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Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Happiness

Happiness, Vols. 4-7

May 19, 2018 by Katherine Dacey

 

This review contains a few spoilers for later volumes of Happiness, and discusses one character’s efforts to cope with PTSD after a violent attack. Proceed with caution. 

The first three volumes of Shuzo Oshimi’s Happiness explore familiar terrain, using vampirism as a metaphor for the ravages of puberty, that moment when hormonal urges overwhelm the rational mind and the body morphs into its adult form. And while these early volumes contained some well-rehearsed scenes of bullying and bloodlust, Oshimi’s artwork — at once raw and refined, primitive and expressionist — made these moments feel strange, fresh, and specific to his story. One could feel fourteen-year-old Makoto Okazaki’s palpable anguish over being trapped in a body and a life he could no longer control, and wondered how he might escape his fate.

Volume four was a turning point in the series, culminating in a scene of frenzied violence in which a major character was killed, another forced into hiding, and a third — Gosho — badly wounded. The violence was grotesque in the Romantic sense of the word, a scene so horrific that it filled with reader with a strong sense of revulsion and pity. But a curious thing happened in the next installment: in the aftermath of this bloody cataclysm, Happiness became Gosho’s story. A time jump advanced the plot ten years into the future, showing us Gosho’s efforts to rebuild her life, one temp job at a time.

Though Gosho seems outwardly calm and self-possessed, her carefully constructed facade is shattered in volume six by a sensational newspaper headline: “Vampire Boy: Where Is He Now?” Oshimi captures Gosho’s experience of being triggered in all its nauseous horror; we can see a painful memory well up in Gosho, causing her to double over and fall to her knees as if she were trying to purge her body of all the fear and shame she’d experienced on that fateful night ten years ago. What makes this moment even more powerful is the skill with which Oshimi captures Gosho’s mounting terror through a series of closeups — first her face, then her eye, then the article itself, as her gaze darts across the page, lingering on a striking image or a suggestive snippet of text.

For all the emotional intensity of this moment, however, volume six is largely uneventful, focusing primarily on the tenative relationship between Gosho and Sudo, her co-worker. Much of their courtship unfolds in brief, wordless scenes depicting everyday activities: eating out, walking home from the train station, buying groceries. The normalcy of these vignettes suggests that Gosho has recovered from her anxiety attack — that is, until Gosho glimpses a boy who might be a vampire:

What makes this image so potent is its ambiguity: is it a figment of Gosho’s imagination, a flashback, or an actual vampire? We’re left feeling as unsettled as Gosho, and wonder what this bloody omen might mean.

That brings me to the hardest part of my review.

Despite the consummate skill and sensitivity with which volumes five and six explore Gosho’s psychic wounds, volume seven may be my last, primarily because I’m dismayed by Oshimi’s decision to further brutalize Gosho. In volume five, Gosho nearly died at the hands of a knife-wielding psychopath, an event that left her with an angry scar on her neck. The terror she felt, and the violence of the scene, seemed necessary at that juncture in the story, revealing the extent to which Gosho’s naivete, determination, and caring could be ruthlessly exploited by someone older and more experienced.

In volume seven, however, Gosho is captured by a cult leader who tortures her, mutilating her body and smearing it with her own menstrual blood. The violence in this scene is fundamentally sexual and, frankly, disgusting. One might argue that Oshimi is deliberately provoking the reader, making us complicit in Gosho’s exploitation, but nothing in Oshimi’s other work — Drifting Net Cafe, The Flowers of Evil — suggests that level of critical engagement with tropes. Instead, it feels as if Oshimi is using this violence as a shortcut, a way of revealing the cult leader’s depravity while providing Sudo motivation to seek revenge on behalf of his girlfriend. The scene also undermines Gosho’s agency — she broke into the cult’s compound looking for Okazaki — and dehumanizes her, reducing her womanhood to breasts and blood rather than her courage, intelligence, and determination to save a friend she hasn’t seen in a decade.

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of reading and watching scenes like these, whether they serve a legitimate dramatic purpose or not. Oshimi’s undeniable artistry makes quitting Happiness an even more difficult decision for me, as I found his artwork and storytelling in the first six volumes compelling. (Hell, I’m quoted in the promotional literature for Happiness.) I don’t have the stomach for another scene of Gosho’s degradation, however, so I don’t think I’ll be reading volume eight.

