Don't Fear the Adaptation

Don’t Fear the Adaptation: Natsume’s Book of Friends

September 16, 2011 by Cathy Yan 4 Comments

Natsume’s Book of Friends | by Yuki Midorikawa | Manga: Hakusensha / Viz | Anime: Brain’s Base / Crunchyroll

Natsume’s Book of Friends is the kind of series that could only be made in Japan. The same plot set-up (young man learns about demons and ghosts, fights some of them and saves others, befriends a supernatural guardian and learns more about his family and himself) when worked over by the United States, well, became Supernatural. Natsume, on the other hand, is a feel-good, low-key series that would gladly eschew demon-slaying for a chance to show an autumn festival in full sway. Less “monster of the week” and more slice-of-life, Natsume’s Book of Friends’ first season tries to bite off more story than it can chew and ultimately left me wavering between dissatisfaction and well-meaning sentimentality.

The eponymous Natsume is a high school boy named Takashi, who has spent his life being ostracized by his family and peers for seeing ayakashi — monsters that are an intersection of mythical beast, ghost, and evil spirit. Takashi’s grandmother Reiko Natsume left him her belongings, among which is the Book of Friends: an old-fashioned notebook filled with names of ayakashi that Reiko had made her followers. The ayakashi whose names were bound in the book were forced to obey Reiko’s commands and, as we discover later in the series, were often Reiko’s only companions.

But Natsume (Takashi)’s connection with the Book of Friends is different. He’s not interested in getting more names; rather, he wants to return the names to the ayakashi. It’s a grueling process that physically and spirtually taxes him. Guided by Nyanko, a dog demon named Madara stuck in the body of fat cat, Natsume finds himself navigating the tricky waters of interpersonal relationships, both with the humans in his life, the ayakashi who won’t leave him alone, and the ayakashi who, surprisingly, need him to guide them through the world of human feelings.

When Natsume’s Book of Friends does its job well, the stories are truly touching. Tsubame, the sparrow ayakashi of episode six, was for me the early standout in this thirteen episode series. Her story arc marks the first time that Natsume gets overly involved in the plight of an ayakashi to his detriment. In his desire to get Tsubame a chance to see the human she loves, Natsume gets trampled on, pushed around, and almost eaten. It’s the kind of dedication that in other anime would result in a love confession. Here, Natsume’s feelings for Tsubame are deliciously kept in the dark, and paired with Tsubame’s unrequited love for a passing human, the whole episode reads bittersweet and touching. Likewise, Hotaru from episode eight has the same melancholy, literary feel to her character arc, much like a short story from Yasunari Kawabata, but animated. At its best, Natsume’s Book of Friends knows when to play the emotional cards close to heart; the most interesting character relationships tended to be the ones that were neither labeled nor even mentioned by anyone in the series.

But other ayakashi who cross Natsume’s path sometimes seemed downright contrived. The kitsune — fox spirit — whose mother is now a pile of rocks (?) had promise as a loner who aims to befriend Natsume, but instead that story fizzled out into a relatively lukewarm conclusion that had me wondering why I was supposed to remember the kitsune kid when he chose to show up in a later episode. Episode three with the dew god was clearly an early foray into the rustic faith of the countryside, but the really interesting religious question (how can you be a god if you have no powers and no followers?) was passed up without any commentary or exploration, while a passable but ultimately silly love story was chosen to cap off the episode. Let’s not even get into the confused emotional climax of episode five, whose musing about friendship between the ayakashi and ill-fated attempt to show us more about Reiko’s personality had me literally falling asleep, despite my best efforts to stay interested. None of the characters in the first season, besides Natsume, get much depth. Sasada, the homeroom president, and Tanuma, one of the few other people who can see ayakashi, had potential to be great foils for Natsume. Instead, Tanuma languishes as a barely realized ally whom Natsume only manages to reach out to in the last episode, and Sasada goes from possibly-no-wait-maybe-not love interest to laughing stock.

In general I found the manga to be more melancholy and on point with the emotional cues. Natsume himself is more gloomy and isolated in the manga, while in the anime, he seems shockingly well-adjusted, making a major sticking point of the story — Natsume’s attempt to build interpersonal relationships — harder to swallow in the anime. Often the anime seemed to be trying too hard for zany or cute or melodramatic or something. I don’t know if it’s because of the switch in medium, but the manga chapters seemed to have an extra air of easy-going softness that was missing from the anime. In many ways, the manga version of Natsume’s life was incredibly fragile. You felt the stories were just like Tanuma’s view of the ayakashi, like if you scrutinized the stories too much they would disappear a little into the background of Natsume’s life. Not so with the anime, where things felt more grounded, more real. Natsume didn’t seem to be the lonely, slightly withdrawn young man he was under Midorikawa’s pen; instead, you felt strongly in the anime that everyone else had had to be wrong to doubt a boy like Natsume. The world of manga Natsume seemed more Japanese, and the ayakashi were everywhere, not just the guest characters they so often were in the anime.

Yet the anime does have its advantages. The ending theme, “Summer Evening Sky”, is a perfect enka-inspired piece that always warms your heart whenever it starts to fade in during the last few minutes of an episode. Kazuhiko Inoue as Madara a.k.a. Nyanko-sensei is a force to behold, easily switching out of Nyanko’s whiny drawl and into Madara’s gruff, no-nonsense bark. And for all my griping that the secondary characters never get development, it’s still refreshing to see a show starring a male character that is neither testosterone-driven nor filled to the brim with ditzy and well-endowed love interests.

Fans of Mushishi and Yumekui Kenbun might consider giving Natsume’s Book of Friends a try (and likewise, those of you who enjoyed Natsume should check out those other two series!). At thirteen episodes, the first season is easy enough to swallow, and the episodic nature of the story arcs makes it easy to start and stop. As for me, I’d put Natsume’s Book of Friends in the box of anime series that neither wow nor disappoint. And, of course, I can only hope the subsequent seasons of the anime learn from Mushishi rather than Supernatural.

