Mangaka Ai Yazawa is best known for Nana, one of the top-selling manga in existence. After debuting in 1999, the story of softhearted Nana has prompted live-action movies, Hello Kitty collabs, and rabid TikTok fandom, but its success hasn't guaranteed Yazawa's other work the same star treatment.
Last Quarter – Yazawa's supernatural shoujo manga from 1998 – has been lost to the English-speaking world until this fall when VIZ Media released the first in a two-book series of the manga's first English translation. Even though it's taken 26 years, I'm grateful that Last Quarter can finally brush off the cemetery dirt and get back onto dusty bookshelves. Its intoxicating suspense is a perfect example of what draws me to paranormal romance.
In the manga, Mizuki – with the Rapunzel hair and platform heels characteristic of a Yazawa heroine – meets Adam by chance. He's a moody musician, another Yazawa trademark, and impossible to resist, so Mizuki stops going to high school. "The rest of my life…belongs to you," she decides.
But life gets in the way. Though Mizuki is too in love to see it, something's wrong with Adam. His hands are freezing, and yet he leaves the windows wide open, for all of March's cold wind to curl through. He lives in an opulent apartment, but neighbors say it's been empty for decades, and when Mizuki ends up there alone, she discovers she can't leave. No one can hear her or see her, either, apart from a blue-eyed cat and the gracious fifth grader Hotaru, who Mizuki meets in a dream.
Since the Jane Eyre days, two things have made a paranormal romance story really worthwhile: the man, and the mystery. I think Last Quarter is an emblematic paranormal romance because it excels at both.
Like Mr. Rochester, like Edward, like Patrick Swayze in Ghost, Adam is beautiful and frightening in Last Quarter, as plausible as a monster as he is a husband. He doesn't appear often in book one, but his bright eyes make a lasting impression.
As French philosopher Roland Barthes writes in A Lover's Discourse, "isn't desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent?" Even after she's forgotten her own name, losing herself in days as repetitive as a nightmare, Mizuki still pines for Adam. She tasks Hotaru and her friends with bringing Adam back to her, declaring that, "I don't care if Hell comes afterward. No matter how wonderful Heaven might be, if Adam isn't there, it would be meaningless to me."
Mizuki's body-aching desire for Adam and what he represents – adulthood, novelty, potential – dissolves whatever boundaries we, as readers, have separating our love from fear. That's always my favorite part of the paranormal romance experience, embracing every possibility of fear. In the unknown, I find red connective tissue and the unmistakable, metallic glint of excitement.
I take the same away from Julietta Suzuki's 2022 manga series, Otaku Vampire's Love Bite, which Viz Media is also beginning to translate. In book one, released today, the perky Romanian vampire Hina has a crush on the gloomy human Amanatsu. He shares a sexy haircut and entire face with her favorite anime character, delectably blending reality and fiction.
It's a tantalizing mystery, the second ingredient in what I think is a winning paranormal romance story. And in Last Quarter, whose grayscale panels are often moonlit and melancholy, strangeness drives the plot more than a male protagonist with luscious hair. Little Hotaru is determined to help Mizuki rediscover her identity, and the truth of the dream-place where they first met. Was it purgatory? An omen?
Through Hotaru and Mizuki's intertwining and opaque fates, Last Quarter establishes a creeping anxiety as absorbing as its romantic elements. That's also what I find fascinating about Junji Ito's popular 1998 horror manga series Uzumaki. Unlike Last Quarter, Uzumaki has disproportionately more people spiraling in slimy agony than in thriving relationships. Its ending – and spoilers ahead – though, creates a satisfying combination of both; narrator Kirie and her boyfriend Shuichi collapse in a pile of dry and twisted corpses, holding each other close while their arms grow long and coil together.
As much as I enjoy mainstream horror manga's spilled blood and bloated bodies, I'm glad shoujo horror like Last Quarter is now starting to be translated. Aside from Uzumaki, it's rare that horror manga has a notable romance element, and when it does, it's often presented in the form of a misogynistic yandere crime scene. But Last Quarter protects the girls in its pages, subjecting them to the uncanny only in the context of tenderness. That's what I want from paranormal romance. It reminds me that nothing is pure, and nothing is doomed.
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