HAPPINESS, VOLS. 3-7 • BY SHUZO OSHIMI • KODANSHA COMICS • RATED OT, FOR OLDER TEENS (VIOLENCE, PARTIAL NUDITY, SEXUALITY)

Filed Under: Manga, Manga Critic, REVIEWS Tagged With: Happiness, Horror/Supernatural, Kodansha Comics, Shonen, Shuzo Oshimi, Vampires

Happiness, Vols. 1-2

January 27, 2017 by Katherine Dacey

The first chapter of Happiness reads like a teenage boy’s answer to Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. Makoto, the principle character, is doing his best to cope with the indignities of being fourteen: he’s bullied by the popular kids, pestered by his well-meaning but clueless mother, and embarrassed by his lustful reactions to pretty girls. Though he has one friend — the equally uncool Nunota — Makoto spends most of his time alone.

A nighttime trip to the convenience store, however, jolts Makoto out of his routine. In a dark alley, a female vampire tackles and pins him to the ground, offering the following ultimatum: “Do you want to die like this, or do you want to be like me?” With tears and snot streaming down his face, Makoto whimpers, “I don’t want to die,” thus beginning his transformation from ordinary teen to bloodsucker.

If Makoto thought that wet dreams and wedgies were awful, he soon discovers that they pale in comparison with the first stages of vampirism. He suffers from an unquenchable, almost violent thirst and finds direct sunlight blisteringly painful. Worse still, his sense of smell is now so acute that he swoons and sweats in the presence of bloody noses, cuts, and girls, a symptom that sends him into an even deeper spiral of shame. The only potential upside to his condition is his supernatural strength: though he still looks like a 100-pound weakling, he can leap from great heights and deliver a lethal karate chop when the scent of blood is in the air.

Given Makoto’s age, it’s not surprising that author Shizuno Oshimi treats his hero’s transformation as a metaphor for puberty itself. In the manga’s earliest scenes, Oshimi frankly documents Makoto’s efforts to cope with hormonal surges and maternal helicoptering, capturing Makoto’s discomfort in his own skin. As Makoto begins turning into a vampire, however, his increasingly urgent thirst for blood amplifies the very aspects of puberty that most embarrass him — his keen interest in sex, his inability to conceal his arousal from others — making him feel even more powerless.

To capture Makoto’s turbulent emotions, Oshimi employs a variety of artistic styles. Some panels are rendered in smudgy pastels, suggestive of a foggy evening, while other panels are rendered in swirling, pulsating lines reminiscent of The Scream. These visual interludes last only a page or two, but vividly capture the nausea, pain, and confusion Makoto experiences in the grips of bloodlust.

Perhaps no scene is as evocative as that first encounter between Makoto and the female vampire. Oshimi uses rapid shifts in perspective and a few fleeting images — a shadowy figure plunging through space, a dark smear of blood — to indicate what’s happening. The extreme close-ups and feverish pacing neatly mimic Makoto’s growing sense of panic as he considers the possibility of dying in an alleyway — and not just any death, but a potentially humiliating one. (And really, what could be worse than that from a fourteen-year-old’s perspective?)

The pacing, like the artwork, is expertly handled. Oshimi has a knack for lulling readers into a false sense of security that Makoto will transcend (or master) his vampirism and silence his tormentors. Then — bam! Oshimi inserts a twist or introduces a new character who contradicts our sense of how socially maladroit or invulnerable Makoto really is. The appearance in volume two of a new bloodsucker, for example, reveals the extent to which vampires pose an active threat to one another — something that Makoto in his solipsistic misery never considered when he agreed to become a vampire himself.

And speaking of volume two, Oshimi does an excellent job of expanding and developing the cast of characters. By volume’s end, there’s more at stake than Makoto’s desire to escape humiliation; Makoto must decide whether to become a full-fledged vampire or fight for his humanity, a decision complicated by his budding friendship with a female classmate. How Makoto resolves this dilemma remains to be seen, though his struggle should provide plenty of dramatic grist for volume 3 (available February 14th).

The bottom line: Happiness is a rare vampire manga with bite: it’s smart, stylish, and unsettling, drawing readers into Makoto’s world with an honest look at the horrors of being fourteen. And what could be scarier than that?

