Manga Bookshelf

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License Requests

License request day: Global Garden

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MJ and Michelle Smith took their Off the Shelf column on the road this week, discussing Saki Hiwatari’s Please Save My Earth (Viz) over at The Hooded Utilitarian. I enjoyed the discussion so much that I took a look at other works by Hiwatari. One of them features the ghost of Albert Einstein.

If you’re anything like me, this is all you need to know to want to read at least one volume of the series, because legendary theoretical physicists just don’t show up in shôjo manga as often as they should.

The series, Global Garden, ran for eight volumes in Hakusensha’s Hana to Yume in the early 2000s. In it, two young men share a precognitive dream that the world tree is dying because of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They foresee a young girl being able to heal the tree and save the world, so Einstein branches out into theoretical pharmacology and gives them something to slow their aging. Einstein dies, and his disembodied spirit offers these eternally youthful do-gooders guidance as they wait about 50 years for the girl who can save the world. Along the way, someone manages to make a clone that’s half psychic slow-aging guy, half Einstein. So, one of the protagonists has a baby with Einstein, basically.

Global Garden also promises several items off of the classic-sounding-shôjo menu: gender fluidity, a seriously magical girl, and complex blended-family dynamics, and mixes them in with an environmental message. Plus psychic powers. And Einstein’s ghost. Hakusensha offers some preview pages of the first volume.

It’s been published in French by Delcourt as Global Garden: Einstein’s Last Dream. I suspect this is because the French are better at marketing manga and know that, when you’ve got the shôjo Einstein card in your hand, you play it.

This isn’t Einstein’s only appearance in manga. Most obviously, there’s Edu-Manga: Albert Einstein (Digital Manga), written by Isao Himuro and illustrated by Kotaro Iwasaki. A teen Einstein clone is part of the student body of Kumiko Suekane’s Afterschool Charisma (Viz). It seems odd that he’s not a cast member of Kouta Hirano’s Drifters (Dark Horse), but perhaps the available information on that series is incomplete.

Since we’re on the subject, what are some of your favorite examples of actual people from history showing up in manga under unlikely circumstances?



License request day: Aoi Hana

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The impetus for a license request can be very simple, but it can also come from a variety of triggers. For instance, someone might casually mention a Japanese magazine that interests me like Ohta Shuppan’s Manga Erotics F. (Any magazine that can host both Natsume Ono’s Ristorante Paradiso and Usumaru Furuya’s Lychee Light Club is bound to catch and hold my attention.) It might also be a week when The Josei Alphabet featured a number of intriguing-sounding titles that featured romances between women. And one might add to that the happy anticipation of the first volume of Takako Shumira’s Wandering Son, to be translated by Matt Thorn, who always has interesting things to say on the subject.

So, with these guideposts, we arrive quite naturally at Takako’s Aoi Hana, a complex yuri romance which is running in Manga Erotics F and has five collected volumes at this point. It’s about the web of friendships and romance among the members of a high-school drama club. For me, commentary on the quality of yuri romance doesn’t get more reliable than that provided by Erica (Okazu) Friedman, so let’s see what she has to say about the series, which she’s read in Japanese.

She’s described the first volume as “both cute and sweet – and I liked it quite a bit. Which is pretty surprising, as it is both genuinely cute and sweet.” (Erica often likes her heroines to carry powerful automatic weapons, as do we all, and it doesn’t seem like there’s much ordinance in Aoi Hana.) The second volume leads Erica to conclude that, “when I read any book, part of what goes on in my mind is ‘Would I want to hang out with any of these people? Would I let anyone in this story come over for lunch?’ No one, not one character in Life would be allowed in my house – while just about everyone in Aoi Hana would.”

