Twin Spica: Volume 1

Twin Spica begins more than a decade after the “The Lion,” the first manned rocket in the Japanese space program, crashed into the crowded seaside city of Yuigahama.  All the astronauts on board lost their lives, thousands of civilians were wounded or killed, and the Japanese space program ground to a halt.  With this constant specter of danger and death ever-present in the background, the manga follows five young students a decade later as they attempt to make sense of the world after the crash and look to the stars with the hope of becoming astronauts in Tokyo’s newly re-opened space program.

Our young heroine, Asumi Kamogawa, was a babe-in-arms at the time of the crash and narrowly survived the inferno, while her mother lost her life.  She wants to be an astronaut more than anything in the world and will do whatever tasks, no matter how difficult, if they get her closer to space.  She’s incredibly focused on her goals and those around her often tease her for focusing so much on her dreams of being an astronaut.  She’s joined in her quest by Shinnosuke Fuchuya, her childhood friend.  He’s a hard worker who takes himself a little too seriously, and his reasons for going to the astronaut school are veiled until right near the end of the manga.  I won’t give anything away, but just know that his story alone is worth reading the entire story.  The cast is rounded out with three more students:  Marika Ukita, a snobbish rich girl with an incredible and awful secret, Kei Oumi, a perky loudmouth with a go-getter attitude, and Shu Suzuki, the coolest kid in school whose decision to join that astronaut school embarrasses his politician father to no end.

The manga unfolds at a slow and powerful pace, revealing the terrible mysteries behind the crash of “The Lion,” delving into the lives of those devastated by the destruction in Yuigahama, and understanding the difficult decisions these five students must make as they strive to become astronauts and grow up into adulthood.

Kou Yaginuma’s art and writing are both simple, stylized, and, at times, completely breath-taking.  His attention to detail is incredible, whether he’s talking about and illustrating the rigors of astronaut training, the dangers of space, and the psychology that drives someone to be an astronaut.  While the manga focuses on the training the students undergo, Yaginuma doesn’t have any issue with taking the time to get to know these characters in quiet and often poignant scenes.  He also drops fascinating details and references about the history of spaceflight in such a way that you never feel like he’s giving you a history lesson.  For example, one of the characters plays a small harmonica, because it was the first instrument carried into space during the Gemini missions.   The tests the students are put through – lining up a room full of dominos until a terrible deadline, coming up with inventive ways to get out of difficult situations – all closely mirror procedures currently used in NASA and Japanese space program.

It is Yaginuma’s dedication to showing not only the rigorous training astronauts go through, but also the trials of survival in space that make this manga so poignant.  Life is a fragile thing, not just in space, he tells us again and again, but also here on earth.  After years and years of hard work, the hopes of the entire world can go down in ruin in a moment and take the lives of innocent people in the process.   A lifetime spent loving someone can end in a moment with a broken heart and rejection.  Anything – developing a friendship, loving someone, rocketing into space – can be a dangerous and perilous undertaking, fraught with the chance for victory and, at the same time, complete destruction.  In the gentle and carefully paced narrative of Twin Spica, Yaginuma shows us that anything worth doing, dangerous though it may be, is worthwhile when done well and with love.

Even more impressive than the details about the space program and his quiet character development, though, is Yaginuma’s attention to what tragedy does to a culture and the joy that people find in unexpected places as they put their lives back together and learn to live again.  In Twin Spica, Yaginuma shows us a national tragedy, when “The Lion” goes down in Yuigahama and takes the dreams for space and a future in the stars from an entire nation.  But then, he has no problem taking the time to delve into the lives of the people affected by the crash, giving readers a multi-page look into their lives as they learned to be whole and living people again.  Every character, even one who only make an appearance for a few pages, is given the dignity and respect Yaginuma gives his five main characters.  Their worries and their losses are just as important and just as formative as the events that shaped the lives of the main cast.  For Yaginuma, those who lost their lives in the crash of “The Lion” have just as much ability to transform the present as those who survived.  The dead in this manga inspire and critique and guide the future as ghosts and as memories.  As these five young students dream of space, the dead dream with them, pulling for the dreams they weren’t able to achieve in life.

While this isn’t an action-heavy manga, the story is beautifully crafted and the characters are drawn, both artistically and narratively, as fully realized people, flaws and all.  Originally collected into 15 volumes, Twin Spica has been translated into English and published in 12 volumes by Vertical.

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