River's Edge

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Japanese: リバーズ・エッジ

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Information

Type: Manga

Volumes: 1

Chapters: 14

Status: Finished

Published: 1993

Genres: Drama, Slice of Life

Theme: School

Demographic: Josei

Serialization: None

Authors: Okazaki, Kyoko (Story & Art)

Statistics

Score: 7.32¹ (scored by 2,366 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #4861²

² based on the top manga page. Please note that 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #3203

Members: 7,773

Favorites: 171

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Kodansha USA

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7.32

Ranked #4861Popularity #3203Members 7,773

MangaOkazaki, Kyoko (Story & Art)

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Volumes: /1

Chapters: /14

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Synopsis

Haruna Wakakusa and Yamada become friends after she saves him several times from her boyfriend's constant bullying. Through him she gets to know Kozue Yoshikawa, a fellow student who also models professionally. The three emotionally stunted teens' lives briefly yet intensely intertwine for one semester before splintering from the aftereffects of one disastrous night. For both Wakakusa and Yamada, their emotional awakening fosters an unlikely friendship between the two battered souls.

(Source: MU)

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Background

River's Edge was published in English by Kodansha USA under the Vertical Comics imprint on June 27, 2023.

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More characters
Characters

Wakakusa, Haruna

Main

Yamada, Ichiro

Main

Yoshikawa, Kozue

Supporting

Kanna, Tajima

Supporting

Kannonzaki

Supporting

Rumi

Supporting

Reviews

Mar 23, 2021

unspecified-user

Recommended

If you found an abandoned corpse, would you come stare at it whenever you needed to feel better about your life?

River’s Edge is the kind of manga I love to find. While Okazaki Kyoko is one of manga’s foremost and greatest josei authors, she’s tragically under-known in English-speaking communities. Her stories capture a kind of realism that’s both tragic and comedic. People suffer, are victims of their own self-imposed complexes and worries, self-destruct, and yet there’s always a sense of nihilistic levity. To worry too much about the horrors before them is to take life too seriously.

Even then, out of the stories of hers that ... I’ve read, River’s Edge is the darkest. Pink was gleeful and flippant in its slice-of-life portrayal of how much easier life is when you don’t worry too much. Helter Skelter was a grand tragedy, of a larger-than-life celebrity whose facade began to break as she flew too close to the sun. And River’s Edge is grounded, focusing its tragedy on ordinary people, with an air of realism inhabiting every way in which they hurt each other. Unlike those other two, River’s Edge is a study of a larger ensemble cast.

The protagonist, Wakakusa finds herself torn as her reckless boyfriend Kannonzaki bullies the secretly gay Yamada. In helping him, she becomes embroiled in the web of relationships with Yamada’s unsuspecting girlfriend, Kanna, and the young bulimic model Yoshikawa (who you may remember from Helter Skelter). There isn’t a singular goal to this narrative — they carry on with their lives, have conversations, and clash for reasons that feel natural.

Is it really realistic? That depends. No story truly can be, but River’s Edge shows one side of how Okazaki views reality, and I think it’s an interesting one. Most high-school manga are written to embody certain fantasies of that era of life. Okazaki is here to explore its flaws, not in the system, but in the people themselves. There’s certainly a realistic flair to some of the dialogue, in Yoshikawa’s eating disorder, or in Yamada’s sexuality. There’s a great conversation where he calls Wakakusa out for thinking that just because he’s gay, it’s appropriate to ask him overly sexual questions.

It’s the same kind of drama that might seem like it could be fully resolved if everyone just communicated, but this is not your shonen or shojo where they fail to do so just to force conflict. River’s Edge’s characters wouldn’t feel like themselves if they truly told each other how they felt, and that would probably make them hate each other more. It captures the imperfections of people who don’t understand what they really want.

You want to see Wakakusa call out her boyfriend. You want a climactic confrontation where she breaks up with him, pledges to never have anything to do with him again. You don’t get it, and it’s not because this manga is realistic. It’s because Wakakusa is a teenager who was never quite aware enough to realize that would be an option, much less go through with it. That’s not to say it’s a tragedy. In the end, her life goes on in a way you can accept, no longer affected by Kannonzaki’s behavior.