Erica finds the third volume “emotional without being histrionic.” The fourth reveals inner strengths of some of the characters. The fifth earns praise for the careful rendering of the heroine’s gradual move towards accepting her sexual orientation. Erica has also reviewed the anime, which ran on Crunchyroll, and hosted a guest review of the first volume of the French edition, Fleurs Bleues, which is being published in Kazé’s Asuka imprint. Asuka offers extensive preview pages from each of the four volumes they’ve published so far, so you can get a look at Shimura’s spare, elegant visual style.

While my initial interest in Aoi Hana sprang from a convergence of whims, further investigation has led me to conclude that it’s the kind of series I always really enjoy: a sensitive examination of adolescence featuring kids pursuing an interesting hobby. It’s also got attractive art and an intelligent look at same-sex relationships. Why hasn’t someone published this already?

License request day: Kaguyahime

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Erica (Okazu) Friedman and I are usually of one mind on most issues, but we’re having a really teensy difference of opinion at the moment. She says Reiko (Moon Child, Himitsu: The Top Secret) Shimizu’s Kaguyahime is josei. I say it’s shôjo. On my side of the argument is the fact that the 27-volume series ran in Hakusensha’s Hana to Yume and Lala. But Erica has experienced the series first hand. After a mesmerizing synopsis of what the series is about (kind of a fusion of an LGBT soap opera with Parts: The Clonus Horror), Erica makes this recommendation:

If you like a challenge, strange sci-fi, conspiracies, pretty boys, hunky girls, angst, fantasy, absolutely ravishing art, and a TON of yaoi/yuri, you need to read this manga.

I NEED TO READ THIS MANGA.

Honestly, I cannot be bothered to try and understand the plot, which seems to defy succinct description, but those are sometimes the best comics of all.

Those lucky, lucky French are able to enjoy this under the title Princess Kaguya, courtesy of Panini. Let’s see how their first-volume blurb translates, shall we?

Reiko Shimizu revisits an old Japanese legend in this new shôjo manga with the pace of a thriller. Children raised at an orphanage on an island off the coast of Japan are intended to be sacrificed to the princess of the moon when they reach sixteen years age. Some manage to escape, but they still feel the island’s pull. Will they be able to escape their destiny? A fascinating thriller with breathless suspense!

That’s so un-French of them not to mention the rich tapestry of sexual orientations Erica promises. Anyway, Panini seems to be about halfway through the series at the moment.

I think, in cases like this, it’s best to just conclude that everyone’s right. I’m technically correct in saying that Kaguyahime ran in shôjo magazines. Erica’s certainly correct in noting it has enough sex and violence to snap most comics for teen-agers right in half. And really, its category doesn’t matter. I just want to read it.

 

License request day: Fore!

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I heard this lovely story on NPR about a professional golfer, 19-year-old Ryo Ishikawa, who’s planning on donating his 2011 earnings to disaster relief in Japan. Okay, it’s kind of annoying when the sports correspondent feigns shock that a 19-year-old could adopt a charitable world view, since some of the most generous people I know are kids. But all the same, it actually made me care a tiny bit about the outcome of professional golf matches. I don’t play golf myself because, while I like taking long walks outside followed by gin and tonics, I don’t like paying to do so or inconveniencing people with my incompetence. Still…

Ishikawa’s nickname (“Bashful Prince”) is just so manga, isn’t it? And he looks so manga in that photo on Wikipedia. It made me wonder if there hasn’t been a surge in golf manga debuting during his ascendance in the sport, which then made me wonder about existing titles about golf. So while it’s entirely possible I have room in my heart for only one sports manga, I thought it might be interesting to hit the links.

Before we move forward, the answer to the question you’re probably asking yourself is, “Yes, there is a shôjo title about golf.” It’s called Super Shot, written and illustrated by Kouko Itamoto. It ran for two volumes and was originally published by Kodansha. I don’t really know much about it, but I assume it’s about a young woman who likes to golf. That seems safe, doesn’t it? Of course, it could also be about a young woman who hates to golf but is really good at it. One never knows.

