen kiss in the dark.
I am not the only critic to come to the conclusion of spiritual asexuality in the case of Thomas, according to Welker, by the way, and he diagnoses us as suffering from "lesbian panic":
In spite of the connections drawn on the pages of these magazines, the possibility that these narratives might be seen to actually depict homosexuality remains broadly denied. To allow that the narratives might truly be about homosexuality—between these girls-cum- beautiful boys—would be an apparently unthinkable invitation to read the narratives as lesbian.While I take the point, and also appreciate the rhetorical necessity for a queer-affirmative cultural politics to redeploy the language of pathology against its pathologizing enemies, I also reserve the right to query the secular sacralization of the sexual as such, whether straight or gay or bi, our total commitment to desublimating love into desire in every last circumstance, even when confronted with narratives that plainly have metaphysical or spiritual aims, as Hagio's narrative does.
The Heart of Thomas, therefore, is one answer to the question with which I began: how to address eros artistically, in all its gender and age complications, without either foreclosing complexity (like American puritans) or promoting exploitation (like French libertines). This masterful piece of fluid comics storytelling, visual beauty, and literary artistry, charts the middle way with consummate intelligence. Hagio's spiritual flight burns the unseemly out of the book; what could have been disturbing—an adult's erotic reverie over the entanglement of early adolescence, perhaps as commended by the philosophers of cultural revolution—becomes a hymn about the journey of every soul amid the violence of time, desire, and death. And because these latter inevitabilities are unflinchingly acknowledged in the story, Hagio's work is as free from puritanism as it is from libertinism. The Heart of Thomas is a book of and about love.
June 9, 2013
I was incredibly, and pleasantly, surprised by Heart of Thomas. At first I merely picked up Heart of Thomas, finally available in an English language edition, because I was intrigued by its significance in the history and development of manga. I thought that it would be a little like watching beloved childhood Saturday morning cartoons, or early fantasy genre fiction, easy to see why those things occupy a fond places in our hearts and act as pivot points for their genre, but a little disappointing to see through our present, adult lenses. I didn't expect it to be so stunning, with respect to both the gorgeous artwork and the emotional depth of the characters, story and themes.
The caveat here is that Heart of Thomas is unequivocally shounen-ai (albeit a thoughtful, meaningful work of the genre rather than merely the "fan servicey" drivel that usually comes to most people's minds when they think of shounen-ai), so I definitely don't think that this work would be appreciated by everyone, especially those leery of any allusions to homosexuality, or those who won't be able to suspend their disbelief about shounen-ai, a genre in which it is not only ordinary for the "beautiful boy" characters to have romantic feelings for other boys, jumbled with feelings of friendship and brotherhood, but in which, at least to me, the characters don't have clear gender or power roles. I can easily hear others' criticisms that the behavior and dialog aren't "realistic," but to me, the strength of Moto Hagio's Heart of Thomas comes from the fact that she weaves a shounen-ai story that takes advantage of the genre's blurred gender lines to discuss more freely and truly what it is to be human, just like good science fiction often uses an imaginary setting and society to comment on present-day issues.
Heart of Thomas is whimsical and enigmatic, and although it's a slow burn of a story, it pulls the reader along. Although I wouldn't describe the story as having "closure," since life so rarely has neat beginnings and endings, it definitely leaves the reader satisfied.
The caveat here is that Heart of Thomas is unequivocally shounen-ai (albeit a thoughtful, meaningful work of the genre rather than merely the "fan servicey" drivel that usually comes to most people's minds when they think of shounen-ai), so I definitely don't think that this work would be appreciated by everyone, especially those leery of any allusions to homosexuality, or those who won't be able to suspend their disbelief about shounen-ai, a genre in which it is not only ordinary for the "beautiful boy" characters to have romantic feelings for other boys, jumbled with feelings of friendship and brotherhood, but in which, at least to me, the characters don't have clear gender or power roles. I can easily hear others' criticisms that the behavior and dialog aren't "realistic," but to me, the strength of Moto Hagio's Heart of Thomas comes from the fact that she weaves a shounen-ai story that takes advantage of the genre's blurred gender lines to discuss more freely and truly what it is to be human, just like good science fiction often uses an imaginary setting and society to comment on present-day issues.
Heart of Thomas is whimsical and enigmatic, and although it's a slow burn of a story, it pulls the reader along. Although I wouldn't describe the story as having "closure," since life so rarely has neat beginnings and endings, it definitely leaves the reader satisfied.
July 28, 2017
i take back all the shit i talked about shonen-ai
sweet merciful god almighty
you know what this book did? this book had me spend like two hours turning pages and pausing intermittently to cry and look off into the distance and think about the idea of grace
this is what literature is meant to be. i can understand why this is a classic and i can see all the familiar tropes and how they work because hagio uses them in service of her themes. the plot is that this boy thomas commits suicide after being rejected by his crush juli. juli is clearly pretty screwed up over this and it churns things up even further when a new student transfers in, erich, a boy who looks astonishingly similar to thomas. queue about 500 pages exploring the nature of love, guilt, and redemption and several hours of miss susan crying
i really hope fantagraphics continues translating moto hagio's work, i can see here why she's critically acclaimed. lady was a straight up genius
5 stars
(also i want to point out this book actually made the 'and then he went off to be a priest' ending work so you know. it's possible so long as you actually have the characters and themes to support it! let's make it a rule: no more 'suddenly a priest' endings unless you commit to building the reasons for it, okay?)
sweet merciful god almighty
you know what this book did? this book had me spend like two hours turning pages and pausing intermittently to cry and look off into the distance and think about the idea of grace
this is what literature is meant to be. i can understand why this is a classic and i can see all the familiar tropes and how they work because hagio uses them in service of her themes. the plot is that this boy thomas commits suicide after being rejected by his crush juli. juli is clearly pretty screwed up over this and it churns things up even further when a new student transfers in, erich, a boy who looks astonishingly similar to thomas. queue about 500 pages exploring the nature of love, guilt, and redemption and several hours of miss susan crying
i really hope fantagraphics continues translating moto hagio's work, i can see here why she's critically acclaimed. lady was a straight up genius
5 stars
(also i want to point out this book actually made the 'and then he went off to be a priest' ending work so you know. it's possible so long as you actually have the characters and themes to support it! let's make it a rule: no more 'suddenly a priest' endings unless you commit to building the reasons for it, okay?)
December 21, 2022
I initially left this book unrated, but in returning to update my review (I have edited, as opposed to replaced, the original), I decided to give it five stars. My general rule is that anything under 5 stars must come with an explanation of what I felt could have been improved, and I don't know that I as an American in this time period have critique suggestions for such a distinctly '90s Japanese text. I also found it genuinely engaging, entertaining, and well worth reading regardless of one's personal interest in the various specific topics it discusses. Feel free to read this review without the ratings metric, though, because I do think it's more complicated than that.
This is the book that, in its approach to boys & boys loving each other in shoujo, inspired shounen-ai, or boys' love, which eventually became the yaoi genre.
