Sean Gaffney

Story by Ryukishi07; Art by Karin Suzuragi. Released in Japan as “Higurashi no Naku Koro ni: Tsumihoroboshi-hen” by Square Enix, serialized in the magazine Gangan Powered. Released in North America by Yen Press.

It’s Halloween, and time for all good bloggers to discuss horror. And so I will talk about Higurashi, which may be a mystery series, and may also be a harem series, but is first and foremost known for its graphic horror. This volume starts a new arc, with events once again reset to the middle of June. There’s a basic horror in the premise: the cast are dying in horrible ways over and over, each time with someone falling into a spiral of paranoia and insanity. Worst of all, the young priestess Rika seems to be aware of the previous iterations. Will this arc, focusing on the cute redhead Rena, be any more optimistic?

Well, probably, but not in this first volume. This is the start of the “Atonement” arc, which is the mirror of the first arc of the entire series, the ‘Abducted by Demons’ arc. Unlike the previous Shion arc, however, which told the same events but from a new perspective, this is showing an entirely different plot, focusing on Rena. We do start off bright and happy as always, with Rena and the rest of the club playing a penalty game with water guns in gym class. As the story goes on, though, we realize that the chapter title “Happy Rena” is misleading, and that she uses a smile to mask her inner pain and sadness. And what’s more, it’s getting obvious.

Rena is an interesting case. Most of the previous arcs have shown the protagonist (Keiichi at first, then Shion) start off relatively well-adjusted, then slowly the paranoia and madness seeps into them as they start imagining things that aren’t really happening. Rena’s backstory shows us that she’s already been committed for a long period after her parent’s divorce, and has attempted suicide as well as assault. And while moving back to Hinamizawa helped briefly, now that a new woman is cozying up to her father, the old feelings are starting up again.

In addition to Rena not really needing much impetus to get her started into killing other people, the people she’s dealing with are those that we’re not really going to miss. It turns out that her father’s new love is a gold digger who leeches onto men and gradually strips them of their money… something she casually brags about in a cafe while on the arm of Satoko’s uncle. Remember him? Back in the Curse Killing arc, we saw his physical and mental abuse of the fragile Satoko. Combined with his new love, they’re a couple that Rena is allowed to kill while still retaining the audience’s sympathy… or are they? Does anything justify murder?

As for the horror elements in this volume, for those who were creeped out by the fingernail torture in the Eye Opening Arc, well, we may have found a way to top it. Rena’s repressed rage and despair apparently comes into her head in the form of imaginary maggots that are inside her skin. Note they don’t feel imaginary to her – or to us, as we see them a few times, most notably bursting from her neck as she tries to kill herself in a flashback. Karin Suzuragi’s art is generally considered the “cutest” and most “moe” of the group of artists adapting the series, so this is particularly grotesque. There’s also Rena’s murder of Rina, the aforementioned gold-digger. The anime keeps things vague and silhouetted, but the manga has no trouble being graphic, showing Rina being beaten to death with a pipe (after trying to strangle Rena, to be fair) and begging for her life once she realizes what Rena will do. Oh yes, and eyeballs bulging from sockets, a Higurashi classic.

Higurashi makes for an excellent horror series, but it’s the mystery and characters that keep me coming back after so many deaths and resets. This isn’t the final arc, so I know things will turn south – they already have. But I want to know if the heroes can get any closer to redeeming Rena, and if she can find the “atonement” the arc title implies. I also want to know why this reset keeps happening. There’s got to be more to it than just torturing teenagers over and over again. Gripping, unnerving, and with a jarring contrast between art and events. Welcome to Hinamizawa.

By Usamaru Furuya, based on the novel by Osamu Dazai. Released in Japan by Shinchosha, serialized in the magazine Weekly Comic Bunch. Released in North America by Vertical.

Vertical released 3 new series in quick succession this past month, and this may be the least talked about of the three. However, it should be talked about more, as it’s excellent, with Furuya creating a disturbing mood of suffocation and pretense as he adapts a classic Japanese novel about despair into modern times.

