In reviewing Eerie Queerie!, a yaoi manga by Shuri Shiozu, I have to get something out of the way at the outset. It has an absolutely terrible cover. To judge the book by it, you might suspect you were picking up a story about boy hustlers getting ready for a night of club drugs and techno. (That might make an interesting manga in its own right, and it might already exist, but… not my point.) It’s nothing of the kind, but given the actual content and tone of the manga, Tokyopop might think about whether they’re deterring potential readers who’d find it resonant by wrapping it in lurid imagery.
Okay, I’m taking my grandpa hat off now.
Once you get past the wrapper, Eerie Queerie! turns out to contain lovely, surprising stories about friendship, loss, and human connections. Shiozu blends insight, romance, and comedy to tell gentle supernatural tales with a lot to say about the living and the dead.
The protagonist is Mitsuo Shiozu, a student wandering the border between loner and lonely. He can see and speak to ghosts, and his body seems able to act as something of a hotel room for spirits with unfinished business. At first, he views these spirits as a nuisance, and he has good reason.
Take, for example, Kiyomi, a schoolgirl who was killed in an accident. A loner like Mitsuo, she died before she could achieve some fairly major milestones – her first kiss, expressing herself to a boy she liked – and she’ll happily use Mitsuo’s body to take care of her unfinished business. Of course, this leads to the spectacle of “Mitsuo” admitting “his” crush on hunky classmate Hasunama, to the horrified delight of their homophobic classmates.
But inconveniences aside, the situation leads Mitsuo to some difficult conclusions about his own life and opens a world of possibilities as he comes to care about both Kiyomi and Hasunama. In helping the dead achieve closure, he’s able to start reaching out to the living. (And Hasunama is definite boyfriend bait… handsome, solicitous, and intuitive.)
The second story is kind of the flip side of the first. The ghost in question wants to help the living move on as opposed to the other way around. It’s equally effective and touching, and it manages to complicate Mitsuo’s ambiguous romantic life even further.
The third entry in the book, oddly enough, doesn’t feature any of the title’s principle characters, but it’s a good thematic match all the same. A young girl, who lost both of her parents, copes with those losses and worries that there’s another to come as she sees her twin brother moving on with his life. The ghosts in this case are figurative rather than literal, but the story explores the same emotional territory in moving and effective ways.
There’s nothing particularly distinctive about the manga’s art, but it serves the story and tone well. (And the boys are predictably gorgeous, matching yaoi standards.) Shiozu does a nice job with facial expressions and body language, which makes the moments of possession play well. (Mitsuo looks like Mitsuo, but you can tell someone else is at the wheel.)
Eerie Queerie! was a real surprise to me, and an decidedly pleasant one. It tells funny, moving stories about the connections people forge and the ways they move on from sorrow and disappointment. I’m looking forward to other volumes.