I kind of felt like I had to give it a read; I needed to compare it to yaoi, LGBT manga, bara manga, and all the rest-- especially since I've been going through quite the forgiving phase with yaoi manga artists. This book was perfect for that. It wasn't just about the moral ambiguity of assumed straight women writing about gay men, but what it means to be subjectively or objectively gay itself. How much of the label "LGBT" is just some crap we made up in an increasingly Western- and even English-centric society? How can we judge by labels rather than experience? Does it matter more what we call ourselves, or how we live? This is a prime book, in my opinion, for exploring that.
I had the intense feeling, while reading Heart of Thomas, that I couldn't judge it as an LGBT book, because it's not about gay men. It's about some kind of alternate fantasy-Germany where every boy in the boys-only boarding school is in love with some other boy, and what that 'love' means is never fully explained, but kisses are exchanged near-constantly, romantic drama blooms, and unrequited crushes can lead to suicide. Many underclassmen vie for older boys, but outside school everyone looks to flirt with girls. The way the boys love each other is not the way they pursue girls, and I'm not sure it can be translated properly, not only in language but in culture and time.
Is this a commentary on childhood? All the adults we meet-- all the parents and aunts and step-parents and grandparents-- are heterosexual and in heterosexual couplings; the homonormalcy stops the minute you leave the classroom doors. This gives the story a sense of real nostalgia, the school a feeling of paradise; Hagio creates a world in which we genuinely long for an invented freedom of love between boys. In that sense, this fits perfectly alongside very recent books like Brian Selznick's Kaleidoscope , in which young gay love is purposefully asserted as beautiful, idyllic, and pure.
With the question of purity, of course, comes the question of sex, and here the book becomes the most interesting of all. Thomas's suicide note in the opening pages states that he knows his love "will be flung against some sexless, unknown, transparent something," and in Japanese I believe the term used for "sexless" was 無性 musei, which really does mean both sexless as in lacking sexual attraction, and sexless as in lacking gender. So it's just as ambiguous in Japanese as it is in English, wonderfully, and the same net falls over the text: how does this story feel about sexuality?
It is true that the boys never do anything with each other which is explicitly sexual. They kiss, but there are never any hands in interesting places, never any references to nudity in anything but the artistic way one might depict an angel statue. At the same time, Juli, our sometime protagonist, is afraid of all intimacy-- sexual or otherwise-- almost certainly because of something that happened to him while alone with older boys in one of the secluded rooms in the building, which he can no longer bear to ever visit. Throughout the text, Juli's trauma is heavily implied to be rape. He responds to it by utilizing heavily religious metaphors, including having lost his "angel's wings" or his "innocence." The same text that does not speak of gentle, kind, affirming sexuality between boys cannot bear to show its other side.
On the one hand, it could be said that the story is putting forth the idea that sexuality between boys is only evil-- but then, with Thomas's impassioned letter to both his classmates and us, we have to consider that the presence of a young boy who wanted, who truly needed, to express a love that was something more than sexless with his peers. With both Juli and Thomas's needs in mind, The Heart of Thomas cries out for the tragedy of those who are, for any reason, unable to grasp the intimacy they seek.
And again, nowhere while reading did I recognize anything I could unambiguously call gay, because it was never about gay men or their experiences. It called to mind what I'd read recently from a lesbian in Japan; boy's love is seen as some kind of 'ultimate fantasy,' not a representation of actual gay men or sexuality. (She continued that lesbians are therefore seen as disgusting by the same girls who love shounen ai, because they're not actually reading about or supporting gay people.) The boys represent a 'neutral gender' of androgynous fairy types, and of course they love each other because they're all beautiful. Women read it not thinking of gay men at all; it's not about the humans of reality but something unreachable in the present. The introduction of my copy noted that Hagio tried to write this story with girls (without the label of shounen-ai that this book spawned, it began simply as shoujo) and it just... didn't... work. With women, she kept bringing it back to reality.
And then there's the fact that all the boys are blonde except one, who faces xenophobia because his father is Greek and not German and he, well, has dark hair. This was, of course, written by a Japanese woman, and it genuinely made me wonder what she was thinking, and mostly I just... wish I understood Japanese culture better for books like this. It felt as though I was missing something important.
All this feels inextricable from the text's relationship with-- dependence on, even-- Christianity. Everything is a religious symbol, all light and Virgin Maries and angels and crosses. The ending of the story hinges on its reader understanding Christianity and religious devotion-- even ascetism-- as essential and healing to its protagonists, which, given the homosexuality I read into them, feels impossible. It does not feel like a happy ending, or like what the characters needed. It is so out of left field, given today's sensibilities, that it almost seems like an ending from a different book, resolving something we never worried about to begin with. But then: does anybody get what they really need in this book?
Moving away from the deep thought and the need to sort myself out: the translation felt natural, there were a couple typos (swapping Juli's name in for Thomas's somewhere, which was a real head-scratcher), and sometimes the speech bubbles were so confusingly placed I wondered how on Earth I was intended to read the book. The art was absolutely gorgeous, even if I could see the beginning of Yaoi Legs in it, and those eyes! You really could swim in them. Perhaps I wish Hagio wouldn't draw the doctor and ornery professor so... hooked-nosedly...
And of course, the "sad gay boys who commit suicide/are abused/have their hearts broken/are generally tragic" trope, that, again, Hagio seriously must have kickstarted in yaoi--though I'll note that she was inspired by a French film (in which, interestingly, the gay boys in the dormitory are the only gay ones, and one eventually commits suicide because of the oppression), and again, there's that difference in cultural views coming up. I do wish I could say something about this book without feeling six different ways about it, but then maybe it wouldn't be half as interesting to me.
And on the level of entertainment... I just liked it. I found myself sucked in, needing to know what happens, and though I wasn't as yanked along on my second read, I still enjoyed it and was glad I returned to it (though my thoughts didn't much change). In some ways I prefer this book as an aesthetic experience rather than an entertainment one: like listening to a song and evaluating it on what it makes me feel, how it is crafted, rather than whether I am compelled by its story. The art, of course, lends itself easily to the same approach. This is an absolutely beautiful book to get lost in.
This is kind of a lot of information and Thinking Stuff; it's not really about Book Good or Book Bad. I don't know what I thought. I honestly can't rate this. I enjoyed the book; it felt distinctly different from yaoi (partially because its publishing started the domino tower that would result in yaoi) and yet it didn't feel like '''''good representation''' either. You would have to be nuts to put this on a typical LGBT list. But I woke up the morning after I started reading this with a need to finish it, and I did read it for a couple hours straight, so make of that what you will. I'm glad I read this book.
Would I recommend this? After a transforming second read, I have to say, yes. The more I recommend it to people and hear their reactions, the more I want to recommend it again. The simple truth is that it's an exciting book, a fruitful one, one which 99% of its modern American readers simply can't totally understand. I love a book that makes me think, and this is one that does that while being enjoyable and beautiful to read. You can use this book as a stepping stone for any number of inquiries: Japanese culture, Japanese literature, yaoi specifically, LGBT identity in fiction, tragic narratives, Christianity, romance, sexuality, childhood...