The original novel by Dazai was released in 1948, and is still beloved in Japan. We’ve seen its influence here already; the first Book Girl novel used it as a focal point, and Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei has many similarities between its protagonist and the narrator of No Longer Human. Furuya uses a bit of a distancing device to bookend the manga, showing himself looking at a website that supposedly describes the life of Yozo Oba, a young man who seems dissolute and bored with life.

The back cover notes that he takes refuge in clowning, but honestly we only see that for the first chapter of the book. In reality, Yozo has a different face for each situation he’s in, and seems to throw on personalities at random. This is not all that uncommon, of course, but he’s also a teenager, and seems to regard his attitude as unique and everyone else as being happy and content. In other words, Yozo thinks too much. As the manga goes on, various bad things start happening to him, but he deals with it by either reacting on the fly or drifting aimlessly. Yozo lacks a purpose.

This isn’t a horror manga (more on that later in the week), but there are certainly several images within that could be right at home in a horror anthology. Furuya loves to draw surrealistic mindscapes showing his characters’ fractured psyches, and so we see swirling faces, blank puppet eyes, and dolls breaking apart in the sea. What Yozo goes through is no picnic, either – he may start out as a rich dilettante, but his family curtails his allowance, then cuts him off completely. And the political group he joins turns out to be a terrorist organization. Is it any wonder he ends Volume 1 where he does?

As with Genkaku Picasso, the emphasis here is on imagery. Furuya is served well by a pre-existing plot, however, even if he’s adapting it to modern times, and so things hold together better than they did in Picasso. This is also for a far older audience than Picasso; there are several scenes with Yozo having sex, and there’s also some violence and graphic situations, particularly at the end of the first volume. No one is going to have their psyche magically fixed by a pen here.

As with most of Furuya’s works, No Longer Human isn’t for everyone. But I definitely regarded it as a step up from Picasso, and it lacks (so far) the sexual violence and gore of Lychee Light Club. Intriguingly, the flipped format we see here *isn’t* flipped – Furuya redrew his entire manga left-to-right for the French market, and Vertical is using that version. It works very well. For those looking for a psychological thriller with intellectual overtones, give this a try.

By Shuzo Oshimi. Released in Japan by Futabasha, serialized in the magazine Manga Action. Released in the United States by Futabasha on the JManga website.

Of all the titles released so far by JManga, no magazine has more examples of its wares than Futabasha’s seinen magazine Manga Action. It’s a bi-weekly magazine that caters to the same sort of reader as all of the ‘Young’ magazines, which is to say each edition features a hot Japanese gravure model on the cover. Now, to be fair, the content is just as varied as any other magazine for men. You have bento manga, medical manga, sports manga, and even Star Protector Dog. That said, you also have manga about guys trapped in loveless marriages who end up with the hot girl of their dreams.

Drifting Net Café stats off with this basic plot. Toki is a salaryman with a pregnant wife, and is dissatisfied with how he got there. Yukie, his wife, is having mood swings; he’s incredibly horny but unable to have sex; and he keeps thinking about the girl he had a crush on in high school, whom he hasn’t seen since then. Then one day as it’s raining he goes into a net café to ride it out, and runs into none other than his old crush!

So far so normal, and the entire first volume is set up so that you’re supposed to root for the adultery. Yukie is cute, and he loves her in that ‘yeah, whatever’ sort of way, but with Tohno it’s clear he still has chemistry and an undefinable spark. Unfortunately, they can’t immediately hook up because the café they’re in is suddenly transported to the middle of a hostile swampy desert in the middle of nowhere.

Yes, that’s right, this isn’t just an adulterous salaryman romance manga, it’s also a takeoff on Kazuo Umezu’s classic horror title The Drifting Classroom. Instead of children, we have bored and jaded young twenty-somethings cast adrift, and the conflict between then erupts almost immediately. We’re only one volume in, so we don’t really get to know the whole cast, but the characters we’ve seen get in the spotlight have issues. I honestly can’t even remember their names, I define them by their roles. The huge guy with some sort of rage disorder. The shallow girl who whines about wanting to go home. The psycho guy.

