違国日記

IKOKU NIKKI

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
11
RELEASE
June 8, 2023
CHAPTERS
54

DESCRIPTION

The manga centers on 35-year-old novelist Makio Koudai and her 15-year-old niece Asa, who live together under one roof. Makio took Asa in on a sudden impulse after Asa's parents, which included Makio's older sister, passed away. The next day, Makio returns to her senses and remembers that she does not do well in the company of other people. So begins their daily life, as Makio attempts to acclimate to a roommate, while Asa attempts to get used to an adult that never acts like one.

(Source: Anime News Network)

CAST

Makio Koudai
Asa Takumi

CHAPTERS

RELATED TO IKOKU NIKKI

ANIME DramaIkoku Nikki

REVIEWS

Gummyfail
100/100
Ikoku Nikki is a story about grief, family and the words we use to name them
This review contains spoilers. I don’t think the work relies upon surprise, but I don’t want to mislead anyone who might read this. I cover the general shape of the protagonist’s relationship with her late mother and her aunt. This is the central narrative to the story. There is a large cast of characters who play significant roles outside of these three, but most of them are not even mentioned in passing in this essay.

Ikoku Nikki is a work primarily concerned with grief. The protagonist Takumi Asa begins the narrative with the death of both parents. She is suddenly found in the care of her estranged aunt Koudai Makio. Her abrupt guardianship was due to a sudden and sweeping pity for young Asa as she sat surrounded by a large, calloused extended family unsure of how to handle the situation. Pity is a keyword, because Makio would deny a sense of love (explicitly) and does not have a strong sense of obligation. Through Ikoku Nikki you will watch this pity warp and wane as they develop a stronger, more stable connection as family. Asa’s grief swells and recedes creating the rhythm of the story as we watch her unlock dusty corners in the minds of everyone that she pulls into her life with a strong and unevenly bright personality. Makio’s grief loosens and reveals itself as she allows her niece to interrupt the privacy of her daily life in the way that children do.

There is an emotional eclecticism to grief that is hard to explain, even to those that understand. Specifically, grief occupies a structure similar to chronic illnesses. It is recurring and its absence is best understood as a state of remission. For the sake of distinction, I will define ‘mourning’ as a reaction to ‘grieving’. This isn’t necessarily a universally acknowledged difference, but I think that I need clarity for the sake of discussion. Mourning is an action that is only achievable through an active state of grief. If I can continue the medical terminology, mourning could be understood as a common symptom of grief’s onset. However, grief is caused by an ultimately unprocessable state of loss. This inability to fully process the loss means that grief will continually present itself in surprising and idiosyncratic ways. Grief is a very unpleasant way to trace previously unknown contours of your mind and emotional disposition. Grief also alters them, reshaping the inner landscapes it maps.

You can neatly divide my life into two parts.The fulcrum is in 2012, when my father died of cirrhosis of the liver, a month later my grandfather died of pneumonia, and then in a few weeks, I graduated from highschool. So I would say it's fairly clear how something like Ikoku Nikki would appeal to me.

Of course I miss my father. I doubt I would write much of anything without his death. He stands at the center of my poetry, which, regardless of its quality, there are maybe a hundred poems I’ve written about him specifically. I was named after him as he was named for his father. I was raised with a very formal and concrete sense of legacy despite my entire inheritance being about $5500 dollars from disability that he was finally approved for after his passing. Even now, he lounges in the back of my mind. Making my peace with his death made my southern accent thicker.

Thanks to his death, I don’t have to grapple with the friction that comes with reciprocal familial love. He has been reduced down to several sentimental objects and an idea I can freely manipulate. I can imagine years of conversation wearing down his racism. I can talk about him like I would a cartoon character I have a particular fondness for, saying things to people I want to find me interesting like, “Did I ever tell you about how my dad did ecstasy and rode a four-wheeler?” I can magnify his tenderness when I need to, but still utilize his mistakes to sulk. You can do this with a living parent, but it dissolves the moment they speak. My mother is still alive, and the knowledge that some things will become easier when she passes is deeply uncomfortable.

