Sean Gaffney

By Natsuki Takaya. Released in Japan by Hakusensha, serialized in the magazine Hana to Yume. Released in North America by Yen Press.

The benefit of re-reading a series with so much going on like Fruits Basket is that things you hadn’t noticed before turn out to be signposted, whereas things that once held your attention don’t appear to be as relevant in the long run. We only get one new Sohma this time around, as we meet shy, bullied Kisa trying to escape from serious bullying at school and a somewhat hysterical mother at home. I remember being impressed at the time with the fact that Takaya had the characters take exception to the standard Japanese response for bullying, which is “if you were strong enough, they wouldn’t bully you”. Of course, this is sort of what happens – the newfound bonds with Tohru and, to a lesser degree Yuki, allow Kisa to find inner strength and return to school. So the message is a bit undercut, but it’s still a very good arc, I think.

Speaking of Yuki, he talks about his own past and that he once turned in on himself the way Kisa did, but the details are sketchy – no doubt to be saved up for later. Certainly he once again contrasts with Kyo – the head of the family, Akito, seems to have smothered Yuki a bit, whereas the opposite is true of Kyo. There’s also the love triangle, which at this point Takaya is still trying to keep as balanced as possible, but knowing the outcome as I do, it’s difficult not to see that she had Kyo and Tohru in mind as the endpoint even at this stage. And while most of the latter part of this omnibus deals with Kyo’s family issues, as he and his sensei Kazuma try to show affection while still somewhat not understanding the other person, it’s very clear that Tohru is why Kazuma showed up in the first place.

This will be deconstructed later in the series, but at this point it’s astonishing how straight it’s played that everything can be healed with the power of Tohru’s all-loving presence. Shigure is betting everything on Tohru being what finally breaks the curse. Kazuma arrives as he’s heard about Tohru and wants to make sure that she’s not going to run away if she sees the actual true form of what Kyo’s curse is. And her immediate “I love you!” to Kisa, even if it’s more in a “so cute!” way, is what starts her on the road to healing. In retrospect, of course, this really is setting us up for a fall – the arrival of Hiro next time around will help, but right now Tohru is being portrayed as a saintly goddess as that’s how most of the main characters are viewing her.

As with previous volumes, this is a good adaptation of the Japanese omnibuses. The interstitials are gone, replaced with simple SD-art, but it was like that in the Japanese reprint as well. and there’s nice color pages at the start. And the translation is smoother but also looser than the original Tokyopop one. Anyone wishing to upgrade should be quite happy.

By Tappei Nagatsuki and Shinichirou Otsuka. Released in Japan by Media Factory. Released in North America by Yen On.

Given the sheer number of ‘person goes to a world based on a game’ light novel plots out in Japan, a genre so oversaturated that some competitions have banned the premise, it’s not a surprise that we’re starting to see the genre poked fun at a bit. Re: Zero begins with our hero, who went out to get snacks, suddenly in a busy intersection of a fantasy world, complete with anthropomorphic creatures, noble princesses, and sneaky thieves. The joke is that this is exactly the sort of thing that he’s read about constantly, and (given that he’s sort of become an ungraduating loser NEET in our world, albeit a buff one who keeps in shape) he is absolutely ready to gain cool new powers and save the world through the power of being awesome. Thankfully, this is not that series.

In fact, Subaru himself may be the weak point in the book – deliberately, to be fair. He’s meant to be the sort of character you want to give a swift kicking to for being so stupid, but that’s always a high wire act, particularly if it’s your protagonist. Subaru is a smartass, and not really in a good way – he’s there with a snarky response most of the time, but it almost feels overscripted, as if it’s a default he drops into when he’s not really sure how to act in a situation. When things get more dire and serious, as they inevitably do, he gets more interesting, though not necessarily more competent. Because his powers are the main title of the series: when he dies, he resets to zero, which is to say he returns back to the start of the day to try to avoid dying. He’s not particularly good at avoiding this.

