Constellations in My Palm

Mizuho and his cousin Enji used to be inseparable, until an accident left him feeling self-conscious around his best friend and he began to pull away. Eight years later Enji has been accepted by a college near Mizuho and, naturally, the family invite their much-liked relative to stay with them. On arrival Enji, now handsome and matured, is polite and warm to all-concerned; except Mizuho. To Mizuho he hardly speaks, conversations are cold and stilted, and Mizuho wonders if his old friend now hates him for pulling away as he did...

Okay, so we can all see how this pans out. Two people, obviously both in love, obviously supposed to be together, consistently misreading almost all the signals until it all gets very happily sorted out right at the end. The trap, I always find, is that authors can't engineer believable misunderstandings, and leaves the audience sitting there going "Oh come ON!" Luckily Chisako Sakuragi and Yukine Honami are good with their plotting and the various twists and turns of the narrative are fairly believable, and made distinctly more palatable by the addition of Mizuho's best friend Issei, who, like the audience, can see pretty well what's going on all the time, even if the main characters don't, and is sitting there shaking his head.

Constellations in My Palm is a really lovely little tale, heart warming, romantic, and the artwork is genuinely interesting and very well drawn. The characters look excellent and what particularly impressed me was the variation displayed by the artist. A lot of mangakas have certain poses and expressions and looks for their characters which they use a lot. Similarly, they learn to draw one or two outfits and leave it at that. Whereas our central character Mizuho has - to my mind - an unusually high number of different clothes. Now, I don't mean all his costumes are fancy or complicated, just a tank top when he's lying around before bed, a shirt one day, a t-shirt and a jacket the next. It all just helps to make the characters fees a lot more real. Likewise I'm sure I've rarely seen such an array of distinct emotions coming out of characters, almost as if the artist is trying to never draw the same scene twice. (Unlike - he says, with a tinge of boredom - Fumi Yoshinaga, who seems to enjoy drawing similar looking characters in identical poses over... and over... and- I think I've gone slightly off point.)

Suffice to say, the artwork is excellent, and effortlessly interesting, which really helps add a sense of realism to the characters. My only gripe comes a little from the plotting. Now, I can forgive this, because I always find these misunderstanding-type stories a bit like farces, in that you constantly need to plot out believable ways for your characters to go on-stage, off-stage, miss each other, catch one another in compromising positions, and so on. And at some point it all normally gets a little bit silly. Here, it gets a little bit too silly for my liking, as Mizuho, in his depressed and angsty state, completely misses an important piece of information, akin to him not noticing that he was living with an enormous purple elephant. But we can forgive, we can forgive.

A final thing I shall note is the excellence of the ending. So often this kind of yaoi novel, which is focussed on how two characters are forced apart at one point, and follows them as they struggle to come back at the end, ends with a kiss, or a kiss and sex, and leaves it at that. Constellations in My Palm made me very happy because it showed a couple of scenes afterwards too; Mizuho being awkward, the two of them trying to work out where exactly they stood, and such like. It was very honest, and brought the story to a far more satisfying and natural conclusion, which, as you might have guessed, I liked.

So yes, in amongst what seems to be a wealth of very lacklustre Juné offerings over the past couple of months, Constellations in My Palm strikes home very nicely, and is refreshingly good with a strong dose of heart-fluttery-type romance. As per usual it's one of Juné's very lovely oversize mangas with their pretty dust jackets (which I used to think so marvellous until I bought some Drama Queen and 801 titles - but then we can't all be perfect). Definitely far more worthy of a read than most.