Kaze to Ki no Uta

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I thought i was well past the point of getting emotional to the point of crying, over a manga/anime, and feeling a sense of profound emptiness after finishing a series after decades of being a weeb, but then i discovered THIS.

This series is an epic romantic tragedy, not entirely in chronological order.
As usual, the hallmark of a good series to me is one that makes you feel a very broad spectrum of strong lasting emotions, and i did. Envy, rage, hate, hopelessness, sadness, regret, frustration, stress and a few moments of bittersweet bliss.

Set in the late 1800s at a posh boys school outside of a ... small town in france, Serge battour finds himself living in the same room as gilbert, who sells his body for various reasons, and he finds himself getting emotionally attached to him, and also the story of both of their entire lives and how they were shaped as people.
Indeed, this series is full of every taboo you could possibly think of, to enjoy this series you need to have a MORBID sense of curiousity and an open mind (able to entertain ideas without necessarily accepting them). It is also very emotionally intricate/mature, so i can imagine a lot of younger people might not fully be able to "get it", i know i probably wouldn't have when i was 18-20 years old. So this series i imagine is for a more mature audience, in the sense of emotional and mental development.

The art is breathtakingly beautiful, which is why it took me as much as a week total to read it despite it only being 17 volumes, i like to read slow and really savour all the details.

I'm not usually someone to hate characters. In my entire 10+ years of being a weeb, i have never come across a character that i truly hated with a burning passion, no, not even characters such as the collectively despised Griffith from Berserk. He is a character that i can sympathize with because i can understand his emotions, although i don't condone his actions. At the top of my head as u write this review, i cannot think of a single manga/anime character that i truly hate. But it happened in this series, i absolutely hate Auguste, the cold blooded calculative sociopath, but i also hated Bonnard almost as much, although he seemed to treat Gilbert somewhat better than Auguste, he still raped him when he was still a child, and trying to pursue him despite knowing full well what kinds of hell he'd been through. What was even more aggravating and revolting to me is how he started taking the moral fucking high ground towards the end of gilberts background story. And this says a lot about the character work in this series in general, all of the characters are written so perfectly, including the side characters such as Pascale (one of my favorite side characters from this series).

Overall i don't think i could praise this series enough. Forget Clannad, forget kanon 2006, this is THE romance tragedy series that your heart desires.

What initially brought me to read KazeKi, besides my general interest in the Year 24 group, was Chiho Saito's, member of the Be-Papas, remark about Revolutionary Girl Utena being "based" on this series. They're indeed alike on the surface: a beautiful and mysterious student that is treated like a heartless doll meets a white knight that sets out to save them but soon finds out that things aren't always what they seem. The main setting is also an isolated boarding school with similar architecture, like Oniisama e... and Heart of Thomas, there's a green house shaped like a cage where Gilbert and Anthy do their ... thing, and this mysterious student's closer relative is the one running the school. But that's about as similar as they get, just the skeleton (this isn't a RGU review anyway, so...)

Gilbert is a gorgeous self destructive angel whom'll put a demoniac facade to get what he wants. His existence is ethereal-like and he'll often be, in a poetic tone, painted as a white dove; the inspiration for his character seems to be Björn Andrésen, the boy from Death in Venice, and the idea behind both characters is the same: rather than human beings they're a stand in for beauty itself. He sleeps around because he can't stand being alone, and is very casually raped from time to time – which he expects to be the only way people will always treat him anyway. The way he understands the world is generally different from normal people. Then we have Serge, a goody-two-shoes with a strong determination, a harsh past and a golden heart. They both meet and somehow form a unstable connection on the first volumes, but then we're thrown on what must have been the biggest flashback I've ever seen (or maybe it's Berserk's, but it's been long since I've read that one)

There're two flashbacks that serves to explain both of our MC's past and how they're supposedly similar to each other. Gilbert's past is covered with an unconfortably high number scenes of abuse and pedophilia: he's constantly assalted by... basically every male character that set their eyes on him, and has a very, uhm, "distinct" relationship with his guardian, August. Gilbert, being "beauty", is capable of awakening desire on seemingly anyone he chooses (or not) – with the exception of Serge, the only one who manages to partially control his urges around him. Serge's flashback starts with his father, before he himself was born, and is a very linear, predictable high born boy meets low born girl story, and then evolves to the evil step mother tale, which I don't find worth dwelling on and seems to me to be the worst section of the whole story.

Problem arises as our two main characters walk towards their fateful bounding, and pretty much all of it involve some form of physical or sexual abuse, to the point of exhaustion. Not only Gilbert but also other characters – there's a lot of rape being thrown around and being hinted as the reason why some characters act the way they do, which sometimes is of pretty bad taste. It's not that there's something inherently wrong with portraying abuse, but there's only so much one can take before it becomes redundant, merely a shock factor. Speaking of abuse and repetition, there's a particularly exhausting plot device on the last third of the manga that involves Gilbert silently suffering on the worst way imaginable while Serge is obliviously being his happy go lucky self, only to later find out everything and greatly suffer from remorse. We're supposed to suffer like Serge, I think, but after so much has been done it's pretty hard to play along with it. There’s also one particular character who rapes Gilbert early in the series and is then portrayed in a very benign light later on. Not that I’d ever want a one dimensional evil monster, but even if I let the moral dilemma aside and try not to be anachronic with my approach, i'm still left wondering what exactly Takemiya was trying to get on with this particular plot line.