Speaking of the psycho guy, this is another manga rated M for mature. For most of the volume, that’s due to the occasional bout of violence, with folks beating up other folks because they’re all confused at being transported from Tokyo to a strange swamp in the middle of nowhere. Then right at the end, one of the meek characters, who’s been bullied by his boss since the start, goes nuts. He stabs his boss with a penknife, then grabs the shallow girl and forces her to go down on him at knifepoint. It’s as sordid as it sounds, and made me feel ill. Then another guy pulls out a taser… and that’s our cliffhanger. Didn’t take long for morality to erode, much like its older counterpart.

So we’ve got a wannabe cheating hero, a heroine who through one volume is still somewhat faceless (in flashbacks, she’s shown to be the cool mysterious beauty, but in the present she seems very passive), a lot of violence, and we end with sexual assault. Is there something to like about this title? Well, it’s certainly very good at setting a mood. From the moment we enter the net café, there’s a creeping feeling of horror that is conveyed very well on the page. I’m just… not sure I want to read the mood that this story is good at setting. If you want to see a horror/mystery title with a side of sex and violence, this may be for you. As for me, it lost me by the final chapter.

By Osamu Tezuka. Released in Japan as “Ribon no Kishi” by Kodansha, serialized in the magazine Nakayoshi. Released in North America by Vertical.

We’ve been waiting for this one a while. Gripping, depressing Tezuka seinen is all very well and good, but sometimes you have to bring out the big guns. And there are few guns bigger than Princess Knight, which most argue is one of the most influential titles ever, inspiring a generation of shoujo artists. There are actually several versions of the title; the original, in 1954; a sequel with the heroine’s children, in 1958; a rewrite and expansion in 1963; and a science-fiction tie-in to an anime in 1967. Vertical is releasing the 3rd and most well-known version.

Though enjoyable to children and adults alike, this work is definitely aimed at the younger reader, with its premise being couched in fairy tale language. In heaven, they give out girl hearts and boy hearts to babies about to be born, determining their gender. A mischievous angel, Tink, feeds a baby a boy heart right before God gives the same baby a girl heart. As a result, the girl is both with hearts for both genders. And what’s worse, the girl is a princess of the kingdom of Silverland! Now the girl is raised as a boy, to avoid rousing the suspicious of the evil Duke Duralumin, who wants his own son on the throne.

The inherent sexism of the kingdom (which must have a male ruler) is offset by Sapphire herself, who manages to be incredibly badass. Yes, there are those moments where the series undercuts itself – at one point, Sapphire’s boy heart is temporarily removed and she grows weak and loses her fencing skills – but for the most part she is a bright and active heroine, one who longs to be a young woman but who also does not want to give up the freedoms of being a young man. Things aren’t subtle here – her love for Prince Charming (yes, really) verges on the histrionic at times – but Sapphire remains a great heroine throughout, who you want to see emerge victorious.

That may be difficult, though. As with many stories in this vein, there are any number of traumas and disasters that befall her. Her father is killed, her mother imprisoned. She is forced to work menial tasks a la Cinderella, turned into a swan, and kidnapped by pirates. Sexy pirates. Once it gets started, the action never really lets up, just like the best children’s stories. Not that it’s all grim tidings. The basic plot trimmings may sound like Disney, but a lot of the gags are also right out of animated cartoons, with circus horses mocking the King, plucky mice helping the heroine escape, and the villain double-act of Duralumin and Nylon hamming it up for all they’re worth.

Vertical is releasing the three original Japanese volumes here as two slightly larger ones, and so naturally we end with a cliffhanger. Their presentation is excellent, with a lovely original cover (whose color is slightly more purple than the picture above, the only one I can find online), and the translation captures the broad, declamatory language. As Sapphire swashbuckles her way through various deathtraps and tries to gain her love and her femininity while remaining strong and speaking her mind, you’ll find that you absolutely can’t put the book down. The second volume cannot come soon enough.

By Tadashi Agi and Shu Okimoto. Released in Japan as “Kami no Shizuku” by Kodansha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Weekly Morning. Released in North America by Vertical.