HAPPINESS, VOLS. 1-2 • BY SHIZUNO OSHIMI • KODANSHA COMICS • RATING: OT, for OLDER TEENS (16+)

Filed Under: Manga, Manga Critic, REVIEWS Tagged With: Happiness, Horror/Supernatural, Kodansha Comics, Shizuno Oshimi, Shonen, Vampires

Manga Giveaway: Kodansha Comics Collection Winner

December 7, 2016 by Ash Brown

Happiness, Volume 1Nekogahara: Stray Cat Samurai, Volume 1
The Prince in His Dark Days, Volume 1Welcome to the Ballroom, Volume 1

And the winner of the Kodansha Comics Collection manga giveaway is… Amaya!

As the winner, Amaya will be receiving not one but four of Kodansha Comics print debuts from 2016: Shuzo Oshimi’s Happiness, Hiroyuki Takei’s Nekogahara: Stray Cat Samurai, Hico Yamanaka’s The Prince in His Dark Days, and Tomo Takeuchi’s Welcome to the Ballroom. As I was reflecting back on the manga of 2016, I found that I was particularly impressed by the increased variety in Kodansha Comics titles. And so, for this giveaway, I asked that participants tell me about their favorite 2016 Kodansha Comics manga, debuts or otherwise. Akiko Higashimura’s Princess Jellyfish seems to have garnered the most love and attention, but be sure to check out the giveaway comments for everyone’s excitement over all of the great manga released by Kodansha Comics this year!

Kodansha Comics 2016 print debuts:
Attack on Titan: Lost Girls written by Koji Seko, illustrated by Ryosuke Fuji.
Attack on Titan Coloring Book by Hajime Isayama
Attack on Titan Anthology edited by Ben Applegate and Jeanine Schaefer
Cells at Work by Akane Shimizu
Complex Age by Yui Sakuma
Fairy Tail: Twin Dragons of Saber Tooth by Kyouta Shibano
Fairy Tail: Zero by Hiro Mashima
Fire Force by Atsushi Ohkubo
Forget Me Not written by Mag Hsu, illustrated by Nao Emoto
The Ghost and the Lady by Kazuhiro Fujita
Happiness by Shuzo Oshimi
In/Spectre by Chashiba Katase
Interviews with Monster Girls by Petos
Maga-Tsuki by Hoshino Taguchi
Nekogahara: Stray Cat Samurai by Hiroyuki Takei
Neo Parasyte F by Various
Paradise Residence by Kosuke Fujishima
Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, Side: P3 by So Tobita
Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, Side: P4 by Mizunomoto
The Prince in His Dark Days by Hiko Yamanaka
Princess Jellyfish by Akiko Higashimura
Queen Emeraldas by Leiji Matsumoto
Real Account written by Okushou, illustrated by Shizumu Watanabe
Spoof on Titan by Hounori
Sweetness and Lightning by Gido Amagakure
That Wolf-Boy is Mine! by Yoko Nogiri
Welcome to the Ballroom by Tomo Takeuchi

As always, thank you to everyone who took the time to participate in the giveaway and for sharing your favorite Kodansha Comics manga with me. 2016 was a great year for manga and 2017 looks like it should be pretty darn good, too. But before we get to that, I hope to see you again for this year’s last giveaway!

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Filed Under: Giveaways, UNSHELVED Tagged With: Happiness, Hico Yamanaka, Hiroyuki Takei, manga, Nekogahara, Prince in His Dark Days, Shuzo Oshimi, Tomo Takeuchi, welcome to the ballroom

Manga Giveaway: Kodansha Comics Collection Giveaway

November 30, 2016 by Ash Brown

Both the last Wednesday and the last day of November has arrived, so it is once again time for a giveaway at Experiments in Manga! Last week was Thanksgiving in the States which happens to be my favorite holiday. (I really enjoy the delicious food and spending time with my family. The extra sleep helps, too.) As is now tradition, I like the giveaways for November to involve a whole feast of manga in order to celebrate. This year you all have the chance to win four first volumes of manga released in English by Kodansha Comics in 2016: Shuzo Oshimi’s Happiness, Hiroyuki Takei’s Nekogahara: Stray Cat Samurai, Hico Yamanaka’s The Prince in His Dark Days, and Tomo Takeuchi’s Welcome to the Ballroom. And, as always, the giveaway is open worldwide!