Watch it streaming at Crunchyroll

Don’t Fear the Adaptation: Summer Special

June 29, 2011 by Cathy Yan 5 Comments

This month Don’t Fear the Adaptation brings you a summer one-two combo of series that span the anime/manga/light novel trifecta: The Story of Saiunkoku and Shiki!

The Story of Sainkoku | Novel: Sai Yukino / Kadokawa | Manga: Kairi Yura / Kadokawa / Viz | Anime: Madhouse / Geneon (previous) / Funimation

The Story of Saiunkoku is a classic shoujo series if there ever was one. Its heroine, Shurei Hong, is a strong, hardworking girl determined to overcome the position she was squashed into, both with regard to her socioeconomic problems and her gender. She’s intelligent, insightful, caring, civic-minded, and just sassy enough to get her way. Its main male character, the Emperor Ryuki Shi, comes from a tortuous family history and is in need of exactly the qualities Shurei has to offer. Though he truly appreciates, even loves, Shurei, there’s an obstacle or three that keeps him from expressing those feelings. Not to mention, he has other things to worry about — like how to keep the country running. Add in a childhood friend with a mysterious background who rounds out the love triangle, some kibbitzing side characters, the glorious half-fantasy rendition of ancient China that is the country of Saiunkoku, and you have a formula for a successful shoujo story that’s been perfected since Rose of Versailles.

I don’t use that comparison lightly. As much as Rose of Versailles romanticized revolutionary France, The Story of Saiunkoku romanticizes ancient China in a way that is deeply familiar to anybody who grew up watching Chinese TV dramas. This isn’t a bad thing. The Story of Saiunkoku‘s aesthetic fits the story perfectly — flowing layered robes in brilliant colors, intricate hairstyles for the women and long luxurious hair for the men, patterned window lattices, pagodas a plenty, and enough flower petals to drown in. It’s vibrant and feminine without exaggeration. Madhouse’s animation, like Kairi Yura’s artwork, is solid but uninspiring, almost to the point of being dull. But Saiunkoku‘s strength is the political intrigue and the character dynamics which, together with a hint of the fantastical and the core of a romantic drama, make for an entertaining story.

David, Kate, MJ, and Michelle have all written about The Story of Saiunkoku‘s charm. The anime does justice to their compliments. The Story of Saiunkoku does what it’s supposed to, and does it well: a cast of likeable characters develop interesting relationships with each other which are then pitted against a meandering but straightforward plot. Shurei is a classic spunky anime heroine, all the way down to her relationship with her father (like so many anime and manga heroines, her mother is absent and she’s had to take care of the family). But The Story of Saiunkoku is a great example of why tropes aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Shurei is loveable because she embodies all the right traits. She’s a strong young woman, someone with her own troubles but is always sensitive to the troubles of others, someone who isn’t above getting angry when her pride is hurt but also genuinely supports the people she loves. She never glamorizes herself as a martyr, even when she’s bullied to the point of exhaustion. She’s the kind of Mary Sue that you want to aspire to, instead of snarking, and she’s definitely one of the strongest anime heroines I’ve seen in years.

What I found most intriguing about Ryuki was his multi-faceted personality. In front of his older brother, he’s vulnerable and adoring; in front of Shurei, he’s a lovesick fool. But when it comes to beating down kidnappers or running an imperial inquiry into corruption, he’s every bit the model emperor, with only his country’s wellbeing in mind. It’s not that he’s manipulative. Rather, you can tell he’s only survived so long by being calculating. As the series progresses, his inability to win over Shurei with tricks and ploys (and hard-boiled eggs) exposes him for the 19 year old he is inside, enthusiastic and well-meaning and more than a little clumsy. Is it just that we like to see a man with so much power reduced to putty in the hands of a mere girl? I know that’s certainly part of my amusement. Here Shurei is never just a damsel in distress depending on Ryuki. She even gives up a life of luxury as Ryuki’s consort in order to pursue her dreams. Shoujo heroines often pay lip service to a life framed around something other than romance, but Shurei actually lives that life. She never wanted Ryuki to fall in love with her; she’d always wanted to serve her country in any way she could. It’s just that love happened along the way.

The other characters are hit or miss, but mostly hits. Split three ways between his fondness for Ryuki, his dedication to Shouka and Shurei as an adopted son, and the torch he carries for Shurei’s affections, Seiran is just as calculating as Ryuki and, without Ryuki’s natural bubbliness, is far scarier. Koyu Li, the assistant secretary of Civil Affairs, is tragic, hotheaded, and heart-meltingly endearing in turns, and in another series could have managed to be the main character. Here, he and his good friend Shuei Ran, whose ladykiller air hides a competent general, are the mocking peanut gallery, almost always on screen as a pair, whether it be as a pair of the Emperor’s confidants or a pair of troublemakers. The Story of Saiunkoku does at times come off as a reverse harem. Don’t get me wrong, I like reverse harems just as much as the next person, but none of the female characters in the first season even come close to matching up to Shurei. While I adored meeting characters like Reishin, the sneaky but overly doting Minister of Civil Affairs who doubles as both Koyu’s adoptive father and Shurei’s uncle, and Kijin Kou, the eccentric masked Minister of Finance, Sakujun — the second oldest of Enjun Sa’s grandsons– is basically a less nuanced version of Ryuki, even in appearance, and Kuro is the least interesting of the three Hong brothers for sure. With a cast this large, there were bound to be a couple of duds, but I just wish there had been more female characters like Kouchou, the courtesan who, with equal equanimity, teaches Shurei how to wear makeup and runs Kiyou’s entire red light district.

