Yatora has passed the first part of Tokyo University of the Arts’ entrance exam but as the second exam starts his stress-induced afflictions are worse than ever and his self-confidence has never been lower. But there’s nothing for Yatora to do but to try and power through with some advice and “advantages” from his prep school teacher, since he isn’t going to have the luxury of waiting a year to take the exam again!
Once Yatora starts school at TUA he’s more than a bit adrift; after spending the better part of the past year intensively working towards getting into TUA, he doesn’t have any immediate life goals to orient himself around and frankly his new teachers aren’t giving him a lot to work with. Now some of this could be economy of storytelling, in so much that we don’t see every single minute Yatora is in the classroom and it’s clear from some small panels that he’s definitely attending some classes in the traditional “sit down in a lecture and take notes” format that the manga isn’t focusing on, like an art history class. But from what we do see, and like I mentioned in the last review, it seems as if his professors expect the freshmen to already have very distinct senses of self, art, purpose, etc. and that they’re less sure what to do with a brand new artist like Yatora.
Frankly speaking, the first critique Yatora has reminds me of what my final semester in my photography degree was like, where you would shoot outside of the class and bring in your work for a critique session with classmates to develop your final portfolio, but I at least got way more out of that class than Yatora did. Heck, I struggled in that class and my professor mentioned that the department was planning to introduce a junior portfolio class so that people would struggle less than folks like me did (a.k.a. recognizing that this was a larger issue that the department should strive to alleviate), and our critiques also included very specific advice for reshooting images (“place your items in this order” for product photographers like me “try showing a greater variety of X” for the wedding photographers, etc).
Yatora has yet to get even a basic critique from his teachers and it’s so frustrating to see! I know that creator Tsubasa Yamaguchi is a real-life TUA graduate and I would love to find interviews, in English or Japanese, asking about their time there since my first thought when reading this set of chapters was “wow, I wonder if Yamaguchi had teachers this crappy as well?”
Fortunately for Yatora he has unwittingly already started developing another critical artistic skill: networking. Or rather “making acquaintances who you can bounce ideas off of, recommend when you can’t take on a job, etc.” and it’s a chance encounter with Kuwana from prep school that’s able to help him understand what his teachers are saying and start to get out of a funk. Kuwana didn’t actually make it into TUA, but other people in her family have, so she’s able to decipher what the teachers mean by “You can start by throwing out everything you learned for the exams. Exam pieces are not proper pieces.” (which, as someone who’s spent the majority of his art career making just exam pieces, completely freaks out Yatora). I was glad to see that my favorite side character is going to keep popping up in the story as we watch her decide to take a different tack and try out something other than oil painting for a little bit, it never hurts to become more well-rounded in your abilities, interests, and expertise after all.
At this point in the story I don’t think Yatora realizes that he’s close to being called a genius by some, or a wunderkind at least, given how fast he managed to develop his art, but I think the other students and instructors at the prep school have. Yatora definitely needs friends at this point. It’s not as if he’s suddenly become anti-social, but with no close buddies at TUA and no college life given his class schedule and commute, he’s withdrawing into his own head and clearly starting to spiral; if his teachers won’t give him the outside perspective he needs to grow then he’ll have to find it elsewhere.
In the US, you see a lot of debate over whether or not to attend art school, just like the conversation Yatora had with his high school art teacher in the first volume. There are a variety of different factors for people to consider but the advice usually boils down to “it depends on what you’ll put in” and “not all art schools are created equal so choose wisely” (I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve seen talk about how SCAD left them completely unprepared for the business side of working in the arts). Yatora is certainly willing to put in the work, both literally in his art and in showing up (i.e. a chance to make connections with classmates and teachers), but I don’t think TUA is putting any work in at this point. Perhaps things will radically change, perhaps Yatora will magically get the kind of life experience he needs so that he won’t be lost without critiques, knowledgeable about what resources to check out when starting working with a new material, and the lived experience to inspire him to think of art in new ways.
But, if Yatora was my friend, I’d be telling him to seriously reconsider his choice of schools because this kind of early burnout is downright traumatizing and I don’t like seeing anyone go through it.