Asa’s wound is complicated by her access to care. Makio, the only one who stepped in and offered her stability, openly resents her dead mother. Makio’s decision to make to tell Asa her true feelings coils anxiety in her niece’s chest. Anxiety about her own status as someone who is loved. This does not only extend to her immediate relationship with Makio, but reaches back in time and blurs the affections of her parents. With time, the stories you hear of deceased parents can be as vivid as your own memories. When Makio describes her sister as cold and judgemental, Asa’s mind wanders to small moments of reprimand. Her mother’s reaction to Asa’s last haircut seemed sharp and exasperated. The only thing she remembered her father saying about her hair was:

If Ikoku Nikki left its tone at this flat spoiling of memory, I don’t think I would like it very much. I think it would feel dishonest. However, Yamashita Tomoko understands grief’s capacity for surprise. Importantly, she writes Ikoku Nikki with the understanding that these surprises are primarily hidden in the understanding of a situation, rather than the production of new situations. Grief defamiliarizes people, places, and words. You can see a confusing shame well up in your grandfather at his son’s funeral like me. You can suddenly realize that your writer aunt’s definition of loneliness is fundamentally different from your own. You can try to communicate and suddenly feel the small but measurable distance between you and your closest friend. You can find yourself weeping, publicly, loudly, because you can’t remember how to write it:

You find yourself wrapped up in the granular explanation of the radicals that spell washtub, because your aunt said it with a healing urgency. You instinctively grasp why she’s so fussy with what she means, although you might find it pedantic.

Makio radiates a nervous energy that works to protect herself from failure. It allows her to withdraw from social situations and gives her the strength to choose her friends. Her introversion may be something innate to her personality, but the importance of her self-image exaggerates her preference for solitude. This is a result of the constant belittling she received from her sister and, to a greater extent than she admits, her mother. She is hesitant to cook gyoza because she’s worried she can’t do it right. Her niece almost makes her cry asking her to help clean. She maintains an ambiguous relationship with her lover for the sake of obscuring its problems. Most importantly, she is very very picky with her words.

I love Makio’s preoccupation with language, it felt very familiar to conversations I’ve had with poets, novelists, and more generalized writers. The way she spoke of the kanji that make up kanji felt self-satisfactory in a way I feel I recognize in myself and some people I’ve spent a long time sharing work with. Although we don’t talk much anymore, I have a friend who began writing poetry as he started working as a programmer. He loves super form-driven poetry. He liked to nest words in his words in ways that were super hard when we were exchanging writings most frequently. I admired his writing and often tried to mimic him so I can show you a smidge of what I mean:

Thick green thread wrapped aro
und the buildings and the posts and the trees. Aro
und the land and the people and the dead. Aro
und and a (let the whirring slow to a drawl)
round of muscadine wine to take the edge.

I wrote this stanza as part of a poem in either 2017 or 2018 I think. I had been writing anything that would let me practice making my line break interesting. I’m not particularly sold on this bit anymore, but I can definitely see myself trying to work something out of the physicality of the text in a way that had to have been because he sent me a poem that did something similar.

Makio’s interest in language, especially in how she explains kanji is rooted in a similar spirit. I broke apart the word ‘around’ just to get the ‘und’ to allow me to stutter an ‘and’-- sort of. When I was breaking words apart in this very literal way, it felt like unscrewing a cheap pen to access the small spring. Atomizing the pen allows you to see the ink’s physicality. I’m autistic so I immediately stuck a paperclip in the back of the ink cartridge and smeared the thick ink on my notebook the first time I did it. With all the parts separated, I couldn’t see the pen as a single object for a while. Makio and Asa’s multiple discussions of kanji function to appreciate the modularity of the words. English is not as good at this, but we do have compound words and the ability to use kennings as an archaic grammatical device when necessary.

Anyway, Makio’s preoccupation with language is central to how Asa’s grief develops. Her refusal to comfort Asa by lying may seed the girl’s initial anxiety, but it also functions as a landmark. Asa depends on Makio’s curtness and pedantic specificity. Makio’s attempt at objectivity allows Asa to use their conversations more ruggedly than just as comforting words.

This pull between grief and language forms the core of Ikoku Nikki. As you watch Asa grow, you watch her bend under the weight of her loss. I don’t mean to use ‘bend’ to insinuate her growth is stunted or malformed, but it is undeniably shaped. Not just the broad contours of her personality, but Asa’s trajectory as a person gets shifted by her loss. Makio’s insistence on clarity is stifling. Makio consistently finagles with definitions, with words as objects, or even forces to bargain with. Asa sees these actions as binding in the way that a cast is binding. Makio and Asa eke out warmth from two words and their difference, and this connection allows them to make irregular steps towards the only recourse towards grief which is adaptation.

While you watch Asa grieve and change, the series plants you in a corner similar to that of Makio. You watch from a fixed position, with the presence of her mother in the corner of your eye. She recurs in the form of empty rooms, in the phrases and expectations of her daughter, in a diary you don’t get to read very much of, and you are forced to flit between the life she is living and how she might have grown with the firm and uncontested security of a mother that let very few people even imagine her in doubt. You might find her cold or cruel, but Asa’s mother stands upright and lets her daughter look up at her in a way no one alive will.

