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5 Reasons to Read InuYasha

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InuYasha was the first comic that I actively collected, the manga that introduced me to the Wednesday comic-buying ritual and the very notion of self-identifying as a fan. Though I followed it religiously for years, trading in my older editions for new ones, watching the anime, and speculating about the finale, my interest in the series gradually waned as I was exposed to new artists and new genres. Still, InuYasha held a special place in my heart; reading it was one of my seminal experiences as a comic fan, making me reluctant to re-visit InuYasha for fear of sullying those precious first-manga memories. VIZ’s recent decision to re-issue InuYasha in an omnibus edition, however, inspired me to pick it up again. I made a shocking discovery in the process of re-reading the first chapters: InuYasha is good. Really good, in fact, and deserving of more respect than it gets from many critics.

What makes InuYasha work? I can think of five reasons:

1. The story arcs are long enough to be complex and engaging, but not so long as to test the patience.

There’s a Zen quality to Rumiko Takahashi’s storytelling that might not be obvious at first glance; after all, she loves a pratfall or a sword fight as much as the next shonen manga-ka. Don’t let that surface activity fool you, however: Takahashi has a terrific sense of balance, staging a romantic interlude between a demon-of-the-week episode and a longer storyline involving Naraku’s minions, thus preventing the series from devolving into a punishing string of battle arcs. The other great advantage of this approach is that Takashi carves out more space for her characters to interact as people, not just combatants; as a result, InuYasha is one of the few shonen manga in which the characters’ relationships evolve over time.

2. Takahashi knows how to stage a fight scene that’s dramatic, tense, and mercifully short.

‘Nuff said.

3. InuYasha‘s villains are powerful and strange, not strawmen.

Though we know our heroes will prevail — it’s shonen, for Pete’s sake — Takahashi throws creative obstacles in their way that makes their eventual triumph more satisfying. Consider Naraku. In many respects, he’s a standard-issue bad guy: he’s omnipotent, charismatic, and manipulative, capable of finding the darkness and vulnerability in the purest soul. (He also has fabulous hair, another reliable indication of his villainy.) Yet the way in which Naraku wields power is genuinely unsettling, as he fashions warriors from pieces of himself, then reabsorbs them into his body when they outlive their usefulness. Naraku’s manifestations are peculiar, too. Some are female, some are children, some have monstrous bodies, and some have the power to create their own demonic offspring, but few look like the sort of golem I’d create if I wanted to wreak havoc. And therein lies Naraku’s true power: his opponents never know what form he’ll take next, or whether he’s already among them.

Sesshomaru, too, is another villain who proves more interesting than he first appears. In the very earliest chapters of the manga, he’s a bored sociopath who has no qualms about using InuYasha’s mama trauma to trick his younger brother into revealing the Tetsusaiga’s location. As the story progresses, however, Sesshomaru begins tolerating the company of a cheerful eight-year-old girl who, in a neat inversion of the usual human-canine relationship, is dependent on her dog-demon master for protection, food, and companionship. Takahashi resists the urge to fully “humanize” Sesshomaru, however; he remains InuYasha’s scornful adversary for most of the series, largely unchanged by his peculiar fixation with Rin.

And did I mention that Sesshomaru has awesome hair? Oh, to be a villain in a Takahashi manga!

4. InuYasha‘s female characters kick ass.

Back in 2008, Shaenon Garrity wrote a devastatingly funny article about the seven types of female characters in shonen manga, from The Tomboy to The Little Girl to The Experienced Older Woman. I’m pleased to report that none of these types appear in InuYasha; in fact, InuYasha boasts one of the smartest, toughest, and most appealing set of female characters in shonen manga. And by “tough,” I don’t mean that Kagome, Kikyo, and Sango brandish weapons while wearing provocative outfits; I mean they persist in the face of adversity, even if their own lives are at stake. They’re strong enough to hold their own against demons, ghosts, and heavily armed bandits, and wise enough to know when words are more effective than weapons. They’re not adverse to the idea of romance, but recovering the Shikon Jewel takes precedence over dating. And they’re woman enough to cry if something awful happens, though they’d rather shed their tears in private than show their pain to others.

5. The horror! The horror!

Takahashi may have the coolest resume of anyone working in manga today; not only did she study script writing with Kazuo Koike, she also worked as an assistant to Kazuo Umezu — an apprenticeship that’s evident in the early chapters of InuYasha. In between Kagome and InuYasha’s first encounters with Naraku are a handful of short but spooky stories in which seemingly benign objects — a noh mask, a peach tree — are transformed by Shikon Jewel shards into instruments of torture and killing. Takahashi’s horror stories are less florid than Umezu’s, with fewer detours into WTF? territory, but like Umezu, Takahashi has a vivid imagination that yields some decidedly scary images. Here, for example, is the demonic peach tree from chapter 79, “The Fruits of Evil”:

Takahashi doesn’t just use these images to shock; she uses them to illustrate the consequences of ugly emotions, impulsive actions, and violent behavior, to show us how these choices slowly corrode the soul and transform us into the most monstrous version of ourselves. (Also to show us the consequences of substituting human bones and blood for Miracle Gro. Kids, don’t try this at home.)

What Takahashi does better than almost anyone is walk the fine line between terror and horror. Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe, author of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), was one of the first writers to argue that terror and horror were different states of arousal. “Terror and Horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them,” she wrote in an 1826 essay, “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” Critiquing Radcliffe’s work in 1966, Devendra P. Varma explained that difference more concretely: “The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse.” And that’s exactly where Takahashi operates: she gives us tantalizing, suggestive glimpses of scary things, then keeps them obscured until the denouement of the story, allowing our imaginations to supply most of the grisly details. We read her work in a heightened state of awareness, which only intensifies our pleasure — and revulsion — when the true nature of Kagome and InuYasha’s foes are revealed.

* * * * *

If you haven’t looked at InuYasha in a while, or missed it during the height of its popularity, now is a great time to give it a try. Each volume of the VIZBIG edition collects three issues, allowing readers to more fully immerse themselves in the story. And if you’re a purist about packaging, you’ll be happy to know that VIZ is finally issuing InuYasha in an unflipped format — a first in the series’ US history.

Rumiko Takahashi’s Rumic Theater

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Most American readers know Rumiko Takahashi through her work in Shonen Sunday, but Takahashi has a foot in the seinen world as well. Maison Ikkoku ran in Big Comic Spirits from 1980-87, alongside Area 88 and Wounded Man, while short stories such as “To Grandmother’s House We Go” and “One Hundred Years of Love” appeared in Big Comic Spirits‘ sister publication Big Comic Original. In Japan, Takahashi’s seinen shorts have been collected into four volumes: 1 or W, The Tragedy of P, The Executive’s Dog, and Red Bouquet. Here in the US, however, only two have been translated into English: The Tragedy of P, which was re-titled Rumic Theater (1996), and 1 or W, which was published as Rumic Theater: One or Double (1998). (N.B. One or Double includes a handful of shonen and josei stories that appeared in Shonen Sunday and Petit Flower, respectively.)

These two translated volumes showcase Takahashi’s ability to work in almost genre. There are sports comedies (“The Grandfather of All Baseball Games”), domestic dramas (“Hidden in the Pottery,” “House of Garbage,” “The Tragedy of P”), rom-coms (“The Merchant of Romance,” “The Diet Goddess”), pop-culture spoofs (“Shake Your Buddha”), and ghost stories (“To Grandmother’s House We Go,” “One or Double”). As with Takahashi’s work in Shonen Sunday, many of these stories fold supernatural elements into everyday situations. In “Extra-Large Size Happiness,” for example, a woman’s relationship with her mother-in-law is strained by the sudden and frequent appearance of a household spirit that only she can see, while in “Reserved Seat,” a ghostly grandma takes possession of her grandson’s body so that she can honor her season tickets at the Takarazuka Revue.

Takahashi is a master at establishing her premise in just a few pages, allowing plenty of room for character development and broad comedy without compromising narrative momentum. One of the reasons Takahashi can be so economical is that she invests even the smallest moments with telling detail, making sure that every aspect of a character’s behavior is consistent with the story’s premise. In “Excuse Me for Being a Dog,” for example, the hero — who turns into a shiba inu whenever he suffers a nosebleed — acts like a canine even in his human form: he investigates an abandoned book bag with his nose, curls his lip at strangers, and recoils in the presence of pungent odors. Takahashi doesn’t make a big deal of these behavioral tics, but their inclusion in the story elevates Shiro’s condition from a wacky plot contrivance to a fundamental aspect of his existence. (OK, it’s also a wacky plot contrivance.)

Takahashi’s deep affection for her characters also contributes to the stories’ success. Though they bicker and tease and goad one another, the characters’ good will and mutual affection is seldom in question, even when their judgment is. Takahashi is as generous with her least sympathetic characters as she is with her leads, allowing them moments of wisdom and decency that often challenge the other characters’ perception of them. In “The Story of P,” for example, a man agrees to care for his eccentric client’s pet penguin, despite the fact the Hagas’ apartment complex doesn’t allow pets. For most of the story, Mrs. Haga plays cat-and-mouse with her neighbor Mrs. Kakei, the head of tenants’ association and a reputed animal hater. (Mrs. Kakei keeps tabs on the other tenants, notifying the management of any pet violations.) Yet in the last pages of the story, we learn that Mrs. Kakei has complicated, emotional reasons for ratting out her neighbors that stem, in part, from a genuine concern for animal welfare and not a humorless love of rules.

