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Kare Kano 8 by Masami Tsuda: B

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From the back cover:
As preparations for the culture festival continue, Soichiro realizes that there are actually two sides to his personality, one that is gentle and giving, and one which is frighteningly violent and possessive. It is a development that hasn’t gone unnoticed by Yukino, and she worries that it will damage their relationship. Meanwhile, Tonami and Tsubaki finally realize that they have fallen in love with each other.

Review:
The back cover blurb has been edited to remove made-up words; it actually says “frightingly.” I also didn’t notice Yukino worrying that Soichiro’s personality issues are going to damage their relationship. All she says is, “Sometimes, I feel like you’re a completely different person. I wonder why.”

Anyhoo, this volume is kind of disjointed because there are so many balls in the air. Tonami is really growing on me as a character; he’s far more interesting in the manga than he was in the anime. In fact, he’s a more developed character than his love interest Tsubaki, and she’s been around longer. The scene in which they admit their feelings for each other would’ve had more of an impact if I could’ve understood how she came to be in love with him, for it’s really not clear.

Arima continues to angst, but there’s a great chapter near the end where a hurricane forces him to stay the night with the Miyazawa family. Feeling Yukino’s presence all around, he sleeps well and without nightmares, even though a storm rages outside. Some things he thinks do have me wondering whether he’s supposed to actually be going crazy or not. It seems possible.

The rest of the volume is occupied by culture festival plans and a boring bonus story whose only redeeming feature is that it doesn’t pair up the two characters I expected it to. In the main story, there are also a few painfully unfunny “comedy” scenes featuring boob-grabbing and Tsubasa inanely jumping out of an upper-story window to glomp on her stepbrother below.

Lastly, I am really peeved at all the untranslated text I’m seeing. TOKYOPOP generally does not translate sound effects, which sucks but is expected, but they’re also not bothering with actual sentences which I then feel compelled to try to look up and make sense of. I’m so glad I managed to learn the kana, or else I’d really be annoyed.

Kare Kano 7 by Masami Tsuda: B

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From the back cover:
The second semester has begun and everyone’s busy with tests, practices, and activities. It’s time to prepare for the culture festival and Yukino has been asked to perform in a futuristic sci-fi play. There’s instant drama when Tonami, a transfer student and old friend of Soichiro, comes back on the scene after three years. Tempers flare and competitive natures run wild.

Review:
This volume is comprised mostly of planning for the play that Yukino and friends are going to be performing at the cultural festival. While not the most riveting fare, this stuff is pretty interesting, because it shows Yukino being great at organization and getting various administrative tasks accomplished. I’m dismayed by how infantalized Tsubasa is in these segments, though.

Initially, there isn’t much fallout from what happened at the end of the previous volume, except one question from Arima to make sure that he didn’t hurt Yukino in any way. Most of the rest of the time, he hangs around looking dejected while she chats with other guy friends of hers. One of these guys is new character Tonami, who has a grudge against one of Yukino’s friends. I’m meh about this story—Yukino’s friend (Tsubaki) is largely unsympathetic now and completely so in the flashbacks—but Tonami is kind of amusing, particularly when he wonders what Arima (his idol back in junior high) is doing going out with such a strange girl. And, okay, the smooch in the tree was sweet.

Right at the end, things get cooler, with Hideaki warning Tonami to keep his distance from Yukino, because Arima is possessive and has a temper. This leads into another visit from Arima’s nightmare self and a genuinely creepy final scene where he encounters Tonami in a darkened corridor and gives him a super evil look. And Yukino has absolutely no idea that all of this darkness is lurking within him.

And yeah, okay, the story could totally get taken over by Arima’s angst, but I still like seeing him be all freaky. It’s certainly the most interesting thing going on in the series currently.

Greetings from Charlotte!

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It’s a beautiful, sunny morning in Charlotte, though I’m still enjoying it through the window of my hotel room, as I lazily prepare for our first day of auditions here. I’ll just be watching our callbacks all day, so I don’t have to rush around to get to the general auditions when they start this morning. I suppose I’ve achieved something when I get to hire other people to do all the rushing around.

