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The Secret Notes of Lady Kanako

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The Secret Notes of Lady Kanako by Ririko Tsujita Volume 1

This manga mash-up of Harriet the Spy and Mean Girls ends up being a great read due to a uniquely acerbic heroine and the unexpected friendships that she finds. It is obvious that The Secret Notes of Lady Kanako was originally intended to be a stand-alone short story that was expanded later on because the first chapter has a very self-contained conclusion. Kanako holds herself apart from her classmates because she’s entertained by the idea of being the perfect outside observer. Her notebook is full of detailed notes about the behavior and secrets of the kids that surround her even though they don’t really know she exists. The focus of her current research are the boys and girl that are the most popular students in the school. Haru is the most handsome boy in school, but his beauty is combined with a somewhat sadistic personality. The prettiest girl in school is Momoka, who is nursing a crush on Haru. Haru encourages her crush just because he wants to see Tota, the boy who is hopelessly in love with Momoka, squirm in agony. Kanako sits back and watches the drama unfold, but her notes are discovered and she soon finds herself growing closer to her observation subjects than she originally intended.

Kanako finds herself gradually won over by Momoka’s innocent gestures of friendship and her stoic response to bullying from the other girls in the class. Since Momoka won’t do anything to defend herself, Kanako decides to take over the PA system to announce that the bullying better stop or she’ll reveal everyone’s darkest secrets. Tota thinks Kanako’s direct way of speaking is cool and he begins to look up to her. Haru’s snarky personality and tendency to call Kanako out on her behavior makes him a great foil. Haru is tall, dark, and conventionally handsome while Kanako is drawn as a very short girl who is always peering over her glasses with a knowing smirk on her face. Haru comments to Kanako that she’s strong, and “It’d be more interesting if all the girls were like you.”

One aspect of this manga I was initially unsure of was the portrayal of female friendships. It is fairly typical for there to be plenty of backstabbing and bitchiness in shoujo manga, and it gets repetitive after awhile. I’m also a little tired of reading stories aimed at girls where the normal behavior of other females is constantly portrayed so negatively. But The Secret Notes of Lady Kanako manages to avoid getting trapped in cliche. Kanako prides herself on seeing through all facades. She transfers from school to school to maintain her prized outsider status and when she hears a someone comment on a nice girl, she thinks to herself “Sweet girls like her? You’re awfully gullible.” Kanako’s observational habits end up uncovering secrets at her new school, but instead of becoming an enemy of the two-faced girl that was the object of her studies they end up becoming unexpected allies, bonding over the fact that they both have twisted personalities. Kanako says that she observes because she doesn’t need friendships, but she usually ends up helping the people she watches. She doesn’t tolerate hypocrisy, and she celebrates the quirky behavior that other students find off-putting.

There’s an element of knowing cynicism in Kanako’s personality that is really refreshing for someone who’s been reading a lot of shoujo manga that features sweet but ditsy heroines. In many ways Kanako is the exact opposite of the typical shoujo heroine, but she does display a few moments of softness when encountering the first friends she’s made in school. Haru occasionally pops up in a chapter here and there to tease Kanako, and she returns to her first school at the end of the volume for the cultural festival. She finds out that while she prides herself on observation, her old friends were actually watching her and use their knowledge to try to do something special for her.

This manga isn’t perfect, as there are repetitive introductions at the start of every chapter and the episodic nature of the manga actually made me wish for more Haru/Kanako interaction. I was surprised to read in the author notes that this was Tsujita’s first volume of manga, because she managed to create such a compelling heroine on the first try. This series is only three volumes long, and is worth picking up if you’re looking for shoujo that manages to combine cynicism with sweetness.

From the stack: The Secret Notes of Lady Kanoko

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The world isn’t populated exclusively with loving optimists, so it’s only appropriate that the world of shôjo manga occasionally reflects that. The surly and the cynical, it seems, can be as worthy of the spotlight as the open-hearted and the gracious, at least in Ririko Tsujita’s The Secret Notes of Lady Kanoko (Tokyopop).