Art-wise, Takahashi produces some of the cleanest, most accessible layouts in manga. Her characters’ faces are easy to read, and her scenes are staged for maximum clarity and emotional impact; no one times a scare or a punch line better than Takahashi. Even more striking is the sense of mischief and play that informs her artwork. The elderly heroine of “One Hundred Years of Love,” for example, gains the ability to fly after surviving a near-death experience. Takahashi draws the old woman astride an enormous crutch, soaring over an urban landscape. At first, Mrs. Hoshino mutters about the weather, but soon she embraces the possibilities of flight, buzzing an unsuspecting eight-year-old apartment dweller:

 

That same sense of mischief is evident in “Extra-Large Size Happiness,” in which a giant yokai pops into the frame — directly behind the frazzled heroine’s mother-in-law. Readers familiar with InuYasha‘s Shippo and Myogi will immediately recognize this round, genial figure:

The similarities between this nameless yokai and Myoga could be construed as a flaw or weakness of Takahashi’s style, but there’s an argument to be made that Takahashi employs a “star system” of her own. Granted, Takahashi never constructed a neat theoretical framework to explain the recurrence of certain characters in her stories, as Osamu Tezuka famously did for his. Flipping through the pages of Rumic Theater, however, it’s easy to imagine these characters as actors who specialize in certain types of roles, retaining something of their own “off-screen” personality and appearance in every story; as David Welsh observed in his recent essay on Ranma 1/2, “The fun is in seeing the specialists find variations on their distinctive themes.” And here, in Rumic Theater, the fun comes from seeing Takahashi’s regulars tackle more grown-up themes — marital discord, neighborhood politics, growing old — than might otherwise be permissible in the context of a long-form adventure such as InuYasha or Ranma 1/2 .

Manga Artifacts: Rumiko Takahashi’s Rumic Theater

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Most American readers know Rumiko Takahashi through her work in Shonen Sunday, but Takahashi has a foot in the seinen world as well. Maison Ikkoku ran in Big Comic Spirits from 1980-87, alongside Area 88 and Wounded Man, while short stories such as “To Grandmother’s House We Go” and “One Hundred Years of Love” appeared in Big Comic Spirits‘ sister publication Big Comic Original. In Japan, Takahashi’s seinen shorts have been collected into four volumes: 1 or W, The Tragedy of P, The Executive’s Dog, and Red Bouquet. Here in the US, however, only two have been translated into English: The Tragedy of P, which was re-titled Rumic Theater (1996), and 1 or W, which was published as Rumic Theater: One or Double (1998). (N.B. One or Double includes a handful of shonen and josei stories that appeared in Shonen Sunday and Petit Flower, respectively.)

These two translated volumes showcase Takahashi’s ability to work in almost genre. There are sports comedies (“The Grandfather of All Baseball Games”), domestic dramas (“Hidden in the Pottery,” “House of Garbage,” “The Tragedy of P”), rom-coms (“The Merchant of Romance,” “The Diet Goddess”), pop-culture spoofs (“Shake Your Buddha”), and ghost stories (“To Grandmother’s House We Go,” “One or Double”). As with Takahashi’s work in Shonen Sunday, many of these stories fold supernatural elements into everyday situations. In “Extra-Large Size Happiness,” for example, a woman’s relationship with her mother-in-law is strained by the sudden and frequent appearance of a household spirit that only she can see, while in “Reserved Seat,” a ghostly grandma takes possession of her grandson’s body so that she can honor her season tickets at the Takarazuka Revue.

Takahashi is a master at establishing her premise in just a few pages, allowing plenty of room for character development and broad comedy without compromising narrative momentum. One of the reasons Takahashi can be so economical is that she invests even the smallest moments with telling detail, making sure that every aspect of a character’s behavior is consistent with the story’s premise. In “Excuse Me for Being a Dog,” for example, the hero — who turns into a shiba inu whenever he suffers a nosebleed — acts like a canine even in his human form: he investigates an abandoned book bag with his nose, curls his lip at strangers, and recoils in the presence of pungent odors. Takahashi doesn’t make a big deal of these behavioral tics, but their inclusion in the story elevates Shiro’s condition from a wacky plot contrivance to a fundamental aspect of his existence. (OK, it’s also a wacky plot contrivance.)

Takahashi’s deep affection for her characters also contributes to the stories’ success. Though they bicker and tease and goad one another, the characters’ good will and mutual affection is seldom in question, even when their judgment is. Takahashi is as generous with her least sympathetic characters as she is with her leads, allowing them moments of wisdom and decency that often challenge the other characters’ perception of them. In “The Story of P,” for example, a man agrees to care for his eccentric client’s pet penguin, despite the fact the Hagas’ apartment complex doesn’t allow pets. For most of the story, Mrs. Haga plays cat-and-mouse with her neighbor Mrs. Kakei, the head of tenants’ association and a reputed animal hater. (Mrs. Kakei keeps tabs on the other tenants, notifying the management of any pet violations.) Yet in the last pages of the story, we learn that Mrs. Kakei has complicated, emotional reasons for ratting out her neighbors that stem, in part, from a genuine concern for animal welfare and not a humorless love of rules.

Art-wise, Takahashi produces some of the cleanest, most accessible layouts in manga. Her characters’ faces are easy to read, and her scenes are staged for maximum clarity and emotional impact; no one times a scare or a punch line better than Takahashi. Even more striking is the sense of mischief and play that informs her artwork. The elderly heroine of “One Hundred Years of Love,” for example, gains the ability to fly after surviving a near-death experience. Takahashi draws the old woman astride an enormous crutch, soaring over an urban landscape. At first, Mrs. Hoshino mutters about the weather, but soon she embraces the possibilities of flight, buzzing an unsuspecting eight-year-old apartment dweller:

 

That same sense of mischief is evident in “Extra-Large Size Happiness,” in which a giant yokai pops into the frame — directly behind the frazzled heroine’s mother-in-law. Readers familiar with InuYasha‘s Shippo and Myogi will immediately recognize this round, genial figure:

The similarities between this nameless yokai and Myoga could be construed as a flaw or weakness of Takahashi’s style, but there’s an argument to be made that Takahashi employs a “star system” of her own. Granted, Takahashi never constructed a neat theoretical framework to explain the recurrence of certain characters in her stories, as Osamu Tezuka famously did for his. Flipping through the pages of Rumic Theater, however, it’s easy to imagine these characters as actors who specialize in certain types of roles, retaining something of their own “off-screen” personality and appearance in every story; as David Welsh observed in his recent essay on Ranma 1/2, “The fun is in seeing the specialists find variations on their distinctive themes.” And here, in Rumic Theater, the fun comes from seeing Takahashi’s regulars tackle more grown-up themes — marital discord, neighborhood politics, growing old — than might otherwise be permissible in the context of a long-form adventure such as InuYasha or Ranma 1/2 .

Blue Exorcist, Vol. 1

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Have you ever seen the pilot episode of Law & Order? Most of the regular characters are present, and the script follows the three-act structure familiar to anyone who’s watched an episode of any Law & Order series, but the pacing is slack; the dialogue fizzles where it should crackle; and the actors struggle to create believable relationships between the characters, even as the script demands that they explain things to one another that, presumably, they’d already know from working together. Small wonder that “Everybody’s Favorite Bagman” languished for nearly a year before NBC rescued the show from limbo and ordered a full season of episodes.

So it is with Blue Exorcist, which has a first chapter that might charitably be described as a “pilot episode.” In these opening thirty pages, Kato introduces orphan Rin Okimura, a hot-tempered young man; Yukio, Rin’s snot-nosed fraternal twin; and Father Fujimoto, their guardian. Rin, we learn, is a direct descendant of Satan, and is in imminent danger of going over to the dark side. Father Fujimoto, however, has kept this information from his young charge, seeing fit only to explain the complexities of Rin’s lineage when Satan’s minions try to spirit Rin back to Gehenna, the demon realm. (Like all manga priests, Father Fujimoto spends more time fighting demons than preparing Sunday sermons or ministering to the sick, hungry, and bereaved.) An epic confrontation between Satan and Father Fujimoto leaves Rin’s mentor dead, forcing the boy to decide whether to cast his lot with Satan or with humanity.

There’s no reason why this opening prelude has to be such a bumpy, predictable ride, but Kato seems so intent on relating Rin’s entire Tragic Past in one installment that she trades naturalism for economy. (Sample: “I see you’ve returned. An overnight trip to the job center? How diligent of you.” And how helpful of Father Fujimoto to ask Rin a question to which he already knows the answer!) In the second chapter, however, Kato finds her stride with the material: the dialogue is looser and funnier; the characters’ relationships are more firmly and plausibly established; and she introduces her first genuinely memorable character, Mephisto Pheles. The plot is stock, with Rin vowing to avenge Father Fujimoto by enrolling in an exorcism “cram school,” but Kato enlivens the proceedings with humorous twists and nifty artwork.

And oh, the artwork! It’s crisp and expressive, filled with small but suggestive details. Mephisto, for example, carries a patched umbrella and wears a polka-dot cravat — two minor flourishes that help establish him as a slightly decadent figure, elegant but down at the heels. The not-very-imaginatively named True Cross Town provides another instructive example of Kato’s meticulous and thoughtful draftsmanship: she lavishes considerable attention on architectural details and infrastructure, stacking layers of houses and buildings on top of one another to form a giant urban ziggeraut:

In short, Kato has created an imaginary urban landscape that seems to have evolved naturally over time, with old and new buildings side-by-side and modern modes of transport straddling canals and rivers. That kind of thoroughness may not serve much purpose in the context of a manga about demon fighters, but it lends Blue Exorcist a temporal and geographic specificity that’s sometimes missing in other areas of the story — like the religious bits.

Whatever my reservations about the first chapter, I freely admit that I’d fallen head-over-heels for Blue Exorcist by the end of the second. The brisk pacing, sharp artwork, and cheeky tone of these later chapters convinced me that Kazue Kato is in firm control of her story, and has successfully laid the foundation for the series’ first major story arc. Bring it on, I say!

BLUE EXORCIST, VOL. 1 • BY KAZUE KATO • VIZ MEDIA • 198 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

Blue Exorcist, Vol. 1

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Have you ever seen the pilot episode of Law & Order? Most of the regular characters are present, and the script follows the three-act structure familiar to anyone who’s watched an episode of any Law & Order series, but the pacing is slack; the dialogue fizzles where it should crackle; and the actors struggle to create believable relationships between the characters, even as the script demands that they explain things to one another that, presumably, they’d already know from working together. Small wonder that “Everybody’s Favorite Bagman” languished for nearly a year before NBC rescued the show from limbo and ordered a full season of episodes.

