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Sosuke Aoyama is a lonely university student harboring a painful secret, but a chance encounter with a famed ink painter changes his life forever.
Hiromasa Togami and Atsunori Horiuchi are relative newcomers to the manga scene, with both writer and artist having published works within the last decade. Horiuchi published his first manga, Baby Worldend, in 2012 and has worked on three other titles prior to his collaboration with Togami. Meanwhile, Togami got his start as a manga writer in 2019 with The Lines That Define Me being both his first published work and his first project with Horiuchi.
As a manga series, The Lines That Define Me follows a very similar premise to Blue Period by Tsubasa Yamaguchi. The story features a university student named Sosuke Aoyama, who is in a dark place in his life. Like Blue Period’s protagonist, Yatora Yaguchi, Sosuke discovers a passion for art, in his case after meeting a famous suibokuga artist (ink painter) who later becomes his mentor. However, this is where the similarities between the two titles end.
In major contrast to Blue Period’s Yatora, Sosuke’s artistic journey in The Lines That Define Me happens purely by accident. It starts with him taking up a short-term gig setting up an art exhibit, expecting nothing more than to fulfill his responsibilities and then go home. On his way out, he is stopped by an old man who wants to ask his opinion on a few suibokuga pieces on display at the exhibit.
During their impromptu tour of the exhibit, the old man is easily impressed by Sosuke’s artistic perceptiveness and decides to invite him to his home. Sosuke doesn’t understand why this is happening — until he learns his identity from the other attendees at the exhibit. Now aware of who the old man really is, Sosuke is invited to exercise his creative muscle alongside two other aspiring suibokuga artists, one of whom happens to be the man’s granddaughter, Chiaki.
For most of The Lines That Define Me Vol. 1, Togami depicts Sosuke as harboring some kind of dark secret that is manifesting in the form of profound sadness. Though he doesn’t wear his emotions on his face, the way he lives his life is strongly indicative of that, and more often than not he finds ways to distract himself from his reality. By being invited to try his hand at suibokuga, Sosuke ends up discovering new aspects of himself he didn’t know he had. He especially starts using that as a creative outlet for the feelings he has bottled up within himself.
While Sosuke is a compelling protagonist, the emotional core of The Lines That Define Me Vol. 1 is his relationship with Chiaki. Apart from him being attracted to her beauty, Chiaki is the one who helps ground Sosuke, being the first to challenge him artistically. Her presence also motivates him to put effort into his art, which inadvertently causes him to reveal his hidden depths — something only Chiaki seems to notice, which potentially sets up a romantic subplot.
A big part of what sells Sosuke and Chiaki’s relationship as the emotional core of the story is the artwork by Atsunori Horiuchi. Stylistically, Horiuchi leans more strongly toward a realistic depiction of the characters and avoids many tropes commonly found in anime and manga, like exaggerated facial expressions and exaggerated poses. As such, the characters tend to resemble real-life Japanese people with more nuanced expressions. Likewise, the characters’ body language and poses tend to be more natural-looking and rarely look cartoony. The same is true of the realistic-looking detailed backgrounds.
Another detail in the artwork that stands out in The Lines That Define Me Vol. 1 is the way the pages are inked, which makes sense in a manga series about ink art. Not only does Horiuchi succeed at imitating real-life suibokuga with the use of digital brushes, but he even incorporates some of the concepts and theories of it into each panel. Like real-life suibokuga, Horiuchi’s contours are smooth and his use of grays tend to follow a gradient. Sometimes they become gradually black, sometimes gradually white, and other times they are strongly contrasted with both black and white.
On the whole, The Lines That Define Me Vol. 1 is a great title to check out for anime and manga fans who enjoyed Blue Period and want to experience a new story with a similar premise. It’s also a great manga for more casual fans who enjoy heartfelt, slice-of-life stories where relationships drive the emotional core and the artwork augments the writing’s strengths.
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