The titular lady, junior high student Kanoko Naeoko, is rather like animated MTV legend Daria in that she’d rather observe human behavior than engage with actual humans. Kanoko is also like Daria in that she finds herself dragged into the woes and schemes of her classmates, whether she likes it or not. Since Kanoko is generally the smartest person in the room, you can see why she’s a go-to resource when things get tricky.

And things do get tricky. Kanoko has standards for her eavesdropping, naturally fixating on the juicier specimens — the hypocrites, the schemers, the egotists. As much as Kanoko objects to interpersonal connection, she seems to appreciate a challenge, and guiding these fools out of their misfortunes provides that.

In a more average comic, it might be safe to assume that she’s really a softy under her isolating exterior, but really, she’s not. That’s what’s pretty great about her. There are a few people that she genuinely likes, but she’s sincere in her general indifference. It isn’t a defense, except in the way that she’s protecting herself from… well… catching stupidity or dullness.

Tsujita plays around with shôjo tropes in her storytelling. There’s the plain girl oppressed by her prettier classmate, except the plain girl is flat-out nuts, and she’s as prone to bullying as her rival. There’s the girl with big dreams who’s actually an obnoxious narcissist with self-confidence so impenetrable as to have possible military applications. There are bratty students and awful teachers at every turn, and Kanoko briskly revels in putting them in line.

For my taste, the art isn’t quite up to the standards of the writing. The best of the illustrations exist in extremes, either in the hyper-stylized bits, where Kanoko can look demonic with glee, or in the glamour shot moments, the relatively realistic close-ups of characters in the grip of emotion. The in-between stuff is mostly serviceable, never exactly bad, but it feels obvious where Tsujita has devoted the bulk of her effort.

Of course, the standards of the writing are very, very high. Tsujita isn’t content to overturn expectations just once in a story, opting to flip things around at least a few times before she’s done. And she’s really good at making harsh personalities into likeable characters without going soft. The Secret Notes of Lady Kanoko offers a great start to the year in shôjo – sneaky, funny storytelling that keeps you guessing and smiling.

Off the Shelf: Sweet Surprises

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Welcome to another edition of Off the Shelf with MJ & Michelle! I’m joined, as always, by Soliloquy in Blue‘s Michelle Smith.

This week, we take a look at new releases from Viz Media and Tokyopop, as well as a continuing series fromYen Press.

MJ: Greetings from the land of mountainous snow!

MICHELLE: Salutations from the land of Floridians feeling put out because they have to wear gloves!

MJ: I hate you people.

MICHELLE: Fine. Then we’re taking back all our sweet tea.

MJ: I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean it! Please bring back the tea!

MICHELLE: Thought so. *smugs*

MJ: So, while you’re feeling smug, wanna tell me what you’ve been reading?

MICHELLE: First up for me this week is Arina Tanemura’s Mistress Fortune, a one-shot due out from VIZ on February 1st. I haven’t had the best luck with Tanemura—early on, I enjoyed the anime version of Kamikaze Kaito Jeanne and the manga Full Moon o Sagashite, but was disappointed by the overpopulated and abruptly truncated Time Stranger Kyoko as well as what little I read of The Gentlemen’s Alliance Cross. Quite frankly, I expected not to like this.

At first, it seemed like I’d be right, since I rolled my eyes several times during the opening pages. The gist of the plot is thus: Kisaki is a fourteen-year-old psychic who works for a government agency fighting adorable aliens. She’s partnered with Giniro, a boy her own age, with whom she is in love but about whom she’s forbidden to ask any personal questions. Their code names are Fortune Quartz and Fortune Tiara and they focus their psychic powers by affixing cheerful star-shaped stickers to their target.

Really.

But, y’know, somehow this story managed to grow on me! I think part of it must be that Tanemura is simply better when dealing with smaller casts of characters, as in those series I mentioned liking above. Secondarily, because it’s a very relaxed, three-chapter love story it isn’t as if I went into it really expecting any sort of depth. Kisaki loves Giniro. Giniro is fixated on Kisaki’s boobs. She discovers he has angst. A very brief misunderstanding ensues. They declare their love. Spoilers? Not really; it was inevitable.