The primary wonderful thing this book does is transport me. When I read this, I enter a world which cannot be compared to mine. I have to let go of all of my assumptions: cultural, social, sexual, spiritual. Some of this is due to its being Japanese, but much of it is Moto Hagio's incredible work in building a world that manages to be a fantasy trapped under the skin of reality. Come with me and disappear into it.
This is the book that, in its approach to boys & boys loving each other in shoujo, inspired shounen-ai, or boys' love, which eventually became the yaoi genre.
I kind of felt like I had to give it a read; I needed to compare it to yaoi, LGBT manga, bara manga, and all the rest-- especially since I've been going through quite the forgiving phase with yaoi manga artists. This book was perfect for that. It wasn't just about the moral ambiguity of assumed straight women writing about gay men, but what it means to be subjectively or objectively gay itself. How much of the label "LGBT" is just some crap we made up in an increasingly Western- and even English-centric society? How can we judge by labels rather than experience? Does it matter more what we call ourselves, or how we live? This is a prime book, in my opinion, for exploring that.
I had the intense feeling, while reading Heart of Thomas, that I couldn't judge it as an LGBT book, because it's not about gay men. It's about some kind of alternate fantasy-Germany where every boy in the boys-only boarding school is in love with some other boy, and what that 'love' means is never fully explained, but kisses are exchanged near-constantly, romantic drama blooms, and unrequited crushes can lead to suicide. Many underclassmen vie for older boys, but outside school everyone looks to flirt with girls. The way the boys love each other is not the way they pursue girls, and I'm not sure it can be translated properly, not only in language but in culture and time.
Is this a commentary on childhood? All the adults we meet-- all the parents and aunts and step-parents and grandparents-- are heterosexual and in heterosexual couplings; the homonormalcy stops the minute you leave the classroom doors. This gives the story a sense of real nostalgia, the school a feeling of paradise; Hagio creates a world in which we genuinely long for an invented freedom of love between boys. In that sense, this fits perfectly alongside very recent books like Brian Selznick's Kaleidoscope , in which young gay love is purposefully asserted as beautiful, idyllic, and pure.
With the question of purity, of course, comes the question of sex, and here the book becomes the most interesting of all. Thomas's suicide note in the opening pages states that he knows his love "will be flung against some sexless, unknown, transparent something," and in Japanese I believe the term used for "sexless" was 無性 musei, which really does mean both sexless as in lacking sexual attraction, and sexless as in lacking gender. So it's just as ambiguous in Japanese as it is in English, wonderfully, and the same net falls over the text: how does this story feel about sexuality?
It is true that the boys never do anything with each other which is explicitly sexual. They kiss, but there are never any hands in interesting places, never any references to nudity in anything but the artistic way one might depict an angel statue. At the same time, Juli, our sometime protagonist, is afraid of all intimacy-- sexual or otherwise-- almost certainly because of something that happened to him while alone with older boys in one of the secluded rooms in the building, which he can no longer bear to ever visit. Throughout the text, Juli's trauma is heavily implied to be rape. He responds to it by utilizing heavily religious metaphors, including having lost his "angel's wings" or his "innocence." The same text that does not speak of gentle, kind, affirming sexuality between boys cannot bear to show its other side.
On the one hand, it could be said that the story is putting forth the idea that sexuality between boys is only evil-- but then, with Thomas's impassioned letter to both his classmates and us, we have to consider that the presence of a young boy who wanted, who truly needed, to express a love that was something more than sexless with his peers. With both Juli and Thomas's needs in mind, The Heart of Thomas cries out for the tragedy of those who are, for any reason, unable to grasp the intimacy they seek.
And again, nowhere while reading did I recognize anything I could unambiguously call gay, because it was never about gay men or their experiences. It called to mind what I'd read recently from a lesbian in Japan; boy's love is seen as some kind of 'ultimate fantasy,' not a representation of actual gay men or sexuality. (She continued that lesbians are therefore seen as disgusting by the same girls who love shounen ai, because they're not actually reading about or supporting gay people.) The boys represent a 'neutral gender' of androgynous fairy types, and of course they love each other because they're all beautiful. Women read it not thinking of gay men at all; it's not about the humans of reality but something unreachable in the present. The introduction of my copy noted that Hagio tried to write this story with girls (without the label of shounen-ai that this book spawned, it began simply as shoujo) and it just... didn't... work. With women, she kept bringing it back to reality.
And then there's the fact that all the boys are blonde except one, who faces xenophobia because his father is Greek and not German and he, well, has dark hair. This was, of course, written by a Japanese woman, and it genuinely made me wonder what she was thinking, and mostly I just... wish I understood Japanese culture better for books like this. It felt as though I was missing something important.
All this feels inextricable from the text's relationship with-- dependence on, even-- Christianity. Everything is a religious symbol, all light and Virgin Maries and angels and crosses. The ending of the story hinges on its reader understanding Christianity and religious devotion-- even ascetism-- as essential and healing to its protagonists, which, given the homosexuality I read into them, feels impossible. It does not feel like a happy ending, or like what the characters needed. It is so out of left field, given today's sensibilities, that it almost seems like an ending from a different book, resolving something we never worried about to begin with. But then: does anybody get what they really need in this book?
Moving away from the deep thought and the need to sort myself out: the translation felt natural, there were a couple typos (swapping Juli's name in for Thomas's somewhere, which was a real head-scratcher), and sometimes the speech bubbles were so confusingly placed I wondered how on Earth I was intended to read the book. The art was absolutely gorgeous, even if I could see the beginning of Yaoi Legs in it, and those eyes! You really could swim in them. Perhaps I wish Hagio wouldn't draw the doctor and ornery professor so... hooked-nosedly...
And of course, the "sad gay boys who commit suicide/are abused/have their hearts broken/are generally tragic" trope, that, again, Hagio seriously must have kickstarted in yaoi--though I'll note that she was inspired by a French film (in which, interestingly, the gay boys in the dormitory are the only gay ones, and one eventually commits suicide because of the oppression), and again, there's that difference in cultural views coming up. I do wish I could say something about this book without feeling six different ways about it, but then maybe it wouldn't be half as interesting to me.
And on the level of entertainment... I just liked it. I found myself sucked in, needing to know what happens, and though I wasn't as yanked along on my second read, I still enjoyed it and was glad I returned to it (though my thoughts didn't much change). In some ways I prefer this book as an aesthetic experience rather than an entertainment one: like listening to a song and evaluating it on what it makes me feel, how it is crafted, rather than whether I am compelled by its story. The art, of course, lends itself easily to the same approach. This is an absolutely beautiful book to get lost in.
This is kind of a lot of information and Thinking Stuff; it's not really about Book Good or Book Bad. I don't know what I thought. I honestly can't rate this. I enjoyed the book; it felt distinctly different from yaoi (partially because its publishing started the domino tower that would result in yaoi) and yet it didn't feel like '''''good representation''' either. You would have to be nuts to put this on a typical LGBT list. But I woke up the morning after I started reading this with a need to finish it, and I did read it for a couple hours straight, so make of that what you will. I'm glad I read this book.
