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Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

children of the whales

Children of the Whales, Vols. 1-2

January 28, 2018 by Katherine Dacey

Children of the Whales suffers from the same problem as many prestige television shows: it boasts a thought-provoking premise, compelling lead characters, and sophisticated visuals, but is such a relentlessly downbeat experience that you’d be forgiven for abandoning ship after a few chapters.

The story unfolds aboard the Mud Whale, a sentient vessel. Its 513 inhabitants have been exiled from their homeland for over 90 years, drifting across a vast ocean of sand punctuated only by the occasional island or abandoned boat. Fourteen-year-old Chakuro is the community’s archivist, tasked with recording births and deaths, strange encounters, and changes in the Mud Whale’s leadership, events he catalogs with almost fanatical devotion. Making his job more bittersweet is the discrepancy between the “marked” residents, whose ability to wield magic (or “thymia,” in the series’ parlance) dooms them to a short lifespan, and the unmarked residents, whose normal lifespans have forced them into the role of caretakers and governors.

To stave off despair, the Mud Whale’s residents eschew emotional display — a point reinforced in the earliest pages of volume one, when Chakuro sheds a tear at a 29-year-old woman’s funeral. Immediately, his peers enjoin him not to weep, lest “the souls at the bottom of the sea cry out for you.” It’s a simple but effective scene, one that reminds us that the Mud Whale’s inhabitants are caught between the real prospect of extinction and the uncertain possibility of survival; only their fierce commitment to living in the present moment preserves their tenuous existence.

While scavenging for supplies on a seemingly deserted island, Chakuro stumbles across a blank-faced girl about his own age. She attacks him with swords and sorcery, only to collapse, unconscious, from the effort of casting a spell. Chakuro is frightened but intrigued, and brings Lykos back to the Mud Whale where he learns her true identity: she’s an apatheia, an emotionless soldier. “Emotions will destroy the world,” she informs Chakuro. “The outside world you want to know so badly about is ruled by people deficient in feeling, using apatheias who have no heart to fight a war without end.”

The next major plot development — a surprise attack — delivers the series’ first truly grim moments, as the Mud Whale’s inhabitants are beaten, impaled, and gunned down by unknown assailants. Though Chakuro and Lykos have been fleshed out enough to earn the reader’s pity, the sheer size of the cast and the suddenness of the ambush blunt the impact of the carnage; we can see that Chakuro is devastated by the loss of his childhood friend Sami, but Sami is such a stock character — innocent, impetuous, infatuated with Chakuro — that her gruesome death registers as a manipulative attempt to illustrate the truth of Lykos’ earlier comments about the outside world. That same kind of heavy-handed editorializing extends to the villains’ physical appearance as well. They look like Juggalos in chain mail, sporting maniacal grins that scream, “Sadists ahoy!”, a point underscored in the gleeful way in which they violate corpses and taunt sobbing victims.

The most frustrating thing about these frenetic chapters is that they seem fundamentally at odds with the deliberate pacing and meticulous world-building in volume one. In these introductory pages, Umeda maps every nook and cranny of the Mud Whale, creating an environment as imposing and intimate as Hayao Miyazaki’s Laputa. She approaches her character designs with same patience and care, bestowing a semblance of individuality on each resident while establishing their collective identity as a people. Even Chakuro’s frequent voice-overs — presumably read from the Mud Whale’s archives — play an important role in helping us experience time the way the Mud Whale’s residents do; there’s a lyrical quality to Chakuro’s narration that captures the rhythms of their day-to-day existence.

Yet for all Umeda’s world-building skills, Children of the Whales‘ dour tone puts the reader at arm’s length from the characters. Minus the flashes of joy, humor, and warmth that temper Miyazaki’s most downbeat films, Children of the Whales feels more like an episode of The Leftovers or Rectify than Castle in the Sky; it’s so utterly mirthless that it casts a pall over the reader instead of prompting deep thoughts or empathy for the characters. Take my manga, please!