Like all the best shoujo stories, The Story of Saiunkoku throws in plenty of humor, and the anime manages to slip in a few extra jokes. One of my favorite episodes is when Shurei falls ill and all the characters come out of the woodwork to wish her well, including an extra silly Reishin who sulks over the implication that one day his beloved niece will get married. I’m especially impressed with the anime’s restraint — there’s not a single super-deformed face for all thirty-nine episodes.

I’ve only read the first two volumes of the manga, but from what I can tell, the anime and manga do have differences, even from episode one. Some characters are introduced early in the anime, and scenes have been both added and rearranged. For instance, while in the manga, Shurei is relatively unaware that she is in danger of being poisoned, in the anime Ryuki is forced to explain the danger to her after she’s almost poisoned at a banquet. As a result, Shurei in the anime learns both about Ryuki’s troubled past and Ryuki pretending to be stupid much sooner than the manga Shurei. It’s hard to compare the entire first season of the anime to just two volumes of the manga, but if I have to make some comparison, I’d say there just seems to be more stuff happening, and at a quicker pace, in the anime. Despite this, the anime does start dragging, in particular during the period after the imperial exams. While there are never any straight-out filler episodes, the series often picks the slowest, most tortuous methods to advance the plot, like episode 21, which is almost entirely superfluous except for an eleventh hour hint at a plot twist.

The Story of Saiunkoku is like Fushigi Yugi meets Dream of Red Chambers, as envisioned by CLAMP. This, actually, is a good thing. If you’re just the slightest fan of shoujo manga, and if you come across a box set of the first season for a reasonable price, I cannot stress how quickly you should snap up that deal. As it is, you can still get the early DVD sets relatively easy, but the later DVD volumes are nigh impossible to get your hands on. Thank goodness Viz is putting out the manga, or else we’d all be missing out. Now if only we could convince them to license the light novels as well!

(Note: I’ve used the Funimation names for this review. Shuurei’s family name is actually Kou, not Hong, but I’m guessing Funimation was worried we’d get her family mixed up with the other Kou family.)

Shiki | Novel: Fuyumi Ono / Shinchosha | Manga: Ryu Fujisaki / Shueisha | Anime: Daume / Funimation

Watch online at Funimation

I feel bad that I’ve been recommending stuff that you can’t buy or watch, or can only buy at ridiculous prices. So I thought I’d throw in a bonus review and recommend something you can watch easily. Shiki has vampires, “werewolves”, and a fascinating ensemble cast that will hook you faster than you can say “Twilight.” Plus, you can watch it for free on Funimation’s site now, and next year it’ll be released as DVD box set. What more could you want? (Well, other than for someone to license the corresponding manga and light novel as well, of course.)

Summer is the season for horror stories, and Shiki delivers in spades. The story is set in the small rural village of Sotoba, a place isolated from the rest of the world by mountains and forests. Sotoba is famous for burying their dead, and as a result the local folklore has plenty of stories featuring the undead, though no one takes that myth seriously. That is, until one summer, the villagers begin to die off an unprecedented rate, only to be seen walking the streets at night. Is it an epidemic? Is it a curse brought in by the mysterious Kirishikis, the eccentric family that builds a castle in the mountains and moved in during the dead of night? Or could there be some truth in the undead legend after all?

The closest Shiki has to main characters are Natsuno Yuuki, the surly teenaged son whose family moves from Tokyo to Sotoba in the beginning of the story, and Toshio Ozaki, the young head doctor of the Ozaki Clinic whose family has always served as Sotoba’s doctors. Ozaki, first frustrated by his inability to identify what the illness killing his villagers is, tries his best to convince the other adults that there are vampires — known as “shiki”, or corpse demons, in the series — walking amongst their midst. As a representative of the adult residents of Sotoba, his is a powerful story of how the rational can brainwash people just as much as the irrational. None of the adult villagers seem able to accept that something unusual is happening in Sotoba, much less that the cause is supernatural. As much as Ozaki tries to save the village, the village unconsciously repels his attempts, and it’s only a drastic eleventh hour sleight of hand by Ozaki that gets Sotoba to listen.

Natsuno’s problems are likewise complicated. He has no love for Sotoba, and in fact only has one friend in the entire village, a cheerful guy named Toru Mutou, but he isn’t willing to stand by and let the shiki kill off the village either. Still, how do you kill the undead, especially when the only allies you have are two middle schoolers who are just as clueless as you are? To make matters more complicated, one of the first victims, a teenaged girl named Megumi Shimizu, has an obsessive crush on Natsuno, and after she’s turned into a shiki, she’s hellbent on stalking him down and turning him into a shiki as well.

It’s not the kids that are interesting in Shiki, though the complications of the Natsuno/Tooru/Megumi relationship certainly make for one of the most dramatic twists mid-series. It’s really the ambiguities of the adult characters and the incredibly well-executed pacing of the narrative that elevates Shiki from a mere vampire horror story to a very complex and very human drama. Shiki is all about asking what it means to be or want to be alive, and what sacrifices are justified in the pursuit. Take Ozaki, whose obsession with hunting down the shiki is matched only by the shiki’s obsession with hunting down him. He wants to save the village from getting taking over; they want to keep him from killing their own kind. Is one really better than the other? The leader of the shiki, Sunako, was bitten when she was just a little girl, and all she wants is to give the shiki a place where they don’t have to hide, where they can have festivals and live as families and walk down the street just like people. It’s a noble enough dream, but to accomplish it, she needs to wipe out Sotoba’s living residents.