SPOILERS:

Towards the end of the manga there's a instance of self sacrifice that our boy Serge indulges on thanks to his father's life story, but much like the naive boy who jumps on a river to save a drowning girl and ironically dies, from Utena, Serge quickly discover that life isn't a fairy tale, even on this shoujo manga, that despite his good intentions he can't save someone who doesn't believe they need to be saved in the first place, and that sometimes love just isn't enough – and so he fails his quest. But unlike Utena’s brilliant ending, KazeKi plays like a more predictable tragedy and ends where you think it will: Gilbert as a character never displays agency beyond one impactful event earlier in the series (where he chooses to be with Serge instead of August), he continues being hopelessly thrown around by everyone and tragically dies after pedophile number #57 in the last minute turns him into a drug addict (which felt silly, to say the least). Gilbert, who could only live for love, then becomes a symbol for Serge’s missing other half, whom’ll live a straight life, probably in both senses of the word, carrying his adolescent love in his heart.

August, the series third center character and “main antagonist”, if you will, is weirdly never confronted in this ending. He just dissapears after the 15th volume and it’s up to you to imagine how he reacted to his child’s death.

END OF SPOILERS

When it’s all said and done, and despite all the criticism, KazeKi isn’t a bad manga, it’s in fact a very good one, and is rightfully considered as such a classic. Simply put, the whole thing is gorgeous: the art itself and the paneling combined to create some stunning imagery. It's seriously outstanding. I found myself hitting the print screen button almost every chapter. Like most older shoujo manga, character’s emotions are usually presented in a very melodramatic way, they are prone to overeact and there’s a lot of blanky eyes, flowery imagery and all sort of embelishments running around the page. It’s dense and a bit overloaded, but also extremely beautiful (and Takemiya is particularly above the rest when it comes to her craft). The moments where Serge and Gilbert get together are breathtaking and staring at these pictures never failed to deliever a wild range of sensations. KazeKi is erotic not only because the story is filled with a huge amount of sex, but because the art exudes such quality almost to an intoxicating degree. It's impossible to ignore Takemiya's talent even when taking notion of the aforementioned contrivied elements that fills the narrative; she knows how to do manga and this one is way above of most of what would come after it under the same genre.

I’d recommend this to anyone that is seeking aesthetic excellence and isn’t bothered by most shoujo troupes. If you’re here looking for ancient BL history, I’d say that this one is a more fulfulling male x male story than it’s cousing, The Heart of Thomas, which is tamer about homossexuality, instead being more focused on telling a (exceptionally beautiful) tale about grief.

Just, for the love of god, do not read this if you’re triggered by rape.

I have rather mixed feelings about this series. I can understand why so many people give it a high rating. It's certainly well-written, and well-crafted. But I find it very disturbing. Apparently, it was the first full-blown shounen-ai series. And it isn't shy in that respect.

It's set in France circa 1900, at a posh boys' school. Serge, a mixed-race boy, manages to attend, but is looked down on because of his ancestry. Also at this school is Gilbert, a beautiful, free-spirited boy who trades sexual favors with the older students for things like homework. It turns out that Serge is assigned to be Gilbert's ... roommate. And it looks like Gilbert might have a more than ordinary interest in Serge...

The characters are quite good. Though they are often defined or motivated by revenge, jealousy, abuse, control, sadism, fear, or anger. For the most part, all the characters are complex, and interesting. Particularly, we follow the mysterious and tragic Gilbert, and discover his background.

If there were an underlying theme to this story, it might be that "suffering breeds suffering." Initially, when we see a character act a certain way (such as Gilbert flirting) we assume it's just their personality. But then eventually we are shown why they act like that. It's because they were a victim of someone once. And their victimizer in turn was someone who had been victimized himself in the past. And the cycle of pain continues.

So it's not trying to be a shallow "let's just see some BL" series. But it is BL...and very much so. Serious BL fans would probably revel in the very, very long sexual scenes. And the shotacon. The pedophilia was what REALLY bothered me.

I'll read shounen-ai when the story is good (and in this case it was) but I gloss over any sex. (I don't care for sex scenes, whether yaoi, yuri, or straight.) And in this case many of the scenes would go on for pages and pages.... And the adult-child scenes made me feel really uncomfortable.

On another note, the art quite good. It's old-school shoujo, but it has a light, breezy quality. And sparkles abound. Everything is well-drawn and detailed, and the atmospheres, whether indoor or outdoor, are perfect. I could almost feel like I was there.

So while this series is a true drama instead of shallow BL fluff, it has a lot of heavy, hard-core, mature content.