Attention to the letter: Lettering and Deaf representation in A Sign of Affection

In a new wave of disability-focused manga, A Sign of Affection by artist and writer duo Morishita suu stands out as one of the most prominent and successful series. The manga has touched hearts around the world, its popularity even leading to a rare high-resource shoujo anime adaption! On the surface, A Sign of Affection is a relatively straightforward fish-out-of-water shoujo romance between two college students: the sweet yet shy Yuki, who is just starting to make her way in the world, and the globe-trotting silver haired heartthrob Itsuomi. What makes the series stand out against its contemporaries is the fact that Yuki—who is d/Deaf—is the point of view character and reader proxy, and Itsuomi is the cool senpai who notices her.

Other series featuring d/Deaf characters, such as A Silent Voice and The Moon On A Rainy Night, will often present their d/Deaf characters as love interests or side characters. These stories are intended to be relatable to an able-bodied audience, not a disabled one. However, in A Sign of Affection we’re immediately shown that this is Yuki’s story. It’s clear that she’s the one we’re following along this journey, without the assumption that an able-bodied reader needs to have everything about her disability painstakingly explained to them. As well as the storytelling structure itself, this is achieved through suu Morishita’s ingenious use of lettering, wherein the format and function of the words on the page themselves allow the reader to experience the world as Yuki does: thus allowing this to be her story, told with her own words, and of her own experiences. 

Communication is a key theme of the series, with the central romance based around Itsuomi’s desire to connect to people all around the world and Yuki’s desire to be understood. Much like in reality, Yuki must use different forms of communication with those around her in order to achieve the level of understanding many hearing people take for granted. Morishita reflect this in their use of text formatting, visually demonstrating the extra mile d/Deaf people must go to in order to interact with hearing people. Conventional speech bubbles are replaced with square text messages with left aligned text to imitate phone messages. These are often paired with conventional bubbles used by Yuki’s friends, showing that she must find different ways of communicating with them than hearing people.

Multiple typefaces are also used throughout to show when something is written down on paper or on a whiteboard, usually as a form of improvisation with strangers; for example, during job interviews or when in a bar. This realistic reflection of the everyday innovations of disabled people makes not only for a far more visually interesting manga, but also helps to show just how much care Morishita have taken in crafting this story. It shows just how closely they have worked with consultant Miyazaki Yuki (her name being a fateful coincidence), ensuring that d/Deaf voices are present throughout the manga.

Like many d/Deaf people though, Sign Language remains Yuki’s preferred method of communication. In many ways, this makes manga an ideal format for the story over regular prose, as the art can show (at least part of) the physical motion while the text provides a translation. These are carefully formatted throughout. The placement of the text translations and the way the text flows throughout the page makes it clear that the signs are the important part, and shouldn’t be ignored or overlooked.

It helps to show that this is an active and important language in its own right, a complex form of communication that is vital to the story and to Yuki’s life. Whilst Morishita does talk about how they found it challenging to depict the movement and complexity of Sign Language in manga, it’s clear that they rose to that challenge with gusto. This recognition and appreciation of Sign Language is an important step forward in d/Deaf representation in fiction, which in turn reflects the gradual improvements in d/Deaf recognition around the world. After all, British Sign Language wasn’t officially recognised by Britain’s government until 2003. In Japan, it wasn’t recognised until 2011—just 8 years prior to the series being written. This series helps demonstrate the importance of Sign and how it functions as a language, made accessible through A Sign of Affection’s status as a piece of popular media. . 

This innovative formatting is not just used to show communication, though. An important part of how Yuki is framed as the protagonist in the story is through the way sound is presented. Yuki is born without any level of hearing, and her hearing aid only allows her to pick up vague background sounds. Right from the start, Morishita places us within that world through the use of sound effects. The first line of the manga (in English) is “This is my world” followed by one small panel on page 1 showing the click and clatter of the train and cacophony of conversation, demonstrated by sound effects that you’d expect to see in a regular manga.