Happiness, Volume 1Nekogahara: Stray Cat Samurai, Volume 1The Prince in His Dark Days, Volume 1Welcome to the Ballroom, Volume 1

As the end of 2016 steadily approaches I’m starting to think about the manga published in the last year that I found particularly notable. Inevitably, I’m asked what my favorite manga is and I generally try to get away with mentioning a single publisher rather than a single title. This year, I’ve especially been impressed by the manga that Kodansha Comics has been licensing and releasing. Over the last few years Kodansha has been successfully expanding its catalog and demographic reach, offering titles that were at one point rumored to either be unliscensable or otherwise highly risky. Josei? Kodansha has it. Classic manga? Kodansha has it. Sports manga? Kodansha has it. Food manga? Kodansha has that, too. In fact, some of my most anticipated manga releases for 2016 were published by Kodansha Comics and looking forward to 2017 it seems as though that will likely be the case next year, too.

So, you may be wondering, how can you win a collection of Kodansha Comics?

1) In the comments below, tell me a little about a manga released by Kodansha Comics in 2016 that you particularly enjoyed and what you liked about it. (If you haven’t read or enjoyed any, simply mention that instead.)
2) If you’re on Twitter, you can earn a bonus entry by tweeting, or retweeting, about the contest. Make sure to include a link to this post and @PhoenixTerran (that’s me).

And there you have it! Participants in the giveaway have one week to submit comments and can earn up to two entries. If needed or preferred, comments can also be submitted directly to phoenixterran(at)gmail(dot)com and I will then post them here in your name. The giveaway winner will be randomly selected and announced on December 7, 2016. Good luck!

VERY IMPORTANT: Include some way that I can contact you. This can be an e-mail address in the comment form, a link to your website, Twitter username, or whatever. If I can’t figure out how to get a hold of you and you win, I’ll just draw another name.

Contest winner announced–Manga Giveaway: Kodansha Comics Collection Winner

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Filed Under: FEATURES, Giveaways Tagged With: Happiness, Hico Yamanaka, Hiroyuki Takei, manga, Nekogahara, Prince in His Dark Days, Shuzo Oshimi, Tomo Takeuchi, welcome to the ballroom

My Week in Manga: November 14-November 20, 2016

November 21, 2016 by Ash Brown

My News and Reviews

Nothing except the usual My Week in Manga feature was posted last week at Experiments in Manga. I was hoping to have my random musings on Ichigo Takano’s Orange ready for November, but the month has been particularly stressful and energy-draining so at this point it looks as though December will be far more likely. Hopefully, I’ll have an in-depth feature of some sort to share soon. I also have my list of notable release from 2016 to work on, too!

There is one thing from last week that I’m very excited for–the most recent Sparkler Monthly Kickstarter! The campaign is raising funds to support the print edition of Heldrad’s highly-amusing send-up to shoujo manga Orange Junk. I greatly enjoyed the first volume of Orange Junk, which I’ve previously reviewed, but the series gets even better as it goes along. Never read any of Orange Junk? Give it a try over at Sparkler Monthly and if you like what you see please consider contributing to the Kickstarter!

Quick Takes

Ajin: Demi-Human, Volume 3Ajin: Demi-Human, Volumes 3-8 by Gamon Sakurai. For a variety of reasons, while I’ve continued to stockpile Ajin, I’ve been rather lax when it some to actually reading the manga. The eighth and latest volume in English was released relatively recently, so I figured it was probably about time that I finally got around to catching up with the series. In retrospect, I’m actually kind of glad that I had a whole stack of Ajin to read all at once. The manga generally tends to be very quickly paced so it was nice to be able to move directly from one volume to the next in succession. Ajin is best, both in art and in storytelling, when there’s action going on. Sakurai’s fight sequences are tremendously dynamic and exciting. The use of the demi-humans’ immortality and black ghosts can actually be quite clever at times, too. While the series continues to be exceptionally violent and brutal, it doesn’t seem to be as gruesome and grotesque as it once was when the demi-humans were shown to be the subjects of live experimentation. The story can be a little heavy-handed, especially when it comes to government corruption and the revelation of everyone’s tragic backstories, but the psychological elements do tend to be handled well in spite of this.