Speaking of young people who come to golf by accident, there’s the protagonist of Nakaba Suzuki’s Rising Impact, which ran for 17 volumes in Shueisha’s Shônen Jump. It tells the tale of a young baseball fan whose life is changed when he meets a traveler who converts him to the good walk spoiled. Then, it’s off to Tokyo to become the very best golfer he can be! (You have to use exclamation points when talking about sports shônen.)

Doesn’t anyone go into golf for the fabulous prizes? Thanks be to Dan Doh! for exploring this motive in a 29-volume series, written by Nobuhiro Sakata and illustrated by Daichi Banjo for Shogakukan’s Shônen Sunday. Like his Rising Impact peer, our hero here switches from baseball to golf when he learns he can earn millions a year on the pro circuit. He’s not as mercenary as he sounds; the money will help him reunite with his mother. I’m not sure why that is, and it sounds like a plan fraught with potential pitfalls, but the cover is cute, and the anime has been licensed and released.

But where’s the love? Surely there are few places as romantic as the rolling hills of a golf course, right? Sakata and Eiji Kazama have you covered with Kaze no Daichi, which is over 50 volumes long and still running in Shogakukan’s Big Comic Original. It’s about a promising golfer, Okita, and his talented caddie, Lily, who work their way to the top and fall in love in the process. It won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1994.

But… but… ridiculous outfits, you cry! What’s golf without at least one person in a ridiculous outfit? Oh, faithful readers, manga provides, as always. In Suu Minazuki’s He-nshin!! – Sonata Birdie Rush, a young woman golfer faces a challenging issue: she finds a sponsor who’ll only bankroll her if she does cosplay during her matches. Honestly, how much more ridiculous can she look than some high-profile players? This five-volume series originally ran in Shueisha’s Young Jump.

So there’s a sampler of titles from this surprisingly robust genre. I’m a bit disappointed that I didn’t find any josei, yaoi or yuri to add to the mix, but I suspect they’re out there somewhere, or will be soon.

License request day: The Lonely Gourmet

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Among the pleasing announcements in the current Previews catalog is the solicitation of Jiro Taniguchi’s A Zoo in Winter from Fanfare/Ponent Mon. I’m of the opinion that there should always be work by Taniguchi in the licensing pipeline, and this opinion was reinforced by a story arc in the third volume of Seimu Yoshizaki’s Kingyo Used Books (Viz).

That arc features a well-traveled copy of a manga called The Lonely Gourmet, illustrated by Taniguchi and written by Kusumi Masayuki. As was the case with The Walking Man (Fanfare/Ponent Mon), the title is apparently quite literal. Here’s my attempt at a translation of the description from the book’s listing on Casterman’s Sakka site:

One knows almost nothing about him. He works in sales, but he’s not a man in a hurry; he loves women, but prefers to dine alone; he is a gastronome, but he most appreciates simple home cooking… This man, he is the lonely gourmet. Created by Kusumi Masayuki, this extraordinary character comes to life under the pen of Jiro Taniguchi, in a mode similar to The Walking Man: each tale leads him to taste a typically Japanese dish, reawakening memories, drawing out new thoughts, or causing furtive encounters. Thus the visit of a sushi-bar in the middle of the afternoon shows him another side of the innocent housewives who attend the place, or takes makes him conscious of the invigorating virtues of curry… The Lonely Gourmet is a choice work from Taniguchi.

It certainly sounds like it’s choice, doesn’t it?

It’s a single volume long, and I’m having a little trouble discerning its provenance. I think it was published at some point by Fusosha, though I have no idea if it was serialized in a magazine or just published as a graphic novel.

The book would have the twofold result of satisfying my need for more food manga and more licensed work from Taniguchi, especially in his “midlife salaryman” mode. What about you? What Taniguchi works are lurking, unpublished or out of print, that you’d like to see published in your language of choice?

 

At the moment

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What with a significant license request so recently fulfilled, I thought it would be a good excuse to take stock, go through the roster, and try and figure which five top my personal wish list at the moment. Here they are:

50 x 50, written and illustrated by Saika Kunieda, originally serialized in Kadokawa Shoten’s Comic Charge. Libre Shuppan’s Magazine Be x Boy.