One thing that genuinely pleased me is that Tanemura’s attempts at humor are actually amusing this time. I still shudder in horror at a theoretically comical side character from Time Stranger Kyoko, but the plushie-looking alien, EBE-ko, whose dreams is to be a socialite with designer bags, is actually lively and cute. There are also a couple of fun “reaction shots” from eyewitness animals, like if something slightly naughty happens, you’ll cut to a nearby frog who says, “I saw it!”

No, Mistress Fortune is not great, but it’s certainly much better than I’d expected.

MJ: I actually read this recently as well, and my experience was very similar to yours. I started out rolling my eyes, but was mostly won over by the end, mainly thanks to the whimsical charm of EBE-ko. Though it’s a pretty shallow romance overall, it’s also very appropriate to the age of the characters and the tone of this short manga. I wasn’t wowed or anything, but I was pleasantly surprised.

MICHELLE: Exactly. It gave me some hope that Sakura Hime, Tanemura’s other new VIZ series (due April 5th), might be kind of fun. The Heian Era setting is encouraging, at least.

MJ: Agreed!

MICHELLE: Read any pleasantly surprising things this week?

MJ: Yes I did, actually! You know, despite your recommendation, I still wasn’t quite prepared for the utter sweetness that is Yuuki Fujimoto’s The Stellar Six of Gingacho.

For those who don’t know, the series revolves around 13-year-old Mike (pronounced “Mee-kay”) and five friends she grew up with, all from families who own food stands in a busy street market. Over the past year, as they entered middle school, the six have quietly drifted apart, each making new friends and becoming increasingly awkward with each other. Feeling the loss, Mike tries to bring the gang back together by inviting them to enter a traditional dance contest at their market’s summer festival. Though her efforts are unsuccessful at first, a mutual enemy finally puts them all on the same page.

The story is simple and not particularly suspenseful, but Mike and her friends are so likable and fun to be with, it’s a real pleasure to watch things play out.

The series’ first volume focuses mainly on Mike and her best buddy, Kuro, son of the market’s fishmonger, from whom she was inseparable until puberty came along to make their friendship more complicated. Their story is nothing new, but there’s something so fresh about the telling of it, you’d swear it was the first of its kind. The secret to this may be the fact that neither their affection nor their awkwardness is overplayed, leaving smaller moments to stand out with real poignance. A panel, for instance, in which Mike first notices that Kuro’s hands have gotten bigger than hers, is actually quite touching, though it comes and goes in the blink of an eye.

Fujimoto’s artwork is spare and not especially distinctive, though like this story, it’s surprisingly expressive. And the fact that one of the Six is a genuinely lovely, overweight girl earns about a hundred points from me.

Though the others of the Six are yet defined by fairly surface characteristics, I expect they’ll each find their moments in upcoming volumes of the series. I honestly can’t wait.

MICHELLE: Oh, I’m so glad you liked it! You mention several of the things I liked best, myself—the moment about Kuro’s hands and the overweight character who is not written off as “fat girl” and given no face or personality—and captured the appeal of the story well when you said that though the story isn’t new, something about the telling feels fresh. I do get the feeling each of the friends will receive more attention as we go along, but I like Mike a lot, so I hope we never stray too far from her perspective.

MJ: Yes, Mike is a lot of fun, and really it’s Fujimoto’s characterization of her that has me so looking forward to getting to know the other four kids. I have a lot of confidence that they’ll all be equally as special. Also, Mike and Kuro have such a sweet backstory, I feel certain we’ll see more of the bonds between the others as well.

So, what else have you got for us this week?

MICHELLE: I read the third and fourth volumes of Yana Toboso’s Black Butler. Despite some terrifically unfunny supporting characters, I’ve enjoyed this series from the beginning, but the third volume really takes things to a whole new level.