If Sunako is a charismatic villain who tugs at your heartstrings, Ozaki is a terribly unsympathetic protagonist who makes you question whether you should even be cheering for him. He’s callous towards the concerns of others, so one-minded that he thinks nothing of sacrificing his own wife to accomplish his aims. Towards the end of series, you begin to wonder whether he actually cares about the village at all, or if this is just a matter of pride for him. Then there’s Muroi, who as the head priest of Sotoba, should be on the frontlines driving away the shiki. But instead Muroi is entranced by the shiki as a way of escaping his stifling life, and you find yourself upset with Ozaki for not being more understanding, even though Muroi is, in effect, enabling the death of Sotoba. And all of this doesn’t even begin to touch on the feelings of the victims’ families, who are simultaneously repulsed and drawn to their shiki loved ones. Would it be better for someone you love to die and stay dead? Or is it better for them to die and come back as a murderous, blood-thirsty, but very animate shiki?

Shiki packs all this and more in crisscrossing plot lines that weave together to form a narrative about life and death that could be mined forever. You’ll find yourself changing loyalties, reconsidering sides, examining long-held preconceptions about how life should be and what rules should guide human interaction, simply depending on which character the episode focuses on. While the story can get a little heavy-handed, especially during Muroi’s dialogues with Sunako, the grand finale of the last few episodes handle the moral dilemmas of the remaining Sotoba residents so unflinchingly that you’ll wish for some sugar-coating. But if there’s one thing you could say about Shiki, it’s that it forces most of its major characters to look their choices in the face and stand up to them — sometimes with disastrous results.

The art in Shiki can be preposterous at times. Don’t get me started on the crazy hairdos, the physics-defying tears, and the inexplicable fashions; Megumi in the first episode doesn’t even come close to the worst of it. There’s a particular moment where one of the Kirishiki servants goes to visit Natsuno which just emphasizes how ill-suited Shiki was for comedy, no matter how hard the series would try to inject occasional jokes. But you forget that failing when you’re dealing with one of the spookiest soundtracks made for any horror anime. The sound effects– whispering choirs, eerie giggles, and almost fetid sucking sounds– will make you cringe and shrink back into yourself. The music ranges from forgettable melodies plucked out on guitar strings to an unassuming main theme that nevertheless ends up being associated with so many depressing events that you start dreading its appearance. The end product gives off the impression of being a demented music box — harmless during the day, but deeply unsettling in the dark.

Shiki is a feast for the fan of vampires or the supernatural. There’s something vaguely Stephen King-ish about its plot and premise, but the execution is something much closer to an HBO miniseries: you know it has a plan, you know it’s going somewhere, and the ending is satisfying and satisfyingly unexpected. The characters span the whole spectrum of unselfish, neutral, and reprehensible. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve watched a series that handled that spectrum as well as Shiki. Watch it now while it’s free, then grab a copy for those hot, terrible summer evenings where you need a little chill that only the undead can inspire.

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Either Natsume Yujincho or Chi’s Sweet Home will be next. If you feel strongly one way or another, as always, drop me a line!

Don’t Fear the Adaptation: Ristorante Paradiso

June 4, 2011 by Cathy Yan 9 Comments

Ristorante Paradiso | by Natsume Ono | Manga: Ohta Shuppan / Viz | Anime: David Production / Crunchyroll

Whenever you write a review of Ristorante Paradiso, you always have to get one thing out of the way first: which one is your favorite gentleman? When I read the manga, Luciano was mine, because I fall pretty hard for the gruff types who despite their claims of disinterest can’t help but meddle. And while the anime cemented my love of Luciano, I have to say anime Teo is exactly the handsome aniki I’d fall in love with at Casetta dell’Orso. It helps that he’s a dessert chef, mouthy, and also rides a motorcycle. (Lorenzo is disqualified from my rankings — he’s too perfect and there’s no way to avoid being in love with him and horribly, horribly jealous of Olga.)

Ristorante Paradiso is primarily about Nicoletta, a twenty-one year old determined to exact revenge on her mother Olga, who left Nicoletta behind in order to marry Lorenzo, a restaurant owner in Rome. But when she arrives in Rome, Nicoletta falls in love with Claudio, a waiter at Lorenzo’s restaurant, and ends up staying there as a kitchen apprentice. Like most of Natsume Ono’s stories, it’s a mature slice-of-life production with a slow plot and an ensemble cast filled with enigmatic men and self-assured women. The manga is short at one volume but has a three-volume prequel-sequel entitled Gente: The People of Ristorante Paradiso. The anime mixes and matches the overall Nicoletta-and-Claudio plot of Ristorante Paradiso but detours heavily into the backstories of Gente. The end product is very, very much House of Five Leaves meets Antique Bakery. Why else do you think I pleaded with MJto let me do a Natsume Ono double punch? ;)

Ristorante Paradiso the anime is a feel-good jousei version of a dating game crossed with a butler café. It falls somewhere in between the beloved reverse harem romcoms like Ouran Host Club and the “counseling session of the week” trope of Bartender (which, incidentally, was also adapted into an anime). Like Antique Bakery, Ristorante Paradiso has its moments of drama — some might even argue, melodrama — but it’s one of those series that ultimately boils down to its playful sampling of human life. It’s bursting with little stories about romance, family, growing up, and, well, more romance. There’s a particularly memorable side story about a woman whose husband keeps cheating on her. The dell’Orso staff, especially Gigi and Vito, get involved, and the episode caps off with a very serious, but touching, lesson about marriage and coincidence that even O’Henry would have been proud of. Episode eight and nine owe more to Giuseppe Tornatore than Iron Chef, and episode four, which chronicles the founding of dell’Orso, could be a movie all by itself.

All the characters, especially the gentlemen, get a boost from being animated and paired with a voice actor. Gigi and Lorenzo as twenty-somethings are heartwrenchingly adorable when animated, and Claudio as a young and awkward server trying to find off the amorous intentions of a rich patron will make you swoon. Of special note for me are the relatively unknown Mitsutaka Tachikawa as Luciano and Jin Yamanoi as Claudio. Listening to Yamanoi really makes you believe you’re in the presence of a saint, while Tachikawa’s Luciano is beyond endearing, especially when he growls.

