Genre: BL/yaoi
Age rating: 16+
Price: $12.95

"In a way, you are a mirror -- neither machine nor doll. Growing and developing in relation to the amount of love bestowed upon you by your owner -- you are a Hybrid Child."

Shungiku Nakamura is probably best known as the creator of Junjo Romantica, one of my favourite BL series. Hybrid Child shows off a very different side of her storytelling talents: where Junjo Romantica is comedy bordering on farce, Hybrid Child is melancholic and sometimes even tragic.

Set in a slightly fantastical version of the early Meiji era, Hybrid Child is a collection of linked short stories about the Hybrid Children and their creator. A Hybrid Child is a kind of android that is initially rather doll-like in appearance; as it is cared for by its master, it grows, gaining human attributes such as movement, speech, and emotion. A Hybrid Child whose master does not love it will not grow, and if you can't see the BL possibilities in that concept, you haven't been paying attention.

But although the Hybrid Children might seem like a goldmine of potential romantic plots, in fact only the first two of the four stories in the collection deal with the Hybrid Children themselves; the third and fourth are about Kuroda, the inventor of the Hybrid Children, and how he came to invent them in the first place. Kuroda is the neighbour and childhood friend of Tsukishima, a high-ranking samurai who inherits the leadership of his clan just as the Emperor Meiji takes over power from the Shogun. Tsukishima and Kuroda have the kind of difficult-but-rewarding friendship in which Kuroda routinely insults Tsukishima and Tsukishima gets hot under the collar and insists that Kuroda commit seppuku for his insolence. In peaceful times, they might have had the chance to let their friendship slowly grow into something different, but they don't live in peaceful times, and right from the very first page there's an air of wistful mourning about their story. It doesn't help that we've seen Kuroda's future in the first story in the collection, and we already know that he's going to end up alone, looking scruffy and insulting his customers. The story is not in where he ends up, but in how he gets there; in seeing the inevitable tragedy unfold.

In a way, I want to say that Nakamura doesn't get as much use out of the Hybrid Child concept as she could have done, since the most important and longest story in the book is about a relationship between two humans with only a brief appearance by a Hybrid Child at the end; but on balance, I can see why she mostly abandoned the Hybrid Children in favour of their creator. There's something a bit creepy about the Hybrid Children before they're fully-grown, and Nakamura exploits that creepiness in both the second and third stories. In the second, the childlike Hybrid Child's naivety and emotional dependence is the occasion for a lot of off-kilter humour (alluding to shota in a way that made me feel a bit queasy before I remembered that this was a DMP book, and DMP are hardly going to publish something that might fall afoul of US anti-child-porn laws). In the third story, the one about Kuroda, the Hybrid Child appears only briefly, as I said, and in that brief appearance it acts precisely as a mirror of its master -- reflecting his true feelings in a way he couldn't anticipate. It's a sharp moment that gains its power from the fact that the Hybrid Children have been absent for most of the story.

If you look on it as BL, Hybrid Child is unconventional in being so downbeat; even the stories that aren't entirely tragic have a melancholy air to them, a sense of sorrow and loss. If you look on it as science fiction, Hybrid Child is not really satisfactory, since Nakamura doesn't really explore the nature of the Hybrid Children all that much, and eventually pushes them aside, preferring to focus on the human characters. Yet the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and while I don't rate this standalone as highly as I do Junjo Romantica, and it's nowhere near as entertaining as even one of the weaker Junjo Romantica stories, it's still affecting and thought-provoking, and it improves on a second reading -- which is more than you can say for most manga.

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