In this series, a thirteen-year-old named Ciel Phantomhive is the head of his family after a fire claimed the lives of his parents. To assist him in his plans for revenge he has entered into a contract with a devil who is serving him in the guise of his butler, Sebastian. The Earls of Phantomhive have always served as a “watch dog” for the crown, a duty Ciel is now expected to perform for Queen Victoria. When she sends him to London to find Jack the Ripper, he duly complies, not realizing someone from within his own family is involved.

There are probably a million historical inaccuracies in this setting, but I don’t care. I’m a sucker for Victorian England, and it’s simply a lot of fun watching Sebastian get into a fight with a chainsaw-wielding corrupt shinigami on a cobblestone street. Moreover, the change of scenery provides some respite from the entirely
incompetent servants at the Phantomhive manor.

They return in volume four, alas, along with a pretty self-proclaimed Indian prince with an impressive butler of his own. This time Ciel is in London to investigate assault crimes against Englishmen who’ve recently returned from India, but developments in the case somehow prompt the leads to contemplate entering a curry competition. I didn’t enjoy this volume as much as the third, but the emphasis on solving mysteries is pretty fun and Toboso’s art is very easy on the eyes.

MJ: I’m heartened a bit to hear your take on volume three, since I let this series go after the first two volumes which did very little for me. The third volume actually sounds like it might be genuinely fun. Maybe I’ll give it another look. Do you find yourself looking forward to the next volume?

MICHELLE: I do! In fact, I even pondered checking out the anime, which is a rare thing for me. If you’ve let the series lapse, I definitely recommend checking out at least volume three because it shows the potential of this series to become something genuinely fascinating.

MJ: I’m genuinely surprised to hear it!

MICHELLE: Now I’m genuinely hoping “fascinating” wasn’t an overstatement. I’ve at least become invested in a way I wasn’t before, which is really all one can ask for.

MJ: That’s good enough for me!

Join us again next week, when we’ll be discussing Karakuri Odette for a special MMF edition of Off the Shelf!

Great Graphic Novels for Teens 2011

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They just announced the results of one of my favorite awards programs, the Young Adult Library Services Association’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens list. Here’s the full roster. Here are the top ten from that pool.

The number of Japanese comics in the top ten has dropped from three last year to one this year (Hisae Iwaoka’s Saturn Apartments from Viz), and I suspect this is simply a reflection of the fact that the indigenous young-adult comic market seems to get stronger every year.

I’m very fond of a lot of the Japanese comics on the list: Natsume Ono’s House of Five Leaves and not simple, Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game, Yuki Midorikawa’s Natsume’s Book of Friends (all from Viz), and Nobuaki Tadano’s 7 Billion Needles and Kou Yaginuma’s Twin Spica (both from Vertical), and Kaoru Tada’s Itazura na Kiss (Digital Manga). I’ve also really enjoyed what I’ve read of JiUn Yun’s Time and Again (Yen Press), the only Korean title on the list.

Since I’m always looking for things that give a little structure to blogging, I think I’ll use the top ten list as an impetus. Just for fun, I think I’ll read and review everything on it that I haven’t already read and reviewed. Any suggestions as to where I should start?

And what are your thoughts on the list overall? Are you delighted by any particular inclusions or aghast at any omissions?

The Seinen Alphabet: X

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“X” is for…

xxxHOLic, written and illustrated by CLAMP, originally serialized in Kodansha’s Young, now wrapping up its run in Bessatsu Shonen Magazine, and published in English by Del Rey. It’s a fairly complicated series to describe, but it’s ultimately about a young man who can see troublesome spirits and falls into the circle of a gorgeous witch.

X-Western Flash, written and illustrated by Masashi Tanaka, serialized in Kodansha’s Afternoon and Morning, three volumes total. I can only guess what it’s about, but Tanaka created Gon (CMX), so how can you not at least be curious?

Xavier Yamada no Ai no Izumi, written and illustrated by Yamada Xavier, published in four volumes by Shueisha, though I’m not sure which magazine was home to it. Again, I have no clue what it’s about, but I liked the cover.

Xenos, written and illustrated by Mio Murao, originally serialized in Akita Shoten’s Young Champion, four volumes. It’s a mystery about a reporter whose wife disappears. Murao also did a four-volume sequel, Xenos 2: Room Share, for Young Champion.