Bartender, written and illustrated by Araki Joh, serialized in Shueisha’s Super Jump.

Gokusen, written and illustrated by Kozueko Morimoto, originally serialized in Shueisha’s You.

Nasu, written and illustrated by Iou Kuroda, originally serialized in Kodansha’s Afternoon.

The Rose of Versailles, written and illustrated by Riyoko Ikeda, originally serialized in Shueisha’s Margaret.

What five books top your current wish list?

 

Sing me an Opera

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Last year, Digital Manga released Reversible, an anthology of short boys’-love comics. It was a terrific idea, to provide a sampler of work by relatively unknown talents. Unfortunately, I found the reality of the book to be a bit tepid. The notion of the book has stuck with me, though, so I would like to propose that someone else take a crack at it, using Akaneshinsha’s edgy yaoi anthology Opera as its source.

I don’t have a ton of Japanese-language comics on my groaning bookshelves, but I do have a copy of an issue of Opera, thanks to Christopher (Comics212) Butcher. I can’t read a symbol of it, but I flip through it all of the time, always marveling at the sheer variety of styles it encompasses. There seem to be a range of character types and story tones, from slice-of-life to comedy to heavy drama to period pieces and even some fantasy.

It’s one of the magazines where Natsume Ono’s yaoi (created under the pen name “Basso”) has been published, including Amato Amaro. Looking at the anthology’s roster of titles at Baka-Updates, it seems like there are several one shots that could be included in an Opera sampler. Titles that reach volume length could even be published under some kind of subsequent “Opera presents…” label, but maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. (Of course, getting ahead of one’s self is what license requests are all about.)

I’ve made no secret of my fascination with comics that fall under what Erica (Okazu) Friedman has described as “the fifth genre.” I could be wrong about this, but I get the sense that Opera is very much fifth-genre yaoi, at least in the sense that it doesn’t seem at all concerned with conventional, commercial concerns of its category, taking a more inclusive and experimental approach. And the possibilities of that excite me very much.

I also think it’s smart (and generous) when publishers give you a low-risk taste of what might be considered higher-risk material. I don’t know how much of a market there is for the kind of yaoi Opera publishes, but I’d certainly relish the opportunity to explore it in depth in the form of a licensed, translated sampler. A similar approach seems to be working for Viz with SigIKKI, so maybe Akaneshinsha could partner with someone to try and expand horizons. And the magazine has a blog, so you know they’re at least a little bit down with this whole internet outreach thing.

License request day: Glass Mask

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Looking back on my most recent license requests, I notice an unfortunate trend: none of them run to the outlandish end of the spectrum. It’s all well and good to ask for things that you may actually receive, but it’s also important to pull out the stops from time to time… to ask for something massive, something commercially suspect, something old… something like Suzue Miuchi’s Glass Mask.

This is the sprawling tale of an ambitious, would-be stage actress named Maya Kitajima who responds to her mother’s dismissal and criticism with a burning desire for fame. (As Roxie Hart sagely noted in Chicago, “And that’s because none of us got enough love in our childhood. And that’s showbiz, folks.” Okay, Renée Zellweger’s Roxie may not have said that, but Gwen Verdon’s did, and Verdon’s is the one that matters.) Maya apparently endorses the Method, throwing herself into rehearsals and performances with reckless disregard for her own health.

And she has a rival, Ayumi Himekawa, who takes a more learned approach to acting and thinks she’d be much better in Maya’s dream role, the lead in The Crimson Goddess. And she has a mentor, Chigusa Tsukikage, whose own very promising acting career was prematurely ended by a disfiguring accident. And she has at least one love interest, entertainment entrepreneur Masumi Hayami, who can only reveal his feelings for Maya through gestures as an anonymous fan.

