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Hey why you like kazeki?

Gilbert is wonderfully complex, but the other characters are first-rate too. Beautifully drawn and written. Takemiya’s firm control over both the pen and her native tongue is evident. Made me cry a lot when I first read it.

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I challenged myself to draw fanart for some of my favorite retro shoujo series! I’m not exactly sure how I feel about this art, but it was fun to make, and I hope you enjoy it too!

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I drew Gilbert! I’m starting to grow more accustomed to digital art, and I’m having some fun. I also wish Keiko Takemiya drew Gilbert with more animals, it feels liked she stopped doing that after he was a child and I miss it. I always thought it’d be cute to see Gilbert playing with some animals while he was with Serge.

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I made the base drawing for this painting months ago. Kaze to Ki no Uta will never not do awful things to my heart. Anyway, not sure how I feel about this painting, but I figured someone might like it.

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I made the base drawing for this painting months ago. Kaze to Ki no Uta will never not do awful things to my heart. Anyway, not sure how I feel about this painting, but I figured someone might like it.

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This is probably one of my favorite Keiko Takemiya illustrations ever. It’s from her manga adaptation of Gene Stratton-Porter’s novel, 𝘍𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘬𝘭𝘦𝘴. I’m very excited to read the manga sometime after I finish the original novel.

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God, so I finished Kaze to Ki no Uta like 2 weeks ago and in celebration of that I made a thing. I would like to make a completed version someday, but presently I have a lot of actual school work to do so here is a taste. I specialize in memes from 2010.

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I haven’t uploaded art in a while, but here’s a sketch I made. God, I’ve been working through the manga in Japanese because I got tired of waiting for the translation. I’m half way through volume 14 and I’m not emotionally ready for the shit storm ahead.

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Gilbert and Serge watercolor I did on a whim. These buggers are too cute!

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gilbert’s habit of drowning in the pond

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they were happy in paris

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his hair is cute in volume 17

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rereading kaze to ki no uta is hurting my feelings

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kaze to ki no uta

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Kaze to Ki no Uta by Keiko Takemiya

When I think of COVER LOVE there are several books that might spring to mind. But I’m not sure if anything is as besotting quite like the life’s work of Keiko Takemiya, a Japanese comic amazingly made a reality from 1976-1984 Kaze to Ki no Uta, or The Poem of the Wind and the Trees. Through its several editions the covers have always evoked a certain sense of atmosphere. I own a bunko edition by Hakusensha since it’s a nice and small set of the girl’s comic series, featuring more photographic covers and the back summary accompanied by colour drawings.

Set in a far-off France of the 19th century past from the first pages, readers know they have been transported and are in for something quite different with a sex scene between two boys at the Lacombrade boarding school near Arles. Going further one will find more of that, as well as racism, homophobia, violence, sexual assault and abuse, child abuse, incest, suicidal behaviour, class issues, drug use and tragedy.

Put simply it’s an opus originally published at 17 volumes and there is a lot to The Poem of the Wind and the Trees, its main characters  Gilbert and Serge growing up along with their aristocratic complicated families and associations. The present is connected to the past, the past the present, a theatre showcasing generational cycles. Through thousands of pages covering decades readers get to know these characters and their joys, struggles and failings. I could write far too much about Gilbert’s relative Auguste for example. He’s a headache inducing figure that I often found myself talking into the pages to as if a character in a book could hear me.

A creation from a Japanese woman over forty years ago with a distinguished career the series is an award-winning classic in Japan. Though, that by no means is meant that people all have homogeneous opinions about it. The Poem of the Wind and the Trees presents special challenges because of the controversial nature of some of its elements like paedophilia or, its sexual frankness. Or maybe it’s just simple for some people to say fiction depicting bad things is bad. (Still it’s frustrating and worrying to me to encounter views similar in comparison to how some around Lolita in Western literature degrade it as Nabokov’s sex kitten book. Yet, somehow that even sounds less insensible to how The Poem of the Wind and the Trees can be [mis]interpreted.) It’s encouraging that two teenage boys finding love with each other and struggling in their expression —and it is eroticism as well, an aspect in the story while remaining pertinent today, may be a lesser contentious part comparatively. No matter who you are getting through adolescence probably never gets easy, one reason why unsanitised coming-of-age stories are important.

For me The Poem of the Wind and the Trees and Takemiya hold such high status for good reasons. Even all these decades later the composition and themes in the series Takemiya was able to present and fight for doing so still blows my mind. I was not alive in 1976 when it first began publication, so I can only listen to people who were but, it all comes off as damn impressive and shocking then. In fact, it took Takemiya some years to get it published in the first place, finally in the year she turned 26 and then serialised for almost some eight years. At the time artists like Takemiya also drew inspiration and referenced a great variety of classic literature, film and other culture, familiar examples from Europe being work of Alexandre Dumas and his son, Heinrich Heine, Hermann Hesse, Roger Peyrefitte/Jean Delannoy, Jules Verne and Luchino Visconti. (I wonder if Gilbert’s last name might be taken from writer Jean Cocteau too.) The fictional school serving as the main setting for the comic would be familiar as the surname of the lead actor in 1964’s Les amitiés particulières. Some of the students are indeed up to some similar things as the novel the film was based on, though the culture of Lacombrade is more corrupt and much less benign, likewise priests at the very least not being so helpful.

Possibly because I’m fond of such titles, this sort of literary aspect to be found in early shônen ai works is something as the genre evolved to the boys’ love of today, I miss. (Sometimes I experience moments of déjà vu, but It could be I’m just overlooking such styled offerings these days.) I’m also quite partial about stories set in France. Takemiya limited in ways we are not today in researching managed to make her setting rich and detailed complimenting the characters inhabiting it. When Gilbert recalls the resilient motto of Paris, Fluctuat nec mergitur, in the scene below I had to smile.

Something like The Poem of the Wind and the Trees has an aura of only being possible in its time. Takemiya had something to impart and did she show us. (I thought of giving an example of what she does with flowers, but tumblr’s flagging algorithms is silly.)

Perhaps more importantly such a title is still relevant today if people want to process, consider and discuss sensitive topics and the culture around them through fiction. There is much the series can offer its teenage target audience. A true song of adolescence. And here I am as an adult still appreciating and revisiting a decades old comic. Isn’t the best sort of art the kind staying in our memory that we pass on to the next generation and onward after that? Therefore, I hope one day we are at a point that The Poem of the Wind and the Trees will be licensed in English as well. (And French, qu’allez-vous faire?) So that more people can read and discover and likewise debate and have messy conversations over it. I think to not, would be a great loss. I hope to see more thoughtful discussions on it and other classic titles in the future.

  Kaze to Ki no Uta by Keiko Takemiya is available in Japanese, the 10-volume release from Hakusensha shown above ISBN# 9784592881513, 9784592881520, 9784592881537, 9784592881544, 9784592881551, 9784592881568, 9784592881575, 9784592881582, 9784592881599, 9784592881605

The series has recently been licensed and translated in both Italy and Spain

Also, the Le poème du vent et des arbres artbook was reprinted in Japan in a revised edition in 2018 ISBN#9784835455921

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Takahashi Miyuki

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I finished translating Takemiya Keiko’s In the Sunroom! It can be seen as something of an early precursor to Kaze to Ki no Uta, and is rather short at about 50 pages. For those interested, it can be found here: https://mangadex.org/title/33890/in-the-sunroom