Charlotte is really a lovely city, though I admit I’ve only seen about three blocks worth of it so far. After arriving yesterday, our assistant production manager and I walked over to the theater where they were doing registrations, and there was an Indian cultural festival of some kind going on in the street. Multiple booths with delicious, spicy-smelling food, and lots of women walking around in colorful saris, it was really a nice welcome to the city.

For anyone who might be wondering, I ended up not taking any of the advice I was given on what manga to bring on the plane, though I did try. Our local bookstores and the comic shop were unhelpful in my search for volume 1 of Dororo (though I could get volumes 2 & 3 at one Barnes & Noble), which was what I’d most strongly considered. I’m happy with my choice, though. I ended up getting the first three volumes of Nana (which I’ve meant to read for a long time, finally cemented by Johanna Draper Carlson’s recent review of volume 9), and wow, what a charming series! Now of course I’m wishing I’d bought more of it, but the volumes I had effectively dulled the horror of my two flights yesterday, so I’m very grateful to them.

Time to start rallying myself to the day’s cause. More later, perhaps. In conclusion: Banana Fish. :D

Kare Kano 6 by Masami Tsuda: B

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From the back cover:
It’s not long before Soichiro’s back from a very successful tournament, much to Yukino’s delight. Now they can spend some time with each other before school starts again. Yukino notices that Soichiro’s matured a lot, which stirs up new feelings in her and makes her fall in love with him even more. Soichiro’s feelings for Yukino deepen as well, and he has some difficulties dealing with that and some family issues.

Review:
This volume was strangely unaffecting. Although I loved Yukino’s struggles to confess her feelings to Arima in the first couple of volumes of the series, her problems here with telling him that her feelings have grown and her eventual confession scene just weren’t all that interesting. Arima’s obnoxious family also made an appearance, but their horrible treatment of him came across as unrealistic rather than upsetting.

This was also the volume where Arima and Yukino do the deed. I knew they would, having seen the anime, but it was still so out of the blue story-wise. In one chapter, Yukino was freaking out ‘cos he touched her boob, and just a few days later, they were consummating their relationship. For teen couples, isn’t there usually an interval of gradually intensifying fooling around between these two occurrences?

The aftermath of this event totally reminded me of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and what happened after Angel and Buffy slept together. After Yukino had gone home, Arima had a nightmare in which a cruel version of himself showed him an instance of early childhood abuse he suffered. When Arima wondered why he was remembering this, the nightmare him said, “Because you dared to think you could be happy… I’m a part of you. I’m half of who you are on the outside. I’m the shadow under your feet.”

Dun dun dunnnnn.

Making the case for Banana Fish

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One of the series I’m always trying to draw friends into is Akimi Yoshida’s classic shojo manga, Banana Fish. I first discovered this series, embarrassingly, through wikipedia, as I was trying to find shojo manga that I could really enjoy. It was this entry that piqued my interested in the series, citing a quote from Frederik L. Schodt, which described Banana Fish as “…one of the few girls’ manga a red-blooded Japanese male adult could admit to reading without blushing.” Right around the same time, mention of Banana Fish began turning up in interviews with Jason Thompson, just before the publication of his book, Manga: The Complete Guide, and though I don’t remember exactly what he said about it back then, it had the effect of spurring my interest into action, and before I knew it, I began buying the series.

I’m certainly not the only person who has tried to generate interest in Banana Fish. Shaenon Garrity made it part of her awesome Overlooked Manga Festival (one of my very favorites of that series so far), and to my mind, no further persuasion should be needed. Still, I find Banana Fish is a tough sell with friends. There’s no way to effectively preview the series, as it is difficult to find in libraries or brick and mortar bookstores. There are not even fan scanlations available to view. Anyone who wants to jump into this series pretty much has to commit to buying at least one book they may not end up liking, and I’ve found just a few who are willing to risk that. I’m going to try here to build on the case that Shaenon Garrity has already made for this series, with hope that even just one more person might choose to take that risk.