The end is woven surprisingly tight, though, for a story of this nature. Every plotline weaves together naturally, in a way that would betray the sense of realism if not for how well it’s done. It doesn’t feel like an ending Okazaki envisioned and contrived her story toward. It feels like the simple result of who the characters are. That’s the whole appeal of this manga. You won’t get the drama of heightened reality, but the characters are interesting, and they find themselves in interesting situations. It’s more about the people than the message, but the message is as simple as how important it is to treat each other kindly. What hooks you isn’t that simplicity, but the complexity that arises when people fail at that.

On a technical level, Okazaki is as competent as ever. While perhaps off-putting to those used to the stylization so common in the medium, with its simply outlined eyes and mouths, there’s still a careful aesthetic, and plenty of great composition and visual storytelling. The story can be a little more text-driven than it needed to be, and the flow of dialogue bubbles was sometimes unintuitive — flaws I didn’t find in Pink or Helter Skelter. But like those two manga, I would put River’s Edge on a list of great character studies that anybody should read if they’re interested in such a thing, in exploring josei, or in exploring what great manga can be found beyond the mainstream.

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Aug 19, 2020

-_-Val

Recommended

First I want to warn you that there will be spoilers, not much but there will be, I am not a native English speaker, and I am sorry for any mistakes I make. We started.

River's Edge, Netflix passed me by and recommended his film, I was going to start watching it but I realized that it's an adaptation of a 1993 manga, although it's not the eighth wonder of the world either.

Story 8/10
Well the story is “innovative” in the 90s because well... this kind of plot was very interesting and touches on taboo subjects for the land of the rising sun (knowing that they are ... very conservative), like homosexuality, I would have liked Yamada's homosexuality, Haruna and Kannozaki's relationship and other characters to have developed a little more (I will talk about this later). I also want to emphasize about the corpse, this had some symbolism or what?, what I understood was that 2 crazy people found a corpse and when they need to calm down, they go to the corpse and relax, WTF? Well, as I said, two crazy people, what can you expect? And about Haruna's reaction to the body... I don't know, she's just another crazy person like the two of them. Take a step back, don't let them know you're leaving and run to the police, I don't know if what I said makes sense but that's the way I see it.

Art 7/10
Well, I'm not much of a critic of animation and this kind of thing because, well, I don't know anything about drawing but I can identify when it's a bad drawing and when it's not. This style of drawing is not the best but I like it, a simple and fresh drawing style for the year the story takes place and when it was published.

Characters 6/10
I have mixed feelings here... but of the bad
Well I would like to talk about each one individually but it would take too long, so I will do my best.
Yamada is a poor boy who is bothered, shy and quiet but surprise, surprise, it's GAY!... for me it's not interesting, I feel that he doesn't innovate much, I don't know if it's because this kind of characters are burned
Haruna is a normal girl, but she's got a screw loose in her head. Her friendship with Yamada is very rare for me, but she enjoys it, it's nothing big but GOD, when I say that this girl has a screw loose in her head it's because I say it with reason, first you have a boyfriend who likes to hit everyone who crosses him, he hits your BFF, possessive, he has relations with your other BFF, you say you don't love him, but they have sex and the worst, he rapes you and the 2 crazy people are watching that and leave her alone, that is to say, bad friends, with those friends so that enemies. Anyway, the hypocrisy. What kind of girl goes around with a guy like that?
Yoshikawa, a girl who didn't really make sense of the plot. A crazy girl who likes to see dead bodies like Yamada and kills cats too, what was the point of her being part of the main characters? That she turns Haruna into a lesbian? We'll never know.

Enjoyment 7/10
Like I said, it's not the wonder but it's not the swill either, it's enjoyable, you want to read something fast? This is for you buddy.

In conclusion, a good manga that could give more, had an interesting story but as long as we advance little by little it declines, either because of its characters that lack more development or because it's an open ending. What I did like about his epilogue is that as he makes it very clear. In life, we know thousands of people but there will be a moment when they will no longer be there, even if it hurts, it is the law of life.

Thank you for reading and have a nice day

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Nov 27, 2023

Galletita

Mixed Feelings

River´s Edge can be a painful read. Exploring sensitive topics ranging from eating disorders to sexual violence and abortion, it is a brutal yet sincere portray of the struggles of the youth in 90s Japan. The story is mostly told from the perspective of Haruna Wakakusa, a high school girl in an extremely toxic relationship disillusioned with her peers and and everything surrounding her life. She soon meets and befriends Ichiro Yamada, a fellow classmate viciously bullied by Haruna´s boyfriend and his friends.

Haruna´s and Ichiro´s shared struggles and bonding through their harsh experiences in this bleak society is the main narrative drive of the manga, ...

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