So it is with Blue Exorcist, which has a first chapter that might charitably be described as a “pilot episode.” In these opening thirty pages, Kato introduces orphan Rin Okimura, a hot-tempered young man; Yukio, Rin’s snot-nosed fraternal twin; and Father Fujimoto, their guardian. Rin, we learn, is a direct descendant of Satan, and is in imminent danger of going over to the dark side. Father Fujimoto, however, has kept this information from his young charge, seeing fit only to explain the complexities of Rin’s lineage when Satan’s minions try to spirit Rin back to Gehenna, the demon realm. (Like all manga priests, Father Fujimoto spends more time fighting demons than preparing Sunday sermons or ministering to the sick, hungry, and bereaved.) An epic confrontation between Satan and Father Fujimoto leaves Rin’s mentor dead, forcing the boy to decide whether to cast his lot with Satan or with humanity.

There’s no reason why this opening prelude has to be such a bumpy, predictable ride, but Kato seems so intent on relating Rin’s entire Tragic Past in one installment that she trades naturalism for economy. (Sample: “I see you’ve returned. An overnight trip to the job center? How diligent of you.” And how helpful of Father Fujimoto to ask Rin a question to which he already knows the answer!) In the second chapter, however, Kato finds her stride with the material: the dialogue is looser and funnier; the characters’ relationships are more firmly and plausibly established; and she introduces her first genuinely memorable character, Mephisto Pheles. The plot is stock, with Rin vowing to avenge Father Fujimoto by enrolling in an exorcism “cram school,” but Kato enlivens the proceedings with humorous twists and nifty artwork.

And oh, the artwork! It’s crisp and expressive, filled with small but suggestive details. Mephisto, for example, carries a patched umbrella and wears a polka-dot cravat — two minor flourishes that help establish him as a slightly decadent figure, elegant but down at the heels. The not-very-imaginatively named True Cross Town provides another instructive example of Kato’s meticulous and thoughtful draftsmanship: she lavishes considerable attention on architectural details and infrastructure, stacking layers of houses and buildings on top of one another to form a giant urban ziggeraut:

In short, Kato has created an imaginary urban landscape that seems to have evolved naturally over time, with old and new buildings side-by-side and modern modes of transport straddling canals and rivers. That kind of thoroughness may not serve much purpose in the context of a manga about demon fighters, but it lends Blue Exorcist a temporal and geographic specificity that’s sometimes missing in other areas of the story — like the religious bits.

Whatever my reservations about the first chapter, I freely admit that I’d fallen head-over-heels for Blue Exorcist by the end of the second. The brisk pacing, sharp artwork, and cheeky tone of these later chapters convinced me that Kazue Kato is in firm control of her story, and has successfully laid the foundation for the series’ first major story arc. Bring it on, I say!

BLUE EXORCIST, VOL. 1 • BY KAZUE KATO • VIZ MEDIA • 198 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

My 10 Favorite TOKYOPOP Titles

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Like many other readers who first discovered manga in the mid-2000s, TOKYOPOP played a major role in introducing me to to the medium. Tokyo Babylon was the first TOKYOPOP title I ever read, followed soon after by Legal Drug, The Legend of Chun-Hyang, and — God help me — Model, a manhwa about a Korean art student who lives in a crumbling mansion with two European vampires. (I should add that the vampires are male and the student is female, and both vampires appear to have bought their wardrobes at Hot Topic.) Though I’d be the first to admit that some of the manga I read were terrible, what I remember most about them was their romanticism: these were big, bold stories featuring impossibly beautiful characters in ridiculous situations, and I couldn’t get enough of them.

Over the years, my tastes have changed considerably, but I still feel a special allegiance to TOKYOPOP: its catalog is so large and diverse that I found plenty of other series to read when I outgrew my initial infatuation with overripe shojo. I had a hard time confining myself to just ten titles; I agonized about whether to include Mitsuhazu Mihara’s Doll, and Erica Sakakurazawa’s Between the Sheets, and Kenji Sonishi’s Neko Ramen, and Minetaro Mochizuki’s Dragon Head, all excellent series that still have pride of place in my manga library. In the end, however, I decided I had to put a cap on the number of titles to prevent my list from swelling to unmanageable proportions. Below are my ten favorite TOKYOPOP manga.

10. JYU-OH-SEI (Natsumi Itsuki)

After their parents are assassinated, twin brothers Rai and Thor are exiled to the penal colony of Kimaera, where they discover extreme weather, man-eating plants, and an elaborate tribal system in which women call the shots. Their only hope of escaping the planet’s inhospitable surface is for one of them to fight his way up the social ladder to become The Beast King, or supreme ruler of Kimaera. Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and District 9, Jyu-Oh-Sei addresses social taboos and scientific issues while serving up generous portions of what audiences crave most: action, romance, monsters, and explosions. Best of all, Jyu-Oh-Sei comes in a neat, three-volume package that’s long enough to allow for world-building and character development but short enough to stay fresh and surprising until the end. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 8/14/09

9. PETSHOP OF HORRORS (Matsuri Akino)

You won’t mistake Count D’s emporium for PETCO—the animals he sells are, in fact, demons, demi-gods, and shape-shifters who assume various guises. (One of the series’ running jokes is that some pets take human form, arousing the landlord’s suspicions that Count D actually runs a brothel.) Count D selects a pet for each customer that will help its owner realize a long-repressed dream. Of course, Count D’s services don’t come cheap; each character suffers an unexpected and often terrible consequence for seeking a magical solution to her problems. What sets Petshop apart from other examples of comeuppance theater is the writing. The characters’ plights elicit genuine sympathy from the reader; though we want these mothers and writers and lovesick twenty-something to find happiness, we can see that their own wishes are sometimes selfish, unwise, or genuinely harmful. –Reviewed at PopCultureShock on 2/13/08

8. SHIRAHIME-SYO: SNOW GODDESS TALES (Clamp)

This lovely anthology is a radical departure for CLAMP. Gone are the super-detailed costumes and fussy character designs of their early, post-doujinshi work; in their place are spare, simply-drawn figures that seem consciously modeled on examples from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scroll paintings. The stories themselves are told directly without embellishment, though CLAMP infuses each tale with genuine pathos, showing us how the characters’ anger and doubt lead to profound despair. As a result, the prevailing tone and spirit are reminiscent of Masaki Kobayashi’s 1964 film Kwaidan, both in the stories’ fidelity to the conventions of Japanese folklore and in their lyrical restraint. My favorite work by CLAMP.

7. SUPPLI (Mari Okazaki)

After being dumped by a long-term boyfriend, twenty-seven-year-old ad executive Minami carves a new identity for herself, accepting more challenging work assignments, forging friendships with her office mates, and exploring her feelings for two very different men: Ishida, a blunt co-worker with bad-boy sex appeal, and Ogiwara, a Tokyo University grad who looks great on paper, but has some nasty romantic baggage of his own. Suppli vividly and humorously evokes office life, from the unproductive meetings and grueling all-nighters to the horseplay and flirtatious banter between co-workers. The denizens of Minami’s office are colorful, if one-dimensional, characters: a salty old maid, two flamboyant karaoke fiends, and a tart-tongued temp who offers sound relationship advice to her officemates while sleeping with a married man. Anyone who’s watched Ally McBeal, The Office, or Ugly Betty has encountered these types before, but Mari Okazaki breathes fresh life into her scenario with stylish artwork, sharp dialogue, and a heroine who occasionally doubts herself, but isn’t neurotic . —Reviewed at PopCultureShock on 12/5/07

6. CYBORG 009 (Shotaro Ishimontori)

Cyborg 009 was one of TOKYOPOP’s few forays into classic manga — a pity, because TOKYOPOP did a solid job translating and packaging Shotaro Ishimonori’s best-known work. For readers unfamiliar with this iconic series, the plot revolves around a group of people who have been kidnapped and brought to the lair of the Black Ghost organization, where surgeons transform them into robot-human fighting machines. The cyborgs soon turn on their creators and escape, intent on preventing armaggedon. I’d be the first to admit that Cyborg 009 is dated: the Black Ghost’s world-domination schemes have the same quaintly outdated ring as Dr. Evil’s, and several characters embody unfortunate gender and racial stereotypes. (As Shaenon Garrity dryly observes, “Cyborg 003 is a French girl with enhanced senses. Her duties are to hold the baby and occasionally hear things.”) Yet Ishimonori’s crisp cartooning, imaginatively staged battle scenes, and fundamental — if fumbling — humanism remain as arresting now as they did when the series first debuted in 1964.

5. QWAN (Aki Shimizu)

Meet Qwan, a child-like figure who possesses super-human strength and speed. Though Qwan realizes he isn’t human, he’s never questioned his origins or abilities — that is, until he meets Shaga, a courtesan who urges him to seek the Essential Arts of Peace, a sutra that will reveal where Qwan came from and why he was sent to live among humans. Questing boys and magical scrolls are de rigeur in fantasy-adventure stories, but Qwan distinguishes itself in two crucial areas: terrific characters and gorgeous artwork. Aki Shimizu’s hero is far more quirky and interesting than the typical shonen lead — Qwan never promises to do his best, or to put friends before himself — while Shimizu’s fight scenes are among the most beautifully choreographed in any licensed manga. TOKYOPOP never finished this one-of-a-kind series, but it’s still worth seeking out, if only to get acquainted with a criminally under-appreciated artist. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 3/3/11

4. PARADISE KISS (Ai Yazawa)

Ai Yazawa knows how to have her cake and eat it, too: though she loves to write stories about such fantasy professions as runway model and rock star, she populates those stories with characters whose relationships and values are firmly rooted in everyday life. Consider Yukari (a.k.a. “Caroline”), the heroine of Paradise Kiss: Yukari becomes the muse for a group of aspiring fashion designers, modeling their clothing at a big design-school show and inspiring their most talented member, George, to new creative heights. In most manga, Yukari and George would bicker like teenage versions of Beatrice and Benedict until they finally admitted their mutual feelings of attraction; in Paradise Kiss, however, Yukari and George’s relationship unfolds in a more haphazard, organic way that reflects the fact that George is far more worldly and romantically experienced than Yukari. For my money, Paradise Kiss is Yazawa’s best work to date.

