Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Tuttle

The Manga Review, 7/15/22

by Leave a Comment

Do you know about Azuki? This year-old company is working hard to make it easy for you to read your favorite manga on a phone, tablet, or laptop. Founded by a quartet of manga enthusiasts, Azuki currently offers a variety of titles from Kodansha as well as smaller publishers such as Glacier Bay Books, Kaiten Books, Star Fruit Books, and SOZO Comics. Best of all, it’s free to get started; all you need is a little patience with pop-up advertisements. Folks who want ad-free, unlimited access to Azuki’s growing library can sign up for a monthly membership that costs about the same as a grande Frappucino.

Wondering what to read? I highly recommend Pop Life, a short series about two single mothers who create their own blended family. In a 2020 review, Morgana Santilli praised Pop Life for being a “gentle, down-to-earth manga, happy and meandering. It takes women thrown into a difficult situation, one that is likely a blow to their self-confidence and ideas of self-sufficiency, and proves that they can overcome hardship by helping each other.” For younger readers, Hikaru in the Light! is great choice, offering tweens a first-hand look at what it takes to become an idol. The series is refreshingly honest about how cutthroat the music industry is, and how much hard, unglamorous work goes into being a popular entertainer. Hikaru is a little too tame for the 13+ set—how ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm when they’ve read Hot Gimmick?—but for kids in grades 5-7, it’s just right. (Special thanks to Azuki for sending me a review copy!)

NEWS

Love Hina creator Ken Akamatsu will be joining Japan’s House of Councillors (the upper chamber of the Japanese Diet) this summer. Akamatsu has been an outspoken critic of proposed changes to Japanese copyright law, as well as a critic of various anti-pornography measures. [Anime News Network]

ICv2 just published its quarterly list of the Top Manga Franchises. Not surprisingly, Demon Slayer, Chainsaw Man, and Spy x Family made the cut, as did perennial favorites Attack on Titan and My Hero Academia. [ICv2]

At its Anime Expo panel, Yen Press unveiled an extensive list of new acquisitions including Your Forma, Kakifly, Honey Lemon Soda, and Doomsday with My Dog. [Yen Press]

In other licensing news, Azuki announced that it would be adding three new titles to its catalog: Turning the Tables on the Seatmate Killer!, a romantic comedy; My Dear Detective: Mitsuko’s Case Files, a Taisho-era mystery; and Invisible Parade, a short-story collection by MISSISSIPPI. [Azuki]

Jennifer De Guzman offers an in-depth look at Tuttle Publishing’s efforts to bring Filipino komiks to American readers. Over the next four months, Tuttle will publish seven graphic novels by Filipino creators, from Arnold Arre’s The Mythology Class, “a foundational work of contemporary Filipino comics ,” to The Lost Journal of Alejandro Pardo, a collaborative work that focuses on the “dark creatures of Phillipine mythology.” [Publishers Weekly]

FEATURES AND PODCASTS

Over at The Comics Journal, readers can preview the third volume of of Glaeolia, “a curated variety of compelling, stylistically varied, and completely self-contained (at least, so far) works, many from artists that have never before had their work read or published outside of Japan and their local small press scene… Glaeolia 3 contains stories reacting to very contemporary circumstances such as the early pandemic regulations and BLM protests or unexpected pregnancy, SF-tinged comics in uncertain worlds, surreal dramas about grief, coming of age, love, and beyond.”  [The Comics Journal]

Also worth a look: Sean McTiernan’s lengthy essay on the weird beauty of Taiyo Matsumoto’s No. 5. [The Comics Journal]

Ashley and Dee discuss The Story of Saiunkoku, “a semi-supernatural, extremely feminist manga adaptation of a light novel series” set in a fictionalized version of Ming Dynasty China. [Shojo & Tell]

Elliot and Andy devote the latest episode of Screentone Club to Ciguatera and Sensei’s Pious Lie. [Screentone Club]

