Some­times great drama doesn’t need ini­tial com­edy while your audi­ence gets in touch with the char­ac­ters, or a long and com­plex buildup to raise the ten­sions, or fan­tas­tic ele­ments and mir­a­cles. Some­time all you need is to blend together two char­ac­ters with unfor­tu­nate cir­cum­stances and breath life into them. After all, the pie of life is always half sweet and half bit­ter, and by directly con­fronting its sad­dest ele­ments we arrive at some­thing bit­ter­sweet, beau­ti­ful, and absolutely touching.

Maybe illus­trat­ing the manga edi­tion of Voices of a Dis­tant Star instilled her with the same essence that Shinkai Makoto used to author his work; maybe she always had the gift. But either way, Sahara Mizu’s works man­age to por­tray char­ac­ter and rela­tion­ship devel­op­ment with a depth that few oth­ers could reach.

Her most notable work  yet is prob­a­bly Watashitachi no Shi­awase na Jikan (Our Happy Time). Despite its slice-of-life drama genre and its short­ness, com­plet­ing its story with only 8 chap­ters in a sin­gle vol­ume, this manga is cur­rently ranked at the #5 most highly rated manga on MAL. A well-deserved achieve­ment, but its still lim­ited to a MAL read­er­ship of 1200ish— which is what inspired this post.

It’s hard to describe Sahara Mizu’s style. To start with, they’re melan­cholic and intensely emo­tional, and they’re always filled with real-life prob­lems, pos­ing dif­fi­cult ques­tions that plague the human con­scious­ness at every turn.

In Watashitachi no Shi­awase na Jikan, a pianist who has thrice attempted sui­cide meets a indiscriminately-killing mur­derer on death row. One has life but no desire to live it, one has taken the lives of oth­ers and couldn’t wait to end his own. We’ve seen plenty of sui­ci­dal char­ac­ters in drama, but Mizu-sensei’s por­trayal of both their tragic pasts and unsta­ble present really brings the reader’s heart and soul to under­stand and even sym­pa­thize for the two leads’ sui­ci­dal ten­den­cies. Yet at the same time, she ele­gantly spins the story about, show­ing how two peo­ple stuck in the dark­est pits of life melt the frozen hearts of one another and help each other real­ize the value of being alive; not to men­tion the birth of a romance doomed to fail from the start but nev­er­the­less pro­vides ever­last­ing hope to the two. The manga also presents sev­eral moral chal­lenges: does a per­son who killed in cold blood deserve for­give­ness? does one have a right to run away from their prob­lems via sui­cide? It’s aston­ish­ing how Mizu-sensei man­ages to bring a deep sense of char­ac­ter attach­ment to the audi­ence despite how despi­ca­ble their lives seem at first glance.

Another work of hers I had just caught up to is My Girl. This series presents a far more com­mon sce­nario: a sin­gle young man dis­cov­ered that his high-school ex-sweetheart has died, leav­ing behind a young daugh­ter (around 7~8?) who is sup­pos­edly his, even though he’s never even heard about her. Amidst the dis­ap­proval of his par­ents and the claims of cowork­ers that he’s being taken advan­tage of, the father bonds with the daugh­ter, uncov­er­ing the truth behind why the love of his life failed and explor­ing a brand new plea­sure in life — the respon­si­bil­i­ties of a father, the joy of a fam­ily. Through the story, Mizu-sensei also con­trasts his sit­u­a­tion with that of other trou­bled fam­i­lies, help­ing to solve prob­lems on both sides. My Girl describes how many of life’s great­est enjoy­ments lies in the most tragic of sur­prises. Must a good life fol­low the proper pro­ce­dures? Is teenage preg­nancy nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing? How painful can a parent’s love become? Mizu-sensei uses the com­mon events we see all around us to bring yet another touch­ing series.

This manga res­onated with me in a very per­sonal way because of the fact I was brought up by a sin­gle par­ent, and I cer­tainly rec­om­mend it to any­one who had sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances. Masamune (the dad) may not be the most capa­ble, but he is such a lov­ing father that I felt sur­pris­ingly envi­ous. Of course, Koharu her­self is also one of the cutest kids ever—

If a sim­ple moment like this touches your heart, then the series has succeeded.

That’s about it for her two seinen seri­al­iza­tions. Sahara Mizu, a pen name itself, is also known as Sahara Keita in her shoujo works, Chikyuya/Sasshi for her dou­jin­shi, and most notably, Yumeka Sumomo for her BL works (I rarely read BL since I’ve seen very few good ones, but I think this is the next thing on my manga back­log to try out). Now that’s a lot of pen names… sadly, most of her other stuff are very short sin­gle vol­umes or out­right one-shots, which is prob­a­bly where her zero-filler no-nonsense style comes from.

Mizu-sensei’s art style doesn’t exactly stand out that much from the norm. Her three finest aspects are the clean­ness of the art­work, the con­sis­tent pro­por­tion­al­ity of the char­ac­ters, and smoothly rounded lin­eart. Not sur­pris­ingly, the art­work does a great job con­vey­ing the appro­pri­ate emo­tions across. Her weak spots would prob­a­bly be the shad­ing and tex­tur­ing, which is often­times com­pletely absent and leaves the lin­eart rather bland looking.

Thanks goes to Psy­cho Pan­das for trans­lat­ing Watashitachi no Shi­awase na Jikan, and to Storm in Heaven for doing both (and sev­eral other of her shorts).

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