The additional materials from Gente, on top of keeping the anime from having to stretch out one volume’s worth of material into eleven slow episodes, also gives more depth to Nicoletta and her relationship with Claudio. Nicoletta’s observation that love comes in different shapes makes more sense when you get to meet all the significant others of the dell’Orso staff. That they spend more time together and go through a lot more troubles together makes their ending in the anime far sweeter and more conclusive. An unexpected benefit of getting to know Luciano better in the anime was that Claudio, in the process, came into better focus. Their friendship and comparable statuses (Luciano as a widow and Claudio, a divorcee) meant Claudio comes off in the anime as more than just a nice guy. You struggle with him over his idealistic nature, sympathize with his inability to move past his ex-wife Gabrielle, and really, truly wish for his happiness. You feel like you understand just what it is that Nicoletta sees in him.

David Production is a smaller, newer studio compared to Madhouse, the studio responsible for Ono’s other anime adaptation House of Five Leaves. The style in Ristorante Paradiso is less obviously Ono’s this time around, but David Production still did an excellent job translating Ono’s art style. The glimpses of food in the series are mouthwatering, and the shots of the staff’s favorite enoteca, with shelves and shelves of wine bottles, make me want to follow Nicoletta’s journey and spend an extended vacation in Rome. There’s some awkward use of CG as well as a laughable moment in episode six, where if you pause the video in Olga’s office, you can see that the certificate behind her is issued to “Bob Fields”, Cambridge, and qualifies the recipient to teach English to adults. Other than that, the animation is top notch. Episode seven introduces Luciano’s daughter Margherita who is almost indistinguishable from Nicoletta, but that, I think, is more the fault of Ono herself and not the studio’s.

For fans of the manga who were frustrated with the slowness of Ristorante Paradiso‘s first few chapters, but liked Gente‘s character development, the anime is the best of both worlds. (It’s just a terrible shame that Crunchyroll took down their videos.) For those of you who have yet to read the manga, while some have complained that the anime’s flashbacks were too confusing, I would recommend watching the anime over reading the manga. The meshing of Gente with Ristorante Paradiso makes for a fuller, more fleshed out cast and also tempers the ending of Nicoletta’s storyline, which I found unsatisfactorily abrupt when reading the manga. It’s far from realistic, the initial conflict between Olga and Nicoletta is still solved too easily, and very few of the staff’s backstories cover truly original ground. But if you like food, are a people-watcher, or simply enjoy a little romanzo in your life, Ristorante Paradiso welcomes you to Casetta dell’Orso.

Don’t Fear the Adaptation: Antique Bakery

May 8, 2011 by Cathy Yan 9 Comments

Antique Bakery | by Fumi Yoshinaga | Manga: Shinshokan/DMP | Anime: Nippon Animation/Nozomi Entertainment

Antique Bakery has already been covered in wonderful reviews by the Manga Bookshelf regulars. It begins with Keiichirou Tachibana, the son of a rich family, quitting his salaryman job in order to open a cake shop. He buys out an antique shop that’s going out of business and hires a former classmate of his, Yusuke Ono, the black sheep of the pâtissier community. Along the way, they pick up ex-pro boxing champion Eiji Kanda, who is determined to become Ono’s apprentice, and also end up employing Tachibana’s childhood friend, Chikage Kobayakawa, as an incompetent waiter. Like last month’s House of Five Leaves, Antique Bakery is a story about forging families and learning to both shoulder and forget your past. Though Ono is technically Eiji’s teacher, they turn out to be more of a parental-child unit than anything else, and any fan of the series will tell you that there’s a funny yet tragic joke about Chikage’s daughter marrying Tachibana in the future, essentially making Chikage Tachibana’s “father”. Add in a tumultuous high school past between Tachibana and Ono, an are-they-or-aren’t-they relationship between Chikage and Ono, and more delicious cakes than you could possibly eat in a life time, and you have Antique Bakery.

Every good fan plays favorites. I’m not afraid to tell you that Fumi Yoshinaga is one of mine. Antique Bakery was one of the first series that I collected from beginning to end, back when DMP was still doing those wonderful large books with the slip covers. The Antique Bakery books came with scratch and sniff covers. I thought they were the bee’s knees. I still do. So it’s only natural that I went into Antique Bakery the anime wanting to like it.

Did the anime deliver? Well, I can’t say there’s really anything actually wrong with it. It follows the source material reasonably closely, it does its best to translate Yoshigana’s characteristic artwork into an animation style, and it’s consistent from beginning to end. Maybe the best thing is the voice acting. Keiji Fujiwara is exactly what Tachibana sounded like in my head when he uses his “badly put upon papa” voice. Eiji Hanawa’s Chikage is flawless from beginning to end, alternatively meek and manly. Mamoru Miyano was an inspired choice for Eiji’s exuberant, cheeky attitude, and Shinichirou Miki as Ono manages to effortlessly straddle all aspects of Ono’s contradictory personality. It’s a real treat to hear scenes where all four voice actors work together, especially in scenes where Ono manages to show off just how much he is the real boss of Antique, not Tachibana.

The real problem comes when you take apart how the anime has restructured the story. I don’t mind that the anime throws together all the employees relatively early (Chikage, for example, shows up in episode one even though he wasn’t introduced until volume two of the manga). But the first episode opens with Tachibana having a nightmare about his kidnapper, which takes away the shock value of learning that competent, put-together Tachibana actually had a traumatic childhood. From the very beginning, the threads of his kidnapping story are scattered everywhere. When Tachibana first discovers Ono’s “gay of demonic charm” in the manga, it was very much tied to his guilt for pushing Ono away and ruining Ono’s life. But in the anime, it somehow came all the way back to Tachibana’s unarticulated homophobia post-kidnapping.