The rest of the cast fares better than Subaru, as they merely have to be fairly standard fantasy types that will get development later. There’s the overearnest princess, who can’t help but worry about Subaru even though there’s no good reason to do so; the aforementioned sneak thief Felt, who the epilogue shows us is more than she seems (my money’s on missing royalty); and Reinhard, who is perfect in every way, and basically is the character that WOULD normally be our hero in most works – the best part of the book is when we figure out that the way Subaru saved the day and avoided getting himself killed is to call for help rather than fight, which indirectly lets Reinhard come in and save the day, something Subaru is simply ill-equipped to do.

I’m not sure where this will go in the future – I assume if he dies in Book 2 he’s not going to go back to that intersection, as that would quickly grow tedious. I do hope that he matures and acts a bit less of a doofus, though I have zero hopes of that coming true. That said, this is a fun series with a premise that can go in many different directions, and I want to see where it takes me.

By Mamare Touno and Kazuhiro Hara. Released in Japan by Enterbrain. Released in North America by Yen On.

Unlike Sword Art Online, which in many ways was less about the game itself and more about the romance between Kirito and Asuna, Log Horizon tries not to focus too hard on romantic pairings. This is not to say they aren’t there, of course, but they’re never going to take over the plot. The closest we get may be this book, in which Akatsuki and Minori both independently realize that they’re in love with Shiroe. This initially starts off being fairly mediocre – the cake eating scene is not as funny as it thinks it is, and reads as quite cliched – but it begins to get good when each of the two girls spies on the other bonding with Shiroe and is forced to deal with ugly feelings of jealousy and self-hatred. Minori, being a middle schooler, has never felt like this before. Akatsuki’s older, but she has a different issue – Minori sees the bigger picture better than she does. In fact, Akatsuki has trouble with the big picture in general.

As you might imagine from the romantic sideplot, this is a bit of a ‘break’ volume for Log Horizon, with the crisis being less epic and more annoying. We get to see more of what we’ve enjoyed from prior volumes – Marielle being genki, Raynesia and Krusty snarking at each other, etc. The adventurers are holding a festival in their town, and people are coming from all over the area to join – both other adventurers and People of the Earth, many of whom have ulterior motives. The idea that these are just NPCs has long left town, and indeed the loathsome Lord Malves could hold his own with some of the other Adventurer villains we’ve seen before. But we save the true villain for the epilogue – we’d seen Shiroe worrying about another large town’s issues at the start o the book, and now we see why: it’s a dark mirror imagine of Akiba.

Nureha is clearly being set up as a major villain, though I’m not sure if she’s really the one manipulating everything here. She’s quite content to turn on her seductive wiles to lure Shiroe to their side, and they really, really want him – rewriting reality last volume to make Rundelhaus an adventurer was something that got noticed, and suddenly Shiroe, who was always the introverted social nerd – is dealing with unwanted attention. This is likely why he’s so comfortable making himself the ‘scary villain’ in Akiba, despite Minori’s protests. Being the center of attention, being wanted, is something that he desires, but makes him too uncomfortable. Not even Nureha’s manipulative sob story about her background (I do think it’s true, but it was still manipulative) or revelation that they may have a way back to the real world can sway him.

For a volume that seemed to be marking time, there was a lot going on here, and some good setup for future volumes. Log Horizon continues to be one of the best of the ‘people trapped in a game world’ books, and deserves attention.

By Jin (Shinzen no Teki-P) and Sidu. Released in Japan by Enterbrain. Released in North America by Yen On.

As we reach the end of this book, our heroes are getting a lot closer to figuring out why they have these strange eye powers and what the powers actually are. In fact, they get a lot closer than the reader, as we’re shown parts of a diary that Marie’s grandmother kept, but they get to read the whole thing. Admittedly, we can connect some dots, but I am reminded once more that this is a light novel series based off of a series of songs, and that the intended audience is meant to be familiar with those songs. In particular, Shinigami (Reaper) Record, which introduces us to Azami’s story that is fleshed out here.