Everyone’s been waiting for this one for a long time – since before the announcement of its license, in fact. It’s rare that you can say that a manga actually has an effect on the real world, but that’s what we have with The Drops of God, which has drastically impacted the sales of wine in Japan and the Far East. It’s been featured in the New York Times over here, and there’s buzz about it in wine magazines as well. Does it live up to the hype?

It does, even though it’s not quiet as revolutionary as you may have been led to believe. This is another in a long line of foodie mangas, and this time around it happens to be about wine. The plot could almost be taken straight from Oishinbo: there is a truculent young man, at odds with his father, who joins forces with a cute young woman to try to capture the “perfect” wines. Indeed, the basic setup of “people bring out food/drink and the hero and heroine gasp and describe its taste” could be from any number of food mangas out in Japan, many with volumes numbering into the 50s and 60s.

That said, where Drops of God draws you in is its writing. The main duo are perhaps not as well-written as the rest, but I’m hopeful we will see character development for them as the book goes on. (Less hopeful for romance, I’m pretty sure that there isn’t an ongoing plot with them as there was in Oishinbo.) More interesting is the so-called villain of the series, Tomine, who manages to capture that ‘sneering bastard’ type very well. I also really liked his sister Sara, who comes across as a shallow and vain model but whose description of the wine she’s drinking is possibly the highlight of the entire volume. I hope we see more of her.

The wraparound story of finding Shizuku’s father’s wine collection is really a way to develop any story needed. Here we see a man and his lover torn apart by circumstance and by his misreading the taste of a wine 15 years earlier; and the cliffhanger deals with a co-worker who refuses to accept French wine, noting that Italian is the best there is. Naturally, most of these problems can be solved by just the right vintage.

The descriptions of the wine can be a bit over the top – everyone by now knows that Shizuku describes a wine as tasting like a Queen concert – but that’s apparently true to life, and it’s noted that the ability to speak poetically about wine is just as important as the identification. Oh yes, and for lovers of fanservice, we get to see Miyabi in bed with Shizuku and in her underwear (don’t worry, nothing happened), as well as Tomine pouring wine onto the back of his lover (yeah, something happened there, but not on screen.)

Vertical’s translation and presentation is as good as we’ve come to expect from them. I was startled to find that the series is unflipped – Vertical tends to go for the widest readership they can get, which usually means flipping the art – but apparently the wine labels used throughout the manga made this impossible. You’re also getting two volumes in one, as Vertical is publishing 4 omnibuses of the first 8 Japanese volumes. The series is 28+ volumes in Japan, and not ending anytime soon, so Vertical has just licensed the first ‘arc’. If sales do well, they may get more. I’d like to see more, this is a fun title, if very typical of its genre.

By Ken Akamatsu. Released in Japan as “Mahou Sensei Negima!” by Kodansha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Weekly Shonen Magazine. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics.

With this second omnibus of Negima, Ken Akamatsu is starting to make his move. He’s obeyed his corporate masters and written in a giant harem cast, with tons of fanservice and blushing tsundere heroine, just like his last title. Indeed, this omnibus contains a mini-arc where the cast fight a battle to get a kiss from Negi. However, bigger things are afoot, and this omnibus is also where Akamatsu lets us know that there will be adventure and pure shonen fighting here as well – and that eventually it will be the main thrust of the plotline.

The most obvious thing we get out of this re-read of Volumes 4-6 is we see another of the main cast introduced – Setsuna Sakurazaki. Just as Asuna bears similarity to Naru from Love Hina, and Nodoka is like Shinobu, Setsuna is clearly meant to be the Motoko of this series, right down to the flustered panicking whenever love is mentioned. (Indeed, the connection to the Aoyama family is later made explicit, about 20-odd volumes later). Setsuna is briefly introduced as a potential villain, but that doesn’t last long, and soon we’re finding out about her loyalty to her friends, her amazing sword powers, her yokai heritage, and of course her repressed yearnings for her Konoka-ojosama, which manages to be played for laughs *and* taken seriously at the same time.