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Travel & manga: Two great tastes that taste great together

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This post is a bit of a mish-mash, which probably reflects the state of my brain after the long weekend. At the moment, I’m thinking a lot about travel. This coming weekend, I’ll be heading to Charlotte, NC to attend the Southeastern Theater Conference auditions on behalf of the children’s theater company I work for. We have quite a few actors to cast for tours starting in January, very serious business, and yet my mind is currently focused on two things:

1) What manga should I bring on the plane?
2) Where does one buy manga in Charlotte, NC?

If you know the answers to these burning questions, please do let me know. Also, I’ve finally purchased my ticket for the New York Anime Festival, so there will be quite a bit of travel for me this month. Thankfully, that is a much easier trip, which also allows me to see old friends in the city, and I certainly won’t have any trouble figuring out where to buy manga. ;)

Speaking of manga, as I’ve mentioned somewhere around here, I’ve been subsisting lately off of what can be found on my local comic shop’s used shelf. They rarely happen to have whatever volume I need next of the many series I’m collecting, so I’ve been reading the first volume in a lot of series. A couple of the series I’ve started recently because of this are Million Tears (which is only two volumes, total) and Zig Zag, both of which I’ll talk about a bit here.

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Interior Desecrations by James Lileks: B+

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From the back cover:
Warning! This book is not to be used in any way, shape, or form as a design manual. Rather, like the documentary about youth crime Scared Straight, it is meant as a caution of sorts, a warning against any lingering nostalgia we may have for the 1970s, a breathtakingly ugly period when even the rats parted their hair down the middle.

What does this have to do with furniture? Nothing. Everything. The kind of interior design you’ll see in these pages is what happens when an entire culture becomes so besotted with the New, the Hip, the With-It Styles that they cannot object to orange wallpaper—because they fear they’ll look square.

Please not that the author and publisher are not responsible for the results of viewing these pictures.

Review:
Lileks is the brains behind The Gallery of Regrettable Food and his site, The Institute of Official Cheer, hosts several other regular features that “humiliate the defenseless past.” I don’t always find his stuff funny, but sometimes it does amuse me, so when I found this book for $1.98, I knew it had to be mine.

The contents of the book are organized by type of room and follow the general format of a full-page color photo on one side and a few paragraphs of snark on the opposite page. It’s an easy read, and would probably be ideal bathroom material for those who like that sort of thing. As usual, I didn’t find everything funny. There were lots of drug references and some occasional crude humor that didn’t appeal to me. Every now and then, though, some particular turn of phrase or visual fancy would strike me in the right way and crack me up.

The designs were indeed genuinely horrible—inducing numerous headshakes, “wows,” and “holy craps”—and Lileks has a knack for picking out something one missed on first glance and finding something amusing to say about it. Probably the most insane room in the entire collection is the bathroom straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It has silver lamé bolster pillows and two toilets.

There was one, though, that I quite liked. The furnishings were crap, but the architecture of the room was really neat. It was high-ceilinged and had an entertainment unit along a wall (boasting a state-of-the-art reel-to-reel player!) and then a ladder built into the adjoining wall that one could climb to access a library loft above. How cool is that?! I want one! Then again, I actually like the wall o’ walnut paneling in my living room, so perhaps my taste is suspect, too.

Love*Com 8 by Aya Nakahara: B+

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Risa and Ôtani are finally going out, but she’s uncertain about how she’s supposed to act around him now. She’s got this preconceived notion of what a girlfriend should be, and internally beats herself up each time she fails to live up to that ideal. It helps some when Ôtani sets aside his natural reticence and introduces her to people as his girlfriend, but he still hasn’t articulated exactly why he loves her, and she’s having a hard time imagining what he could see in her.

Later, Ôtani’s neighbor, Mimi, finds out he’s got a new girlfriend and is furious. The beautiful and tall middle schooler has harbored a crush on him for years, but abandoned hope because she thought he only liked tiny girls. A lot of Mimi angst follows, and while it’s creditable that Risa sympathizes with her plight, the way this new character suddenly dominates the story is rather irksome.