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math3001
50/100
An incredible story portraying grief and love told by mangaka with an incredible hand at their craft
I will preface this by saying this is not a real review, but rather a collection of disparate thoughts I had on this wonderful manga. Also, the score on the bottom is the default score left as is. I don't rate and give number values and I am not allowed to remove it despite my wishes. So I leave it as is.

So the tl;dr is essentially that I think this manga is incredible at captivating my emotions and giving such a great sense of the process of grief and loss. And using that and beyond that it gives the such a great sense of the anxieties, troubles, and differences among people that they hold. I lack the capacity to fully articulate why I felt that way reading this. But I can point to some specific parts of the manga that I wish to expand on.

The first is chapters 7-8. Seeing the way the manga opens up and shows the way Asa first handles her grief. Where she's not openly or heavily grieving. But it's clearly affected her and she's adjusting to her new life with her aunt and no parents mostly. Reading that reminded me of a thought I often have myself. Whether I would cry or really care if one of my close loved ones would die. I've had people around me die, but I've never had a super strong bond with them to have really grieved them myself. It was mostly just pangs of regret down the line when I think of them. But I've always wondered what if my parents died, how much would I care, would I cry? I could relate a lot to the early presentation of Asa's grief cause of this as she's still finding her way. But then with chapters 7-8 Asa finally shifts from adjusting to life with her aunt to returning to her school for graduation. Textually it's presented as her wanting a moment without her parents death hanging over her and others simply thinking of her as the girl with dead parents. But it also represents the first time she's forced to actually go back to regular life and interacting with society at large. It finally hits her how real the loss of her parents is and everything comes crashing down on her releasing the emotions she kept. She lashes out in anger before breaking down in tears finally and then recognising the support she still has in her friend. Writing it out like this it feels like a very standard beat, but reading it made me cry and this is when I really realised this manga was going to be something.

Chapter 14 was also another standout one I thought. Having to now make decisions for herself with no feedback from her parents. Only to be paralysed by frustrating memories of their own views and differences but knowing that they still wouldnt be there. It was so well done and had some amazing sequences. Like the sequence where she's discussing clubs but then we get a flashback and it returns. It was so well executed and did a lot to just demonstrate those feelings of suffocation and frustrations but also sadness of not actually being able to have those interactions again. These following pages are a good showcase

and then a few pages later for the same scene we get another great sequence

It's just the mangaka's sense of storytelling and knowing how to show it all is incredible. Without even explicitly spelling it out to the viewer there's so much emotion merely conveyed in the way the story is presented.

Chapter 23 is also another brilliant one I thought. By using the diary it humanises Asa's mom and shows us a glimpse at her own life and troubles. BUt all while Asa is trying to reconcile her own feelings and questioning the love of her own parents. Hard to fully put down into words the way I felt reading this chapter. I really liked seeing Asa's mom and how she contrasts with the characters we've seen so far and the image that was already put towards us from other characters. And then it ending with her professing love for Asa but asa being unable to reconcile it with her own grief addled mind. Honestly just re reading it brings me to tears.

This is then immediately followed up with two very good chapters of Asa running away and then Makio trying to find her again. The way it ends just always moves me to tears. With Asa finding relatability in the novel Makio writes and then just breaking in tears once again.

A lot of this manga can end up feeling very cyclic now that I write some about it and think on it. But it hardly feels repetitive while reading. And knowing the nature of grief it makes sense, its never just resolved suddenly. It comes and goes and thats shown so naturally in this manga. One of my favourite recurring threads is Asa's anxieties over whether her dad really ever loved her at all. He was a reserved person who never spoke much to her and others so Asa is just left with questions. It's a question that just keeps popping up within Asa that the story touches on and doesnt with chapters in between. It's a kind of anxiety I can relate to and Asa without ever being able to confront her ad would naturally always wonder. Another thing I loved was the way the manga presented Makio and her own grief in relation to her sister whom she hated. Shes incredibly resentful and it never goes away as it makes sense but you can get the sense of ti dulling as she learns mroe of her sister and starts to relate in a sense to raising Asa. And honestly even beyond the greta representation of grief that's where the manga truly shines. The connection and love and bond formed between Asa and Makio. It is incredibly touching and heartfelt.

Unfortunately it feels I've more described what happens in the manga than really reflected on what it did to make me feel a certain way. I'm not too smart when it comes to talking about stuff like this. But I find what really makes this manga work is Tomoko Yamashita's grasp at the art of comic books. She has such a great sense of storytelling and utilising this medium to tell her story. It's honestly just another example of the kinds of stories and art I love this medium for. Even beyond the pages I've posted, there's just a clear ability Yamashita shows in her comic booking that is a step above what I see from the average manga or comic. It just helps sell the impact of this story and characters.
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