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That Time I Got Reincarnated As a Slime

My Week in Manga: September 25-October 1, 2017

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My News and Reviews

September has ended and October has begun, but there’s still a little time left to enter the most recent manga giveaway at Experiments in Manga! The results will be announce on Wednesday, so be sure to get your comments in for a chance to win the first volume (actually, I think it may even be the first half) of Takashi Yano and Kenji Oiwa’s Assassin’s Creed: Awakening. For this giveaway, I’m interested in learning more about everyone’s favorite pirate characters in manga. Otherwise, it was once again a fairly quiet week here at the blog. It’s been a while since I’ve last mentioned any of the Kickstarter’s that have caught my eye, but Matthew Meyer’s campaign to continue his series of illustrated yokai guides launched last week. The Book of the Hakutaku: A Bestiary of Japanese Monsters will be the third volume following The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons: A Field Guide to Japanese Yokai (which I’ve previously reviewed) and The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits: An Encyclopedia of Mononoke and Magic. I really love these books, and the artwork is fantastic.

Quick Takes

Love and Lies, Volume 1Love & Lies, Volume 1 by Musawo. In general, I don’t tend to gravitate towards high school romances, but I am a sucker for utopian and dystopian fiction, so when those two genres mix I can’t help but want to give the resulting story a try. Love & Lies is set in Japan in the near future. In response to the crisis of an extreme decline in population, the government has implemented a program which assigns marriage partners based on their genetic makeup and social circumstances so that any children born will be healthy, skilled, contributing members of society. Once both partners have turned 16, they receive a notice from the government revealing their identities to each other for the first time. Who they may or may not truly love isn’t really taken into consideration, but it also seems that program may be susceptible to corruption. I find the premise of Love & Lies to be very interesting; it has great potential to explore the nature of love and personal relationships in a dramatic and engaging way. When the entire purpose of marriage has become a government-funded reproduction program, the impact on society and its people will be tremendous. I also especially appreciate that Love & Lies includes at least one character who isn’t heterosexual seeing as a marriage program of this type would have particularly drastic social implications for a person who is queer in some way.

TaprootTaproot: A Comic about a Gardener and a Ghost by Keezy Young. I first encountered Young’s work through the ongoing webcomic Yellow Hearts which joined Sparkler Monthly‘s lineup of online comics relatively recently. Part of what I love about Yellow Hearts is Young’s gorgeous illustrations and use of color as well as the natural inclusion of queer characters in the story. Taproot is Young’s debut graphic novel and it, too, has what I’ve come to love and expect from the creator’s other comics. The graphic novel has a great amount of depth to it, more than the rather simple, straightforward subtitle would seem to imply. Hamal is young man who can see ghosts, an ability which has made it difficult for him to find acceptance from others. At least from those who are living. Many of the ghosts, on the other hand, are drawn to and quite like Hamal; Blue has even fallen in love with him, although being incorporeal presents a few challenges. But there’s an even greater problem that the two of them must face–the very existence of the local ghosts is being threatened by a frighting supernatural disturbance. There is a sense of loneliness and melancholy to be found in Taproot, but the comic is also incredibly heartwarming and endearing. Taproot is a sweet and touching queer romance with beautiful artwork, making it something that’s extremely easy to recommend.

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, Volume 1That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime written by Fuse and illustrated by Taiki Kawakami. There seems to be a preponderance of manga series right now with the underlying conceit of a person dying and then being reincarnated in some sort of fantasy world. I have read a few of these series, so I haven’t been completely avoiding them, but I’ve not really been seeking them out, either, having experienced genre-fatigue by proxy. However, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime still managed to pique my interest simply because it sounded like such a ridiculous spin on what has become such a well-worn story. And I’ll admit, the first volume of the That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime manga is surprisingly entertaining. The protagonist of the series also happens to be a 37-year-old man, which isn’t the most common in translated manga. Of course, as can be safely assumed from the title, he soon dies only to start life again as a slime, one of the lowliest monsters there is. Mikami accepts this turn of fate pretty quickly and focuses his attention on gaining the ability to verbally communicate with the adventurers and other creatures he encounters. What he doesn’t realize is that he’s essentially been leveling up the entire time he’s been trying to find a way to talk and has unintentionally become one of the most powerful monsters in the area, inadvertently gaining a large following in the process.

Notes of a CrocodileNotes of a Crocodile by Miaojin Qiu. So far, only two of Qiu’s long-form works have been translated into English. Last Words from Montmarte, originally published posthumously after the author’s suicide at the age of twenty-six, was released in translation in 2014 and the English-language edition of Notes of a Crocodile, described as a cult classic of queer Taiwanese literature, was more recently released in 2017. Notes of a Crocodile is also one of Qiu’s most highly acclaimed and well-known works. The novel is about a small group of lovesick and psychologically troubled queer college students coming of age in Taipei in the late 1980s. The narrative unfolds as a series of notebooks which contain a combination of diary-like entries, letters between friends and lovers, and fragments of a surreal story about crocodiles posing as humans, in part a metaphor for those who have to live hidden lives. The narrator of Notes of a Crocodile is nicknamed Lazi, a young lesbian woman with self-destructive tendencies who is struggling to come to terms with her sexuality. The women she falls obsessively in love with and their doomed romances feature prominently as do the tumultuous and fraught relationships between her and her small group of extremely close friends. Notes of a Crocodile is a beautiful work but it is also filled with pain, desperation, and longing–the novel resonated very strongly with me and I hope to read more of Qiu’s work.

