Tanaka Yutaka (born September 8, 1966) is a mangaka responsible for a number of titles, the most well-known being the short story collection Virgin Night, My Lovely Ghost Kana, Ai-Ren, and Mimia Hime. His work is generally considered and categorized as hentai on indexes, which may restrict his potential audience, but truthfully what he writes is Slice of Life stories that also happen to be Porn with Plot with heavy emphasis on plot. His stories focus on relationships, love, sex, and how honesty and openness causes them to flourish. He likes to avert most of the usual tropes, with strong women who are not afraid to take the lead in a relationship, honesty between partners and an aversion to Can't Spit It Out-itis and other Poor Communication Kills. Despite some dark back-stories and bittersweet moments (and more than occasional severe Mood Whiplash) his work is inevitably optimistic and can leave you with warm fuzzies if you are willing to go for the ride. If you haven't heard of him before, the above titles are excellent starting pointsnote and can often be found as scanlations on various manga sites and are most certainly worth reading.
Works written by Tanaka include:
- Virgin Night (1996)
- Ai-Ren (1999)
- Mimia Hime (2006)
- My Lovely Ghost Kana (2006)
Tanaka-san is known for:
- Bittersweet Ending: He is very likely to set you up and then pull the rug out from under you in either direction.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: Nobody gets a free ride, and they get what they work for. Honesty and trust pay off in the end.
- Ecchi: Even his tamer works tend to have strong sexual influences.
- Genre-Busting: Ai-Ren and My Lovely Ghost Kana are really hard to categorize, other than Slice of Life in only the most superficial sense.
- As of now, Mimia Hime is his only G-rated manga with barely two volumes scanlated.
- Hentai: Virgin Night is on the explicit side of the scale; Ai-Ren is barely R-Rated; My Lovely Ghost Kana is somewhere in between. So far, Mimia Hime is distinctly G-Rated.
- Lighter and Softer: It's refreshing to see sex portrayed in an R-Rated manga as nothing more than a natural, happy part of a solid relationship and not involve rape, demons, and/or tentacles.Daikichi: "The deeper we fall in love, the more we make love... with more and more sex... comes lots of happiness."
- Minimalism: His regular dialogue and narration is often broken up by short, striking, almost haiku-like paragraphs that come across just as poetically in translations.Virgin Night: You shivered when we kissed. You had sparkles in your eyes. I was so excited too. Because I ... I fell in love with you.Ai: I'll be here dreaming... with lots of stars ♥ ... Smiling while dreaming... waiting for you, whom I love.Kana, in her summer clothes, shone in the golden light of sunset. / And Kana and I / waited patiently under the red sky / for the first twinkling of stars.
- If you read some of the post-chapter notes by the translators, the minimalist parts were actually the hardest parts to translate. It's a minor moment of awesome in translation for managing to keep the spirit of the text intact across the language barrier.
- Mood Whiplash: Or more appropriately, Mood Compound Neck Fracture. He is really, really good at hitting you with a sudden punch of scary, sad or heart-warming moments when you are least expecting it, even when you think you are expecting it.
- No Export for You: If you don't read Japanese, or in the case of Mermaid Kiss and Tsuki to Sakuranbo, French, you will have to find scanlations. Adult-only official translations outside of French probably won't be seen any time soon.
- Poor Communication Kills: Avoided hard. Only invoked to show how poor communication is bad for relationships, and how his characters avoid or overcome said problems and grow closer by learning to be honest and open with each other.
- And not coincidentally, how honesty and trust averts poor communication from the get-go.
- Porn with Plot: There's heavy emphasis on the plot and characters portion of the trope, but he does not shy away from showing all aspects of a relationship, including the sexual parts.
- The Power of Love: His characters find happiness and/or peace with each other, sometimes even in the face of the absolute worst things the world wants to throw at them. The central idea of most of his stories is that, if you have love, you can overcome anything.
- Scenery Porn: You can expect at least one amazing two-page spread in most of his stories along with plenty of gorgeous background panels.
- Signature Style: He has a strong preference for minimalist writing. Mimia Hime in particular takes his love for minimalist, poetic writing and Scenery Porn and cranks it Up To Eleven, resulting in something of transcendent beauty.
- Slice of Life: His works have the primary formula of taking two people, putting them together, and showing us how much they love each other.
- Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Directly invoked in nearly all his works and solidly pegged on the idealistic side. Despite the circumstances many of his characters must endure, endure is exactly what they do, and Earn Their Happy Endings.
