Part 307: Two Women Named Nana: Ai Yazawa, the Number of Music, and the Builders Who Could Not Save Each Other

Two women meet on a train to Tokyo. They are the same age, they share the same name — Nana — and they are opposites. Nana Osaki is a punk singer, sharp, guarded, ferociously ambitious, fleeing a band and a love she could not hold. Nana Komatsu, whom Osaki nicknames Hachi, is soft, romantic, dependent, chasing a boyfriend and a vague dream of being taken care of. They become roommates, and then something more complicated and more intense than the word "friends" can hold, and Ai Yazawa's Nana (ナナ) — serialized in Shueisha's Cookie from 2000 — becomes one of the great josei works of the century, a story about love, fame, and the slow discovery that the people we need most are the ones we are least able to save.

Nana reduces to a Destiny 3 — the Creative Communicator, the number of expression, performance, and music — which is the correct number for a manga whose beating heart is a rock band and whose most iconic images are of a woman singing. And both Nanas, the punk and the homemaker, reduce to the same Destiny 4: the Builder. Two builders, building opposite things, unable to inhabit each other's construction.

The Music in the Number

The 3 on the work is the cleanest fit in this pass, and I will not over-argue it: Nana is about expression — about music as the thing Nana Osaki uses to say what she cannot otherwise say, about performance as both armour and confession, about a punk band called Black Stones and a rival band and the industry that chews through both. Yazawa reportedly loved fashion and music with equal intensity, and her pages carry it: the clothes are characters, the lyrics matter, the sound is somehow present on a silent page. The Creative Communicator's number belongs to a manga in which the truest things are sung rather than said. The Grammar of the Page series discussed how a silent medium draws sound; Nana is one of its supreme examples, and the 3 names why.

Two Builders, Opposite Blueprints

The shared 4 is where Yazawa's tragedy lives. Both women are builders — the 4 is the number of constructing a durable life through labour — but they are building incompatible things. Nana Osaki is building a career, a band, an identity as an artist, a fortress of independence that will let her never again depend on anyone the way she once depended on the lover she lost. Nana Komatsu is building a home, a relationship, a nest, a life organized entirely around being loved and belonging to someone. Each is constructing, patiently and with real labour, exactly the structure the other cannot live inside.

And the heartbreak Yazawa engineers from this is that they need each other precisely because they are opposite builders — Osaki needs Hachi's warmth, Hachi needs Osaki's strength — and cannot keep each other, because the life each is building has no room for what the other requires. The 4's patient construction, in both of them, is a construction that slowly pulls them apart even as they cling together. It is one of the most emotionally exact things in the medium: two people who are each other's home and cannot live in the same house.

The 33 I Am Not Going to Use

Here is where honesty requires a small refusal. Ai Yazawa reduces to a Destiny 33 — the Master Teacher, the rarest number in the scheme. And I am not going to build anything on it, because I have now encountered the 33 three times in this hand-written run — Parasyte, Yu Yu Hakusho, Toriyama and Dragon Ball — and a "rarest number" that turns up every few essays is a useful lesson in how rarity collapses under sampling. There is no obvious sense in which Yazawa is a "master teacher"; Nana is not a manga about teaching. The number fits nothing here, and rather than perform the accommodating trick this series has criticized — the willingness to make any number mean something — I will simply note that it landed, that it means nothing, and that noticing when a coincidence does not fit is as much a part of honest looking as celebrating when it does.

(One melancholy real-world note the number cannot carry: Yazawa fell seriously ill in 2009, and Nana has been on hiatus ever since, unfinished. The two builders are frozen mid-construction, and may remain so. The Serialization Machine series wrote about the bodies that break under this industry; hers is among the losses.)

The Close

The caveat is permanent: romanized names, Latin-alphabet arithmetic, spelling and not soul. Part 300 settled it for good.

But the 3 on Nana — the number of music, on a manga about a singer — and the shared 4 on its two heroines — the number of building, on two women constructing opposite lives — are the kind of small, apt accidents that make the looking worthwhile even when the looking is all there is. It sent me back to Yazawa's unfinished masterpiece to see the thing at its centre, which is not the music or the fame but the two builders themselves: a punk and a homemaker, each the other's true home, each patiently building a life the other cannot enter. The arithmetic did not know it. And the 33 on Yazawa herself fits nothing, which I have said plainly, because a series that has spent three hundred essays learning to distrust its own method owes its readers the coincidences that miss as honestly as the ones that land.