Yet this quickly disappears, and on the very next page those kanji have now become vague shapes. They imitate the idea of sound as large blocks that have a muffled and indistinct appearance. These are just as thoughtfully and precisely placed as any other sound effect would be, yet appear abstract and unclear, easily demonstrating how Yuki experiences the world. This clever use of abstracted sound effects continues throughout the series, playing an important part in the manga’s overall visual language, ensuring that the reader remains anchored in Yuki’s perspective. 

One of those prominent ways in which Yuki’s d/Deafness is expressed is through the color of the text. Gray coloured text is used to show that Yuki is lip reading, whilst black is text that she cannot pick up. This helps to create easy visual clues for the audience to follow, whilst also showing that lip reading is not a perfect art. If the text for Yuki was formatted like normal speech bubbles in a manga, it would suggest that she has a perfect understanding of what is being said. Instead, much as the reader must pay more attention to pick up paler text, Yuki must pay more attention to a conversation than a hearing person would need to. It helps ground Yuki’s disability in reality and once again place her as the perspective for the series.  

Another way the formatting presents the difficulties of lip reading is through the flipping and jumbling of kanji. It means that, much like Yuki, the reader must use context clues in order to understand what is being said. The reader, of course, has the luxury of being able to take time to decipher text in a way that a hard-of-hearing person in real life would not. Yet by presenting this difficulty for the reader, Morishita help to fight the assumption that lip reading gives a 1:1 experience. It is still clear that Sign Language is the easiest and clearest form of communication for Yuki as it is the clearest most reliable form for us too, transcribed with clear black text that doesn’t leave anything out. 

This method of representing lip reading created new specific challenges for those localizing the series, with different localization teams coming up with different solutions depending on their target language. The English localization team at Kodansha, Carl Vanstiphout and Lys Blakeslee, use mirrored text. For English readers, this makes the text look familiar at first but illegible upon actually reading it, requiring focus and concentration to understand what is being said. The technique is used sparingly throughout, but increases in use when things are getting particularly difficult for Yuki to understand.

In contrast, the German localisation from Altraverse (lettering by Vibrant Publishing Studio) chooses to reduce the size of the kerning—the distance between the letters—so the text is almost impossible to read without first taking time to decipher what is meant to be said. This plays into how German is a language known for its compound nouns and extra long words, where letterers are often forced to hyphenate in strange ways to get them to fit into bubbles. Here, the team behind the series plays to that: if text were to be broken up as it usually is, then it wouldn’t be as obvious to the reader that something was amiss. By reducing the kerning, the team is able to create a closer experience for the reader that not only reflects that of the original Japanese text, but also visualizes the experience of d/Deaf people who lip read. 

Both these localizations still utilize the technique of flipping letters over as used in the original Japanese, but have used their own languages’ unique attributes and the creativity of the localizers to create pieces of work that help to translate these experiences to a broader global audience. The care taken in ensuring that this localization is true to the very heart of Morishita’s story, and in turn to the heart of d/Deaf representation, allows for the series to shine. 

A Sign of Affection is not a perfect series, and many readers have argued that, while the artists’ extensive consultation and earnest empathy is admirable, this story cannot be as “authentic” as one told by an artist who shares Yuki’s lived experience. Yet, it is clear just how hard Morishita are working to make this as representative as possible, right down to the construction of the manga’s text formatting elements like lettering and sound effects that the average reader usually doesn’t even think about. Through these visual and linguistic techniques, they’re not only playing innovatively with form, but putting d/Deaf people, putting disabled people, at the heart of this series. Their thoughtfulness, their care to attention, and their dedication to their craft allows for A Sign of Affection to be a prime example of what the manga medium can do above anything else. This series is a wonderful showcase in the importance of lettering, and how it can be used to enhance the message of a story and draw the reader into a specific, carefully crafted worldview, even if that experience may not be the “universal” one.