It sounds like the acting version of Kyoko Ariyoshi’s Swan (CMX), and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Both series launched in 1976, with Swan in Shueisha’s Margaret and Glass Mask in Hakusensha’s twice-monthly Hana to Yume. Swan concluded in 1981 with its 21st volume. Glass Mask is still running, though it did move to Hakusensha’s monthly Bessatsu Hana to Yume. The 46th volume of Glass Mask came out in October of 2010. The series has enjoyed to anime adaptations, one of which has been released in North America.

Dauntingly long? Check! (Miuchi indicated in 2009 that the end of the series was near, though.) Vintage, difficult-to-market shôjo style? Double check! (Hakusensha is somewhat skimpy with preview pages, but if you click on the red button with the open-book icon on the third entry down in the right-hand column, you can see a bit of Glass Mask and gape.) Do I want to read it like Maya wants to play the lead in The Crimson Goddess? Triple check!

What ridiculously long, commercially questionable series would you like to see licensed? Or do you just want the chance to read the rest of Swan, From Eroica with Love, and Oishinbo?

 

License request day: Jin

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Anime News Network passed along the announcement of the manga nominees for the 15th Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize. You all know what that means, right? We’ve struck a vein of license request ore! It’s an interesting and diverse slate, and I’m sure it will fuel future license requests, but there’s one title that has an unshakable grasp on my imagination and curiosity.

That would be Jin, written and illustrated by Motoka Murakami and serialized in Shueisha’s Super Jump for a total of 20 volumes. Any manga that launches with a modern-day doctor finding a carcinogenic fetus in a patient’s skull, followed by that fetus then sending said doctor back in time is a manga I want to read very, very badly.

It’s being published in French by Tonkam, which makes it much easier for me to figure out details about the book. I’m guessing that the fetus is just a MacGuffin to send our hero, 30-something doctor Jin Minakata, back to the Edo period. He adapts to his new/old world and begins applying his modern medical knowledge to bygone problems.

A cholera epidemic in Yokohama… communicable diseases among the courtesans of the red-light district… “discovering” penicillin centuries ahead of time… a geisha with breast cancer… If you want to be a busy doctor and seem like a miraculous genius whether you are one or not, it seems like all you have to do is go back in time. (How you get there is your own problem. My suggestion would be to randomly x-ray the skulls of your patients for mysterious fetuses. Of course, any fetus you find in someone’s skull is bound to count as “mysterious.”)

Judging by the sample pages from the first volume that Tonkam has shared, the art looks very clean, detailed, and attractive in a seinen sort of way that won’t be unfamiliar to fans of creators like Jiro Taniguchi. And while it’s perhaps a little soon after asking for Zipang to dip into the well of rewritten history, I think Jin sounds different enough in era and focus that they wouldn’t cannibalize each other’s audience, should we see a day when they’re simultaneously published in English.

So that’s my first choice from the current Tezuka nominees. I’ve only chosen one cover image, because they’re all pretty similar, featuring a strangely blank Jin standing with a beautiful woman. I used to work at a local newspaper, and so many submitted wedding photos looked kind of like these covers, with the woman actively engaging the camera and the man staring out of the frame at something shiny.

Which of the Tezuka nominees would you most like to see licensed?

License request day: Rough

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Greg (Read About Comics) McElhatton has joined the knot of fervent admirers of Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game (Viz). It’s a title that inspires a bit of evangelical fervor among its admirers, or at least I feel like it is, and that enthusiasm must certainly extend to Adachi himself. Whenever the subject of out-of-print manga comes up, his Short Program (Viz) is always among the bemoaned.

There are plenty more volumes of Cross Game still to come (five of the twelve seventeen have been published in Viz’s two volumes so far), but Adachi is so amazing that it’s impossible to resist wondering which treasure from his catalog might be next in line. Many people might vote for Touch, a 26-volume series from Shogakukan’s Shônen Sunday. I would have no objection to this, but it’s another baseball series, and perhaps some variety might be key in building Adachi’s reputation among English-language readers. So, for a change of pace, why not see what he can do with high-school swimmers?