Anime Tachibana is completely reduced down to his childhood trauma. Gone is his fondness for inventing overly dramatic and completely specious explanations for the behavior of the customers in the shop. Gone is the very telling scene where his family visits the shop and you realize the entire Tachibana family has a face reserved for dealing with the public. When we hear about his past girlfriends, it’s limited to the one in high school, so you never realize that Tachibana’s willingness to please is one of his virtues as well as one of his weaknesses.

The other characters suffer from similar abridgment. Eiji’s background as a hypersexual gang member teenager, reformed by a kindhearted boxing coach, has been completely wiped in the anime, so he’s ends up being only an overly enthusiastic sports-type with a heart of gold. While we are introduced to Haruka and Tamiko, the news anchors that come to interview the shop for a cake fair, we aren’t given their history, which like all things Yoshinaga is that wonderful blend of humor and commentary on gender in modern day Japan. Chikage never had much of a story in the first place, but most of the scenes showing his idiosyncratic, yet charming, way of interacting with the Antique customers have also been cut. And one of my favorite lines, where Ono displays his insight into the hearts of men by diffusing an argument between Eiji and Tachibana, never makes it into the anime. Most of Ono’s gay lifestyle, actually, never makes it into the anime.

The characters seem to be shallower reflections of their manga selves. In fact, the story as a whole seems to be a shallower version of the manga. For me, the beauty of Antique Bakery was that it was a slice of life series — iyashi-kei, if you will — which pretended for a while to be a drama about Tachibana’s past. In the end, though, it was all about how these four men, whether or not they mean to, are stuck together forever as a family. Even when Chikage moves out of Tachibana’s apartment, even when it’s only Tachibana and Ono in the store, they’re still a family, bound together by fate and their investment in each other’s lives.

But the anime should probably be renamed “Keiichirou Tachibana and the Never Ending Kidnapping Trauma”. Everything is subsumed into this one overarching theme. This defect is nowhere more obvious than in the ending. In the manga, the kidnapping plot is wrapped up, Eiji and Chikage leave the store, followed by Tachibana and Ono pretending to be a gay couple for some schoolgirl customers, and we end on Tachibana’s realization that, despite evidence to the contrary, he’s still not over his trauma. But the anime, bizarrely enough, starts with Tachibana’s realization that he isn’t okay after all, transition into Chikage’s, then Eiji’s, departure, and finally lets Tachibana face off his kidnapper. The flashback to Tachibana a child, running away from his kidnapper, worked in the manga as a faux-climax to the story, but contradicts anime Tachibana’s assertion that he isn’t cured. The sense of the store continuing on, despite all changes, has disappeared. We end where we began, alone with Tachibana.

Finally, the animation leaves a lot to be desired. Fumi Yoshinaga’s art was never ornate or highly detailed, but when translated into an anime, it looks sadly flat. As if to compensate, the anime overuses CG art for the backgrounds, leaving you with the unsettling sense that you’re watching cutscenes from a late nineties video game. While abrupt transitions into super-deformed faces worked for the characters in the static medium of manga, their appearance in the anime verges on excessive and more than once took me completely out of the story. Like everything else in this anime, the animation isn’t terrible, but it definitely doesn’t do the series any favors, and it certainly didn’t take the story places where only the anime medium can go. I finished the anime with the uncomfortable feeling that it would have been better off with a studio like BONES, Studio Pierrot, or even Sunrise, which understood enough baking to make Yakitate!! Japan memorable. If a series like Genshiken found a way to parody cheesy BL storylines with French subtitles, you’d think a canonical cheesy BL storyline set in Paris would be played for laughs in Antique Bakery. Alas.

For completist fans, the DVD set is worth getting exclusively for the bonus booklet, which contains two enlightening interviews with Fumi Yoshinaga and the voice actors. The DVDs themselves are pretty bare, but the last DVD does include an adorable special where the voice actors are interviewed while wearing the outfits of the characters they play. On the other hand, if this is your first experience with the Antique gang, I have to say that you’re better off reading the manga than watching the anime. It’s not even that the anime is actually bad; it’s plenty enjoyable on a lazy Sunday afternoon, especially if you have a piece of cake on hand. But Fumi Yoshinaga’s work is so good that the anime was doomed to failure from the beginning. That’s the danger of playing favorites.

A million thanks to RightStuf for providing a copy of the DVD set for review.

Don’t Fear the Adaptation: House of Five Leaves

March 29, 2011 by Cathy Yan 27 Comments

House of Five Leaves | by Natsume Ono | Manga: Shogakukan/Viz Media | Studio: Manglobe/Funimation

Watch streaming from Funimation

Regular readers of Manga Bookshelf will need no introduction to House of Five Leaves. MJlisted it as one of her best new seinen series of 2010, Kate has reviewed all three volumes, and David himself wrote a smart little ode to it recently when he reviewed volume two. For those of you still new to the series, House of Five Leaves is Natsume Ono’s seven volume samurai story. The main character, Akitsu Masanosuke, referred to in the series as Masa, is a masterless samurai determined to change himself while looking for work in Edo. One afternoon, Masa is hired by a suspicious man named Yaichi as a bodyguard. But all is not as it seems: Yaichi is actually the leader of a band of kidnappers who call themselves “Five Leaves”, and he doesn’t just want Masa to be his bodyguard — he wants Masa to join them as a comrade in crime. Masa, by nature a righteous and naïve man, resists Yaichi’s attempts to draw him in. However, he soon finds himself entangled in the fate of Five Leaves and, more importantly, in the mystery of Yaichi.

There are so many wonderful things about the anime adaptation of House of Five Leaves that it’s hard to know where to start. Thankfully, Natsume Ono’s distinct art style makes my job easier. Manglobe and the series director Tomomi Mochizuki transferred Ono’s art effortlessly into animation. The character designs are instantly recognizable, especially in Masa’s wide, childish eyes and Otake’s playful lipsticked smile. The sweatdrops, stray hairs, and blush lines of Ono’s characters are rendered in loving detail in every episode. There are even moments — the candy pieces of episode four, the pillars of the bridge in episode twelve — where the lines look like calligraphy, as if they were penned by Ono herself.