Would I recommend this? After a transforming second read, I have to say, yes. The more I recommend it to people and hear their reactions, the more I want to recommend it again. The simple truth is that it's an exciting book, a fruitful one, one which 99% of its modern American readers simply can't totally understand. I love a book that makes me think, and this is one that does that while being enjoyable and beautiful to read. You can use this book as a stepping stone for any number of inquiries: Japanese culture, Japanese literature, yaoi specifically, LGBT identity in fiction, tragic narratives, Christianity, romance, sexuality, childhood...
The primary wonderful thing this book does is transport me. When I read this, I enter a world which cannot be compared to mine. I have to let go of all of my assumptions: cultural, social, sexual, spiritual. Some of this is due to its being Japanese, but much of it is Moto Hagio's incredible work in building a world that manages to be a fantasy trapped under the skin of reality. Come with me and disappear into it.
July 18, 2023
Absolutely stunning paneling and linework, overflowing with pitch perfect, over the top Christian imagery and overblown drama between 14-year-olds. This and Rose of Versailles are probably THE two 70’s shojo manga you should read. Good thing the 2012 Fantagraphics English translation goes for only uhhhhhh $300 online. I read it on m*ngadex.
September 10, 2024
4⭐️
Trigger warning: suicide, death, and grief
The Heart of Thomas follows the journey of Juli and his roommate Oskar. One day, they receive the news that a fellow classmate, Thomas, had died in an accident. However, Juli receives a letter from Thomas that was posted a day before his death. In the letter, Thomas once again declares his love for Juli, and Juli understands that he has just received Thomas' suicide note!
Juli struggles to cope in the coming days. Once he seems to get a grip on the situation, a transfer student, who looks very much like Thomas, starts in the school. The transfer student is called Erich, and he is not thrilled to be judged based on his looks.
The story was well drawn. Sometimes, I had to re-read a few panels to understand when the point of view changed from one of the main characters Juli, Erich, and Oskar to another.
The Heart of Thomas is an emotional story that I recommend everyone to give a try.
Trigger warning: suicide, death, and grief
The Heart of Thomas follows the journey of Juli and his roommate Oskar. One day, they receive the news that a fellow classmate, Thomas, had died in an accident. However, Juli receives a letter from Thomas that was posted a day before his death. In the letter, Thomas once again declares his love for Juli, and Juli understands that he has just received Thomas' suicide note!
Juli struggles to cope in the coming days. Once he seems to get a grip on the situation, a transfer student, who looks very much like Thomas, starts in the school. The transfer student is called Erich, and he is not thrilled to be judged based on his looks.
The story was well drawn. Sometimes, I had to re-read a few panels to understand when the point of view changed from one of the main characters Juli, Erich, and Oskar to another.
The Heart of Thomas is an emotional story that I recommend everyone to give a try.
May 18, 2016
The introduction to this graphic novel states that Manga featuring romances between boys is/was very popular with straight young women. I wonder why.
This story is set in an all boys boarding school in Germany (of all places), and boy on boy romance and crushes are all the rage. Most of what is actually depicted is rather chaste, but there is abuse and the story starts out with a young boy committing suicide. I liked the art, but the story did not really work for me. There were too many things that did not make sense - for example Juli's hair is sometimes black and sometimes not, and the author makes a point of talking about his black hair. Then there is Bacchus - was he a teacher of a student? The religious overtones were a bit jarring as well. There is the expected teen angst and melodrama, and if that's your thing you'll probably like this one. This is a fat book, so there were plenty of pages in which to spin out this yarn. I know this is considered a classic in the genre, but I wanted more.
This story is set in an all boys boarding school in Germany (of all places), and boy on boy romance and crushes are all the rage. Most of what is actually depicted is rather chaste, but there is abuse and the story starts out with a young boy committing suicide. I liked the art, but the story did not really work for me. There were too many things that did not make sense - for example Juli's hair is sometimes black and sometimes not, and the author makes a point of talking about his black hair. Then there is Bacchus - was he a teacher of a student? The religious overtones were a bit jarring as well. There is the expected teen angst and melodrama, and if that's your thing you'll probably like this one. This is a fat book, so there were plenty of pages in which to spin out this yarn. I know this is considered a classic in the genre, but I wanted more.
January 2, 2024
This copy has quite a few errors with wrong names or spelling its not that confusing or annoying. It just needed more proofreading or what-not. The story itself? I freaking love it. I love classic shojo romances. I love the style of them, ugh its so pretty!! I just which they'd translate and put out the girl loving girl stuff more from way back when the are was like thi. Ugh love it. ITS GOOOOOOOD. Give me that melodrama.
January 4, 2019
I understand how this manga was groundbreaking back when it was first published in Japan, but as a Western twenty-something in the 21st century, I found The Heart of Thomas to be melodramatic and bloated. Even so, the art is beautiful, and I would recommend it for that reason alone since it is a “bucket-list” manga every manga fan should read.
April 11, 2024
I have wanted to read this manga for a couple of years. I was so excited when it got a reprint.
I really enjoyed this manga! I was invested in all the boys’ lives! I found the all characters interesting. I loved the hint of mystery thrown in as the reader slowly learns more about Thomas and the secrets the other boys hide!
I loved reading this classic manga! I definitely want to read more by Moto Hagio! I really enjoyed her storytelling and her characters!
I really enjoyed this manga! I was invested in all the boys’ lives! I found the all characters interesting. I loved the hint of mystery thrown in as the reader slowly learns more about Thomas and the secrets the other boys hide!
I loved reading this classic manga! I definitely want to read more by Moto Hagio! I really enjoyed her storytelling and her characters!
January 23, 2020
*3.5 stelline.
Uno shounen-ai molto enigmatico e particolare, dove le divisione di genere sembrano sfocate, se non addirittura completamente inesistenti. Una storia che, anche se a tratti molto surreale e confusionaria, mi ha incuriosita fin dalle prime pagine.
Uno shounen-ai molto enigmatico e particolare, dove le divisione di genere sembrano sfocate, se non addirittura completamente inesistenti. Una storia che, anche se a tratti molto surreale e confusionaria, mi ha incuriosita fin dalle prime pagine.
November 22, 2013
Published nearly one year ago, The Heart of Thomas by Moto Hagio has yet to receive the kind of accolade it truly deserves, which I'm inclined to think is unfortunately due in part to its price. For myself, being a poor grad student living alone, I admit to having lusted after but denied myself this title every time I walked into my local comic book shoppe due to its extremely high price point for an English manga. However, Fantagraphics has a reputation for publishing manga as high art that has yet to be challenged, so the price is not unfitting the work that went into producing it. Fortunately for me, I was eventually able to borrow a copy from a manga reviewer who also appreciates Fantagraphics and boys' love stories. The truth is though, I should have bought it the moment it was published.