Yes, I’m talking about Rough, a 12-volume series that also ran in Sunday. It’s about a boy who swims and a girl who dives from feuding families that fell out over owl-shaped cookies. Will Yamato and Ninomiya’s shared love of pool-based athletics help them overcome this great cookie schism? I have no idea, and please don’t spoil it for me. I do know that Adachi has demonstrated a real knack for portraying contentious relationships between sporty teens of the opposite sex, and he can draw anything, so I’m not seeing a down side to Rough. It’s even a reasonable length.

Did you even need to ask if Rough is available in French? Of course it is, courtesy of Glénat, who have also published Touch and Niji-Iro Togarashi. (an 11-volume fantasy series that ran in… wait for it… Sunday). The French are basically all over Adachi, and I dream of a day when the audience for manga in English catches up.

But I’m not so selfish that I’ll only accept Rough. I would love to know what tops your Adachi wish list, assuming you have one. And if you haven’t joined the forces of Adachi advancement, well… there’s this little book called Cross Game…

License request day: Zipang

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From the Manga Moveable Feast to a lively but technologically challenged Manga Out Loud podcast, it’s all about World War II this week. Barefoot Gen (Last Gasp) addresses history directly and brutally, and Ayako (Vertical) invents a tale of history’s victims, so one might be forgiven the impulse to rewrite history. That leads us to this week’s license request.

Kaiji Kawaguchi’s Zipang, which yielded an astonishing 43 volumes in Kodansha’s Morning, sends visitors from the present into the past and explores the potential consequences of that kind of junket. In this case, it’s a contemporary Defense Force vessel, the Mirai, which takes a wrong turn on the way to Hawaii and winds up in the Pacific on the eve of the decisive Battle of Midway.

The crew of the Mirai encompasses a number of different viewpoints on the tricky subject of time travel, from those who yearn to rewrite history whenever the opportunity presents itself to those who don’t so much want to divert a butterfly, lest that butterfly be headed someplace really, really important. I admit that I’m not especially interested in either war stories or treatises on the elasticity of time, but this book is supposed to be really, really good.

It won the Kodansha Manga Award in 2002. It was one of the Official Selections at the 2007 Festival International de la Bande Desinée. Four volumes were apparently published as a part of Kodansha’s Bilingual Comics project back in the day, but I can’t find confirmation of that claim, and I can only imagine what they’d cost, if they do exist. You’re in better shape if you’re able to read French, as Kana is publishing the book in that language, and they’re up to the 29th volume at this point.

Highly regarded as Kawaguchi is, his only work to see complete publication in English was Eagle: The Making of an Asian-American President (Viz, originally serialized in Shogakukan’s Big Comic), which I think is out of print. Its five volumes don’t seem to be fetching the prices that some out-of-print titles do, but I’m not sure how easy it is to find all five volumes. Casterman’s Sakka imprint published it in French in 11 volumes.

The likelihood of this request being fulfilled seems rather slim. It’s long, it’s manly, and I’d wager it displays a shortage of girls in body stockings doing cartwheels. This is the kind of title that makes publishers ask you why you’re wishing bankruptcy on them when you bring it up. But if I could go back in time and rewrite the history of manga in English, I would divert whatever butterfly I could to improve the chances of books like this.

License request day: Gaku

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With Valentine’s Day around the corner, I should request something in a romantic vein, but I’m just not in the right groove. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’ve spent most of the week catching up on Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack (Vertical) and reading Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen (Last Gasp) for next week’s Manga Moveable Feast. Gory, often cynical fiction and autobiographical despair don’t suggest chocolates and flowers.

It’s also possible that I’m still a little fixated on mountain men and prize-winning manga. Fortunately, Shogakukan provides the right crossover property in the form of Gaku: Minna no Yama, or Peak: Everyone’s Mountain, written and illustrated by Shin’ichi Ishizuka, currently being serialized in Big Comic Original. Gaku won the inaugural Manga Taisho Award in 2008, and it won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 2009.