3. YOUR & MY SECRET (Ai Morinaga)

Your & My Secret focuses on Nanako, a swaggering tomboy who lives with her mad scientist grandfather, and Akira, an effeminate boy who adores her. With the flick of a switch, Akira becomes the unwitting test subject for the grandfather’s latest invention, a gizmo designed to transfer personalities from one body to another. Nanako revels in her new-found freedom as a boy, enjoying sudden popularity among classmates, earning the respect of Akira’s contemptuous little sister, and discovering the physical strength to dunk a basketball. Akira, on the other hand, finds his situation a mixed bag: for the first time in his life, his sensitive personality endears him to both male and female peers, but many of the things his maleness had previously exempted him from turn out to be much worse than he’d imagined. There are plenty of gender-bending hijinks — and the inevitable blackmail scene in which someone threatens to reveal Akira’s secret — but Morinaga still allows her characters moments of vulnerability and decency, preventing the humor from curdling into pure meanness. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 4/25/10

2. TRAMPS LIKE US (Yayoi Ogawa)

Twenty-eight-year-old Sumire Iwaya is frustrated: though she’s a successful journalist with degrees from Tokyo U. and Harvard, she’s hit the glass ceiling at her job and has just been dumped by her fiance. When she discovers a cute but dissheveled young man sleeping in a box outside her apartment, Sumire “adopts” him, allowing Takeshi to stay in her apartment as her “pet.” You don’t need a PhD in manga to guess the outcome of their unusual arrangement, but romantic triangles and workplace intrigue prevent Tramps Like Us from spinning into complete silliness or offensive gender stereotyping. But what really stayed with me was the depiction of Sumire’s romance with her handsome senpai Hasumi; almost every woman I know has had a relationship like theirs — perfect on paper, but stressful and unhappy in practice — and Yayoi Ogawa captures Sumire and Hasumi’s awkward dynamic in pitch-perfect detail. Now that’s good writing.

1. PLANETES (Makoto Yukimura)

Planetes is that rarest of manga: a human interest story that just happens to have some sci-fi trappings.Planetes focuses on a motley crew of junk collectors that includes Hachimaki, a young astronaut who aspires to join a pioneering mission to Jupiter; Yuri, a Russian astronaut with a Tragic Past; Tanabe, a sensitive but emotionally resilient trainee; and Fee, the ship’s balls-to-the-wall captain. Makoto Yukimura skillfully uses of each of his principal characters’ personal histories to explore meaty issues such as eco-terrorism, space pollution, and good old-fashioned racism. I know, I know — I’m making Planetes sound like Star Trek: Deep Space Waste Removal Station, but Yukimura is a more graceful storyteller than Gene Rodenberry every was, allowing the characters’ actions to speak louder than their words. Vivid, detailed artwork brings the terrestrial and extra-terrestrial settings to life.

* * * * *

So I turn the floor over to you: which titles were your favorites? Which ones deserve to be rescued and finished by another publisher? Inquiring minds want to know!

POSTSCRIPT, 4/20/11: Readers seeking a list of titles published by TOKYOPOP may wish to consult the ANN database entry on TOKYOPOP, the Comic Book DB entry on TOKYOPOP, or Wikipedia’s list of titles published by TOKYOPOP. I can’t vouch for their accuracy, but a quick glance at all three website suggests that these lists are comprehensive. Special thanks to all the folks on Twitter who pointed me towards these resources: @skleefeld, @yuriboke, @Funkgun, and @andrecomics.

My 10 Favorite TOKYOPOP Titles

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Like many other readers who first discovered manga in the mid-2000s, TOKYOPOP played a major role in introducing me to to the medium. Tokyo Babylon was the first TOKYOPOP title I ever read, followed soon after by Legal Drug, The Legend of Chun-Hyang, and — God help me — Model, a manhwa about a Korean art student who lives in a crumbling mansion with two European vampires. (I should add that the vampires are male and the student is female, and both vampires appear to have bought their wardrobes at Hot Topic.) Though I’d be the first to admit that some of the manga I read were terrible, what I remember most about them was their romanticism: these were big, bold stories featuring impossibly beautiful characters in ridiculous situations, and I couldn’t get enough of them.

Over the years, my tastes have changed considerably, but I still feel a special allegiance to TOKYOPOP: its catalog is so large and diverse that I found plenty of other series to read when I outgrew my initial infatuation with overripe shojo. I had a hard time confining myself to just ten titles; I agonized about whether to include Mitsuhazu Mihara’s Doll, and Erica Sakakurazawa’s Between the Sheets, and Kenji Sonishi’s Neko Ramen, and Minetaro Mochizuki’s Dragon Head, all excellent series that still have pride of place in my manga library. In the end, however, I decided I had to put a cap on the number of titles to prevent my list from swelling to unmanageable proportions. Below are my ten favorite TOKYOPOP manga.

10. Jyu-Oh-Sei
By Natsumi Itsuki
After their parents are assassinated, twin brothers Rai and Thor are exiled to the penal colony of Kimaera, where they discover extreme weather, man-eating plants, and an elaborate tribal system in which women call the shots. Their only hope of escaping the planet’s inhospitable surface is for one of them to fight his way up the social ladder to become The Beast King, or supreme ruler of Kimaera. Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and District 9, Jyu-Oh-Sei addresses social taboos and scientific issues while serving up generous portions of what audiences crave most: action, romance, monsters, and explosions. Best of all, Jyu-Oh-Sei comes in a neat, three-volume package that’s long enough to allow for world-building and character development but short enough to stay fresh and surprising until the end. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 8/14/09

9. Petshop of Horrors
By Matsuri Akino
You won’t mistake Count D’s emporium for PETCO—the animals he sells are, in fact, demons, demi-gods, and shape-shifters who assume various guises. (One of the series’ running jokes is that some pets take human form, arousing the landlord’s suspicions that Count D actually runs a brothel.) Count D selects a pet for each customer that will help its owner realize a long-repressed dream. Of course, Count D’s services don’t come cheap; each character suffers an unexpected and often terrible consequence for seeking a magical solution to her problems. What sets Petshop apart from other examples of comeuppance theater is the writing. The characters’ plights elicit genuine sympathy from the reader; though we want these mothers and writers and lovesick twenty-something to find happiness, we can see that their own wishes are sometimes selfish, unwise, or genuinely harmful. —Reviewed at PopCultureShock on 2/13/08

8. Shirahime-Syo: Snow Goddess Tales
By CLAMP
This lovely anthology is a radical departure for CLAMP. Gone are the super-detailed costumes and fussy character designs of their early, post-doujinshi work; in their place are spare, simply-drawn figures that seem consciously modeled on examples from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scroll paintings. The stories themselves are told directly without embellishment, though CLAMP infuses each tale with genuine pathos, showing us how the characters’ anger and doubt lead to profound despair. As a result, the prevailing tone and spirit are reminiscent of Masaki Kobayashi’s 1964 film Kwaidan, both in the stories’ fidelity to the conventions of Japanese folklore and in their lyrical restraint. My favorite work by CLAMP.

7. Suppli
By Mari Okazaki
After being dumped by a long-term boyfriend, twenty-seven-year-old ad executive Minami carves a new identity for herself, accepting more challenging work assignments, forging friendships with her office mates, and exploring her feelings for two very different men: Ishida, a blunt co-worker with bad-boy sex appeal, and Ogiwara, a Tokyo University grad who looks great on paper, but has some nasty romantic baggage of his own. Suppli vividly and humorously evokes office life, from the unproductive meetings and grueling all-nighters to the horseplay and flirtatious banter between co-workers. The denizens of Minami’s office are colorful, if one-dimensional, characters: a salty old maid, two flamboyant karaoke fiends, and a tart-tongued temp who offers sound relationship advice to her officemates while sleeping with a married man. Anyone who’s watched Ally McBeal, The Office, or Ugly Betty has encountered these types before, but Mari Okazaki breathes fresh life into her scenario with stylish artwork, sharp dialogue, and a heroine who occasionally doubts herself, but isn’t neurotic . —Reviewed at PopCultureShock on 12/5/07

6. Cyborg 009
By Shotaro Ishimontori
Cyborg 009 was one of TOKYOPOP’s few forays into classic manga — a pity, because TOKYOPOP did a solid job translating and packaging Shotaro Ishimonori’s best-known work. For readers unfamiliar with this iconic series, the plot revolves around a group of people who have been kidnapped and brought to the lair of the Black Ghost organization, where surgeons transform them into robot-human fighting machines. The cyborgs soon turn on their creators and escape, intent on preventing armaggedon. I’d be the first to admit that Cyborg 009 is dated: the Black Ghost’s world-domination schemes have the same quaintly outdated ring as Dr. Evil’s, and several characters embody unfortunate gender and racial stereotypes. (As Shaenon Garrity dryly observes, “Cyborg 003 is a French girl with enhanced senses. Her duties are to hold the baby and occasionally hear things.”) Yet Ishimonori’s crisp cartooning, imaginatively staged battle scenes, and fundamental — if fumbling — humanism remain as arresting now as they did when the series first debuted in 1964.