This week’s Mangasplaining podcast focuses on Hiroki Endo’s All-Rounder Meguru, a manga about two childhood friends who become bitter rivals in the world of mixed martial arts. [Mangasplaining]

REVIEWS

Manga Librarian Ashley Hawkins is pleasantly surprised by the first volume of Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon. “I expected this manga to be bad,” she notes. “But what this manga does is that it basically takes the character designs and essential threads of the show, and fixes a lot of the problems with the anime.” Writing for No Flying No Tights, fellow librarian Adam gives Samurai Deadpool mixed marks, observing that “this particular book makes a very odd choice: it takes an incredibly simple story that would be a great entry point for newer/younger readers and then adds just enough violent gore to make this book inaccessible to that age group.”

At Women Write About Comics, Masha Zhdanova posts brief reviews of Kaiju No. 8, My Love Mix-Up!, and Devil’s Candy, while the Beneath the Tangles crew weigh in on the latest volumes of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, Penguin & House, and A Silent Voice.

Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination

by

Author: Edogawa Rampo
Translator: James B. Harris
U.S. publisher: Tuttle
ISBN: 9784805311936
Released: May 2012
Original release: 1924-1950

After reading and enjoying Edogawa Rampo’s novella Strange Tale of Panorama Island I decided to seek out more of his work. What better way to start than with Rampo’s debut in English? Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination, translated by James B. Harris and first published in 1956, was reissued in 2012 by Tuttle Publishing with an additional and quite useful foreword by Patricia Welch putting the collection and Rampo into historical and literary context. Despite Rampo’s prolificacy, influence, and popularity in Japan, relatively few volumes of his work are available in English although his short stories can often be found in anthologies. In addition to being Rampo’s introduction to English-reading audiences, Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination is particularly interesting in that Rampo worked very closely with Harrison on its translation.

Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination collects nine of Rampo’s short stories selected to represent some of his best work. Eight of the nine stories were originally written in the 1920s. The collection opens with what is perhaps Rampo’s most well-known story “The Human Chair.” (At least, it was the story with which I was most familiar before reading the volume.) Next is “The Psychological Test” which features Rampo’s famous detective Kogorō Akechi. “The Caterpillar” is another story I was previously aware of and for a time was even banned in Japan. The collection continues with “The Cliff.” Written in 1950, it is the most recent example of Rampo’s work in the volume. Other tales of mystery include “The Twins,” “The Red Chamber,” and “Two Crippled Men” while other tales of imagination include “The Hell of Mirrors” and “The Traveler with the Pasted Rag Picture.” Though, as Welch points out in the foreword, Rampo frequently blurs the lines of genre and many of the stories have significant crossover.

Rampo is an incredibly clever and imaginative writer. Even when working with similar themes and plot elements, each story in Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination exhibits Rampo’s creativity in narrative technique and structure and he throws in enough plot twists that they all feel fresh. Each story is a little peculiar and each story is vaguely disconcerting–the erotic and the grotesque and macabre are no strangers to Rampo’s work–but in the end the tales are all different from one another. The culprits of his crimes stories are often undone by their arrogance, belief in their infallibility, or on occasion their guilty consciences, but the paths to their downfalls vary. Rampo’s more fantastic tales rely on subtle and not so subtle horror, but their thrills and terrors are all distinctive.

Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination is a captivating collection of short stories and would make a fine introduction to Rampo’s work for the uninitiated. If I had to choose, I think that I personally prefer Strange Tale of Panorama Island and its outrageousness slightly more, but the selections in Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination show evidence of the elements in the novella that I particularly enjoyed: the tight plotting, the light style of narration with slight touches of humor, the unexpected turns in the story, the inherent strangeness of the characters and their accounts. Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination has stood the test of time well. Nearly fifty years after it was first released, and more than a half-century since the stories were originally written, the volume remains an intriguing and engaging collection.