What starts with “X” in your seinen alphabet?

Kamisama Kiss Giveaway

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To celebrate the upcoming (Next week! Are you ready and excited to talk about android girls?) Manga Moveable Feast for Julietta Suzuki’s Karakuri Odette, I’m giving away a copy of the first volume of her latest series, Kamisama Kiss. Just leave a comment in this post answering the question:

How would you force your hot fox-spirit familiar to bend to your will?

Snorgles? Bungee cord? Making an excellent moussaka? Leave your comment and I’ll select a random winner, to be announced at the close of the MMF.

Links instead of lists

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It’s a good thing that we use Midtown Comics for our Pick of the Week round robin, as the Diamond-focused ComicList is a barren wasteland this week.  So, instead, I will look back through my Twitter archives to point you at some fun and enlightening things to read online:

PotW Showdown: Cross Game vs. InuYasha

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David leads us off this week, in our second group Pick of the Week with the Manga Bookshelf gang & special guest Michelle Smith! This week comes down to a showdown between a new series and a long-running favorite. Who will come out on top?

From David: I’m very happy to go first this week, because I’m fairly sure I won’t be the only person to choose the second volume of Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game (Viz), and I don’t want to seem like a copycat. I was so pleasantly surprised by the first multi-volume collection, with its slice-of-life blend of comedy and drama. If the prospect of a story about sports (baseball, in this case) triggers your fight-or-flight instinct, and I would be very much in sympathy if it does, I urge you to try and suppress the response. Adachi is the real deal as a manga-ka: a versatile original who earns laughs and tears with equal facility and surprising subtlety. Come to think of it, I don’t care if I seem like a copycat. The more people who sing this book’s praises, the merrier. Looking at Cross Game‘s inclusion in Deb Aoki’s round-up of the Critics’ Choice: Best Manga of 2010, it seems like the merriment is off to a great start.

From MJ: I expect you’re right, David, though it won’t be me (only because I haven’t read the first volume!), and in fact, it’s a bit of a difficult week for me, with nothing from ComicList piquing my interest, though I did find an exciting item elsewhere. I took a peek at Comicopia’s list where they claim to be expecting the second volume of Yumemakura Baku and Jiro Taniguchi’s Summit of the Gods from Fanfare-Ponent Mon. The series’ first volume was stunningly beautiful, and despite the fact that it sometimes feels like an illustrated novel rather than a comic (I’ll point to Kate’s review for a thoughtful discussion of the series’ strengths and flaws), it’s definitely a must-read. This volume has been due out for quite a while, so I was surprised to see it on the list. I’ll definitely be looking to pick one up!

From Kate: Cross Game and Summit of the Gods are both on my must-read list, but I’m going with a sentimental favorite this week: InuYasha. The final volume — that’s number 56, for folks who are still keeping track after all these years — arrives in stores on Wednesday. After so many story arcs, villains, and recovered jewel shards, it will be interesting to see how Rumiko Takahashi brings the whole thing to a close. I suspect that many readers have expectations for how and with whom the characters ride off into the sunset, making it a sure bet that someone will be disappointed in the conclusion. (Look for a surge in InuYasha fan-fic in the coming weeks…) I’m confident, however, that Takahashi will deliver a satisfying finale. InuYasha gets kicked around a lot by manga cognescenti– “It’s not as good as Lum or Ranma or Maison Ikkoku,” they insist — but InuYasha represents Takahashi at the top of her game, not least for its terrific cast of characters. There are manga I like more than InuYasha, but there are few fictional characters — in comics, anyway — that have as strong a claim on my loyalty as InuYasha and Sango.

From Michelle: For me it’s a toss-up between Cross Game—the bittersweet first volume of which I truly loved—and the final volume of InuYasha, a series I’ve been following for years. Mitsuru Adachi versus Rumiko Takahashi… who will reign supreme? While I love both equally, I think in the end I’m also going to have to come down on the side of InuYasha. Like Kate, it’s the characters that have earned my loyalty here rather than ingenious plotting—indeed, the series is rather notoriously repetitive—but I am looking forward to the storyline actually coming to a point where the nefarious villain is finally unable to escape. Perhaps the best testament I can make in favor of this series is that, even though it’s 56 volumes long, I can still easily imagine the day when I will undertake a marathon reread and enjoy luxuriating in its comfy goodness.