From page one a reader is sucked into the world of the classic shoujo via the brilliant crimson watercolored intro pages, which function both to entice the eyes but also to set the mood for a story that begins with a suicide. Having long been a fan of Riyoko Ikeda's work, I was immediately struck by the similarities to Onii-sama e...: the unrequited love relationships between a complacent transfer student into a cloistered boarding school and the melancholy upperclassmen who can't fit in. The jovial, much-loved upperclassmen mentor who takes the transfer student under his/her wing, trying in vain to protect them against the rumors and cat-calls of their peers (although it's fun to realise that Oskar smokes to give him a cool aesthetic, but in Onii-sama e... it's Rei who smokes to give her a bad-girl aesthetic). And of course, from the devestating opening scene of young, beautiful Thomas flinging himself from a catwalk onto the railroad tracks. Thanks to the brilliant post-script by prolific translator Matt Thorn, the reader is made aware that Moto Hagio was a direct contemporary of Riyoko Ikeda and the Heart of Thomas was actually first published as a competitive venture riding on the coat-tails of The Rose of Versailles, and published during the very same year, 1974 (The Year of the Shoujo), as Onii-sama e...
For myself, their are two very beautiful and brilliant examples that both echo Ikeda and make Heart of Thomas wholly Hagio's own: page 214, an omake drawing of Oskar Reiser wearing a very Saint Juste-sama looking tuxedo (see page 111 in the Chuko Comics reprint of Oniisama e...) and tophat, standing next to Erich Fruhling, similarly adorned in what could only be a 18th century French uniform and ascott, but holding his mother's summer hat. Additionally, the scene that truly made the story for me: on page 122, the reader is presented with a quiet series of 4 panels on the top of the page in which kuudere mysterious roommate Juli Bauernfeind stops to adjust classmate Erich's bow-tie while admitting to him, "One of these days, I will kill you and remove you from my sight..." Not only is this scene so beautiful in its contradictory imagery, but the modern reader will be struck dumb to realise that this must in fact be the very first use of the image that would go on to be reused in shoujo and inexorably lead to the famous opening scene of Sachiko fixing Yumi's sailor collar tie, forever burned into the contemporary shoujo reader's mind.
To briefly touch on the rest of the story, Erich (who very closely resembles the deceased Thomas) grows closer and closer to school "prefect" Juli (the boy Thomas loved) and with the discovery of a love letter kept hidden in a library book, becomes the key for which Juli is able to finally unlock his feelings for Thomas and Erich and realise his (I hesitate to use the word "potential") desire to become a priest. The story is richly infused with a cast of interesting characters and past-love interests, mixing explosively with a tempest of roiling teenage emotions and male-male desire (which thanks in no small part to THIS VERY WORK would go on to create the entire genre of boy's love and yaoi and, yes fuel the world-wide love of manga as we know it, (I suppose Osamu Tezuka helped in some small way too). thank you Moto Hagio). In a word, The Heart of Thomas is masterful.
,,,The editing in this English edition however, leaves much to be desired for.
From page one a reader is sucked into the world of the classic shoujo via the brilliant crimson watercolored intro pages, which function both to entice the eyes but also to set the mood for a story that begins with a suicide. Having long been a fan of Riyoko Ikeda's work, I was immediately struck by the similarities to Onii-sama e...: the unrequited love relationships between a complacent transfer student into a cloistered boarding school and the melancholy upperclassmen who can't fit in. The jovial, much-loved upperclassmen mentor who takes the transfer student under his/her wing, trying in vain to protect them against the rumors and cat-calls of their peers (although it's fun to realise that Oskar smokes to give him a cool aesthetic, but in Onii-sama e... it's Rei who smokes to give her a bad-girl aesthetic). And of course, from the devestating opening scene of young, beautiful Thomas flinging himself from a catwalk onto the railroad tracks. Thanks to the brilliant post-script by prolific translator Matt Thorn, the reader is made aware that Moto Hagio was a direct contemporary of Riyoko Ikeda and the Heart of Thomas was actually first published as a competitive venture riding on the coat-tails of The Rose of Versailles, and published during the very same year, 1974 (The Year of the Shoujo), as Onii-sama e...
For myself, their are two very beautiful and brilliant examples that both echo Ikeda and make Heart of Thomas wholly Hagio's own: page 214, an omake drawing of Oskar Reiser wearing a very Saint Juste-sama looking tuxedo (see page 111 in the Chuko Comics reprint of Oniisama e...) and tophat, standing next to Erich Fruhling, similarly adorned in what could only be a 18th century French uniform and ascott, but holding his mother's summer hat. Additionally, the scene that truly made the story for me: on page 122, the reader is presented with a quiet series of 4 panels on the top of the page in which kuudere mysterious roommate Juli Bauernfeind stops to adjust classmate Erich's bow-tie while admitting to him, "One of these days, I will kill you and remove you from my sight..." Not only is this scene so beautiful in its contradictory imagery, but the modern reader will be struck dumb to realise that this must in fact be the very first use of the image that would go on to be reused in shoujo and inexorably lead to the famous opening scene of Sachiko fixing Yumi's sailor collar tie, forever burned into the contemporary shoujo reader's mind.
To briefly touch on the rest of the story, Erich (who very closely resembles the deceased Thomas) grows closer and closer to school "prefect" Juli (the boy Thomas loved) and with the discovery of a love letter kept hidden in a library book, becomes the key for which Juli is able to finally unlock his feelings for Thomas and Erich and realise his (I hesitate to use the word "potential") desire to become a priest. The story is richly infused with a cast of interesting characters and past-love interests, mixing explosively with a tempest of roiling teenage emotions and male-male desire (which thanks in no small part to THIS VERY WORK would go on to create the entire genre of boy's love and yaoi and, yes fuel the world-wide love of manga as we know it, (I suppose Osamu Tezuka helped in some small way too). thank you Moto Hagio). In a word, The Heart of Thomas is masterful.
,,,The editing in this English edition however, leaves much to be desired for.
December 18, 2023
absolutely wonderful —what a story! so much nuance in the characters... and so gay, too ... so innocent and spiritual. the importance of love and whatnot. i do wish that juli didn't leave. wish juli x oscar became real. oscar did not go through all that effort to lose to a boy who didn't even know juli that way, even if that boy did wonders for juli's mental health (in the end) and realization that he needs love too. i love oscar. wish we saw more of him. GOD I WISH JULI AND OSCAR KISSED. THAT'S ONE STAR OFF FOR YOU MOTO HAGIO. also i love how, in early examples of this genre, boys were used less as real representations of boys especially gay ones but as gender neutral tools/vessels to which the female author or reader may project themselves onto, as this genre was made initially as tools for women to explore themes hitherto unallowed to them if they were girls. if this was explored with female characters it would be too close to reality and wouldve made too much of a fuss so turn them all into boys ..but in the process turn these boys into almost non binary project able creatures. also i could go on and on as to why oscar did not succeed in his pursuit of juli and lost to thomas via eric
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 13, 2014
I'm overjoyed to see an English translation of this classic manga. Moto Hagio is one of those legendary creators who were hugely influential in Japan, but whose work remains largely unavailable in the US due to various factors, among them the age of this story, originally published in the mid-70's. There is an essay by the translator, Matt Thorn, in which he explains some of the cultural context of Heart of Thomas, and also details some of the impact it had on manga in general. It's worthwhile, for those unfamiliar with this book's reputation, to read this essay first. While many of the tropes of HOT are familiar to readers of shojo manga today, not all of them were at the time it was written. It's a bit angst-ridden and flowery, but it's still easy to see why this remains such a classic. Kudos to Fantagraphics for bringing us this treasure.
