The Size of My View

(Farewell to My Alter review)

The opening title story of Nio Nakatani’s one-shot collection Farewell to My Alter (2020) sets the bar so high that we wonder if she will keep up that level of quality. She doesn’t. But even if the remaining one-shots do not hit the target dead center, this is still a collection worth reading and owning. All of these one-shots have a more mature and refined feel than most manga out there. It cements Nakatani in the same league as Natsuki Takaya, Mitsuru Adachi and Tatsuya Endo.

What sets Nakatani apart from other manga creators is a sense that she gets her influences and inspiration from places other than anime and manga. In particular, some of the one-shots call up memories of short story master Raymond Carver in how the most powerful emotions go unsaid or unexpressed.

The collection has all Nakatani’s favorite themes: Girl’s Love, identity, and the self. At the center is the title story, which if written as prose, would get recognized as a masterpiece. It opens at the funeral of a high school girl where her twin sister sits in attendance. The mourners speak vaguely of an accident. The reader could be excused for thinking this will be a conventional story about the death of a sibling. It is anything but. It deals not with death, but with life. By starting the story at the end and then jumping back in time, Nakatani gives us a coiled tension so when the final tragedy occurs, we are devastated not because it happened, but because we were powerless to intervene.

The second story, “The Hero Saves the World Three Times” also bears special mention, as Nakatani takes a generic fantasy setting and gives it a Kurt Vonnegut twist. Other stories like “Tear-Flavored Escargot” dip into magical realism and point towards her most recent work, God Bless the Mistaken. “Happiness in the Shape of a Scar” which details the relationship between a High-School girl and her piano-prodigy classmate shows the Carver influence in full force. It moves from placidity to shock and guilt, then circles back without missing a beat, evoking Ian McEwan. There are also cute stories such as “Double Bed” that counteract the more serious ones nicely. The final story, “I Want to Be Kind” rounds out the collection on a melancholic note.

There are some one-shots I liked more than others, but none that are completely awful. Nakatani displays a command of skill that not only compares to the best manga creators, but also the best short story writers. That she could write so many of these stories early in her career before the triumph of Bloom into You is even more astonishing.

Patrick Paul Barrett

Note: The following piece was first drafted back in 2023. Of course I was a different person and writer back then, but going through my files I dug it up and liked it enough to decide to share. The version here has been slightly revised.