Readers, what’s your Pick of the Week?

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Blue Spring

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As depicted in most shojo and shonen manga, the Japanese high school is the epitome of order, with students in neat, military-style uniforms diligently studying for exams, tidying up classrooms, staging plays, and participating in cultural festivals. Students who don’t fit into the school’s established pecking order — social, athletic, or academic — quickly find themselves ostracized by their peers for lack of purpose.

Taiyo Matsumoto, however, offers a very different image of the Japanese high school in his anthology Blue Spring. His subjects are the kids with “front teeth rotten from huffing thinner,” who “answer to reason with their fists and never question their excessive passions” — in short, the delinquents. Kitano High School, the milieu these kids inhabit, is a crumbling eyesore with graffiti-covered walls, trash-filled stairwells, and indifferent faculty. Students cut class and fill their after-school hours with girlie magazines, petty crime, and smack-talk at the local diner, marking time until they join the world of adult responsibility.

Gangs, bullies, disaffected teens playing at thug life — it’s familiar territory, yet in Matsumoto’s hands, these potentially cliche stories acquire a new and strange quality. Matsumoto eschews linear narrative in favor of digressions and fragments; as a result, we feel more like we’re living in the characters’ heads than reading a tidy account of their actions. Snatches of daydreams sometimes interrupt the narrative, as do jump cuts and surreal imagery: sharks and puffer fish drift past a classroom window where two teens make out, a UFO languishes above the school campus. Even the graffiti plays an integral part of Matsumoto’s storytelling; the walls are a paean to masturbation, booze, and suicide, cheerfully urging “No more political pacts—sex acts!”

One of the most arresting aspects of Blue Spring is Matsumoto’s ability to manipulate time. In one of the book’s most visually stunning sequences, for example, Matsumoto seamlessly blends two events — a baseball game and a mahjong game — into a single sequence:

Matsumoto makes it seem as if the gambler’s action precipitated the slide into second base. It’s an elegant visual trick that establishes the simultaneity of the two games while suggesting the intensity of the mahjong play; the discarding of a tile is portrayed with the same explosive energy as stealing a base.

Some of Matsumoto’s time-bending sequences are more cinematic, evoking the kind of split-screen technique popularized in the 1960s by filmmakers like John Frankenheimer and Richard Fleischer. The prologue, for example, contains a series of short, vertical strips in which we see unnamed teenagers preparing for a day at school. Matsumoto deliberates re-frames the activity in each panel, drawing back to show the full scene in some, and pulling in close to reveal the blankness of a characters’ face in another:


It’s an effective montage, largely for the way it juxtaposes the banal with the violent; the fist-fight is presented in the same, matter-of-fact fashion as the student eating breakfast, suggesting that conflict is as routine for some of Blue Spring‘s characters as catching the train to school. The transitions, too, are handled deftly; the eye can process these little vignettes in a sequence while the brain grasps the entire prologue as a simultaneous collage of events, a representative cross-section of high school students going about their business on a typical day.

Matsumoto’s stark, black-and-white imagery won’t be to every reader’s taste; I’d be the first admit that many of the kids in Blue Spring look older and wearier than Keith Richards, with their sunken eyes and rotten teeth. But the studied ugliness of the character designs and urban settings suits the material perfectly, hinting at the anger and emptiness of the characters’ lives. Matsumoto offers no easy answers for his characters’ behavior, nor any false hope that they will escape the lives of violence and despair that seem to be their destiny. Rather, he offers a frank, funny and often disturbing look at the years in which most of us were unformed lumps of clay — or, in Matsumoto’s memorable formulation, a time when most of us were blue: “No matter how passionate you were, no matter how much your blood boiled, I believe youth is a blue time. Blue — that indistinct blue that paints the town before the sun rises.”