CHILDREN OF THE WHALES, VOLS. 1-2 • BY ABI UMEDA • VIZ • RATED T+ (FOR OLDER TEENS)

Filed Under: Manga, Manga Critic, REVIEWS Tagged With: Abi Umeda, children of the whales, Fantasy, shojo, VIZ Signature

My Week in Manga: December 18-December 24, 2017

December 25, 2017 by Ash Brown

My News and Reviews

Well, this is it! The final My Week in Manga feature here at Experiments in Manga before my semi-retirement. The fun isn’t quite over yet, though–later this week there will be one last giveaway. For anyone who wants a head start, I’ll be asking participants to tell me a little about some of the favorite things that they’ve read in the past year. And while the list doesn’t include all of my personal favorites, I recently posted my own random musings on some of the notable releases from 2017.

Quick Takes

Children of the Whales, Volume 1Children of the Whales, Volume 1 by Abi Umeda. With such a striking cover, and interior artwork to match, I couldn’t help but be curious about the first volume of Children of the Whales. It also doesn’t hurt that the manga is the start of shoujo fantasy series, a category of work that I generally tend to appreciate. And indeed, I thoroughly enjoyed the first volume of Children of the Whales. The setting is incredibly intriguing, the majority of the story taking place on the Mud Whale, a largely self-sustaining ship-like island that has been adrift on a sea of sand for nearly a century. Most of the people on the Mud Whale can work a kind of magic based on the power of emotions. However, they are very short-lived; only the few people who aren’t magically inclined reach old age. This has an interesting impact on their civilization. Control over one’s feelings is very important culturally and the community as a whole has a disconcerting lack of knowledge about their own history and the greater world. And so when they encounter a human from outside the Mud Whale she is greeted with excitement, but her arrival is also a harbinger of greater misfortune.

Kakegurui: Compulsive Gambler, Volume 1Kakegurui: Compulsive Gambler, Volume 1 written by Homura Kawamoto and illustrated by Tōru Naomura. The cover art of Kakegurui is fairly eye-catching as well. The series takes place at Hyakkaou Private Academy, a school for the wealthy elite in which the entire social structure is based on how well the students can gamble. In many cases, this translates directly to how much money they can throw around or how skilled they are at cheating the system. Yumeko Jabami is a new transfer student whose sweet demeanor makes her appear to be an easy mark. However, her classmates soon discover that her personality completely changes when presented with a risky enough proposition. That and she has the skill and luck needed take any one of them down. Despite the dramatic artwork and high stakes, I actually didn’t find Kakegurui nearly as engaging as I hoped or expected it to be. While entertaining, I didn’t feel particularly invested in the characters or their plights. The games played were interesting, with some clever twists, but as a whole the first volume didn’t seem to have much depth to it.

Filed Under: FEATURES, My Week in Manga Tagged With: Abi Umeda, children of the whales, Homura Kawamoto, Kakegurui, manga, Toru Naomura

Children of the Whales, Vol. 1

December 20, 2017 by Anna N

Children of the Whales Volume 1 by Abi Umeda

Dystopia manga can sometimes be a bit tricky. Some have great world building, some have intriguing characters, some have compelling story lines, but you don’t often get a manga that has the perfect ratio of those three elements. I very much liked the setting of Children of the Whales, but the character and story development fell a little flat to me in the first volume.

The Mud Whale is an floating island adrift on a sea of sand, and Chakuro serves as the archivist, chronicling the lives of the people. One class of people with magical powers called thymia tend to die young. The less gifted are long-lived elders who end up governing the Mud Whale. One thing I liked very much about this title was the art. The desolate sea of sand contrasts with the rounded towers of the Mud Whale, and the bleak horizon in the background serves to underscore the isolation of the characters. Aspects of the art reminded me a little bit of Nausicaa, particularly the lack of hard edges and the look of the eroded buildings. The setting is one of the most compelling things about Children of the Whales, however I think the story could have benefited from being a bit more slowly paced. There was a bit of a tendency to dump way too much background information in Chakuro’s internal narration, instead of letting the reader discover this world in a more organic fashion. Since so much of the manga is spent in Chakuro’s head, the other characters just don’t seem as developed, with their motivations not as thoroughly explored.

As can be expected in a story that centers on an isolated society, when outside influences come in, the world of the Mud Whale is tested in unusual and violent ways. This first volume was intriguing, but it didn’t totally make me invested in wanting to find out what would happen to the characters, which is a little disappointing because it ends on a shocking cliffhanger. There were enough aspects of Children of the Whales that I did like that I would give the second volume a try, just to see if things come together a little bit better once all the exposition is out of the way.

Filed Under: viz media Tagged With: children of the whales, viz media

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