Paradise Kiss

## Paradise Kiss *Paradise Kiss* is Ai Yazawa's most compact and emotionally bracingly honest work — a fashion romance that refuses to give its heroine the ending she thinks she wants, and is more truthful for it. Yukari Hayasaka is a studious high school girl whose entire identity has been built around academic achievement and meeting her parents' expectations. When she stumbles into the orbit of the Paradise Kiss fashion studio — a group of art college students designing their own clothing label — her ordered world starts to dissolve. George Koizumi, the studio's mercurial designer, is unlike anyone she has met: brilliant, bisexual, emotionally impenetrable, and completely certain of himself. He recruits Yukari to model for their graduation show, and the two fall into a relationship that Yukari is never quite in control of. Yazawa draws fashion as a kind of liberation — the idea that choosing your own aesthetic is the first act of self-determination — while refusing to romanticize the relationship at its center. *Paradise Kiss* is a rare manga that ends honestly rather than satisfyingly, acknowledging that the people who change us most are not always the ones we stay with.