January 10, 2016
One of the very first manga stories in the BL/yaoi genre and typical of those in that it's pretty darn chaste, yet highly emotional. The setting is a German boys' boarding school in the 1960s or so (the story was written in the 70s). Illustrations are lovely if one likes the huge-eyed, pretty 1970s shojo style, and the story is a bit overwrought (great if you're into intense, dramatic narratives, and appropriate for young teens in a strict atmosphere with a recent tragedy) but compelling.
Trigger warning for brief but unnerving descriptions of abuse and torture of a young-teen boy.
For teen through adult BL / Shonen-ai fans who like the "angst-and-kisses" subgenre with characters from highly dysfunctional families, and enjoy retro manga art.
Trigger warning for brief but unnerving descriptions of abuse and torture of a young-teen boy.
For teen through adult BL / Shonen-ai fans who like the "angst-and-kisses" subgenre with characters from highly dysfunctional families, and enjoy retro manga art.
September 27, 2016
A classic of manga, a classic of shōnen-ai. The narrative is, in places, melodramatic and sentimental, but that all adds to its tone and direction. And it touches upon a theme I see in some of Hagio's work, doubling and doppelgangers.
June 4, 2019
Very beautiful and extremely romantic.
July 24, 2019
At a German boys' boarding school, a new student arrives who looks uncannily like a student who committed suicide for unrequited love. This is early shojo and helped establish the shonen-ai genre, and it's fascinating as a historical artifact but it also holds up--where dated, it's dated in a way that reaffirms its strengths and significance; it doesn't feel worn thin by the stories it inspired. The art is dreamy, beautiful, and clean, with relatively light use of screentone and an abundance of the allegorical panels, romantic imagery, and sparkling eyes that distinguish the genre. (The handsome Fantagraphics hardback is also a pleasure.) And where it's easy (and productive!) to criticize everything problematic about shonen-ai, its appropriation/metaphorical use of queer men and its gayngst, this is everything that makes shonen-ai successful: the metaphorical tone set against melodrama and trauma, and the evocative, interior, chaste view of non-normative desire, is everything that makes the genre attractive to and supportive of its young female audience, providing them a heightened and safe avenue to explore their own anxieties. (The introduction, quoted below, has a relevant passage about the manga's origin.) I'm glad I finally read this! It exceeded expectations.
Hagio begin to think about a version of her story that would be acceptable to a shojo manga editor. She tried to rework it using female characters, to overcome the most obvious hurdle: the story featured only boys, yet the readers were all girls.
But it didn't work with a female cast. Creating as a woman, for female readers, she found herself wanting to make every action more realistic and plausible. As she put it in her 2005 Comics Journal interview, "it came out sort of giggly." it was important that the characters be Other in order for Hagio to explore the themes, some quite abstract, that she wanted to explore.
March 20, 2023
4.6/5
Questa è la mia prima opera di Moto Hagio e sicuramente non sarà l'ultima.
Una lettura quasi perfetta se non per il finale un po' troppo velocizzato.
Siamo stati abituati ad un ritmo lento e molto intenso che poi tutto ad un tratto si è trasformato in un susseguirsi di informazioni e di avvenimenti.
Da un lato sono quasi certa sia voluto, il nostro protagonista è come se si risvegliasse e iniziasse quindi a vivere in modo accelerato.
Dall'altro mi sono ritrovata a volte in difficoltà a seguire tutte le vicende tra passato e presente senza fare confusione.
Le emozioni sono accompagnate da delle tavole pazzesche che riescono ad esprimere appieno ciò che provano i protagonisti. Il tratto del disegno è super particolare e riconoscibile. Ci sono questi disegni a pagina intera che rappresentano tantissime cose insieme e sono veramente bellissimi da vedere.
Diventano veri e proprio quadri.
Che dire poi della storia in sè, già ho detto essere molto intensa, a volte straziante. Mi è piaciuta l'ambientazione e l'uso dello spazio, sia a livello di scuola che fuori scuola. I personaggi secondari sono ben giostrati ricordando sempre al lettore della presenza di molte altre persone e non solo dei personaggi principali.
L'edizione, per finire, è meravigliosa. Mi piace tantissimo quando per autori di un certo calibro le case editrici decidono di avere uno stile tutto a loro dedicato che si ripresenta poi in ogni loro opera.
Da' proprio un'idea diversa, da collezione e di opera pregiata. Unico appunto su questo è la delicatezza dei materiali, sia la copertina che il cartone del libro vero e proprio tendono a rovinarsi con una facilità estrema, rendendo la lettura un po' intrigosa vista l'accortezza che è da riservare nel maneggiare il volume.
Questa è la mia prima opera di Moto Hagio e sicuramente non sarà l'ultima.
Una lettura quasi perfetta se non per il finale un po' troppo velocizzato.
Siamo stati abituati ad un ritmo lento e molto intenso che poi tutto ad un tratto si è trasformato in un susseguirsi di informazioni e di avvenimenti.
Da un lato sono quasi certa sia voluto, il nostro protagonista è come se si risvegliasse e iniziasse quindi a vivere in modo accelerato.
Dall'altro mi sono ritrovata a volte in difficoltà a seguire tutte le vicende tra passato e presente senza fare confusione.
Le emozioni sono accompagnate da delle tavole pazzesche che riescono ad esprimere appieno ciò che provano i protagonisti. Il tratto del disegno è super particolare e riconoscibile. Ci sono questi disegni a pagina intera che rappresentano tantissime cose insieme e sono veramente bellissimi da vedere.
Diventano veri e proprio quadri.
Che dire poi della storia in sè, già ho detto essere molto intensa, a volte straziante. Mi è piaciuta l'ambientazione e l'uso dello spazio, sia a livello di scuola che fuori scuola. I personaggi secondari sono ben giostrati ricordando sempre al lettore della presenza di molte altre persone e non solo dei personaggi principali.
L'edizione, per finire, è meravigliosa. Mi piace tantissimo quando per autori di un certo calibro le case editrici decidono di avere uno stile tutto a loro dedicato che si ripresenta poi in ogni loro opera.
Da' proprio un'idea diversa, da collezione e di opera pregiata. Unico appunto su questo è la delicatezza dei materiali, sia la copertina che il cartone del libro vero e proprio tendono a rovinarsi con una facilità estrema, rendendo la lettura un po' intrigosa vista l'accortezza che è da riservare nel maneggiare il volume.
September 19, 2024
Read:
Tues September 17th - Thursday September 19th,2024
This manga was definitely worth the frame it received online among vintage shojo manga readers and manga vintage art fans.
Parental advisory:
Mentions of abuse,bullying and suicide.
Full review soon.*
Review in progress*
This book has become one of my favorite stories.
The story is very intriguing and the characters are written well.
I prefer this story over Kaze ki no uta.
I wish The Heart of Thomas had more than 3 volumes.
Eric is intentionally funny.
This scene was almost as funny as when he kept asking Julius when he would kill him.
Julius is cool,complex and relatable.
Thomas is sweet and kind.
Oscar isn't what he seems.
