Growing Up Day by Day in Keigo Shinzo's Hirayasumi Volume 7
Keigo Shinzo’s slice-of-life story captures the ups and downs that most of us face every day, reflecting them through our own insecurities as we watch these mismatched cousins try to navigate their lives.
For cousins Hiroto and Natsumi, things seem to be going in opposite directions; Natsumi has hit a creative block with her budding manga career while Hiroto is finally making a low-budget zombie movie with his best friend Hideki. It’s a bit of a reversal of fortunes as Hiroto wasn’t quite a slacker, but his ambition wasn’t much more than that and Natsumi was making headway early on in her attempts to get her manga published. Maybe they’d be able to help each other during this time if they weren’t both wrapped up in their small worlds. Worse yet, even as they try to get through their lives, they see their friends taking steps, making progress, and growing up a bit. Natsumi’s best friend Akari wins an art competition that compounds Natsumi’s creative block. At the same time, Hideki tells Hiroto about a major upcoming change in his own life that upends Hiroto’s joy over their movie. In Hirayasumi Volume 7, Keigo Shinzo tells the story of Hiroto and Natsumi’s struggles with a compassion for all of his characters that is a gentle nudge to remind all of us to try and have the same kind of compassion for ourselves and others.
A couple of months ago, I described Hirayasumi to my son as “it’s Scott Pilgrim if Scott Pilgrim was actually a good guy.” (My son has read enough Scott Pilgrim to get this reference.) Like Bryan Lee O’Malley’s seminal story of growing up, Shinzo’s Hiroto is pretty much the definition of a man-child, grown up and responsible enough to be on his own (maybe that’s a bit more than Scott Pilgrim’s capable of) but still immature enough to be a hanger-on. Hiroto has his own place because an old granny that he was friends with left her house to him when she passed on. But he works at the local fishing pond, hanging out with the old dudes and families who spend their days there to pass the time. So when Hideki had his mid-life crisis and quit his job (in previous volumes,) the two old friends decide it’s time to do what they used to do when they were younger and make a low-budget movie. And they recruit Natsumi’s art school friends to be their crew.
While all of this is happening in Hiroto’s life, Natsumi won a manga competition and has a budding career as she tries to balance that with art school and the friends that she’s made there. So when her creativity feels at its lowest, she sees Akari’s star rising after she won a competition and that sends Natsumi spiraling into an even deeper funk and she begins trying to avoid her apparently more successful friend. Worse yet, she sees her slacker cousin doing something that he’s actually good at and it all weighs down even more on her. Of course, she doesn’t realize that Akari felt the same way when Natsumi’s manga started getting noticed.
Shinzo’s slice-of-life story captures the ups and downs that most of us face every day, reflecting them through our own insecurities as we watch these mismatched cousins try to navigate their lives. Hiroto and Natsumi are fairly universal types of characters; it’s easy to see something of yourself in both of them. Shinzo even extends that to their friends. Hirayasumi Volume 7 is about these specific days in these characters' lives but he writes and draws his stories in a way that opens them up for all of us. The story focuses on both the hopes and insecurities of these characters; the hope for tomorrow to be better than today but the fear that the people we love are going to leave us behind.
Akari and Hideki are Natsumi and Hiroto’s best friends but they’re also anchors in their lives. So if the anchors are moving up and on without them, where does that leave the cousins? Shinzo’s series has been a series of highs and lows for these characters; we see their lives shifting between these extremes in this very volume. So it’s this story of getting through each hour, day, week, and year trying to be open to the experience of these times. Shinzo manages to be both sympathetic and judgmental of his characters, giving them space to feel these emotions but that only goes so far before the storyteller wants to smack them upside their heads to get them back on track and see their friendships for what they really are.
Shinzo Kenzo captures the ups and downs of life and how they propel us or drag us down. He generates excitement in Hirayasumi Volume 7 by practically focusing on the mundane day-in-day-out life of these characters and the little things that happen that keep them going. A game of catch can become these moments of connection and reconciliation. Or the memory of sharing a shaved ice with a friend who is no longer around can trigger a memory of some wise words that they once had for you. As the characters go through their days and have these small, personal revelations, Kenzo uplifts his audience hoping that they’ll have the same little learnings that Hiroto and Natsumi have.