5. Qwan
By Aki Shimizu
Meet Qwan, a child-like figure who possesses super-human strength and speed. Though Qwan realizes he isn’t human, he’s never questioned his origins or abilities — that is, until he meets Shaga, a courtesan who urges him to seek the Essential Arts of Peace, a sutra that will reveal where Qwan came from and why he was sent to live among humans. Questing boys and magical scrolls are de rigeur in fantasy-adventure stories, but Qwan distinguishes itself in two crucial areas: terrific characters and gorgeous artwork. Aki Shimizu’s hero is far more quirky and interesting than the typical shonen lead — Qwan never promises to do his best, or to put friends before himself — while Shimizu’s fight scenes are among the most beautifully choreographed in any licensed manga. TOKYOPOP never finished this one-of-a-kind series, but it’s still worth seeking out, if only to get acquainted with a criminally under-appreciated artist. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 3/3/11

4. Paradise Kiss
By Ai Yazawa
Ai Yazawa knows how to have her cake and eat it, too: though she loves to write stories about such fantasy professions as runway model and rock star, she populates those stories with characters whose relationships and values are firmly rooted in everyday life. Consider Yukari (a.k.a. “Caroline”), the heroine of Paradise Kiss: Yukari becomes the muse for a group of aspiring fashion designers, modeling their clothing at a big design-school show and inspiring their most talented member, George, to new creative heights. In most manga, Yukari and George would bicker like teenage versions of Beatrice and Benedict until they finally admitted their mutual feelings of attraction; in Paradise Kiss, however, Yukari and George’s relationship unfolds in a more haphazard, organic way that reflects the fact that George is far more worldly and romantically experienced than Yukari. For my money, Paradise Kiss is Yazawa’s best work to date.

3. Your & My Secret
By Ai Morinaga
Your & My Secret focuses on Nanako, a swaggering tomboy who lives with her mad scientist grandfather, and Akira, an effeminate boy who adores her. With the flick of a switch, Akira becomes the unwitting test subject for the grandfather’s latest invention, a gizmo designed to transfer personalities from one body to another. Nanako revels in her new-found freedom as a boy, enjoying sudden popularity among classmates, earning the respect of Akira’s contemptuous little sister, and discovering the physical strength to dunk a basketball. Akira, on the other hand, finds his situation a mixed bag: for the first time in his life, his sensitive personality endears him to both male and female peers, but many of the things his maleness had previously exempted him from turn out to be much worse than he’d imagined. There are plenty of gender-bending hijinks — and the inevitable blackmail scene in which someone threatens to reveal Akira’s secret — but Morinaga still allows her characters moments of vulnerability and decency, preventing the humor from curdling into pure meanness. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 4/25/10

2. Tramps Like Us
By Yayoi Ogawa
Twenty-eight-year-old Sumire Iwaya is frustrated: though she’s a successful journalist with degrees from Tokyo U. and Harvard, she’s hit the glass ceiling at her job and has just been dumped by her fiance. When she discovers a cute but dissheveled young man sleeping in a box outside her apartment, Sumire “adopts” him, allowing Takeshi to stay in her apartment as her “pet.” You don’t need a PhD in manga to guess the outcome of their unusual arrangement, but romantic triangles and workplace intrigue prevent Tramps Like Us from spinning into complete silliness or offensive gender stereotyping. But what really stayed with me was the depiction of Sumire’s romance with her handsome senpai Hasumi; almost every woman I know has had a relationship like theirs — perfect on paper, but stressful and unhappy in practice — and Yayoi Ogawa captures Sumire and Hasumi’s awkward dynamic in pitch-perfect detail. Now that’s good writing.

1. Planetes
By Makoto Yukimura
Planetes is that rarest of manga: a human interest story that just happens to have some sci-fi trappings.Planetes focuses on a motley crew of junk collectors that includes Hachimaki, a young astronaut who aspires to join a pioneering mission to Jupiter; Yuri, a Russian astronaut with a Tragic Past; Tanabe, a sensitive but emotionally resilient trainee; and Fee, the ship’s balls-to-the-wall captain. Makoto Yukimura skillfully uses of each of his principal characters’ personal histories to explore meaty issues such as eco-terrorism, space pollution, and good old-fashioned racism. I know, I know — I’m making Planetes sound like Star Trek: Deep Space Waste Removal Station, but Yukimura is a more graceful storyteller than Gene Rodenberry every was, allowing the characters’ actions to speak louder than their words. Vivid, detailed artwork brings the terrestrial and extra-terrestrial settings to life.

* * * * *

So I turn the floor over to you: which titles were your favorites? Which ones deserve to be rescued and finished by another publisher? Inquiring minds want to know!

POSTSCRIPT, 4/20/11: Readers seeking a list of titles published by TOKYOPOP may wish to consult the ANN database entry on TOKYOPOP, the Comic Book DB entry on TOKYOPOP, or Wikipedia’s list of titles published by TOKYOPOP. I can’t vouch for their accuracy, but a quick glance at all three website suggests that these lists are comprehensive. Special thanks to all the folks on Twitter who pointed me towards these resources: @skleefeld, @yuriboke, @Funkgun, and @andrecomics.

Butterfly, Vol. 1

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Reading Butterfly won’t change your life, make you a better person, or cause subtle but significant changes to South American weather patterns, but it may just restore your faith in Tokyopop’s ability to suss out smart, entertaining series that quietly subvert genre conventions.

The genre in question is what I call “seeing dead people,” in which a teenager struggles to cope with the unwanted ability to interact with ghosts. Normally, these long-suffering teens see spirits everywhere, but Genji Ishikawa, Butterfly‘s protagonist, sees only one ghost: his older brother, who committed suicide after pushing a girl into the path of an oncoming train. Though Genji would like nothing better than to have a girlfriend, his tragic past and rumored ability to speak to the dead proves irresistible to classmates with an interest in the paranormal.

Genji has another problem: he’s ¥600,000 in debt, more than he could hope to earn through an after-school job. When a peculiar girl approaches him with a money-making proposition, he reluctantly accepts, only to renege on their agreement when he realizes what he’s being asked to do: tangle with ghosts. Or, more accurately, tangle with what Ageha’s clients believe are ghosts; she has the ability to make people’s fears take corporeal form, and expects Genji to “kill” these projections for her clients’ benefit.

Though Ageha is a type we’ve seen before — manipulative, preternaturally calm, faintly androgynous — her abilities put an interesting twist on the “seeing dead people” premise. She clearly profits from her deceptions, but her fraud is, at bottom, a useful public service, one that allows shopkeepers, frightened swimmers, and hotel chambermaids to resume their normal routines after a catastrophic event, even if these “exorcisms” don’t actually help the dead cross over to the afterlife. As mercenary as Genji finds Ageha, her success forces him to to consider the possibility that his own spiritual powers are less a bane than a blessing, that he has an obligation to develop and use them, rather than deny their value.

The only downside to such an ambitious premise is that Yu Aikawa needs almost every page of volume one to establish the basic parameters of her story. Some of the exposition is handled gracefully; the details of the brother’s death, for example, are revealed slowly and casually, forcing the reader to piece together what happened to him with little authorial guidance. Some of the exposition is handled clumsily, however; Ageha and Genji’s first few encounters seem more like job interviews than spontaneous exchanges of information, an impression that isn’t thoroughly dispelled until one of their ghostbusting gigs goes awry.

Narrative hiccups aside, the story that’s beginning to emerge in the later chapters of volume one is compelling, a supernatural mystery that explores its characters troubled emotional lives with the same thoroughness as it dispenses with pesky spooks. Recommended.

BUTTERFLY, VOL. 1 • BY YU AIKAWA • TOKYOPOP • 208 pp. • RATING: TEEN (13+)

Butterfly, Vol. 1

by

Reading Butterfly won’t change your life, make you a better person, or cause subtle but significant changes to South American weather patterns, but it may just restore your faith in Tokyopop’s ability to suss out smart, entertaining series that quietly subvert genre conventions.

The genre in question is what I call “seeing dead people,” in which a teenager struggles to cope with the unwanted ability to interact with ghosts. Normally, these long-suffering teens see spirits everywhere, but Genji Ishikawa, Butterfly‘s protagonist, sees only one ghost: his older brother, who committed suicide after pushing a girl into the path of an oncoming train. Though Genji would like nothing better than to have a girlfriend, his tragic past and rumored ability to speak to the dead proves irresistible to classmates with an interest in the paranormal.

Genji has another problem: he’s ¥600,000 in debt, more than he could hope to earn through an after-school job. When a peculiar girl approaches him with a money-making proposition, he reluctantly accepts, only to renege on their agreement when he realizes what he’s being asked to do: tangle with ghosts. Or, more accurately, tangle with what Ageha’s clients believe are ghosts; she has the ability to make people’s fears take corporeal form, and expects Genji to “kill” these projections for her clients’ benefit.

Though Ageha is a type we’ve seen before — manipulative, preternaturally calm, faintly androgynous — her abilities put an interesting twist on the “seeing dead people” premise. She clearly profits from her deceptions, but her fraud is, at bottom, a useful public service, one that allows shopkeepers, frightened swimmers, and hotel chambermaids to resume their normal routines after a catastrophic event, even if these “exorcisms” don’t actually help the dead cross over to the afterlife. As mercenary as Genji finds Ageha, her success forces him to to consider the possibility that his own spiritual powers are less a bane than a blessing, that he has an obligation to develop and use them, rather than deny their value.

The only downside to such an ambitious premise is that Yu Aikawa needs almost every page of volume one to establish the basic parameters of her story. Some of the exposition is handled gracefully; the details of the brother’s death, for example, are revealed slowly and casually, forcing the reader to piece together what happened to him with little authorial guidance. Some of the exposition is handled clumsily, however; Ageha and Genji’s first few encounters seem more like job interviews than spontaneous exchanges of information, an impression that isn’t thoroughly dispelled until one of their ghostbusting gigs goes awry.

Narrative hiccups aside, the story that’s beginning to emerge in the later chapters of volume one is compelling, a supernatural mystery that explores its characters troubled emotional lives with the same thoroughness as it dispenses with pesky spooks. Recommended.

