My Boy Volume 4 Review
Some spoilers ahead if you haven’t already read this far…
Two years have passed since thirty-something single businesswoman Satoko was forced to move back home to Sendai by the father of Mashuu, the twelve-year-old boy she’d secretly been mentoring. So a chance encounter with older Mashuu – now in junior high with a breaking voice and much shorter hair – throws her completely. He is delighted to meet her again (he’s on a school trip). We learn that he’s tried to contact her – but she has changed her contact details, trying to make a fresh start in her home city, living with her mother and younger sister. And now he’s really keen to stay in touch but she’s very wary of incurring his father’s anger again, even though she knows that her desire to help a lonely child was seen as meddling and possibly worse by the absent parent. It turns out that Mashuu and his young brother are currently being looked after by their grandmother while their father works abroad. And Mashuu (and his shy classmate Ogata) are now class reps, charged with organizing the school trip. Ogata has made herself into something of an agony aunt for her friends, getting tips from an online professional, and quietly revelling in the fact that she can be ‘useful’ to others (and wield a certain amount of emotional influence over them again). Guessing from his behaviour that Mashuu has a girl that he’s interested in, she offers ‘advice’ (gleaned from her professional source). This brings the two closer together – in a way. Ogata is vicariously living the relationship that perhaps she might like to have with Mashuu – but at a safe, controlling distance. Mashuu is just eager to keep in touch with his ‘Miss Satoko’ (without telling Ogata who the object of his interest is). And Satoko in all this? Living with constant emotional pressure from her mother to get married, her sister is the one who notices her unusual behaviour. Satoko is trying hard to distance herself from Mashuu – but the more she evades his friendly and well-meaning inquiries, the more determined he becomes to see her again…
If you can put aside the ‘coincidental’ meeting between Satoko and Mashuu that happened at the end of Volume 3, in which Mashuu is cast in the role of saviour as Satoko runs away from a marriage proposal from an old school friend, My Boy makes a refreshing new move in this second arc by offering us Mashuu’s perspective on events as they are now. Mangaka Hitomi Takano seems positively relieved and refreshed to be working with a different viewpoint character – and even tells us so in her Afterword! From the reader’s point of view, Mashuu is a breath of fresh air as while the reader sympathizes with Satoko, she’s something of a stifled, wary presence since her banishment to Sendai (‘She gave me a lot of trouble this volume,’ the mangaka tells us in the Afterword and the reader can see how and why.) The art is as accomplished and attractive as before and the characters’ thoughts and feelings (which sometimes conflict with what they are saying or doing) are well conveyed in the wide range of facial expressions and gestures as well as the many texts we are shown whizzing between their smart phones.
Kumar Sivasubramanian carries on the good work in this fluent translation for Vertical Comics and the edition is attractively presented.
My Boy continues to intrigue and beguile as the two-year gap in the narrative and change of point-of-view character provide a welcome change of focus. But the underlying question remains: why is Satoko so attached to a boy eighteen years her junior? The friendship is evidently important to both of them – but can it be allowed to continue within the constraints of contemporary Japanese society?