The other thing I noticed here was how casually we’re introduced to two of the major villains of the entire work. Fate and Tsukuyomi both appear as supposed ‘mid-level bosses’ of the villain of this arc, Chigusa. However, Chigusa proves to be mostly useless (Akamatsu lampshades this by having her defeated by Chachazero, Evangeline’s two-foot-tall puppet creature), so Fate quickly takes over, and proves to be more than a match for Negi, who is powerful but inexperienced. Fate is mostly drawn as a blank here, though I did like some of his dry humor when he muses about the water spells he’s using on Asuna, and how they interact with her magic cancel abilities. And Tsukuyomi is cute and adorable, and only wants to fight her sempai in a sword battle! Except for one panel, she is not at all the terrifying lunatic we will see later on.

Akamatsu is still feeling around how to work in all 31 girls in his plot without making the whole thing too unwieldy – he never did quite master that, though he got close. The popularity poll included at the end shows that Makie is the most popular of all the girls for two polls running, so perhaps she is the character that is most disappointing – despite a late run, Ken hasn’t really worked out her potential. On the other hand, he’s also realizing which girls *do* work well as a main cast member. Setsuna arrives and is immediately one of the crew, as I mentioned, and Nodoka is the second girl to get a pactio with Negi (and oh what a pactio it is). As for Evangeline, let’s just say I think her skyrocketing popularity caused both Shonen Magazine and Akamatsu to go “Whoah,” and after being casually disposed of by Negi in the first omnibus, she’s back to full strength here, going toe to toe with Fate, taking out huge building-sized ancient demons, and laughing all the while.

The translation here is new, as with the first one, with the Nibley twins replacing the work of Peter David (Vols. 4-5) and Trish Ledoux (Vol. 6). A replacement of David’s very loose adaptation was quite welcome. The extras have the preliminary sketches included at the end, but lack the ‘character bios’ and cover art sketches we get with individual releases.

Overall, if you’re going to be getting into Negima, this is likely where you’ll hop on. Vol. 5-6 have a great arc that shows the series finally escaping its harem roots, and even though there will always be fanservice, it’s a gamechanger. Fans want magical battles, and Akamatsu is here to provide them.

By Ken Akamatsu. Released in Japan by Kodansha, serialized in the magazine Weekly Shonen Magazine. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics.

Everyone has those titles. You know, the ones you were obsessed with 10-15 years ago. The ones you still enjoy, even though in the back of your mind you know you can never revisit it ever, because if you do you will be mature enough to see all the flaws you missed in the first rush of fandom. The mid-late 90s are a particularly strong time for me in that regard. Ranma, Oh My Goddess, Tenchi Muyo, and (a bit later) Love Hina. Four titles that in your early 20s are AMAZINGLY AWESOME, especially if you then get involved in fanfics, mailing lists, etc. And then you read them and you realize what you glossed over earlier annoys you now, and the plot you enjoyed has now been used by 80 other series to the point that you grow weary of it. Would Love Hina, now being re-released nine years after Tokyopop put it out, suffer the same fate?

There are a few things you will have to come to terms with as a reader if you are going to enjoy Love Hina. It is a harem manga. Worse, it is a harem manga where the outcome is never in doubt – thus if you like a girl who isn’t Naru, you know you’re doomed and spend 13 more volumes getting progressively more annoyed. It is filled with blatant and obvious fanservice, mostly involving girls under the age of 18. This never goes away. It is filled with what has been commonly dubbed ‘comedic sociopathy’ – which is to say characters are angry and hit each other all the time because the author thinks it’s funnier that way. In the 550 pages of this omnibus, I believe Naru punches Keitaro almost 50 times, and I may be underestimating that. And this doesn’t even count Su kicking him, or Motoko trying to slice him in two with her katana. It’s a comedy. Keitaro recovers 2 panels later. Learn to roll with it.