BUTTERFLY, VOL. 1 • BY YU AIKAWA • TOKYOPOP • 208 pp. • RATING: TEEN (13+)

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Kekkaishi

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I have a challenge for all you Shonen Jump readers: pick up a copy of Kekkaishi. It may not be as sexy as Death Note, or as goofy as One Piece, or as battle-focused as Bleach, but what it lacks in flash, it makes up in heart, humor, and good old-fashioned storytelling.

The premise of Kekkaishi is simple: Yoshimori Sumimura, a seemingly unremarkable fourteen-year-old boy, is a kekkaishi, or barrier-master. When he isn’t consuming unhealthy amounts of coffee-flavored milk, dozing off in class, or baking architecturally magnificent cakes (one of his pet obsessions), he’s patrolling the grounds of his school, which sits atop the Karasumori, a locus of magical energy that proves irresistible to ayakashi (demons) looking to augment their power. Yoshimori traps unwanted visitors within cube-shaped barriers, then vaporizes them, barrier and all.

Joining him on patrol are his sixteen-year-old neighbor Tokine Yukimura—a more disciplined kekkaishi whom Yoshimori secretly adores—and a small complement of demons that includes two dog spirits, Madarao and Hakubi, and a half-human, half-ayakashi, Gen Shishio. Further complicating matters are the families themselves: the Sumimuras and Yukimuras detest one another. Though their clans have been tasked with protecting the Karasumori for nearly 500 years, the oldest generation carries on an energetic feud, making it difficult for Yoshimori and Tokine to work together harmoniously. In short, Kekkaishi reads like an entertaining mash-up of Bleach, InuYasha, and Romeo and Juliet. (Or maybe Romeo Must Die. Take your pick.)

Each volume unfurls at a brisk clip, in part because Tanabe doesn’t feel the need to explain the entire mythology of the Karasumori site all at once. Nor does she resort to the kind of lazy, expository dialogue found in many shonen series with complicated backstories. (You know the kind: “As you know, Tokine, we’ve been combating ayakashi together for almost a year, and our faithful demon dog sidekicks have played an indispensable role in helping us rid the site of ayakashi. Don’t you think, childhood friend and neighbor of mine?”) Instead, Tanabe reveals details about the Karasumori site’s past gradually as she introduces new characters and confronts her principal cast members with new demonic challenges. In fact, the kekkaishis’ greatest adversaries—the Kokuburo, a group of powerful demons whose plan for world domination involves taking over the Karasumori site—don’t even appear in the first volume of the series.

What makes Kekkaishi such a joy to read is Yellow Tanabe’s consummate skill as both an illustrator and storyteller. Her artwork is clean and attractive, with bold lines and nicely composed pictures. Though her character designs are immensely appealing—and seem ready-made for the inevitable assortment of lunchboxes, t-shirts, shijikis, and coffee milk drinks that the series inspired—it’s her action sequences that really shine. Kekkaishi is one of the few shonen series where the fight scenes are (a) dynamic (b) thrilling (c) easy to follow (d) essential to the plot and (e) just the right length. There’s also a wonderful sense of play in Tanabe’s combat. Yoshimori and Tokine use kekkaishi not only as traps, but also as aerial stepping-stones that allow them to pursue demons mid-air.

There’s another appealing—and slyly didactic—aspect to these fight scenes as well. Though Yoshimori possesses greater spiritual powers than Tokine, it’s Tokine who frequently saves the day. Why? Because she practices creating barriers with the same diligence as she does her homework. Yoshimori, on the other hand, struggles to master his powers, sometimes embarking on marathon training sessions and other times neglecting to practice at all.

Kekkaishi offers readers more modest pleasures as well. Tanabe creates a colorful cast of supporting characters that include Yoshimori and Tokine’s sparring grandparents, who prove surprisingly spry for a couple of sexagenarians; Yoshimori’s father, who reminds me of James Dean’s apron-clad dad in Rebel Without a Cause; Masahiko Tsukijigaoka, a genial ghost who was a baker in life; Heisuke Matsudo, a nattily-dressed friend of Yoshimori’s grandfather with a specialty in weird science; and Mamezo, the grouchy guardian spirit of the Karasumori site who looks a bit like Kermit the Frog on a bender. Tanabe’s villains are a less colorful and distinctive bunch than, say, Naraku’s various incarnations, but I find that refreshing. For once the hero—and pals—are as vivid and appealing as the bad guys without having sordid or unnecessarily complicated backstories.

Like all shonen series, Kekkaishi suffers from an occasional dry spell. In volumes seven and eight, for example, the series seemed to have lost its mojo; I found the fight scenes tedious and felt Tanabe had fumbled in her depiction of Tokine, who went from being an appealing, competent character to a mere tag-along. But Tanabe quickly righted the ship in volume nine, introducing new characters, fleshing out the Kokoburo’s motives for capturing the Karasumori, staging some ecological intrigue at the Colorless Marsh, and revealing that Yoshimori’s dad has some demon-busting skills of his own. Though volume nine features two dramatic fight scenes, it’s the quieter, character-building moments that really shine, raising the emotional stakes by revealing unexpected facets of the heroes’ personalities; what happens in volume ten is all the more devastating because Tanabe makes us care deeply about her characters’ welfare.

If I still haven’t persuaded you that Kekkaishi is more fun than a barrel of demon monkeys, let me sing the praises of Yellow Tanabe’s omake. I don’t usually read sidebars or gag strips for reasons that David Welsh so aptly summarized in a memorable blog entry:

The content is generally pretty repetitive. They’re working really hard, and they’re sorry they’re behind on their fan mail. This volume isn’t as good as they’d have liked, but they’re trying, and reader support keeps them going. They wish they had a kitty. That sort of thing.

Tanabe’s omake steer clear of the usual bowing and scraping before the fandom. Instead, she depicts herself as a slightly tubby penguin with a perpetual scowl and an implacable panda for an editor. Not much happens in a typical strip, but the back-and-forth between penguin and panda is amusing and, for anyone who’s ever been on the receiving end of editorial criticism, all too true. She also has a lot of fun explaining her creative decisions:

And if you’re still on the fence, let me pull out my trump card: Kekkaishi is complete. Done. Finished. Finito.

After a successful eight-year run in Weekly Shonen Sunday, the series wrapped on April 6th with the publication of its 334th chapter. And by successful, I mean successful in Japan, where the series inspired a 52-episode television series and a robust assortment of video games, and nabbed nabbed the 2007 Shogakukan Award for Best Shonen Series. Here in the US, however, Kekkaishi has barely made a ripple. VIZ has been making a concerted effort to promote the series, featuring sample chapters on its Shonen Sunday website, licensing broadcasting rights to Cartoon Network, and releasing two budget editions: one digital (for the iPad), and one print. (Look for the first three-in-one edition on May 3, 2011.) I’m not sure why Kekkaishi hasn’t caught on with American audiences yet, but now is a great time to jump into this addictive series. I dare you not to like it!

This is a revised version of an essay that originally appeared at PopCultureShock on 5/14/07.

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Kekkaishi

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I have a challenge for all you Shonen Jump readers: pick up a copy of Kekkaishi. It may not be as sexy as Death Note, or as goofy as One Piece, or as battle-focused as Bleach, but what it lacks in flash, it makes up in heart, humor, and good old-fashioned storytelling.

The premise of Kekkaishi is simple: Yoshimori Sumimura, a seemingly unremarkable fourteen-year-old boy, is a kekkaishi, or barrier-master. When he isn’t consuming unhealthy amounts of coffee-flavored milk, dozing off in class, or baking architecturally magnificent cakes (one of his pet obsessions), he’s patrolling the grounds of his school, which sits atop the Karasumori, a locus of magical energy that proves irresistible to ayakashi (demons) looking to augment their power. Yoshimori traps unwanted visitors within cube-shaped barriers, then vaporizes them, barrier and all.

Joining him on patrol are his sixteen-year-old neighbor Tokine Yukimura—a more disciplined kekkaishi whom Yoshimori secretly adores—and a small complement of demons that includes two dog spirits, Madarao and Hakubi, and a half-human, half-ayakashi, Gen Shishio. Further complicating matters are the families themselves: the Sumimuras and Yukimuras detest one another. Though their clans have been tasked with protecting the Karasumori for nearly 500 years, the oldest generation carries on an energetic feud, making it difficult for Yoshimori and Tokine to work together harmoniously. In short, Kekkaishi reads like an entertaining mash-up of Bleach, InuYasha, and Romeo and Juliet. (Or maybe Romeo Must Die. Take your pick.)

Each volume unfurls at a brisk clip, in part because Tanabe doesn’t feel the need to explain the entire mythology of the Karasumori site all at once. Nor does she resort to the kind of lazy, expository dialogue found in many shonen series with complicated backstories. (You know the kind: “As you know, Tokine, we’ve been combating ayakashi together for almost a year, and our faithful demon dog sidekicks have played an indispensable role in helping us rid the site of ayakashi. Don’t you think, childhood friend and neighbor of mine?”) Instead, Tanabe reveals details about the Karasumori site’s past gradually as she introduces new characters and confronts her principal cast members with new demonic challenges. In fact, the kekkaishis’ greatest adversaries—the Kokuburo, a group of powerful demons whose plan for world domination involves taking over the Karasumori site—don’t even appear in the first volume of the series.

What makes Kekkaishi such a joy to read is Yellow Tanabe’s consummate skill as both an illustrator and storyteller. Her artwork is clean and attractive, with bold lines and nicely composed pictures. Though her character designs are immensely appealing—and seem ready-made for the inevitable assortment of lunchboxes, t-shirts, shijikis, and coffee milk drinks that the series inspired—it’s her action sequences that really shine. Kekkaishi is one of the few shonen series where the fight scenes are (a) dynamic (b) thrilling (c) easy to follow (d) essential to the plot and (e) just the right length. There’s also a wonderful sense of play in Tanabe’s combat. Yoshimori and Tokine use kekkaishi not only as traps, but also as aerial stepping-stones that allow them to pursue demons mid-air.