Eventually, though, I realized that her purpose is to solidify the main couple’s relationship. We see that she really poses no threat to them at all, that Ôtani’s feelings never waver, and that he and Risa really are made for each other, rough edges and all. Having fulfilled this destiny, may she now go quietly away.

While this particular volume didn’t focus on the leads quite as much as I would’ve liked, it still excels at depicting the insecurities and awkwardness of this period in a relationship. That’s no surprise, since Love*Com has nailed many other aspects of first love. I’m sure it will continue to do so in the volumes to come.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Review originally published at Manga Recon.

7SEEDS 5 (Japanese) by Yumi Tamura: B+

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Book description:
With the rest of Team Summer B settled nearby the shelter at Mt. Yufudake in Kyushu, Arashi and Natsu decide to journey to Kanto to see what has become of their homes and families. Joined by Semimaru, they soon encounter Team Autumn, who were released three years ago and who have built a secure village. The only problem is that a tyrannical couple treats the others like slave labor, and the team’s guide is too weak to put a stop to it. Is this the kind of desperation Team Summer B will eventually experience?

Review:
It becomes apparent in this volume that we’re not only bouncing around in time a little, but that the various teams were released at different times, as well. The story of Team Winter recounted in the last volume actually took place fifteen years ago, while Team Autumn has been working to survive for three years. Also, in the last volume Hana found a note in a stockpile that was actually left by Natsu in this volume, if that makes sense.

Anyway, there’s a lot of traveling going on in this volume. Although I was looking forward to the teams meeting up, it kind of amuses me that Arashi, Natsu, and Semimaru suddenly seem to run into every team but Hana’s on this outing. Like, in the whole of an empty and desolate Japan, they just happen to walk in the direction where Team Autumn has built their village. I suppose having common clues for where to look for the stockpiles helps a little, but still.

Team Autumn is pretty horrible, and the Summer B folk are scarred by the experience, so when they meet gentle and kind Taka from Team Winter, they end up suspecting him and slipping away in the night. Just a few days later, he runs into Hana from Team Spring, and she (who has met no one else yet) accepts him. It’s very sweet. It also shows just how close Arashi and Hana are to each other without knowing it.

Alas, not much more than this really happens in the volume. Walking, angsting, big dangerous animals, reckless puppies. That about sums it up.

7SEEDS 4 (Japanese) by Yumi Tamura: A-

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Book description:
It’s been confirmed that the desolate land is indeed Japan, though the teams still don’t know what happened or what year it is. Team Spring—having lost their guide, Yanagi—travels to Mt. Fuji to look for another of the stockpiles, only to find that the volcano has erupted and is no longer there. Just as their hope is flagging, Hana notices some manmade signs directing them to another mountain to the east. The members of Team Winter face their own hardships from the start—between equipment failures, man-eating tigers, and Hokkaido’s bitter cold, some of them will not survive.

Review:
The majority of the chapters in this volume featured Team Winter. I’m a little torn about the introduction of other teams into the story. On the one hand I want to see them and what they’re doing, and on the other, there are already tons of characters as it is. Right from the start, Team Winter’s story is a bit more grim than the others, however, as a few of their number do not survive the thawing process, and I got into it more than I thought I would.

More shocks and twists in the story follow, and since I’m not the kind to go around suspecting such things, I really enjoyed the various surprises. The main protagonist of this group is Taka, who believed himself to be weak until inspired by the example of boisterous Fubuki, another member of the group. It was good to see how Taka had progressed by the end of the story, though the appearance of a couple of precious puppies at a crucial point was a bit silly (but sniff-inducing nonetheless).

So, as it stands, each of the teams has now located a stockpile of goods and is camped out nearby. Arashi and Natsu have passed through where Hana’s team is and left a note, though Hana, of course, still has no idea that Arashi is alive. I’m eager for the teams to meet up, especially since I have no idea what to expect from the story after that happens. I have faith that it’ll be something really cool.