Did you know Clamp's writer Nanase Ohkawa had a grandma's spirit ? She knows wonderful sad stories from the past... Three of them are here in Shirahime shô...

Published in June, 92 by Kôbunsha, that manga from Clamp, whose title could be translated as "some legends about the whiteprincess" is different from the other works from the same team because of its very sober design. Sometimes, the drawing is not so good, but that book is a pure visual wonder that you must have at home. The costumes are very well done, the snowy atmosphere takes you into a dream, and the characters remain engaging, even though we don't spend much time with them. Really, Shirahime shô deserves to be translated. Let's hope that a publisher will be wise enough to do it, and especially will know how to preserve the endless beauty of Nanase Ohkawa's dialogues.

In this book, there are actually three different stories, three moving tragedies which only have three common points : the period (Japan middle-age), the theme (they are three touching love stories with tragic endings), and the appearance of the white princess (Shirahime), who is an important figure in Japanese culture, a symbol for snow who can be found in the brilliant Urusei yatsura (Lum) where she is called O-Yuki, or in one of Kurosawa's Dreams. In each story, the snow starts falling and a voice tells us it means that the white princess is crying. But the princess will eventually tells us that it's false... "The snow is brought by the sadness of the people living on that Earth..."

In The mountain of the starving wolf we see Fubuki, a young girl who's trying to take revenge for the death of her father, killed by a legendary man eater wolf that lives far in the mountain. As she is attacked by wild dogs, she is saved by ... that very wolf, who is not as aggressive as people say. Fubuki has to remain with him while she cures her wounds, and she eventually become linked to her Inuki (as she calls him) by a strong love feeling. Until the day when her mother, who went looking for her daughter, shot the wolf because she believed he was attacking Fubuki, while he was only playing with her in the snow. As she sees her daughter crying for the wolf's death, she looks up to the sky and thinks... "Perhaps had he understood you were the daughter of the man he killed once... Perhaps he had decided you would be the one who would kill him..."

In Ice flower,we face the sad destiny of two lovers divided by the events. The man is back to his home country and he gets close to this lake, where he promised thirty years ago, to meet his beloved Kaya. She had promised to wait for him, even for years or centuries. Driven by a strange feeling that makes him go back to that place, both holy and cursed, he will find his darling Kaya. But then, he'll understand why she told him thirty years ago that the lake was so cold that it could kill the people who would dive into the water, and why she added that beyond the death, she would turn into a flower to keep on waiting for him ...

Finally, The two birds is the story of a warrior back from the war, who is coming back to join his beloved and ask to marry her, but who gets lost in a snow storm. Driven by jealousy when he sees a couple of two loving herons, he kills one of them with an arrow. Lost and desperate, he is helped by a young woman carrying a skull who tells him the way he must head for. The one he had mistaken for Death, was in fact the heron's ladyfriend who appeared as a human in his dream and who understood his despair. He realizes that only at the end, when he is starving, but close to his objective, and when he kills an animal hiding in a bush, that was nothing else than the female heron, keeping under her wing the skull of her beloved, who is now lost forever ...

All they can do is crying ... Inuki's death ... The sacrifice of Kaya, a young, pure young girl who only wanted to keep her promise ... The unforgivable murder of a couple of birds who only wanted to be happy ... The three main characters of Shirahimé shô will remain forever haunted by remorse and regrets. They nearly reached the happiness waiting for them. Their tears are now calling the snow ...

Cyber Namida was created and designed by René-Gilles Deberdt. All rights reserved.