Azami is a mysterious supernatural creature – called a Reaper, she seems to also have many traits of a medusa, something which she’s apparently passed along to her granddaughter. Speaking of Marie, the bigger revelation in this book may be just how old she actually is – it’s somewhat startling, particularly given her fairly childlike personality. But of course, when you live alone in a cabin in the woods, there’s not as much chance to evolve or learn. And there’s also Konoha, whose real identity we’ve been able to guess with information from the previous two books, but who looks to be just as different from his other self as Ene is from Takane. Actually, the biggest disappointment here may be Shintaro, who still has a tendency to get dragged along and whine much of the time – indeed, the trip to and from the cabin is an endless stream of irritation from him.

If there’s a larger issue with these books, it’s the length – they’re much, much shorter than the average Japanese light novel, and you barely get into the book before it’s already finished, padding out its page count with lots of character design art and advertisements for the manga. Each of the last three volumes has featured a segment of the main plot and a more serious side story that gives us backstory and hints, but the backstory really is not connecting fast enough for my taste, and some of the things I was most interested in last time (Kano confronting Shintaro in Ayano’s body) is glossed over here, as Kido reassures Shintaro in a way that makes it seem like just a bad nightmare.

This volume was delayed two months, so the next one will come sooner than expected, and I’m hoping that less lag time will allow me to get into it a bit more. It would seem to involve Kano in a big way, so maybe I’ll finally get the answers to my questions. Kagerou Daze is enjoyable, particularly to fans of the multimedia franchise, but I still wish it wasn’t so fragmented. And short – even this review is underlength when I try to discuss it.

By Ryohgo Narita and Suzuhito Yasuda. Released in Japan by ASCII Mediaworks. Released in North America by Yen On.

Narita’s books, be it Baccano!, DRRR!!, or what have you, all enjoy being endlessly re-readable. Not only do you get the single-volume habit of various disparate and seemingly unconnected plots all crashing together at the end, which certainly happens here, but you also see this as part of a series whole, as he also teases out future major plot and characters that don’t pay off here but will several books down the line. I’ve called DRRR!! a nerd series, and it’s not just because Erika and Walker talk a lot about anime and manga types (their discussion of whether Celty is a tsundere or not is one of the highlights of the book). It’s because his series cry out for Tumblr analysis and bullet points explaining what’s going on and how it affects things down the road.

As an example, this volume is very good about taking the metatext and making it textual. In addition to the analysis of Celty’s character and how it applies to a seemingly ‘real life’ person, we meet Izaya’s twin younger sisters, Mairu and Kururi, who are not as loathsome as him but do seem to be just as difficult to stop. They’re polar opposite twins, as per the TV Tropes article, but Izaya helpfully tells us they deliberately engineer this in order to balance each other out, the better to be one person in two bodies (which is what they think they are). This isn’t the sort of exposition you expect to be casually laid out in the book itself. Things get even weirder when, at the end of the volume, Izaya has to meet with an even higher level of manipulator to find out about events he wasn’t around for (most of them, in fact). We don’t learn all that much about him, but what we do get seems to imply that Izaya is literally meeting the book’s omniscient narrator.

This is not to say the book does not function as a normal book as well. There’s a lot going on, as always, but if you pay enough attention it’s easy to follow and have fun (indeed, the narrative helpfully spells out the difficult bits, like the fact that all the money Celty lost ends up returning to her by the end of the volume). There’s car chases and fights, Shizuo throws people across the city and hits them so hard they need reconstructive surgery. We meet Aoba Kuronuma, who is a new high school student who is clearly there to manipulate Mikado for evil ends, but at the same time he himself is thrown off by the higher-levels weirdness of the Orihara Twins. (Speaking of the Twins, those who disliked Namie’s creepy incest subtext in previous books won’t be happy to see Mairu and Kururi making out here – again, they deliberately invoke tropes, even distasteful ones.) My favorite subplot was probably that of Shizuo’s brother, who runs into the cutest serial killer you’ll ever see, and helps her redefine what it means to be a monster.