Happiness, Volume 1Happiness, Volume 1 by Shuzo Oshimi. I’m not especially interested in vampires and they seem to have been so overdone lately that there often has to be some sort of extra impetus for me to actually pick up a vampire manga. In the case of Happiness, the additional push that was needed came from the fact that Oshimi is also the creator of The Flowers of Evil, a manga series which left a pretty big impression on me. Oshimi is incredibly skilled at establishing the mood and atmosphere of a series. Happiness is about Okazaki, a bullied high school student who survives being attacked by a vampire only to become one himself. The pacing of Happiness is leisurely, showing only the first few days of Okazaki’s new existence as he struggles to adjust to his emerging symptoms. Given how the first volume unfolds, Okazaki’s descent into vampirism can easily be read as a metaphor for puberty and sexual awakening; it will be interesting to see if the manga continues in that direction. Happiness has an underlying sense of eroticism mixed in with its horror which, at least in my opinion, is exactly how a vampire story ought to be. There is also a fair amount of angst in the manga, something that I’ve come to expect from Oshimi’s work.

Kitaro, Volume 2: Kitaro Meets NurarihyonKitaro, Volume 2: Kitaro Meets Nurarihyon by Shigeru Mizuki. I am still absolutely thrilled that more of Mizuki’s Kitaro manga is being released in English. However, I was a little sad that the second volume of Drawn & Quarterly’s new series didn’t include the same sort of bonus activities that were present in the first. Those were fun. But then again, Kitaro Meets Nurarihyon is plenty of fun in and of itself. In addition to an opening essay and a closing set of yokai files by the series’ translator Zack Davisson,  the volume collects seven of Mizuki’s short Kitaro manga, most of which are from the latter part of the 1960s although one is from the late 1970s. Generally when I think of yokai, I think of traditional Japanese folklore. However, the term can also be applied more broadly. In Kitaro, Mizuki doesn’t limit himself and incorporates mythology, urban legends, and popular culture from both within and outside of Japan. For example, in Kitaro Meets Nurarihyon, a descendant of Dracula plays a very important role in one of the stories. Sometimes the results are more cohesive than others, but I particularly enjoy and find it interesting how Mizuki is able to meld seemingly disparate elements and traditions together.

Nekogahara: Stray Cat Samurai, Volume 1Nekogahara: Stray Cat Samurai, Volume 1 by Hiroyuki Takei. Best known as the creator of Shaman King (which I somewhat surprisingly haven’t actually read yet), one of Takei’s most recent manga series is Nekogahara. Story-wise, it’s a fairly familiar tale of a ronin wandering the country, doing good deeds while trying to outrun past tragedies. There are numerous manga, novels, anime, and film that follow a similar premise. What makes Nekogahara stand out from all of those is that all of the principal players are literally cats. Granted, they’re cats dressed in kimono, carrying swords, and so on. Humans exist in Nekogahara, too, more or less as the daimyo, though they are generally discussed rather than seen. The lead of Nekogahara is Norachiyo, a scarred tom who was once a kept cat but who is now living his life as a stray. He is an extremely capable fighter and legend has it that he once even killed a person. Both the story and the visuals of Nekogahara rely on chanbara tropes. The actual flow of movement and action can sometimes be difficult to discern, but overall the artwork and character designs are rather stylish. Nekogahara is played fairly straight, but the characters’ more cat-like behaviors do bring levity to the manga.

The Black Cat Takes a Stroll: The Edgar Allan Poe LecturesThe Black Cat Takes a Stroll: The Edgar Allan Poe Lectures by Akimaro Mori. Bento Books doesn’t release very many titles, but the publisher’s books tend to be interesting so I make a point to keep an eye out for them. The Black Cat Takes a Stroll is one of Bento Books most recent releases. In addition to being the first volume in Mori’s Black Cat series, it was also the winner of Japan’s inaugural Agatha Christie Award for mystery fiction. The book collects six largely episodic but related short stories featuring the Black Cat, a young but respected professor specializing in aesthetic truth, told from the perspective of his personal assistant, a female graduate student whose research focuses on Edgar Allan Poe. I really wanted to like The Black Cat Takes a Stroll more than I actually did. I love the series’ basic concept and all of the literary and cultural references found in the stories. Sadly, the mysteries come across as trying too hard to be intellectual or overly academic and their solutions are frequently convoluted and coincidental. In addition to that, despite having a few charming and endearing quirks (such as his fondness for strawberry parfaits), the Black Cat tends to be infuriating more than anything else, misusing his intelligence in a way that is deliberately cryptic and intentionally manipulative of both the narrator and readers.

Filed Under: FEATURES, My Week in Manga Tagged With: Ajin, Akimaro Mori, black cat, Gamon Sakurai, Happiness, Hiroyuki Takei, Kitaro, manga, Nekogahara, Shigeru Mizuki, Shuzo Oshimi

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