The Heart of Thomas

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Pages ordered from right to left.
"The setting: A boys' boarding school in Germany, sometime in the mid-20th Century. One winter day, fourteen year-old Thomas Werner falls from a lonely pedestrian overpass to his death, immediately after sending a single, brief letter to another boy at the school: 'To Juli, one last time. This is my love. This is the sound of my heart. Surely you must understand'" -- from publisher's web site.

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A Real Treat submitted by torikaebaya on February 4, 2017, 11:49am Published nearly one year ago, The Heart of Thomas by Moto Hagio has yet to receive the kind of accolade it truly deserves, which I'm inclined to think is unfortunately due in part to its price. For myself, being a poor grad student living alone, I admit to having lusted after but denied myself this title every time I walked into my local comic book shoppe due to its extremely high price point for an English manga. However, Fantagraphics has a reputation for publishing manga as high art that has yet to be challenged, so the price is not unfitting the work that went into producing it. Fortunately for me, I was eventually able to borrow a copy from a manga reviewer who also appreciates Fantagraphics and boys' love stories. The truth is though, I should have bought it the moment it was published.

From page one a reader is sucked into the world of the classic shoujo via the brilliant crimson watercolored intro pages, which function both to entice the eyes but also to set the mood for a story that begins with a suicide. Having long been a fan of Riyoko Ikeda's work, I was immediately struck by the similarities to Onii-sama e...: the unrequited love relationships between a complacent transfer student into a cloistered boarding school and the melancholy upperclassmen who can't fit in. The jovial, much-loved upperclassmen mentor who takes the transfer student under his/her wing, trying in vain to protect them against the rumors and cat-calls of their peers (although it's fun to realise that Oskar smokes to give him a cool aesthetic, but in Onii-sama e... it's Rei who smokes to give her a bad-girl aesthetic). And of course, from the devestating opening scene of young, beautiful Thomas flinging himself from a catwalk onto the railroad tracks. Thanks to the brilliant post-script by prolific translator Matt Thorn, the reader is made aware that Moto Hagio was a direct contemporary of Riyoko Ikeda and the Heart of Thomas was actually first published as a competitive venture riding on the coat-tails of The Rose of Versailles, and published during the very same year, 1974 (The Year of the Shoujo), as Onii-sama e...

For myself, their are two very beautiful and brilliant examples that both echo Ikeda and make Heart of Thomas wholy Hagio's own: page 214, an omake drawing of Oskar Reiser wearing a very Saint Juste-sama looking tuxedo (see page 111 in the Chuko Comics reprint of Oniisama e...) and tophat, standing next to Erich Fruhling, similarly adorned in what could only be a 18th century French uniform and ascott, but holding his mother's summer hat. Additionally, the scene that truly made the story for me: on page 122, the reader is presented with a quiet series of 4 panels on the top of the page in which kuudere mysterious roommate Juli Bauernfeind stops to adjust classmate Erich's bow-tie while admitting to him, "One of these days, I will kill you and remove you from my sight..." Not only is this scene so beautiful in its contradictory imagery, but the modern reader will be struck dumb to realise that this must in fact be the very first use of the image that would go on to be reused in shoujo and inexorably lead to the famous opening scene of Sachiko fixing Yumi's sailor collar tie, forever burned into the contemporary shoujo reader's mind.

To briefly touch on the rest of the story, Erich (who very closely resembles the deceased Thomas) grows closer and closer to school "prefect" Juli (the boy Thomas loved) and with the discovery of a love letter kept hidden in a library book, becomes the key for which Juli is able to finally unlock his feelings for Thomas and Erich and realise his (I hesitate to use the word "potential") desire to become a priest. The story is richly infused with a cast of interesting characters and past-love interests, mixing explosively with a tempest of roiling teenage emotions and male-male desire (which thanks in no small part to THIS VERY WORK would go on to create the entire genre of boy's love and yaoi and, yes fuel the world-wide love of manga as we know it, (I suppose Osamu Tezuka helped in some small way too). thank you Moto Hagio). In a word, The Heart of Thomas is masterful.

,,,The editing in this English edition however, leaves much to be desired for.