Often anime simplifies manga artwork. House of Five Leaves, the anime, does the opposite. While the manga tends to be very “white” on the page, full of negative space, the anime is full of textures: the unpolished wood of Goinkyo’s home, the tatami mat of the Katsuraya house, the smooth rice paper doors of Ume’s restaurant. Even more impressive is the interplay of light and shadow in the anime. Characters constantly move in and out of candlelight, open doors to let in sunlight, or sit with their backs to a window, hiding their faces in the dark. Ono is no slob herself when it comes to lighting in the manga, but the anime takes full advantage of its color palette — earthy browns and subdued gray-greens — to make Edo come alive.

The soundtrack features a combination of rumbling drums, wistful koto melodies, and reedy flute-like tunes that helps ground us in a historical Edo that, amazingly, never comes off as antiquated or forced. Likewise, the voice actor choices are almost flawless. Daisuke Namikawa as Masa is exactly the kind of guy who wears his heart on his sleeve and never says anything less than what he means. Veteran voice actor Takahiro Sakurai’s performance as Yaichi is by turns teasing, seductive, spiteful, and, at his best, all three at once. A shout out must be given to Masaya Takatsuka, who never misses a beat conveying Ume’s my-bark-is-worse-than-my-bite personality, especially in episode three when Ume makes a crack at Matsu. But the anime adaptation goes that extra mile: if you listen carefully, you can hear Edo in the background, in the soft drone of water boiling in a kettle, or the river streaming past, or the birds of Goinkyo’s backyard, or the shuffling of Yaichi’s wooden shoes. Ono’s manga might not think to comment on the “shaaa chhk” sound of a rice door sliding open or the faint crackle of straw as Ume unloads their latest hostage out of a basket, but it would be a pity to go through this anime without appreciating these little details.

At first glance, House of Five Leaves is about the journey Five Leaves takes from a ragtag group of misfits to a family who looks out for their own, even when there’s no money involved. For lack of a more nuanced, less cheesy word, the story is heart-warming. The more you uncover the crisscrossing ties of responsibility that connect the Five Leaves members, whether it be the reluctant life debts Matsu shoulders or the reason Ume remains in Five Leaves, the more you enjoy seeing them together at Ume’s restaurant, making fun of each other as they drink sake. Sadly, the anime does cut out one of my favorite scenes from the manga so far (Ume and Matsu bickering in volume one), and I imagine the later episodes similarly streamline forthcoming volumes. But the heart of the story comes through unscathed, which is a testament both to the strength of Ono’s writing and Manglobe’s talent at adaptation.

Underlying this story, though, is another tried and true theme: appearances are deceiving. Yaichi shows up in the first episode as a sage and benefactor to Masa, so naturally Masa, along with the viewer, looks upon Yaichi as a voice of authority. When we meet Yagi, the police chief who seems to know more about Yaichi than he lets on, we’re immediately suspicious of him because Yaichi tells us to be. But the more that’s uncovered about Yaichi, the more we realize Yaichi is the unreliable one. Just as Ume, Matsu, and Otake are more virtuous than the criminals we first meet them as, Yaichi is not at all the kind-hearted character we first encounter. In fact, he’s the most dangerous one of them all.

The anime has restructured the pacing of Ono’s series, favoring episodes that end on jarring cliffhangers and jumps in the timeline, often through flashbacks. Some might prefer the more measured pacing Ono shows in the manga; others might find the anime benefits from a more coherent focus, especially when it comes to Yaichi’s storyline. I for one felt like I could guess the events of episode twelve from the flashback sequence in episode one — a flashback sequence, I should add, that does not exist in the manga. But anime being the inherently action-based medium it is, I can’t fault Manglobe for wanting to ratchet up the tension just a little on what is, overall, a slow-moving story.

In the end House of Five Leaves is one of those series that I enjoy for reasons I can’t put into words. It’s not plot driven, and the characters never really change, even if they become more well-rounded. Certainly Masa never learns to get over his fear of being watched and remains the clumsy, shy samurai we first meet. But there is a marvelous je ne sais quoi to House of Five Leaves, an atmosphere of rambling down a countryside path on a late autumn afternoon, knowing that you’ll get to your destination eventually but not really knowing when. The anime luxuriates in that feeling. You could spend your time trying to piece together all the threads of the story, but you’d be missing the point. It’s meant to be savored, like a dango shared with a friend while hungry.

P.S. Next month’s anime adaptation will be Antique Bakery, just in case you haven’t had enough of stories about people making their own families. As always, if you have any anime you’d like taste-tested, drop me a line.

Don’t Fear the Adaptation: Maison Ikkoku

February 23, 2011 by Cathy Yan 20 Comments

Hello, this is Cathy! I’m so excited to be a part of Manga Bookshelf! To kick off the anime reviews, I thought I’d start with something long, old, and beloved.

Maison Ikkoku | by Rumiko Takahashi | Manga: Shogakukan/Viz Media | Anime: Studio Deen/Viz Media

Buy at Amazon

Anyone who’s ever read manga has probably read a Rumiko Takahashi story, whether it be Rumic Theater, Ranma 1/2, or Inuyasha. She is easily one of the most recognizable and popular mangaka, one of the few that all American readers can name with ease. But in 1980, Takahashi was 23 and her first major work, Urusei Yatsura, was only just beginning to pick up. Armed with her own experiences of living in a small apartment with her two assistants, she sat down to write what became my favorite of her long epics: Maison Ikkoku.

