Tokyo and underground music protagonists of Yuhta Nishio's work
Tokyo After Hours (After Hours) is a three-volume shojo-ai, written and drawn by Yuhta Nishio, published in Japan by Shogakukan and arrived in Italy thanks to J-Pop Manga, which has collected the volumes in a practical and convenient box .Emi Asahina is invited by a friend to an evening in a nightclub; not being able to find it, however, and not being a lover of certain places, he feels like a fish out of water. However, there he will soon make the acquaintance of Kei, a tough and confident girl who instead seems to be in her natural habitat. Emi is immediately struck by this mysterious girl, so much so that she follows her out of the club and ends up in her apartment, where she will discover her passion for records, music and her work as a DJ. After some chat, Emi does not go back to his house, but decides to stay and sleep with Kei, thus giving life to a new and particular friendship.
Almost prophetic are the words of Emi: After Hours not only tells the meeting between two girls, but first of all the path that the protagonist will have to take in seeking the strength to close with her past, the ability to break a bond with a world that it is no longer his and find a place that he can define as “home”.
Kei thus takes Emi under his wing, proposing her to become his VJ. But what exactly does a VJ do? "He is the one who chooses in real time the videos that adapt to the music", a job that seems simple, but which actually requires a certain knowledge and harmony with the DJ himself.
Right from the start, you can see Emi's strange attachment to her new friend: she settles in her house, begins to follow her in her work, meets her group of friends and colleagues. Initially, the girl does not seem to have a "home" or a past to return to, but as time passes we will discover a secret that she has kept from Kei and that will question their new relationship.
The story therefore follows a very specific path, namely that of Emi in chasing away the shadows of her past and finding a new life, a new light together with Kei in the underground world of Tokyo.
A problem that can be found in reading Tokyo After Hours is the lack of insight into the feelings of the girls. If on the one hand the world of nightclubs is best represented and with many details, on the other, the same cannot be said of the relationship that is created between the two protagonists.
Yes, we learn about Emi's past and problems, but we know little and nothing about Kei. She barely touched the surface of the character and it would have been preferable to have more information about her past love affairs.
If in other works of the same genre we dwell much more on the complexes of falling in love with someone of the same sex, here some situations are put in the background, giving much more space to the musical setting.
A point in favor is instead the use that the author makes of some really existing tracks, such as We Are Your Friends by Justice or Music Sounds Better With by Stardust, to be kept as background while reading some chapters to get deeper into the spirit of musical event.
Nishio's line is often simple and sometimes "dirty": he makes a wise use of screens, blacks, lights and shadows, giving the tables the right depth, as can be seen from some shots that the author gives us of a Tokyo night, its buildings and its streets, glimpses that anyone who has been to Japan will recognize as family. Not only that, but the darkness of some scenes allows the reader to identify with what the character is experiencing, better understanding his feelings.
As for the physical edition proposed by J-Pop on our market, the manga format is 12x16.9 cm paperback with dust jacket with relief elements; each volume has a handful of color pages, and contrary to how it is usually used, these are not placed at the beginning of the volume but in the middle of the volume. Moreover, if the first two volumes have a very similar number of pages, the same cannot be said of the third which appears much more often; to highlight in this sense the choice of the publisher who did not increase the price (€ 6.90 each) despite the greater number of pages.