After reading The Yakuza’s Bias, I decided check out Teki Yatsuda’s debut work, A Home Far Away. I heard many good things about this work and I wanted to read more 1-volume manga stories, so why not.

I’m going to be discussing a bunch of heavy stuff, so here we go.

The story is about a 17-year old male teenager named Alan Saverio and a drifting young man in his ‘20s named Hayden Stewart. The year is 1990 and Alan is running away from his strict and religious parents. Hayden runs into him at his workplace and the two begin to connect. We learn that Alan has medical issues and his family considers him a “sin” due to their religious upbringing. Hayden tells Alan to not give up on himself, despite having his own issues. Hayden’s mother was a victim of domestic abuse and would later die of an overdose when he was 18. After seeing Alan in a moment of pain and thinking about his own trauma, Hayden offers him the opportunity to run away with him. Alan accepts and the two would embark on a road trip that would change their lives forever.

There’s really a lot to unpack and I think I’ll start with how trauma attracts trauma. If you’re in a lot of emotional pain, you might find solace with someone who’s been through the same experiences. There’s nothing wrong with that. The tricky thing is what happens if that relationship is nudging towards romance. Alan struggles with this as he falls in love with Hayden, but wishes that he was a woman to not feel like a sinner. It’s devastating to hear.

While the two do get together, there’s so much tension between Alan and Hayden for a while and you can’t but wonder if they’re just hurting each other more because they aren’t able to face their own pasts and selves. There’s many people out there who get into troubling relationships just to escape their own pain.

But what can you do when you’ve been hurt by people that were supposed to protect you? Alan tells Hayden that he was raped by a priest he trusted and wondered why God didn’t save him. Hayden wondered why his mother could never stand up to the abuse. I think reading about their pasts hits too close to home.

While Alan and Hayden do eventually make sense of their pasts, the journey was filled with pain. Alan befriends a prostitute named Maria, who he finds an affinity with since it’s the name of a religious figure. Maria is dealing with her own trauma as she lost her son who Alan reminds her of. The two form a bond due to their needs for familial love. Yet when Alan tries to move on from Maria after accepting himself, Maria goes berserk and actually tries to kill him. She dies after Hayden runs her over. It does not help that Hayden is already a wanted kidnapper of a minor by authorities.

The penultimate point of the story comes when Alan and Hayden travel to Mexico to see the sea. It turns out Alan’s priest is still around and Alan confronts him. Alan finally opens up to his parents about his disappearance and his victimization, only to have his father chastise him for being a filthy sinner. Alan kills his abuser and finally realizes that his place is not with God, but with Hayden. Hayden feels that Alan is the only person that matters after everything they’ve been through together. While the police do catch up to them, the two decide to ride off into the sea together in a scene that’s touching and so damn hard to see.

There’s a moment in the story with a detective character whose perspective I enjoyed. He’s one of the few characters who sympathizes with Alan and Hayden. The cop once tried to help Hayden years ago and saw how much adults have given up on him. He even tells another cop during the manhunt that even if they murdered someone (Maria), it’s the adults that deserve so much blame for how Alan and Hayden turned out.

Alan and Hayden were both young men that society gave up on. And right now, aren’t we facing a masculinity crisis? Don’t young men feel lost? I do feel like we’re failing young men so hard and having hard-line masculine beliefs doesn’t help anymore. There’s a lot of institutional neglect. I also think about the context of the story as this story took place in Texas. Nuclear families were slowly being de-emphasized in America. The absence of a supportive parental figure hurts men a lot. Both Alan and Hayden felt this immensely.

No one wants to acknowledge how institutional harm leads to terrible mental health outcomes. No one wants to say “It’s not your fault.” to someone going through stuff they have no control over. No one wants to admit the power societal factors have on the psyche. A Home Far Away pushes the hard truth that people involved with institutions will do whatever it takes to victim-blame someone if they are being challenged for things that hurt people. The victim-blaming then takes a life of its own and ends up hurting everyone involved.

The final scene let me feeling angry and sad. And yet, I know that Alan and Hayden didn’t want to go back to reality. They found joy in each other and lived the best they could with no regrets. Sure, they probably died too young. But a lot of us live so long and face depression/anxiety most of the time by ourselves. We’re told that having certain kinds of material pleasures will satisfy everything when they don’t. Feeling connected with someone who wants to stay by your side no matter what and reciprocating it is what heals the heart. I will not romanticize what happens with Alan and Hayden, but I don’t blame them for what they decided to do in the end.

I say that loss is often necessary to produce joy, but I wish losses shouldn’t get so extreme (as is the case with this manga) to feel like you’re truly alive. This isn’t the suffering Olympics. But hey, some institutions just love make suffering a competition on who deserves help the most based on how much pain they can endure.

Even though A Home Far Away’s story takes place in 1990, the themes and topics it covers are still relevant today. And sadly, I don’t see it changing any time soon. I do know that at least, we can try to care for each other more and validate people’s worst experiences better.

I can’t recommend this manga enough not just for fans of tragic romances, but for people who want to see what trauma caused by society can do to anyone unlucky enough to be in its path.