Maison Ikkoku is about the residents of Ikkoku-kan, a boarding house in Tokyo. The protagonist, Yusaku Godai, is a 20 year old ronin student deep into his second year of trying to pass college entrance exams, when the story opens on the arrival of Kyoko Otonashi, the young widow who’s Ikkoku’s new manager. Yusaku instantly falls in love with Kyoko, but like all Takahashi romances, there are plenty of obstacles. The other residents of Ikkoku do their utmost to create embarrassing situations for the uncertain couple. The local tennis coach Shun Mitaka, a rich and suave playboy, declares his own intentions towards Kyoko within hours of meeting her and spends the rest of the series wooing her. Yusaku’s cheery ex-coworker Kozue Nanao eventually becomes his cheery girlfriend, though, much to everyone’s chagrin, she never cottons onto Yusaku’s feelings for Kyoko. Then of course, there’s Kyoko herself, who worries that loving a new man would be betraying the memory of her dead husband. Throw in three interfering families, an engagement made and broken by a fear of dogs, and a high school girl determined to marry Yusaku, and it’s easy to see how the story spanned seven years, fifteen volumes of manga, and 96 episodes of anime before coming to a satisfactory end.

Maison Ikkoku is ultimately a slice-of-life romantic comedy, but unlike Takahashi’s other series, it’s set firmly in the real world. The recurring characters, while exaggerated, are perfectly ordinary people with perfectly ordinary problems. Families get into screaming arguments, marriage is complicated by monetary concerns and societal approval, young men and women worry about their future careers. The path leading up to Ikkoku, the persimmon trees, the kotatsu, the fear of the economic downturn, Kyoko’s habit of sweeping the sidewalk free of leaves– all these are still elements of everyday Japanese life.

Yet the more humorous plot devices of Maison Ikkoku could have only existed in the Internet-less, cellphone-less world of the eighties. If gimmicks like mistaking the French restaurant “Ma Maison” for the local pub “Mamezou,” or Yusaku’s female friends pranking Kyoko so badly she ends up installing a public phone for the rest of the boarding home seem ridiculous at first glance, they’re enjoyable for nostalgia’s sake. In 2011, hijinks like that just don’t happen anymore– people just text each other!

The relationship between Yusaku and Kyoko is the highlight of the entire series. The anime does a wonderful job of showing how it changes from obsession (on Yusaku’s part) and annoyance (on Kyoko’s part) to a mutual affection. Surrounded by secondary characters who are more or less caricatures, the main romantic players come across as surprisingly real. Yusaku might appear at first to be simply a lecherous loser just barely out of his teenage years, but with time, he emerges as a man who, if nothing else, will always do the right thing, even if it’s to his disadvantage. And Kyoko is never just a pretty face. While Mitaka and Yusaku are both guilty of idealizing her, they also embrace her faults: her tendency towards jealousy, her bad temper, her indecisiveness. In an adorable moment in episode 43, they even spend a night drunkenly swapping notes and consoling each other. Kyoko is secretive to a fault with her feelings, so it’s no surprise that most of the series consists of both men learning to reconcile their idea of Kyoko with the person she actually is. An admirably realistic portrayal of love, for sure, but gosh if the story isn’t repetitive! If you don’t find yourself tempted to throw your TV out the window by episode 58, you’re doing it wrong.

Despite the addition of numerous sidestories, Maison Ikkoku the anime feels more streamlined than its manga counterpart, simply because the anime has the benefit of hindsight. While the manga hesitates over how to resolve Kyoko’s and Yusaku’s relationship, the anime already knows how the story ends and stresses their romantic tension early on, most notably in episode 14 and and 22. Readers of the manga might actually wonder if Kyoko ends up with Yusaku; the anime, on the other hand, is emphatically a story about Kyoko and Yusaku, just with detours.

However, the anime never strays far from the manga’s wacky sitcom nature. Don’t expect Ichinose to be much more than a busy body with a fondness for alcohol, or for Yotsuya to stop being an infuriatingly mysterious leech. Just the opposite, as the Ichinose-Yotsuya-Akemi trio get far more screen time in the anime. On the other hand, Nikaido, an accidental resident introduced late in the manga, is absent from the anime, and his lines are given away to the other Ikkoku residents. Anime-only fans thus never experience the epic prank war that erupts between Nikaido and Yotsuya, but Nikaido’s absence is glossed over so well in the anime that it made me question Takahashi’s choice to introduce him at all in the manga.

With five opening and six ending songs, including a Japanese pop hit by Anzen Chitai and two songs by Gilbert O’Sullivan that never made it to the American release, the soundtrack is a perfect representative of the music from that time period. Likewise, the animation is classically eighties but holds up well despite its age. Among other things, the characters frequently change outfits — a rare feat even nowadays for an anime series! Despite its simplicity, the animation does an excellent job conveying the characters’ every emotion, no matter how nuanced, and manages to stay true to Rumiko Takahashi’s original art. Paired with an all around impressive performance from the entire Japanese voice acting cast, the characters of Maison Ikkoku have never been more alive as they are in the anime.

For those who have never read the original manga, Maison Ikkoku the anime is an excellent substitute or introduction. For those who are already fans of the manga, watching the anime is just like revisiting an old friend. Personally, three episodes — 27, 84, and 92 — make the anime adaptation for me. Episode 27’s masterful use of silence, a blinking light, and silhouettes elevate the anime treatment of Souchirou-san’s disappearance into something far more cinematic. I could write whole essays on how wonderfully episode 84 encapsulates repeating issues of trust, family, and determination, not to mention the little animation details — the classical music soundtrack, the Joan Miro in the hotel lobby — that build a world richer than the one in the manga. And Episode 92, split into three acts, each dedicated to one woman, is a great argument for why Takahashi writes some of the best women in anime.

Viz Media distributed both the manga and anime, and both are available through most major online retailers. As the series is pretty old now, it’s unlikely to be found in bookstores, but chances are good that if your local library is like mine and only stocks outdated anime or manga, the old Viz volumes (complete with cheesy titles like “The Hounds of War” or “Good Housekeeping”) will still be there.