Gaku seems to track more with my expectations of what happens when you try and scramble up the side of a tall and forbidding peak: you get in trouble. And when you get in trouble, you need someone like protagonist Shimazaki Sanpo to rescue you. Sanpo helps out with a volunteer rescue team that helps climbers in trouble in the Japanese Alps.

It seems to be fairly episodic, with various character stumbling into danger and being saved (or not) by our hero. It also seems to be very beautifully drawn. Shogakukan has a number of preview pages available for several volumes. If you click on the button under the cover image on this listing for the first volume, you’ll open up another window that offers a sneak peak… er… peek. I always like when creators combine stylized character work with realistic backgrounds.

Okay, so it’s possibly not the ideal time of year for rugged, outdoor adventure or stories set in wintry landscapes, given how sick most of us are of the wintry landscapes outside our front doors. But Gaku sounds like fun, and just look how excited Sanpo is about the prospect!

The Akiko Higashimura license pool

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You know what seems kind of weird to me? That nobody has licensed any manga from Akiko Higashimura yet. She’s been nominated for the Manga Taisho Award three times for three different titles. She was nominated for the Tezuka Cultural Prize in 2010, and she won the Kodansha Award in 2010. Of course, the admiration of one’s peers and critics doesn’t necessarily translate into something marketable.

And yet, there’s evidence that her highly regarded artistic sensibility yields commercially successful product. Kuragehime, which won the Kodansha, has been adapted into an animated series, which is available in the United States through Funimation as Princess Jellyfish. While it’s not unheard of for a josei series like Kuragehime (which ran in Kodansha’s Kiss) to be made into an anime, it’s still unusual enough to be impressive.

The manga also has the advantage of falling into the “Nerds, yay!” genre. It’s about an apartment building filled with female otaku. They describe themselves as “nuns,” and each has her own religion. The lead, who’s loved jellyfish since memorable trips to an aquarium with her mother, wants to be an illustrator and has moved to Tokyo to achieve that, but she’s cripplingly shy. She makes an outgoing new friend, though, who becomes her roommate. The friend turns out to be a cross-dresser from a well-connected political family who’d rather work in fashion.

So there are geeks, secret-identity shenanigans, big dreams, romance, and, if I’m correctly informed, the pernicious influence of gentrification. What’s the hold up? Based on existing enthusiasm, I’d imagine that Kodansha is waiting for the best offer, or to establish their outpost well enough to publish it themselves. It’s up to six volumes.

And if I’m going to be perfectly honest, I’d rather read her Himawari: Kenichi Legend, which is running in Kodansha’s Morning. It’s about another aspiring artist, this time a would be mangaka who toils at an office lady for the same company that employs her eccentric father. There are 13 volumes available so far, and I just get a good vibe off of it, particularly because it’s supposed to be loosely autobiographical.

Her current series is Omo ni Naitemasu, which I’ve seen translated as Mainly Crying, running in Morning and up to three volumes. As near as I can determine, it’s about an extraordinarily beautiful woman who lives a rather isolated life. It also has really striking covers, which is always a plus.

So what are your thoughts on Higashimura’s license prospects? She’s clearly talented and prolific, neither of which ever hurt a mangaka. Which of her titles tickle your fancy? Do you think any of them will be announced by the end of the year?

My official guess: Kodansha will announce Kuragehime at this year’s Comic-Con International.

License request day: Umimachi Diary

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It’s award season, and while I should theoretically devote the next few license requests to some of the current honorees and nominees, I find myself distracted by the first set of nominees for the Manga Taisho Awards. I’m not distracted because of the bounty of titles yet to be licensed; it’s the volume of nominees we already have at our fingertips, and what fine comics they are.