If you can get past all that… this is a fun, heartwarming title. Admittedly, it takes a while to get going. As with Negima, Volume 1 of Love Hina is pretty obviously the nadir. Keitaro was a highly influential harem lead, but for all the *wrong* reasons. Ataru was after the girls himself, Tenchi had actual superpowers to bust out, and Ranma was a martial arts master. Keiichi Morisato comes closest, and is certainly unlucky, but lacks the patheticness Keitaro Urashima has at the start. We see him as a 2nd year ronin, having failed to get into the prestigious Todai university. Again. He also notes that he’s not handsome, and has no real friends, and has never had a girlfriend. What does he have? Well, he has the bad luck to always walk in on women naked, and tends to fall over clutching their breasts. Oh yes, and he’s NICE. Keitaro was first, so I won’t get on his case as much, but he was the prototype for many harem leads who literally have no redeeming qualities except their ability to be extra super nice. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Added to this, we have a cross-section of girls that end up living in the inn his grandmother leaves to him in the introductory chapter. Tsundere Naru, aka the second most polarizing female in all of anime (Akane Tendo being first) tends to lash out with her fists when angry, embarrassed, or scared, which, around Keitaro, is all the time. Luckily, like most tsundere characters, this is only half of her persona, and we do over the course of these three volumes see Naru’s softer, more caring side. She also starts to see that Keitaro means well, and begins to realize that she might even be falling for him. Which… makes her angry, embarrassed, and scared. Cue fists, repeat as needed. If you leave out all the scenes when she’s hitting him, what you’re left with is quite a sweet relationship between two people who are a lot more alike than Naru would like to admit.

As for the others, like most ‘date sim’ or harem mangas they’re designed to provide a selection of different female leads to appeal to the reader. Cute and shy Shinobu, who’s 7 years younger than Keitaro – and can cook to boot! Hyperactive Su, who is foreign but not from India, and runs through each scene she’s in on pure energy. Stoic Motoko, the young kendo swordswoman who worries she may be dealing with those pesky feelings of love. Trickster Mitsune, who enjoys alcohol and teasing Keitaro and Naru, probably not in that order. Motoko and Shinobu will get far more focus in future volumes (indeed, Motoko seems rather out of character here, and won’t come into her own till she gets just as flustered and blush-ridden as Naru currently gets), Su slightly less so. Mitsune gets virtually no page time of her own, it needs to be said, and the anime deepened her friendship with Naru quite a bit.

Then there’s Mutsumi, a.k.a. my favorite character. Again, this is for purely irrational reasons – she only appears sporadically through the series, and is never one of the main cast. Of all the cast, she probably comes closest to winning Keitaro’s heart – except she’s nowhere near it either, and knows it – the man only has eyes for Naru. Mostly I think I like her because of my penchant for, if you’ll pardon the expression, ‘dizzy dames’. Mutsumi is the type who will get a perfect score on a test and forget to write her name; or will end up on a desert island without realizing that if she walks back into it 50 yards she’ll find her house. She is, however, savvy enough to pick up on Keitaro and Naru’s relationship almost immediately – certainly before either of them do. (She also kisses Keitaro, and then to make up for it kisses Naru. When I first read the series, this was VERY IMPORTANT to my young self.) I am always happy when Mutsumi’s around in this series.

I should take some time to talk about the re-release. If you’re a fan of the old manga, and are wondering if the upgrade is worth it – yes, it is. The artwork is much clearer, the translation retains honorifics and last name usage (important in a series like this where so much could depend on Keitaro saying Naru rather than Narusegawa – he doesn’t, in the entire omnibus, call her by her first name). The lettering is professional and looks neat – a far cry from Tokyopop’s… um, enthusiastic lettering job of old. The old ‘bonus pages’ are retained, and we get the usual Kodansha endnotes, detailing things such as Naru namechecking Doraemon.

I will admit that when I heard this series was going to be part of the Manga Movable Feast, I raised an eyebrow. Love Hina is no deep, meaningful masterpiece, and merely flipping through it can tell you that. But if you want a romantic comedy with a hearty emphasis on the comedy, and don’t find it aggravating when slapstick violence happens every two pages, there’s much to enjoy here. The loud rampaging scenes make the occasional quiet, heartfelt ones sweeter, and it’s there, where Naru is quietly cheering Keitaro on to study harder, or confessing her own worries and fears to him, that we start to see what a good couple they will eventually make.

Eventually. Once we have 11 more volumes of slapstick violence.

This review was based on a review copy provided by the publisher.