Rudy Recs: Season of Alabaster (Patreon)

I stumbled on this manga called Season of Alabaster by Takatsu Makoto a bit ago and I've wanted to write about it for a bit, but the chapter that came out today compelled me to spill my thoughts about it while they were still fresh. There are only 9 chapters out at the time of writing this, but something has really grabbed my attention very early (no, not JUST what you're thinking, haha) so I wanted to talk about why I'm invested in this one and hope the manga sticks the landing.

Season of Alabaster is about a young high schooler named Gin who has more or less become disillusioned with school on his small little island, and spends most of his time hanging out with his friends practicing graffiti. He gets caught by a woman who actually turns out to be his school's art teacher and she ends up taking his abandoned sketchbook as he and his friends run away from fear of getting reprimanded or expelled.

What I find really interesting in hindsight is that the first introduction to this teacher is this loud spouting of her mentality that artists should be creating their work to show off to others in proper spaces. For now, it seems inconsequential, but I really like when some themes or ideas that drive the story are pushed right in front of you before you see what they mean for the bigger picture.

Gin gets summoned to the art room after school by way of ransom note in his locker over his missing sketchbook and when he can't find the art teacher, he ends up chasing a wild cat, stumbling onto the roof of one of the school buildings to find the teacher with an elaborate room setup and a larger than life nude self portrait in progress. The teacher, named Sakura, had been looking through his sketchbook and sees that he has potential. She makes an offer to give the sketchbook back if he will practice nude figure drawings of her.

So this is where I have a lot to say about what this manga is doing. On the surface, this appears to be just an erotic school fantasy where a boy gets to interact with his teacher in a forbidden, sexually tense manner and maybe things get wild or whatever. An extra layer I haven't touched on though is that Gin has an aversion to sexual stuff, like getting nauseous from nudity or sexually explicit imagery like when his friends find a porn magazine. Gin wants nothing to do with this teacher and she kind of makes him sick a bit until she sits down and the light hits her a certain way and things just kind of click for him.

My suspension of disbelief is still going through this wild scenario because I've felt, as an artist, the ability to sort of turn off a lot of desires for bodies when you start to look and observe them with an analytical eye and a purpose for learning. You could view this as her knowing and banking on this factor to come into effect through drawing, as she expects that he would be stupidly horny from seeing her naked that he would gladly take part in drawing her and eventually get lost in the process. Gin doesn't bite immediately and Sakura doesn't have an alternative so she has to take the rout of more intentional sex appeal to try to get him to break. The situation Gin and Sakura find themselves in is so deeply problematic but is seems like Sakura is subtly pushing Gin in a direction for her own unexpressed purposes. 

He starts drawing and after 10 minutes are up, Sakura checks his work and he didn't get much done. I think it starts become very clear now by how she responds to him making the effort that Sakura is actually trying to push him to find purpose to his art and create work that means something to him; to get attached to the subject matter of whatever he draws and to FEEL something worth conveying to others. This here is what gave me the impulse to talk about this work in the first place! I think Sakura as a character is really complex and most of her actions are driven by feelings that she is going out of her way to not express, either purposefully or by something that prevents her from doing so; she takes this approach for a lot of different feelings at different times through the story. She's quite an unreliable character and I think this complex, flawed personality makes this much more interesting than you would expect.

There's a little bit of questionable morals because we see Sakura try to use the sexual tension to keep Gin interested in continuing the nude drawing sessions with her after their first one. He might be a bit averse to it at times but there's a connection between them now and he's still a teenage boy, he's not completely immune to her charms and behaviors. She's also still THE art teacher and he also can't find answers to his problems alone.

This premise really had me stewing on the idea of letting characters make wrong choices in their pursuit of things that aren't fundamentally bad. We're quick to make judgements on if a character is good or bad when I think the most interesting stories happen when they convince us to not form an opinion and just understand why a character made their decisions to get to their goal. Sakura is actually a very considerate teacher and sees a student with a potential to become something, slowly trying to introduce him to art history and to see MORE art which can give him some sort of sustainable path that he can pursue.

It's only from her own selfish desires, later expressing that she still thinks of herself as an artist first, that she pushed Gin to start nude drawing because she was frustrated with her own mark making and wanted to take it out on him, possibly to guide someone through the process and hope to make a revelation in her own art by seeing someone else's expression of the same subject matter (but that's my personal read on it).

The two are deeply linked as mentor and student, and the problematic relationship that they're engaging in is really just the best that they can do and they stick to it because it's working. Gin is developing a stronger desire to be an artist even though he's getting pushback from his own family and Sakura is the one person he trusts that can guide him to the end goal that he's wrestling with.

The situation they find themselves in gets more complicated with Gin's childhood friend (that he kind of can't stand) finds out about their drawing time and Sakura clearly makes up an excuse because of her own selfish desires to hang on to the time they're spending together developing Gin's art. Gin struggles to figure out his own artistic desires while wrestling with how hopeless and frustrated he feels, stuck on his little island, and Sakura is clearly trying to use her one tactic of nudity to keep him focused and feel like he has something going for him that he isn't going to find anywhere else.

I don't know if there's any sort of real romantic tension forming between Gin and Sakura which I find so fascinating. It's in hard contrast to the amount of times they APPEAR to be in sexually tense situations, but to me it feels more like a wild and backwards way of forming a platonic intimacy and understanding between two artists that have a lot of complex feelings that are maybe too hard to put into words. When Gin becomes transfixed on Sakura and looks at her deeply, it's hard to know if he's looking at her as an object, a reference, a muse, or as a person that he's getting to know.

It's really quite a fun read that I have a lot of hope for! And beyond all of what I've said about the story, Takatsu Makoto's art is really cute, sexy, and appealing in a way that I feel a strong kinship and connection to. Hopefully this write-up gets you interested in giving this manga a shot!!