Ôoku: The Inner Chambers, Kimi Ni Todoke: From Me to You, Natsume’s Book of Friends, Flower of Life, Moyasimon, Yotsuba&! … We can go into a store and buy all of these, and they’re terrific, terrific books. I’ve already mentioned another of the nominees in this feature (Fumi Yoshinaga’s What Did You Eat Yesterday?, and how fabulous is an awards program that nominates Yoshinaga three times in one year?), but I felt I had to dig deeper into the other contenders.

Oh, geez, you guys, the creator of Banana Fish is doing a josei series.

It’s called Umimachi (Sea Town) Diary, written and illustrated by Akimi Yoshida, and it’s running in Shogakukan’s Monthly Flowers. It’s about three sisters who learn of the death of their long-absent father and the existence of a fourth sister. From what I can determine, the publisher describes it as “ardent” and “raw,” and I have no resistance to those adjectives. Or those covers. It basically sounds like an observant drama about complicated women dealing with stressful new circumstances and old family issues. And it’s set in a town by the sea.

WHY CAN I NOT BUY THIS NOW? THE WANT… IT BURNS US!

Sorry. I lost the thread there for a minute. I’m better now.

It was nominated for the 2008 Taisho (losing to Shinichi Ichizuka’s Gaku, which I’ll get to later) and the Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize twice, losing to Moyasimon in 2008 and Ôoku in 2009, which is perfectly respectable, and it received an Excellence Prize in the 2007 Japan Media Arts Festival. Three volumes have been released so far.

Beyond the fact that it sounds like a lovely series, there’s the not inconsiderable fondness for Yoshida’s Banana Fish to factor into the equation. For starters, the inimitable Shaenon Garrity featured it in her Overlooked Manga Festival, which is definitely a badge of honor. MJ(Manga Bookshelf) has assembled a murderer’s row of manga critics to break down the series volume by volume. And Banana Fish is over 30 years old. Can you imagine what Yoshida is capable of now?

Yes, this has been a great week for license announcements. Yes, one should occasionally take a moment to bask in what they have or will soon have rather than what’s not yet within their grasp. Neither of those things alters the fact that I want Umimachi Diaries, and I want it soon. Viz… Fantagraphics… it’s in your court.

Onwards and upwards with Vertical

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There’s some fabulous news from Vertical via Anime News Network. They’ve announced three new licenses, two of which are some of the most eagerly awaited of them all. (Coincidentally, both of those are license requests.)

First up is Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight, originally published in Kodansha’s Shôjo Club and to be released in two volumes here. Kodansha published bilingual editions ages ago, though they’re long out of print and very expensive. Viz published a sample chapter in its defunct Shojo Beat magazine, which raised hopes that a license might be imminent, but it took Tezuka specialists Vertical to make it happen. It was published in French by Soleil. (Update: It’s been suggested to me that Vertical is most likely to publish Tezuka’s second take on the series, which ran in Kodansha’s Nakayoshi roughly a decade after the original.) (Update 2: But they aren’t, and are, in fact, going with the original version. I’m delighted either way.)

Next is Drops of God, or Kami no Shizuku, written by Tadashi Agi (the pseudonym for wine-loving siblings Yuko and Shin Kibayashi) and illustrated by Shu Okimoto and serialized in Kodansha’s Weekly Morning. I don’t think there’s ever been a Japanese comic that’s received as much ink in English-language media, in spite of the fact that it had yet to be published in English. There was some indication in April of 2010 that the book’s licensing was imminent. It’s being published in French by Glénat.

Last up is No Longer Human, Usumaru Furuya’s adaptation of Osamu Dazai’s novel of the same name. It’s currently running in Shinchosha’s Comic Bunch. It’s about a troubled man who hides his true nature from the people around him.

Aside from a perfectly understandable level of excitement about these titles for their own merits, it’s nice to see that Kodansha is still working with other publishers to release titles that help express the breadth of their catalog, and it’s great that they chose Vertical, a company with a strong track record of publishing both classic and unique contemporary titles.