This story is not a yaoi nor is the focus of the story about sexuality a coming of age story about one's insecurities,lost of and regaining of their faith,longing of acceptance & love and regret.
The artwork is vibrant and beautiful.
The ending was uniquely illustrated and narrated.
This story is one of the most beautiful pieces of literature I've ever had the fortune to read and I don't say this lightly.
I wish The Heart of Thomas was given an animated series.
It deserves it.
5 of 5 stars.
Tues September 17th - Thursday September 19th,2024
This manga was definitely worth the frame it received online among vintage shojo manga readers and manga vintage art fans.
Parental advisory:
Mentions of abuse,bullying and suicide.
Full review soon.*
Review in progress*
This book has become one of my favorite stories.
The story is very intriguing and the characters are written well.
I prefer this story over Kaze ki no uta.
I wish The Heart of Thomas had more than 3 volumes.
Eric is intentionally funny.
This scene was almost as funny as when he kept asking Julius when he would kill him.
Julius is cool,complex and relatable.
Thomas is sweet and kind.
Oscar isn't what he seems.
This story is not a yaoi nor is the focus of the story about sexuality a coming of age story about one's insecurities,lost of and regaining of their faith,longing of acceptance & love and regret.
The artwork is vibrant and beautiful.
The ending was uniquely illustrated and narrated.
This story is one of the most beautiful pieces of literature I've ever had the fortune to read and I don't say this lightly.
I wish The Heart of Thomas was given an animated series.
It deserves it.
5 of 5 stars.
February 26, 2023
Jumping into this book, I knew it would be a tragic read – but damn this one really got me. Juli, Eric, and Oskar could not catch a break! So many things went wrong for these boys and a lot of stuff felt unresolved. Still, with everything that happened in this book, the fact that Juli survived the end of this story is a win! I'm counting it as a win, love be damned! Really felt for the boys & adored Oskar to pieces and I'd like the think they reunite in the future and remain friends after everything that happened between them!
Read
October 5, 2019i'm still thinking about this. there was a lot of religious analogy that i haven't quite pieced together yet.
the way some characters' feeling changed seemed a bit sudden...but also the book was paced well. this is a landmark book in the shoujo genre, and i'm interested in reading more of the works from this time period.
overall recommend, lotta content warnings though: sexual abuse, suicide, xenophobia.
the way some characters' feeling changed seemed a bit sudden...but also the book was paced well. this is a landmark book in the shoujo genre, and i'm interested in reading more of the works from this time period.
overall recommend, lotta content warnings though: sexual abuse, suicide, xenophobia.
February 25, 2024
Encore un chef d'œuvre de Moto Hagio dont on ne sort pas indemne, il m'a fallut du temps pour digérer la fin du premier cycle du Clan des Poe et il va me falloir du temps pour digérer le cœur de Thomas.
Les sentiments des personnages sont si vivants et sonnent d'une façon particulièrement juste. J'ai peine à écrire quelques mots tant l'œuvre est indescriptible et unique mais de façon très positive.
Les sentiments des personnages sont si vivants et sonnent d'une façon particulièrement juste. J'ai peine à écrire quelques mots tant l'œuvre est indescriptible et unique mais de façon très positive.
April 13, 2022
am i crazy for reading a 500 page manga in one sitting? perhaps. i enjoyed this so much, though. and i loveeeee the religious imagery! ahhh!
February 24, 2023
A beautiful drawn book thay had interesting prose, but what a buck wild story and what this book said why I'm the not biggest fan of the bl genre
December 31, 2014
The Heart of Thomas is something of a peculiar relic. It is one of the earlier boys' love manga, but isn't particularly representative of what many people think of when looking for BL. It is shoujo, but it is consistently darker than most series that are published for young girls. It is from the 70s, but the art falls less in line with the overwrought sparkles of other 70s shoujo and instead falls between shoujo stylings and Tezuka Osamu's art (not to mention having somewhat subtler melodrama). The Heart of Thomas exists in its own little world, somewhat apart from Hagio's more mainstreams works but also from her sci-fi/fantasy endeavors. And the world that it inhabits is one of heart-wrenching moments, gentle and compelling art, and characters with frozen hearts that the reader desperately wants to see thaw.
There is so much positive to write about The Heart of Thomas that it's a little difficult to find a point to begin. The art is fairly simplistic and often wispy. While a product of the 70s, it is not terribly dated. The more understated style that I mentioned earlier keeps it from being an apparently older series. The characters' eyes are more akin to modern series than what people think of when they think of "70s shoujo eyes." And by setting the series in a boarding school, the characters are rarely shown in clothes other than their uniforms which helps to avoid giving the series a distinct era (although the few scenes out of uniform involve bell bottoms so counteract that ageless for a few pages).
The characters all have a deep sense of brooding that makes the story feel even heavier, and perhaps is a bit out-of-character for teenage boys. Then again, as I try to recall back through the decades, I'm sure I spent plenty of time forlorn and lamenting my mistakes, ennui, and the ideas of love, god, and the world. Granted, I now recognize much of that as being self-indulgent, but at the time it was so real, and so are these emotions for the characters in The Heart of Thomas. Plus, with the exception of Juli, all of the boys are just as like to turn around and blow up in anger or begin to joke ridiculously. These sudden changes in emotion give credence to the characters' behavior, although they did pull me out of the story on occasion. The three--or perhaps four?--main characters are particularly well-developed. Juli serves as an enigma through much of the tale, and in some ways The Heart of Thomas is set as a mystery where the reader slowly gains the necessary pieces to determine what has caused him to show such hatred toward Thomas and his unintended proxy, Erich. Oskar serves as a nice sounding board for Juli and Erich alike, and his own storyline about the identity of his father and the fate of his mother serve nicely as a break in the melancholy of Juli's life. Erich was a bit of a troubling character for me early on. He was so irrational and impetuous to the point that it felt unnecessary. However, as we learn about his past life with Marie and how he was raised, his lack of emotional maturity makes more sense, particularly when considering the situation he was thrown into looking so much like the deceased Thomas. Of course, then there is Thomas, who we only get to see as himself through the few pieces of writing he left behind. We only see him as he was viewed by others, which was a shining light, the embodiment of "Amor"--and we often project onto others what we want them to be, not who they actually are (John Green's Paper Towns is an enjoyable novel tackling this very concept, by the way). Thomas internal loneliness and his sense of loss when Juli both changes and when the "farce" occurs are palpable. His selfless selfishness is a conundrum that fits so well into the story and really adds a nice layer onto an already emotionally fulfilling story.
There are plenty of faults to The Heart of Thomas, of course. It can be quite repetitive with the same arguments occurring time and again. Juli's behavior around Erich is inconsistent in a way that doesn't fit with the rest of his character. And then there are the random bits of comedy with a more comic strip-like art style that pop up in some of Tezuka's works as well that simply feel out of place both in tone and in the art. Thankfully, Hagio uses them much more infrequently than Tezuka did in say, Buddha, but they are there so reader beware that you might be momentarily pulled from the story every so often.