That Time I Got Reincarnated As a Slime, Vol. 1

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I’m a sucker for a great title, a tendency that’s yielded a bumper crop of disappointments through the years; I still haven’t purged the memory of a Screaming Broccoli album I purchased in 1988, or the 90 minutes I spent watching So I Married an Axe Murderer. I’m pleased to report That Time I Got Reincarnated As a Slime proved a better gamble than punk-rock vegetables, offering enough solid jokes and weird plot developments to sustain this reader’s interest. What surprised me the most about Reincarnated, however, wasn’t the premise — that’s clearly advertised in the title — nor the hero’s appearance — again, see title — but the story’s fundamentally optimistic message: there are always second chances in life.

The first chapter introduces us to Mikami, a 37-year-old virgin trapped in a lousy job. On a fateful afternoon, he impulsively saves a junior colleague from a knife-wielding attacker, an act of heroism that costs Mikami his life — as a human being, at least — and leads to his reincarnation in a fantasy realm that looks remarkably like World of Warcraft, Game of Thrones, and a hundred MMORPGs. Guided by an unseen dungeon master, Mikami reinvents himself as Rimuru, a slime monster who absorbs his enemies’ powers by eating them — a trick that quickly enables Rimuru to do remarkable things from healing the wounded to spinning thread.

What’s more remarkable about Rimuru is that he immediately puts his powers to work — for other people. (Well, monsters, really.) In chapter two, for example, he teaches a community of goblins how to defend themselves against a numerically superior opponent, helping them build sophisticated fortifications that repel a snarling pack of direwolves. (Paging George R.R. Martin!) Rimuru also bestows names on each member of the tribe, an act that transforms the once small and homely goblins into strapping specimens. That would be a good joke in and of itself, but it lands with greater impact because Rimuru’s act of generosity is consistent with what we saw of his human self, both in the prologue and in a brief flashback to his interactions with colleagues.

And speaking of jokes, Stephen Paul’s crisp translation plays an instrumental role in bridging the gap between the original novels and their manga adaptation by creating a distinctive, sardonic voice for Rimuru that situates him somewhere between audience surrogate and hero. The tone of Rimuru’s monologues captures the mixture of enthusiasm, wonder, and bewilderment with which he approaches new situations, great and small. After bestowing the names Gobta, Gobchi, Gobstu, Gobte, and Gobto on a family of goblins, for example, Rimuru heads off criticism from the reader by declaring, “I didn’t claim I was some kind of naming virtuoso!”, while a fortune teller’s romantic predictions prompt him to ask the same questions we’re thinking: “Do slimes even have genders? How do they multiply? Cell division?”

What Paul’s translation can’t do is goose the pacing. Manga-kaTaiki Kawakami makes a game effort to handle the first volume’s exposition as efficiently as possible, which results in many static panels of Rimuru learning the rules of play from the unseen dungeon master. Though the dialogue is punchy, the story unfolds in fits and starts, seesawing between short, intense bursts of action and leisurely scenes of Rimuru chatting with other characters, pondering one of his new-found abilities, or describing something that happened off camera. These info-dump passages are all the more tedious because Rimuru lacks the limbs, eyes, or mouth to adequately register surprise or awe at what he learns; what features he has — two pencil-line eyebrows — are frozen in a perma-scowl.

The other disappointing element of the manga adaptation is the paucity of female characters in volume one, a problem that series creator Fuse cheerfully acknowledges. “It’s quite possible not to have a heroine in a traditional sense,” he opines in the manga’s epilogue, “but not having any female characters whatsoever is a problem. There’s no beauty in the manga.” Kawakami’s strategy for addressing this issue is not to introduce an important character a little sooner than she appeared in the novels, or expand one of the minor female characters into a more essential figure, but to pile on the fan service by turning any gathering of female characters into a harem scene; I’m still scrubbing my eyeballs after reading a chapter in which an attractive elfling uses Rimuru as a boob shelf. (Worse still: someone cracks wise about E.I.L.F.s, a quip that wouldn’t have been funny in 2003, let alone 2017.)

For all its flaws, however, Reincarnated has its heart in the right place, using Rimuru’s adventures to demonstrate that it’s possible to make the most of any situation, no matter how improbable or unpromising it may seem at the outset. Better still, Reincarnated imparts its moral with tongue firmly in cheek, never lapsing into sappy earnestness about doing one’s best, or sacrificing yourself for the greater good. Of course, we haven’t seen what will happen if and when Rimuru stumbles into a second chance at romance, though volume one offers a few tantalizing clues about a future love interest. Here’s hoping that Rimuru begins his second — and potentially more terrifying — journey of romantic self-discovery without losing his wit or his wits.

THAT TIME I GOT REINCARNATED AS A SLIME, VOL. 1 • CREATED BY FUSE • MANGA BY TAIKI KAWAKAMI • CHARACTER DESIGNS BY MITZ VAH • TRANSLATED BY STEPHEN PAUL • KODANSHA COMICS • RATED: TEEN (13+) • 240 pp.