The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

Last Quarter

What's It About? 

A supernatural mystery of two star-crossed lovers from the creator of Nana!

Struggling to adapt to life with a new mother and sister after her father's remarriage, Mizuki meets a blue-eyed man playing guitar on the street in Shibuya and is powerfully drawn to him. How far will she go to see him again?

After a brush with death, young Hotaru meets Mizuki for the first time in a dream. The next day, Hotaru wanders into an abandoned mansion and comes face-to-face with the girl she met in her dream…

Last Quarter has a story and art by Ai Yazawa, with adaptation and English translation by Max Greenway. This volume was retouched and lettered by Inori Fukuda Trant. Published by Viz Media (September 3, 2024).

Content Warning: This story contains domestic abuse and drug abuse.

Is It Worth Reading?

All ghost stories are tragedies. By their very nature, ghost stories involve someone who has died, and there's no escaping that fact, even if the general feeling of the book leans into being scary, comedic, or fantastical. Last Quarter, a 1998 series by Ai Yazawa, fully understands the inherent sadness of ghost stories, even as she mixes that with other elements, and the result seen here in the first of two omnibus editions is one of quiet yearning, bittersweet melancholy, and a few sad truths wrapped up in a mystery.

The potential ghosts in question are a high school-aged girl and a cat, although the mysterious musician Adam could also easily be counted in that number. Fifth grader Hotaru meets the teenage girl when she's walking along a mysterious fence in a strange, white world, looking for her cat Lulu. The girl stands on the other side of the fence, from which Lulu emerges…and the next thing Hotaru knows, she's in the hospital after a car accident. Uncertain that it was truly a dream they met in, Hotaru, resuming her search for Lulu, follows a different cat into an abandoned mansion, where she finds the girl again – but when she brings her friends to meet her, none of them can see her. They decide to call the ghost “Eve” because her only memory is that she's pining after Adam, even though she has no idea where he could be, or even who she is.

We briefly meet Adam in the first chapter, and apart from being a walking red flag, there are a few other things that are decidedly off about him. Why is he dressed in a style from twenty years ago? Why is he so keen on establishing a relationship with Mizuki, a seventeen-year-old girl, that he invites her to the mansion where he's spending only two weeks? And when he says that he wants to take her away with him, where, exactly, is he hoping to go? For a character whom we only see in two full chapters, Adam is the driving force of the story, playing an outsize role in the mysteries of both Eve and the mansion where she's trapped, his song “Last Quarter” playing in a constant loop in her head.

The story is primarily experienced through the eyes of Hotaru and her three friends, who form a quasi-investigative group to try to help Eve. They all suffer in their own ways – Hotaru missing her cat, Sae dealing with her strict parents, Masaki with his neglectful parents, and Tetsu trying to figure out his own emotions. All of these inform Eve's story and her greater mystery, and the way they all start coming together by volume's end is excellent storytelling.

It's incredibly difficult for me to just talk about this single volume. Last Quarter is my favorite Ai Yazawa manga and the first manga to ever make me cry; I even like the admittedly subpar live-action film because it hits on enough of what makes the story good. This is Yazawa distilled down to her strongest form, showcasing her ability to use ethos, pathos, and a little bit of humor. The mysteries are all about human emotion at their core, and if you've ever pondered the tragic nature of ghost stories, this is not a duology you want to pass up.

I'm ashamed to admit I've never read any of esteemed shojo manga author Ai Yazawa's works. When Nana was first translated in English as part of Viz Comics' Shojo Beat anthology in the early 2000s, stupid licensing restrictions prevented it from coming to the UK. While I did glimpse the occasional copy of Tokypop's Paradise Kiss translation on book-store shelves, I never obtained any copies before they disappeared from print.

Now, with Viz releasing Last Quarter in English, I have finally learned why Yazawa has attracted a legion of fans. This manga is mesmerizing. Although it takes a while to get going (the lengthy opening chapter takes almost fifty pages before even hinting at the story's central premise), from the second chapter onwards I was utterly hooked by this compelling supernatural mystery.

Last Quarter is a story of loss, longing, and love transcending (what at least initially appears to be) death. Almost gothic, it reminds me of the excellent old 1970s-80s British girls' comics anthology Misty. Yazawa keeps her central mystery ticking along with a slow drip feed of information, as the main child characters gradually uncover details about “Eve”, the enigmatic ghostly girl who plays piano in a spooky abandoned mansion.

Yazawa's linework is simple but expressive, pages full of willowy long-haired adults with pained, tearful expressions, all the better to accentuate the themes of grief and loss. Her child characters are cute without being cloying or irritating. Later chapters introduce fascinating wrinkles that recontextualize the story we think we're reading, and the volume ends on a brutal cliffhanger. I know I intend to buy the concluding second volume the minute it's published.

The name “Ai Yazawa” is enough to sell a manga to a certain subset of the population. The creator of Nana, Paradise Kiss, and Neighborhood Story has garnered enough well-earned renown that quite a few fans will buy anything with her name on it. Count me among those fans, because even before I got my review copy, I had Last Quarter on order.

But this isn't like other Yazawa manga. While her other series revels in the beauty of the every day and the ordinariness of extraordinary people, Last Quarter has a supernatural element. I assumed it would be about vampires based on the lunar title. So far it's more of a ghost story. When the fifth grader Hotaru stumbles into a derelict mansion, she meets a teenage girl she recognizes from her dreams when she is in a coma. The girl can't leave the room and has no memories of her life, herself, or anything other than her boyfriend Adam. When Hotaru invites her friends over to meet the girl, she discovers that none can see her. The group resolves to uncover the mystery of the girl they've called Eve's identity and find Adam so that she can move on, whatever that may mean for her.

Although Last Quarter's subject matter may be unusual for Yazawa, it still has everything that has made her one of the top shoujo artists of a generation. This is where she moves away from the cartoonishness of Neighborhood Story toward a more mature, albeit still lanky art style. Her gift for micro-expressions remains unmatched, conveying the slightest shift of a character's mood through subtle changes in their features and body language. Hotaru and her friends' childishness, young and lively and going through the motions of early crushes, contrasts beautifully with the aching sadness of Mizuki, who has nothing left but her love with her spirit trapped in a moldering mansion.

Many companies are hesitant to license older manga; US audiences have a short attention span and tend to be attracted to newer properties. If you can, please make it so that Viz's choice to license Last Quarter pays off and proves that bringing over older series, especially older shojo, can be profitable.