Ono-sensei has such a distinctive art style, it’s too bad that, most of the time, I find her jumpy storytelling hard to follow–the sole exception being House of Five Leaves, (although looking back at my review, I had some of the same problems with the writing there).
At least, Not Simple is intentionally set up as a frame. It starts with….
SPOILERS
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…the main character’s death.
The whole story is told as a ‘how did we get here?’ kind of tale. I don’t necessarily hate that kind of set-up, but I find it more rewarding when it’s not so unrelentingly grim.
Ian (he’s an Australian) has a really terrible life. You know his life is sh*t, when one of his happiest moments is VISITING HIS SISTER–who is actually his biological mom–IN JAIL.
Ian’s life is so awful that he can be traumatized by bubblegum… and you don’t even really want to know why, and, yet, Ono-sensei tells you all about it. TWICE. (It involves sex work, when Ian is SUPER underage.)
Like much of what I’ve read so far of Ono-sensei’s other work, I spent the whole time waiting for things to get better, which was especially dumb with this one given its frame. I KNEW Ian was literally doomed to die as he’d lived–used by other people for their selfish gain (with a tragic twist of connectivity).
I guess I kept hoping for some kind of explicit relationship to form between Ian and his New York writer/reporter friend, Jim. Jim is implied to be gay, and seems to have a on again/off again relationship with a (trans?) person named Alex. Jim follows Ian around because he says he wants to make Ian the subject of his new book, because the crap that happens to Ian is almost unbelievable it’s so awful.
For himself, Ian portrayed as ‘simple.’ Everyone who meets him remarks on how weird he is, and he rolls with situations that I suspect most people would react to by yelling “RED FLAG! RED FLAG!” and running screaming in the other direction.
I’m not sure what the point of Not Simple is. Because, the story seems to be: sh*t happens to Ian and then he dies.
It’s possible that Ono-sensei thought she was being more subtle with the sister-is-actually-mom-by-incest “mystery,” but that seemed clear to me the first time Ian suggests that he thinks maybe his sister is his mom. Even if the Ian/sister relationship supposed to be the point of the thing, it’s deeply unsatisfactory. Ian, who made it his life’s quest to reconnect with his sister/mom is thwarted by the fact that, just before he arrives, she dies of pneumonia in jail–actually a complication of AIDS, which Ian also contracted (from the same man, as it happens).
I guess it’s not bad enough that Ian ends up shot to death by a mobster in a case of mistaken identity, but he was already dying of AIDS, given to him by his bio mother’s boyfriend who had been pimping him out at fourteen at the behest of his ‘adoptive’ mother (his father’s wife).
Just even writing that plot point out shows how ridiculous this thing is. The amount of preposterously AWFUL circumstances that have to connect to make this work are unreal (–I didn’t even get to how the “mistaken identity” is actually part of a whole contrived thing where this seemingly random girl wants Ian to pose as her boyfriend because her mob father is going to kill her actual boyfriend, only, it turns out? Random girl isn’t so random. Her mom is a woman that Ian actually had one nice date with years ago and he’s come back to this particular diner, three years later, in order to meet up with the mom again…).
Slice-of-life, my a$$. This is tragic magic. What can go wrong, will go wrong, and it will all sh*t on Ian in some kind bastardization of “fate.”
Hmmmm, I guess I didn’t really enjoy this manga. It made me sad.
As a bonus, as far as I can tell (and Baka-Updates reports) no one has scanlated it. You can, however, read a sneak-peak via Viz Media’s official site for the manga: https://www.viz.com/not-simple (looks like you have to have flashplayer to read it, though, so be warned.)
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