Spiritual twins is a combination of an innocent shojo with josei who is to talk about difficult social issues . Lonely, hard-pressed heroes see their only hope in finding "the other person".
Soul and body
Alex and Rita are ghosts haunting people with a soul twin. The kids have no idea why they appear to anyone at all, and they don’t remember their history. Past events will come back to them gradually as the manga story unfolds. The childhood of both phantoms was devoid of love, the guardians used any kind of tenderness only as a last resort – in the case of the girl, literally in such circumstances. The reader knows from the very beginning that the destination of the stories told will be the meeting of these two.
The people to whom Alex and Rita appear will be equally important, although not immediately. The manga will focus on two of them, scientists involved in analyzing the psychology and development of twins, a Japanese and a German, among others. They are as far apart as possible, but they share much more than common interests and being haunted.
You already have a plot image and a concept behind which Spirit Twins are based . Somewhere there is a person who is our other half – and therefore the loneliness devouring oversensitive people will not be silenced until the “twins” are found. Another question is whether it will happen in life or after it, perhaps because of destiny.
Brothers Grimm and gothic Lolita
At the beginning, I wrote that the manga combines elements of shojo and josei. I mean, first of all, mixing the romantic idea of two halves of an apple with dealing with very serious issues of child prostitution or domestic violence. Mihara does the latter in a way reminiscent of manga directed at younger readers. How to write it delicately … It simplifies a drastic topic very much, they show it with overwhelming naivety. And I don’t mean the memories of Alex and Rita (although the characters appearing in them are very unambiguous and black and white), but the very end of the comic. The vision of a happy life and the connection of the separated halves is simplified, conservative and very fairy-tale like. And maybe this is how the manga should be perceived – as something like developing the tradition of the Grimm brothers, with their love of brutality and violence on the one hand, and rewarding the hardships of the protagonists on the other.
Connecting shojo with josei also comes from the parallelism of the narrative – we have memories of separated children (the title spiritual twins) and the everyday life of the adults to whom they appear. They, too, try in various ways to escape loneliness and look for their place in the world. This is a much less dramatic story told in an interesting way – for most of the chapters, the world of the living is presented in snapshots, short dialogues and scenes showing the characters’ mismatch, but also their joys and hopes. These two plans also contrast with each other visually – Alex and Rita were shown in the gothic Lolita aesthetics , adults much more realistically and economically.
Spirit Twins seems to be the simplest Mizuhara manga I know. I have read Balsamista and Beautiful People , both of them feature aesthetics and sharp lines, characteristic of this author. Her style is clearly emotional, focused on the difficult internal experiences of the characters. The single-volume book discussed here is something for fans of this kind of storytelling. As for the plot, I think it will appeal to lovers of classic romance or gothic novels.