There’s another appealing—and slyly didactic—aspect to these fight scenes as well. Though Yoshimori possesses greater spiritual powers than Tokine, it’s Tokine who frequently saves the day. Why? Because she practices creating barriers with the same diligence as she does her homework. Yoshimori, on the other hand, struggles to master his powers, sometimes embarking on marathon training sessions and other times neglecting to practice at all.

Kekkaishi offers readers more modest pleasures as well. Tanabe creates a colorful cast of supporting characters that include Yoshimori and Tokine’s sparring grandparents, who prove surprisingly spry for a couple of sexagenarians; Yoshimori’s father, who reminds me of James Dean’s apron-clad dad in Rebel Without a Cause; Masahiko Tsukijigaoka, a genial ghost who was a baker in life; Heisuke Matsudo, a nattily-dressed friend of Yoshimori’s grandfather with a specialty in weird science; and Mamezo, the grouchy guardian spirit of the Karasumori site who looks a bit like Kermit the Frog on a bender. Tanabe’s villains are a less colorful and distinctive bunch than, say, Naraku’s various incarnations, but I find that refreshing. For once the hero—and pals—are as vivid and appealing as the bad guys without having sordid or unnecessarily complicated backstories.

Like all shonen series, Kekkaishi suffers from an occasional dry spell. In volumes seven and eight, for example, the series seemed to have lost its mojo; I found the fight scenes tedious and felt Tanabe had fumbled in her depiction of Tokine, who went from being an appealing, competent character to a mere tag-along. But Tanabe quickly righted the ship in volume nine, introducing new characters, fleshing out the Kokoburo’s motives for capturing the Karasumori, staging some ecological intrigue at the Colorless Marsh, and revealing that Yoshimori’s dad has some demon-busting skills of his own. Though volume nine features two dramatic fight scenes, it’s the quieter, character-building moments that really shine, raising the emotional stakes by revealing unexpected facets of the heroes’ personalities; what happens in volume ten is all the more devastating because Tanabe makes us care deeply about her characters’ welfare.

If I still haven’t persuaded you that Kekkaishi is more fun than a barrel of demon monkeys, let me sing the praises of Yellow Tanabe’s omake. I don’t usually read sidebars or gag strips for reasons that David Welsh so aptly summarized in a memorable blog entry:

The content is generally pretty repetitive. They’re working really hard, and they’re sorry they’re behind on their fan mail. This volume isn’t as good as they’d have liked, but they’re trying, and reader support keeps them going. They wish they had a kitty. That sort of thing.

Tanabe’s omake steer clear of the usual bowing and scraping before the fandom. Instead, she depicts herself as a slightly tubby penguin with a perpetual scowl and an implacable panda for an editor. Not much happens in a typical strip, but the back-and-forth between penguin and panda is amusing and, for anyone who’s ever been on the receiving end of editorial criticism, all too true. She also has a lot of fun explaining her creative decisions:

And if you’re still on the fence, let me pull out my trump card: Kekkaishi is complete. Done. Finished. Finito.

After a successful eight-year run in Weekly Shonen Sunday, the series wrapped on April 6th with the publication of its 334th chapter. And by successful, I mean successful in Japan, where the series inspired a 52-episode television series and a robust assortment of video games, and nabbed nabbed the 2007 Shogakukan Award for Best Shonen Series. Here in the US, however, Kekkaishi has barely made a ripple. VIZ has been making a concerted effort to promote the series, featuring sample chapters on its Shonen Sunday website, licensing broadcasting rights to Cartoon Network, and releasing two budget editions: one digital (for the iPad), and one print. (Look for the first three-in-one edition on May 3, 2011.) I’m not sure why Kekkaishi hasn’t caught on with American audiences yet, but now is a great time to jump into this addictive series. I dare you not to like it!

This is a revised version of an essay that originally appeared at PopCultureShock on 5/14/07.

The Red Snake

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The Red Snake isn’t the most disturbing manga I’ve read — that honor belongs to Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show, a book so intent on celebrating taboo behavior that I was certain I’d be arrested for having a copy in my house. But The Red Snake earns a special place on my manga-reading list for being one weirdest horror stories I’ve read, a grim fable about a family obsessed with bugs, boils, chickens, and snakes.

The book opens with the narrator wandering the halls of a sprawling house. “For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to get away from this house,” he explains. “Something evil lurks within these walls.” As lugubrious as the corridors and empty rooms may be, the inhabitants are even scarier: the grandfather is a tyrant who lavishes more attention on his poultry than on his family; the grandmother believes she’s a chicken and sits on a gigantic nest, attacking anyone who threatens her “territory”; the sister has an almost erotic fascination with insects; and the mother is a virtual slave, forced each day to massage and drain the pus from an enormous boil on the grandfather’s face. (Perhaps they’re the kind of people Tolstoy had in mind when he famously opined that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”?)

What follows the prologue is hard to classify as a story; it’s more a string of loosely connected vignettes, all increasingly horrific, in which:

  • Snakes violate the sister in almost every way imaginable;
  • The sister kills chickens and drinks their blood — straight from their dripping necks;
  • The grandmother transforms into a chicken with a human head;
  • The mother gives birth to a monstrous creature that looks like a Garbage Pail Kid; and
  • The narrator goes mano-a-mano with a flotilla of zombie infants.

After nearly one hundred pages of blood-soaked insanity, we find ourselves right back where we started: the narrator begins his soliloquy about the house again, using the same words and wandering the same corridors as he did in the book’s opening pages.

Hino’s artwork resembles a scratchboard drawing or a woodblock print, characterized by large patches of black ink pierced by thin, white lines. In the opening pages, for example, there’s no visible light source anywhere in the house or the surrounding woods — no sky, no candles or lamps — creating an atmosphere of almost unbearable claustrophobia; the shadows are palpable, pressing in on the narrator just as surely as the demons he unwittingly frees later in the story.

Character-wise, Hino’s designs belong to the same genotype as Kazuo Umezu and Kanako Inuki’s. Hino draws young girls and mothers as beautiful, glassy-eyed dolls and old women, fathers, and boys as grotesques. The narrator, for example, wears his worry like a shirt; he has enormous eyes rimmed in circles and is almost bald, even though his behavior and height peg him as a child of about ten or twelve. The grandparents, by contrast, resemble animals: the grandfather looks like a toad, with a bumpy hide, wide-set eyes, and a broad, leering mouth filled with rotting teeth, while the grandmother increasingly resembles the object of her delusion:

I feel like chicken tonight?

For all Hino’s ability to provoke and amuse, I’m not sure how I feel about The Red Snake. The story unfolds with the feverish logic of a dream, yielding some suitably creepy and bizarre images; I’ve never pictured the Sanzu River as alive with flesh-eating zombie babies, but it’s an arresting idea. The ending, too, is surprisingly effective. It’s not clear if the narrator realizes that he’s trapped in a cycle of unending horror, or is simply puzzled that all of the house’s nameless inhabitants have reverted to their “normal” state; either way, it’s a nasty punchline that subverts our desire — and the narrator’s — for closure.

At the same time, however, Hino has a juvenile fixation with blood, pus, and bugs, relishing every opportunity to draw a close-up of the grandfather’s boil or fill the page with a squirm of insects. Though some of these images merit an appreciative eewww, they’re too broadly cartoonish to really spook us; the grandfather’s ailments reminded me of an old George Carlin routine about the perverse delight humans take in studying their hangnails and pimples, rather than the disturbing metamorphoses found in Junji Ito and David Croenberg’s work. Maybe that’s Hino’s point: that we’re weirdly — almost comically — obsessed with our own bodily existence, but The Red Snake is so packed with ideas and sight gags and detours into the ludicrous that it’s hard to know what, exactly, Hino is trying to do besides mess with our heads.

THE RED SNAKE • BY HIDESHI HINO • DH PUBLISHING • 200 pp. • NO RATING (APPROPRIATE FOR OLDER TEENS AND MATURE AUDIENCES; SEXUAL CONTENT AND DISTURBING IMAGERY)

The Red Snake

by

The Red Snake isn’t the most disturbing manga I’ve read — that honor belongs to Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show, a book so intent on celebrating taboo behavior that I was certain I’d be arrested for having a copy in my house. But The Red Snake earns a special place on my manga-reading list for being one weirdest horror stories I’ve read, a grim fable about a family obsessed with bugs, boils, chickens, and snakes.

The book opens with the narrator wandering the halls of a sprawling house. “For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to get away from this house,” he explains. “Something evil lurks within these walls.” As lugubrious as the corridors and empty rooms may be, the inhabitants are even scarier: the grandfather is a tyrant who lavishes more attention on his poultry than on his family; the grandmother believes she’s a chicken and sits on a gigantic nest, attacking anyone who threatens her “territory”; the sister has an almost erotic fascination with insects; and the mother is a virtual slave, forced each day to massage and drain the pus from an enormous boil on the grandfather’s face. (Perhaps they’re the kind of people Tolstoy had in mind when he famously opined that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”?)

What follows the prologue is hard to classify as a story; it’s more a string of loosely connected vignettes, all increasingly horrific, in which:

  • Snakes violate the sister in almost every way imaginable;
  • The sister kills chickens and drinks their blood — straight from their dripping necks;
  • The grandmother transforms into a chicken with a human head;
  • The mother gives birth to a monstrous creature that looks like a Garbage Pail Kid; and
  • The narrator goes mano-a-mano with a flotilla of zombie infants.

After nearly one hundred pages of blood-soaked insanity, we find ourselves right back where we started: the narrator begins his soliloquy about the house again, using the same words and wandering the same corridors as he did in the book’s opening pages.

Hino’s artwork resembles a scratchboard drawing or a woodblock print, characterized by large patches of black ink pierced by thin, white lines. In the opening pages, for example, there’s no visible light source anywhere in the house or the surrounding woods — no sky, no candles or lamps — creating an atmosphere of almost unbearable claustrophobia; the shadows are palpable, pressing in on the narrator just as surely as the demons he unwittingly frees later in the story.