Speaking of said killer, I mentioned how DRRR’s novels tie into each other and reward re-reading, and the same can be said for “The Naritaverse” as a whole. Nebula, the evil corporation we’ll see in Baccano!, is still the evil corporation 70 years later in DRRR!!. We hear about a couple of thieves who liked to dress in costumes, clearly Isaac and Miria. And while Ruri’s ‘monstrous’ nature is kept deliberately vague, anyone who reads Narita’s unlicensed series Vamp! will have figured it out already. DRRR!! is a nerd series that rewards overanalysis, and also a lot of fun and action packed. It ends with everyone in the cast having food with friends and loved ones, except Izaya, who is alone and unloved. Needless to say, this pisses him off and he will no doubt be far more active in future books. Can’t wait.

By Mitsu Izumi. Released in Japan by Shueisha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Jump Square. Released in North America by Viz.

For a nation that mostly seems to revolve around Shintoism and Buddhism, Japanese manga authors seem very taken with Christianity. Not necessarily for the actual religious thought behind it, but I think they see the Bible as sort of a Lord of the Rings-type book, filled with epic battles between angels and demons, lots of divine punishment, and a few bouts of sinning for good measure. There have been quite a few stories talking about a battle between heaven and hell with Earth as its grounds, most famously Neon Genesis Evangelion, but Angel Sanctuary is also up there. 7th Garden is firmly along those lines, as a young man with a tortured past finds himself allying with a demon with a tortured past in order to protect his young mistress, who may in fact have a tortured past as well. All of this revolves around the symbols and imagery of Christianity, slightly distorted,

This actually ended up being a lot more wholesome than the descriptions I saw led me to believe – I probably should have guessed that give that the busty demon on the cover actually has her back turned to the reader, rather than facing them chest first. Said demon is Vyrde, who is accidentally freed by our hero from a thousand year sleep, and proceeds to be the best thing about this series once she wakes up. She’s playful, seductive, and amoral in just the right amount, and even the ‘sneak into the hero’s bed at night’ feels for once as if it didn’t come out of the pages of ‘Love Comedy For Beginners’. Probably because there’s not much love here – yes, there’s a suggestion that Awyn (the hero) and Marie (his mistress) sort of kind of like each other, but make no mistake about it: this is a battle manga, with ridiculous swordfights and lots of corpses.

I mentioned Christianity above, but given that in this series the demons are the good guys and the angels the bad guys (very common in manga), it’s unsurprising that this fantasy world calls it ‘anti-Quoristiantity’, enforced by ‘anti-Knights, who as you might imagine with a name like that tend to mete out anti-Justice. To be fair, we’re told that the mooks we see killing innocents here are not Knights but Apostles – those who were not good enough to be Knights so do the Church’s dirty work. This does allow our hero to be somewhat more cavalier about life and death than you’d expect from a Jump manga – then again, this is Jump Square, and Blue Exorcist can also have very ambiguous morality. The most interesting part of the manga may have been told the end, as we’re fed little droplets of backstory hints that might pay off. Who is Ashriel, really, and what does she know? (With a name like that, the foreshadowing isn’t subtle.) What do they mean by the village not existing? And is there any significance that our demon’s real name is so close to Awyn’s innocent mistress? (That last may be a no. I suspect it’s the Western name equivalent of Isumi and Izumi being nothing alike.)

There’s a lot of tease here but not much beyond promise, and the fighting is good but can get confusing (on a level of 1 to Trigun Maximum, it’s about a 4). But it does show promise, and I am interested enough to pick up a second volume. Recommended for those who like fantasy and don’t mind religion being used as a heavy spice.