This is an expanded version of a review that appeared at PopCultureShock on 4/30/07.

BLUE SPRING • BY TAIYO MATSUMOTO • VIZ • 216 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Blue Spring

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As depicted in most shojo and shonen manga, the Japanese high school is the epitome of order, with students in neat, military-style uniforms diligently studying for exams, tidying up classrooms, staging plays, and participating in cultural festivals. Students who don’t fit into the school’s established pecking order — social, athletic, or academic — quickly find themselves ostracized by their peers for lack of purpose.

Taiyo Matsumoto, however, offers a very different image of the Japanese high school in his anthology Blue Spring. His subjects are the kids with “front teeth rotten from huffing thinner,” who “answer to reason with their fists and never question their excessive passions” — in short, the delinquents. Kitano High School, the milieu these kids inhabit, is a crumbling eyesore with graffiti-covered walls, trash-filled stairwells, and indifferent faculty. Students cut class and fill their after-school hours with girlie magazines, petty crime, and smack-talk at the local diner, marking time until they join the world of adult responsibility.

Gangs, bullies, disaffected teens playing at thug life — it’s familiar territory, yet in Matsumoto’s hands, these potentially cliche stories acquire a new and strange quality. Matsumoto eschews linear narrative in favor of digressions and fragments; as a result, we feel more like we’re living in the characters’ heads than reading a tidy account of their actions. Snatches of daydreams sometimes interrupt the narrative, as do jump cuts and surreal imagery: sharks and puffer fish drift past a classroom window where two teens make out, a UFO languishes above the school campus. Even the graffiti plays an integral part of Matsumoto’s storytelling; the walls are a paean to masturbation, booze, and suicide, cheerfully urging “No more political pacts–sex acts!”

One of the most arresting aspects of Blue Spring is Matsumoto’s ability to manipulate time. In one of the book’s most visually stunning sequences, for example, Matsumoto seamlessly blends two events — a baseball game and a mahjong game — into a single sequence:

Matsumoto makes it seem as if the gambler’s action precipitated the slide into second base. It’s an elegant visual trick that establishes the simultaneity of the two games while suggesting the intensity of the mahjong play; the discarding of a tile is portrayed with the same explosive energy as stealing a base.

Some of Matsumoto’s time-bending sequences are more cinematic, evoking the kind of split-screen technique popularized in the 1960s by filmmakers like John Frankenheimer and Richard Fleischer. The prologue, for example, contains a series of short, vertical strips in which we see unnamed teenagers preparing for a day at school. Matsumoto deliberates re-frames the activity in each panel, drawing back to show the full scene in some, and pulling in close to reveal the blankness of a characters’ face in another:


It’s an effective montage, largely for the way it juxtaposes the banal with the violent; the fist-fight is presented in the same, matter-of-fact fashion as the student eating breakfast, suggesting that conflict is as routine for some of Blue Spring‘s characters as catching the train to school. The transitions, too, are handled deftly; the eye can process these little vignettes in a sequence while the brain grasps the entire prologue as a simultaneous collage of events, a representative cross-section of high school students going about their business on a typical day.

Matsumoto’s stark, black-and-white imagery won’t be to every reader’s taste; I’d be the first admit that many of the kids in Blue Spring look older and wearier than Keith Richards, with their sunken eyes and rotten teeth. But the studied ugliness of the character designs and urban settings suits the material perfectly, hinting at the anger and emptiness of the characters’ lives. Matsumoto offers no easy answers for his characters’ behavior, nor any false hope that they will escape the lives of violence and despair that seem to be their destiny. Rather, he offers a frank, funny and often disturbing look at the years in which most of us were unformed lumps of clay — or, in Matsumoto’s memorable formulation, a time when most of us were blue: “No matter how passionate you were, no matter how much your blood boiled, I believe youth is a blue time. Blue — that indistinct blue that paints the town before the sun rises.”

This is an expanded version of a review that appeared at PopCultureShock on 4/30/07.

BLUE SPRING • BY TAIYO MATSUMOTO • VIZ • 216 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)