Character-wise, Hino’s designs belong to the same genotype as Kazuo Umezu and Kanako Inuki’s. Hino draws young girls and mothers as beautiful, glassy-eyed dolls and old women, fathers, and boys as grotesques. The narrator, for example, wears his worry like a shirt; he has enormous eyes rimmed in circles and is almost bald, even though his behavior and height peg him as a child of about ten or twelve. The grandparents, by contrast, resemble animals: the grandfather looks like a toad, with a bumpy hide, wide-set eyes, and a broad, leering mouth filled with rotting teeth, while the grandmother increasingly resembles the object of her delusion:

I feel like chicken tonight?

For all Hino’s ability to provoke and amuse, I’m not sure how I feel about The Red Snake. The story unfolds with the feverish logic of a dream, yielding some suitably creepy and bizarre images; I’ve never pictured the Sanzu River as alive with flesh-eating zombie babies, but it’s an arresting idea. The ending, too, is surprisingly effective. It’s not clear if the narrator realizes that he’s trapped in a cycle of unending horror, or is simply puzzled that all of the house’s nameless inhabitants have reverted to their “normal” state; either way, it’s a nasty punchline that subverts our desire — and the narrator’s — for closure.

At the same time, however, Hino has a juvenile fixation with blood, pus, and bugs, relishing every opportunity to draw a close-up of the grandfather’s boil or fill the page with a squirm of insects. Though some of these images merit an appreciative eewww, they’re too broadly cartoonish to really spook us; the grandfather’s ailments reminded me of an old George Carlin routine about the perverse delight humans take in studying their hangnails and pimples, rather than the disturbing metamorphoses found in Junji Ito and David Croenberg’s work. Maybe that’s Hino’s point: that we’re weirdly — almost comically — obsessed with our own bodily existence, but The Red Snake is so packed with ideas and sight gags and detours into the ludicrous that it’s hard to know what, exactly, Hino is trying to do besides mess with our heads.

THE RED SNAKE • BY HIDESHI HINO • DH PUBLISHING • 200 pp. • NO RATING (APPROPRIATE FOR OLDER TEENS AND MATURE AUDIENCES; SEXUAL CONTENT AND DISTURBING IMAGERY)

Twin Spica, Vols. 5-6

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If you spend any time surfing the mangasphere, you don’t need me to tell you that Twin Spica is about a group of teenagers who are training to become Japan’s first astronauts. You probably know — or have heard from other readers — that it’s poignant. And you may have heard pundits declare it one of the best new series of 2010. (It made my best-of list.) Rather than re-hash plot points or tell you how awesome it is, therefore, I thought I’d share what I like best about Twin Spica: every volume makes me want to look up at the sky.

I’m not talking about the simple act of looking through a telescope or watching clouds drift in the wind — I’m talking about the way the act of looking at the sky makes me feel. Reflecting back on my childhood, that act elicited very specific emotions: the sky represented the future, a large canvas on which I could project my most cherished dreams of traveling to distant places, having adventures, and doing things that, from a six or eight-year-old’s perspective, seemed important. Kou Yaginuma clearly remembers that feeling from his own childhood, because his characters are at their most optimistic and thoughtful when they’re looking up at the sky and thinking about their own experiences.

There’s a lovely moment in volume six, for example, when Fuchuya’s grandfather tells six-year-old Asumi to cherish the memory of gazing up at the sky, as the sky will look different to her as she reaches adulthood. He explains:

You might as well spend your time looking up, at the sky. Me, I’ve spent decades staring up the sky in this town. I only thought the sky was very high when I was your age. When you’re old, it doesn’t seem quite that way. The sky you see as a kid is a lifelong treasure. I mean it. Value what you can see now, and only now.

Reading this passage reminds me of “Feldeinsamkeit” (“In Summerfields”), a beautiful piece of juvenilia from Charles Ives’ 114 Songs. The lyrics, taken from German poet Hermann Allmers, describe the experience of lying in a meadow on a summer’s afternoon and watching the sky. The sight of drifting clouds induces melancholy in his poem’s narrator, who — in typical nineteenth-century fashion — sees the clouds’ gentle, unfettered progress across the sky as a symbol of release from earthly burdens:

I’m resting quietly in tall green grass,
and cast my eyes far upwards;
around me crickets chirp unceasing,
the sky’s blue magically encloses me.

The beautiful white clouds float past
through the deep blue, like lovely silent dreams.
It is as if I had been long dead,
and flew in bliss with them through unending space.

Ives’ setting, by his own standards, is rather tame; there’s a running accompaniment figure that suggests fast-moving clouds, and a fleeting moment of bitonality, but it falls squarely within the nineteenth-century Stimmungslied tradition with its rounded binary form and gentle chromaticism. The song has an undeniably haunting quality, however. Its rapid modulation to harmonically distant key signatures and achingly sad melodic line suggest that the singer isn’t simply describing the act of watching clouds, as the lyrics alone might imply, but remembering what she was thinking and feeling as she did so.

That may sound like a minor distinction, but memory — or, more accurately, the act of remembering — is an important motif in the 114 Songs. “At the River,” for example, initially sounds like a straightforward rendition of “Shall We Gather At the River,” only to deviate from the melody as the singer “forgets” the proper tune, while “Memories” re-enacts a child’s enthusiasm at attending a concert. “In Summerfields” is less self-consciously modernist than either of these songs, but all three rely heavily on the illusion that the performer is reliving one of her own memories.

And that’s exactly the quality I find so compelling about Twin Spica: it’s a manga about living with vivid memories — some haunting, some happy — about reconciling past and present, about recognizing the value in both joy and pain, about negotiating the transition from youthful innocence to adulthood. In that scene with Fuchuya’s grandfather, we’re given a powerful reminder of just how much symbolic importance the sky holds for all of us, even if it doesn’t fill us with the same sense of wonder that it did when we were small.

Review copies provided by Vertical, Inc.

TWIN SPICA, VOLS. 5-6 • BY KOU YAGINUMA • VERTICAL, INC. • RATING: TEEN (13+)

Twin Spica, Vols. 5-6

by 14 Comments

If you spend any time surfing the mangasphere, you don’t need me to tell you that Twin Spica is about a group of teenagers who are training to become Japan’s first astronauts. You probably know — or have heard from other readers — that it’s poignant. And you may have heard pundits declare it one of the best new series of 2010. (It made my best-of list.) Rather than re-hash plot points or tell you how awesome it is, therefore, I thought I’d share what I like best about Twin Spica: every volume makes me want to look up at the sky.

I’m not talking about the simple act of looking through a telescope or watching clouds drift in the wind — I’m talking about the way the act of looking at the sky makes me feel. Reflecting back on my childhood, that act elicited very specific emotions: the sky represented the future, a large canvas on which I could project my most cherished dreams of traveling to distant places, having adventures, and doing things that, from a six or eight-year-old’s perspective, seemed important. Kou Yaginuma clearly remembers that feeling from his own childhood, because his characters are at their most optimistic and thoughtful when they’re looking up at the sky and thinking about their own experiences.

There’s a lovely moment in volume six, for example, when Fuchuya’s grandfather tells six-year-old Asumi to cherish the memory of gazing up at the sky, as the sky will look different to her as she reaches adulthood. He explains:

You might as well spend your time looking up, at the sky. Me, I’ve spent decades staring up the sky in this town. I only thought the sky was very high when I was your age. When you’re old, it doesn’t seem quite that way. The sky you see as a kid is a lifelong treasure. I mean it. Value what you can see now, and only now.

Reading this passage reminds me of “Feldeinsamkeit” (“In Summerfields”), a beautiful piece of juvenilia from Charles Ives’ 114 Songs. The lyrics, taken from German poet Hermann Allmers, describe the experience of lying in a meadow on a summer’s afternoon and watching the sky. The sight of drifting clouds induces melancholy in his poem’s narrator, who — in typical nineteenth-century fashion — sees the clouds’ gentle, unfettered progress across the sky as a symbol of release from earthly burdens:

I’m resting quietly in tall green grass,
and cast my eyes far upwards;
around me crickets chirp unceasing,
the sky’s blue magically encloses me.

The beautiful white clouds float past
through the deep blue, like lovely silent dreams.
It is as if I had been long dead,
and flew in bliss with them through unending space.

Ives’ setting, by his own standards, is rather tame; there’s a running accompaniment figure that suggests fast-moving clouds, and a fleeting moment of bitonality, but it falls squarely within the nineteenth-century Stimmungslied tradition with its rounded binary form and gentle chromaticism. The song has an undeniably haunting quality, however. Its rapid modulation to harmonically distant key signatures and achingly sad melodic line suggest that the singer isn’t simply describing the act of watching clouds, as the lyrics alone might imply, but remembering what she was thinking and feeling as she did so.

That may sound like a minor distinction, but memory — or, more accurately, the act of remembering — is an important motif in the 114 Songs. “At the River,” for example, initially sounds like a straightforward rendition of “Shall We Gather At the River,” only to deviate from the melody as the singer “forgets” the proper tune, while “Memories” re-enacts a child’s enthusiasm at attending a concert. “In Summerfields” is less self-consciously modernist than either of these songs, but all three rely heavily on the illusion that the performer is reliving one of her own memories.

And that’s exactly the quality I find so compelling about Twin Spica: it’s a manga about living with vivid memories — some haunting, some happy — about reconciling past and present, about recognizing the value in both joy and pain, about negotiating the transition from youthful innocence to adulthood. In that scene with Fuchuya’s grandfather, we’re given a powerful reminder of just how much symbolic importance the sky holds for all of us, even if it doesn’t fill us with the same sense of wonder that it did when we were small.

Review copies provided by Vertical, Inc.

TWIN SPICA, VOLS. 5-6 • BY KOU YAGINUMA • VERTICAL, INC. • RATING: TEEN (13+)