Overall, The Heart of Thomas is a story that any connoisseur of manga really should check out. It tells a compelling story with accessible characters and an art style that shouldn't put off more modern-focused fans. Additionally, the hardcover volume published by Fantagraphics is well composed and includes a nice historical essay by the editor, Matt Thorn, about the story's beginning and how it helped to change the face of shoujo manga. Quick note: there is a printing error on one page which is addressed in Professor Thorn's blog: http://matt-thorn.com/wordpress/?p=609
[Cross-posted to my blog effective 1/5/2015]
There is so much positive to write about The Heart of Thomas that it's a little difficult to find a point to begin. The art is fairly simplistic and often wispy. While a product of the 70s, it is not terribly dated. The more understated style that I mentioned earlier keeps it from being an apparently older series. The characters' eyes are more akin to modern series than what people think of when they think of "70s shoujo eyes." And by setting the series in a boarding school, the characters are rarely shown in clothes other than their uniforms which helps to avoid giving the series a distinct era (although the few scenes out of uniform involve bell bottoms so counteract that ageless for a few pages).
The characters all have a deep sense of brooding that makes the story feel even heavier, and perhaps is a bit out-of-character for teenage boys. Then again, as I try to recall back through the decades, I'm sure I spent plenty of time forlorn and lamenting my mistakes, ennui, and the ideas of love, god, and the world. Granted, I now recognize much of that as being self-indulgent, but at the time it was so real, and so are these emotions for the characters in The Heart of Thomas. Plus, with the exception of Juli, all of the boys are just as like to turn around and blow up in anger or begin to joke ridiculously. These sudden changes in emotion give credence to the characters' behavior, although they did pull me out of the story on occasion. The three--or perhaps four?--main characters are particularly well-developed. Juli serves as an enigma through much of the tale, and in some ways The Heart of Thomas is set as a mystery where the reader slowly gains the necessary pieces to determine what has caused him to show such hatred toward Thomas and his unintended proxy, Erich. Oskar serves as a nice sounding board for Juli and Erich alike, and his own storyline about the identity of his father and the fate of his mother serve nicely as a break in the melancholy of Juli's life. Erich was a bit of a troubling character for me early on. He was so irrational and impetuous to the point that it felt unnecessary. However, as we learn about his past life with Marie and how he was raised, his lack of emotional maturity makes more sense, particularly when considering the situation he was thrown into looking so much like the deceased Thomas. Of course, then there is Thomas, who we only get to see as himself through the few pieces of writing he left behind. We only see him as he was viewed by others, which was a shining light, the embodiment of "Amor"--and we often project onto others what we want them to be, not who they actually are (John Green's Paper Towns is an enjoyable novel tackling this very concept, by the way). Thomas internal loneliness and his sense of loss when Juli both changes and when the "farce" occurs are palpable. His selfless selfishness is a conundrum that fits so well into the story and really adds a nice layer onto an already emotionally fulfilling story.
There are plenty of faults to The Heart of Thomas, of course. It can be quite repetitive with the same arguments occurring time and again. Juli's behavior around Erich is inconsistent in a way that doesn't fit with the rest of his character. And then there are the random bits of comedy with a more comic strip-like art style that pop up in some of Tezuka's works as well that simply feel out of place both in tone and in the art. Thankfully, Hagio uses them much more infrequently than Tezuka did in say, Buddha, but they are there so reader beware that you might be momentarily pulled from the story every so often.
Overall, The Heart of Thomas is a story that any connoisseur of manga really should check out. It tells a compelling story with accessible characters and an art style that shouldn't put off more modern-focused fans. Additionally, the hardcover volume published by Fantagraphics is well composed and includes a nice historical essay by the editor, Matt Thorn, about the story's beginning and how it helped to change the face of shoujo manga. Quick note: there is a printing error on one page which is addressed in Professor Thorn's blog: http://matt-thorn.com/wordpress/?p=609
[Cross-posted to my blog effective 1/5/2015]
December 1, 2019
Questo mese, per il #girlstalkcomics ideato da @aphroditeuraniayt e @akaikoelize , abbiamo letto "Il cuore di Thomas" di Moto Hagio.
Questo è stato il mio primo approccio a questa autrice e posso assolutamente affermare che è stato positivo al 100%.
Nelle prime pagine ho trovato qualche "difficoltà" perché sembrava tutto così frammentato. C'era sempre qualcosa che mancava, quel dettaglio che completava il puzzle. Inoltre, non ero per niente abituata allo stile di disegno di Moto Hagio - per esempio, leggendo la notte a volte ero stanca e non riuscivo a distinguere Eric da Thomas e Oscar- però c'è da tener presente che questo è un manga del 1974 e trovo che la delicatezza del tratto e i dettagli, inseriti soprattutto per gli sfondi, siano davvero meravigliosi.
Durante la lettura di questo manga, ho sentito crescere giorno dopo giorno come una "passione" per le vicende che Jules e gli altri bambini del collegio stavano vivendo. Non riuscivo a staccarmi dalle pagine e, come una sorta di empatia, percepivo anche io le sensazioni intense dei personaggi.
Una "pecca" è stata il lasciare in sospeso alcuni dei personaggi e delle situazioni che avrei voluto si sviluppassero maggiormente, magari in un altro volume.
Essendo ambientato in Germania, i miei occhi hanno brillato quando ho letto poesie che rimandavano a Goethe: «E il ragazzo crudele spezzò la rosellina sul prato». Questo ragazzo che nonostante le spine, il dolore che queste possono provocare, vuole prendere - e fare sua - la rosa.
Spero di poter leggere presto anche "Il clan dei Poe" (in due volumi sempre per la Jpop).
Questo è stato il mio primo approccio a questa autrice e posso assolutamente affermare che è stato positivo al 100%.
Nelle prime pagine ho trovato qualche "difficoltà" perché sembrava tutto così frammentato. C'era sempre qualcosa che mancava, quel dettaglio che completava il puzzle. Inoltre, non ero per niente abituata allo stile di disegno di Moto Hagio - per esempio, leggendo la notte a volte ero stanca e non riuscivo a distinguere Eric da Thomas e Oscar- però c'è da tener presente che questo è un manga del 1974 e trovo che la delicatezza del tratto e i dettagli, inseriti soprattutto per gli sfondi, siano davvero meravigliosi.
Durante la lettura di questo manga, ho sentito crescere giorno dopo giorno come una "passione" per le vicende che Jules e gli altri bambini del collegio stavano vivendo. Non riuscivo a staccarmi dalle pagine e, come una sorta di empatia, percepivo anche io le sensazioni intense dei personaggi.
Una "pecca" è stata il lasciare in sospeso alcuni dei personaggi e delle situazioni che avrei voluto si sviluppassero maggiormente, magari in un altro volume.
Essendo ambientato in Germania, i miei occhi hanno brillato quando ho letto poesie che rimandavano a Goethe: «E il ragazzo crudele spezzò la rosellina sul prato». Questo ragazzo che nonostante le spine, il dolore che queste possono provocare, vuole prendere - e fare sua - la rosa.
Spero di poter leggere presto anche "Il clan dei Poe" (in due volumi sempre per la Jpop).
Displaying 1 - 30 of 144 reviews