My Life in Manga

I think there are times when we dreamt of having lived in a manga.

Erin F. posted on tumblr this funny post of two characters from Nana with a caption on how you should think twice on living in an Ai Yazawa manga. Just imagine your life in Nana, where you may possibly fall with a rock star, get played, get preggers, find a hot not!girlfriend as your roomie and live the dream with great tears.

No. I’d rather live in Gintama where life is carefree and I can hire someone for the price of sugar.

The image eventually sparked a wonderful exchange with twitter folks! Some wouldn’t mind living in an Ai Yazawa title while others had their own suggestion. I ran down a list which isn’t enough since I’d like to live in most of the manga I enjoy until a friend turned the question around and asked “Which mangaka would you pick to illustrate your life story?”

Now, isn’t that a dream? Now who out there can make my most “boring” life amazing?

My life as a manga?

You have got to be kidding me.

I don’t think my life is any special that it merits a manga nor do I think that someone can make my life interesting. Even if I asked Naoki Urasawa to write my life, he’d sooner write a fictional story of me getting killed by Johann during my trip to Frankfurt when I went to Germany in 2008.

But I do know that there are authors out there who find inspiration in the plebian lives of others, thus with the absence of ninja, samurai, and magical girls in my life, I am possibly saying goodbye to a wealth of shounen and shoujo authors. So goodbye, CLAMP. I don’t think we can ever work on Khursten-holic. Also, I’d like to keep my eye, kthx.

I wondered in hindsight if my life was something like Crayon Shin-chan? I lived around cousins who had a potty mouth and my parents have had their fair share of wackiness. But then Yoshito Usui’s dead and I also didn’t flash my non-existent ‘elephant’. I was a prude kid too with the occasional joke or two. I wasn’t particularly social either. So skip making something out of my childhood. Maybe my adolescence has something better to say.

Shoujo life. Didn’t we all dream of that?

Unfortunately, I studied in an all girls school. And as much as I would love for Suzue Michi to capture my life in High School debate (and my sparkly shoujo eyes), it was, unfortunately, quiet in the romance department. I didn’t get to have a High School debut, I was too smart, too plain, too geeky for that. So… goodbye to romcoms. That’s a ‘NO’ to a Kimi ni Todoke life. And a ‘NO’ to Aoharaidou.

Is my manga life looking glum?

Well, if anything, I was part of a really funny class. There’s a great chance that Kiyohiko Azuma would have found my all girls class interesting. I’d probably be the Yomi of the group. Only… I became an otaku as a karma for teasing my classmate for being obsessed with Yuusuke in Yuu Yuu Hakusho.

What about my Otaku life?

By the time I hit college, I have become an otaku and that much hasn’t changed 12 years later. I wasn’t a complete social outcast but I did spend hours studying Japanese and went on pilgrimages to oggle with people about manga. It’s easy to say that my otaku life should be captured by Genshiken I feel the title only captures my otaku life and not my life as a woman. Can Shimoku Kio balance it? I have no doubt that he can capture my fujoshi life but I feel that some of my emotions as a woman might escape him.

Clearly, josei’s the way to go. And while it’s tempting to grab an author with great melodrama (my adult life seemed to be littered with this, strangely, a decade too late), my life until now was a great life. I need an author who can capture my crazy academic life and manages to balance my downs with some bad puns for uppers.

An Akiko Higashimura life

I think, out of all the authors out there, Akiko Higashimura’s the lady who can capture my crazy fujoshi life as it struggles to find validity in the real world. She draws women of all body types so my full figure won’t be difficult for her! At the same time, her style captures a wide range of emotions that are past happy and sad. She has batshit insane, all my creys, do not want, and rolling in the deep.

She can definitely make the crusty old historians I meet on a day to day basis as adorable and lively as I see them. Bastions of national history appear a lot less intimidating when they start telling jokes about Marxists and the human failures of heroes.

She can defintely catch my daily fangirling, the face I make when I spazz about an academic who suddenly emails me, or series that has stolen my heart.

Painful memories become beautiful and everyday’s filled with insanity and hope.

I trust Akiko Higashimura with my life story and I’m quite sure if she’d written it, you’d probably enjoy it a lot more, especially the bad puns and references.

So, if you can get a mangaka to draw your life, who would you ask to draw it? <3