Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews
These won’t be anything profound or particularly coherent, but I thought I’d at least check in, since I think there are at least a couple of people waiting to see what I think of Fruits Basket.
Last night I finished volume ten, and I’ve paused at this point
Um. Apparently this has temporarily become a music blog. Back to the usual manga-talk and self-important essays soon, but first:
Last night, one of my very favorite bands, Northampton’s own Winterpills had a cd release party for their third album, Central Chambers at the Iron Horse Music Hall. It’s always great to see Winterpills at the Iron Horse, because they are able to bring up all their musical pals and create a really rich and exciting show. Last night was no exception.
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Yesterday began on a pretty depressing note. Groggy and cranky after a night of poor sleep, I noticed, just as I was about to leave for work, a kitchen full of inky footprints (which led to inky footprints in the living room, where a very inky dog sat chewing on an ink pen). Long story short, I arrived at work very late with ink-covered hands, and the day went downhill from there. Everything changed, however, at the end of the day, and I spent the evening being reminded of two very important truths:
1. People are awesome. Waiting for me when I returned home from work was an unexpected package from the very wonderful Deanna Gauthier, who sent me her entire collection of Fruits Basket manga, and the anime series as well! Now, this is a person I’ve only interacted with online, and the only reason we know each other at all is because she went to graduate school with a mutual friend. She lives way out west, we’ve never met, and yet here she’s sent me this big box of manga that I otherwise would not have the opportunity to read anytime soon. Deanna, you are incredibly generous, and seriously awesome. Thank you so much.
2. Music is awesome. The planned awesomeness for the evening, and the reason why I have not yet dipped into that marvelous box of manga, was a trip to Boston to see British singer-songwriter Tom McRae at Berklee College of Music’s Cafe 939. I’ve been a fan for a while, but this was my first time hearing Tom play live (Paul had seen him once before). The evening was even better than I’d imagined.
Tom McRae is somewhat known back at home, I believe, but horribly under-appreciated over here, and though the cafe has a nice sound system, and is very well-run, I was depressed to see that he’s playing such small venues in this area, and that even this place was not full. When my husband found out I’d be blogging about this concert today, he said, “Beg. Please beg.” And so I will. Tom McCrae does not have nearly enough fans in this part of the world, so please, follow the jump and allow me to beg your attention.
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This morning, I read a post by a good friend of mine, sistermagpie, over at LiveJournal, in which she talked about some conversations she’d seen recently revolving around whether academic analysis could ruin a person’s enjoyment of fiction. The crux of her post was that she couldn’t imagine that analyzing a story could ruin her love of reading, and when I first read her argument, I was in complete agreement. Wouldn’t analysis simply deepen my love for something, by helping me to fully understand and appreciate the depth of the material? Then I remembered my state of mind when I left the commercial theater business, and my brain said, “Oooooooh, that’s right.”
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This volume finds Princess Kyoko and her bodyguards on the search for more of the god stones required to awaken Princess Ui from her sixteen-year sleep. After the first two stones are found in the possession of the leaders of the dragon and flower tribes, the hunt is on for the rest of the tribe leaders in the hope that each of them will have one of the powerful jewels, too.
Each new psychic or “Stranger” that Kyoko encounters has some silly obstacle to overcome before they can join up with her, like nearly being sold at auction or being tricked into relinquishing their god stone to a member of the demon tribe. These stories are painfully boring and have absolutely zero depth, especially the one in which the leader of the fish tribe tells her sibling, “It doesn’t matter if we are brother and sister… I love you!” Arina Tanemura, you’re no Kaori Yuki. Just don’t even try.
Kyoko’s also preoccupied by the fact that someone kissed her while she slept in the last volume, so there’s much tedious speculation over who it could’ve been. This combined with everything else results in a muddle so mind-numbingly bad that I very nearly awarded this volume a D. A sudden twist in the final chapters provides the bare minimum of interest to avoid that fate, but I still can’t recommend slogging through the rest of it to get there.
Review copy provided by the publisher. Review originally published at Manga Recon.
A cool side-effect of Saturday’s post, Why you should read NANA is that in checking out my site statistics, I noticed that it had been linked from this fantastic website, When Fangirls Attack (womenincomics.blogspot.com), which is a blog that simply posts links to “articles on gender in comics and comics fandom,” including specific manga editions. How I’ve missed out on this for so long, I have no idea, especially since, if my stats are anything to go by, everyone else is reading it. The upside, I suppose, is that I now have an endless archive of links to peruse at my leisure, most of which will probably be new to me. Hurray for women in comics!
Speaking of the NANA post, I’ve now added a blog category for persuasion posts (a term I started using when I realized I could no longer stomach the term “pimping”). I’ve posted three of these here so far, the one for NANA of course, along with Making the case for Banana Fish, and Why you should read xxxHolic. I have to say, I probably enjoyed writing these more than anything else I’ve ever posted here. If only people would pay me to push my favorite manga series on them, I could live a life of perfect bliss. Oh, cruel world!
Lunch is eaten. Now I must refill the wonderful water bottle our assistant production manager gave me last week for Boss’s Day (who even knew there was such a day?), and attempt to ignore my stuffy nose and aching head. Later!
It’s difficult for me to imagine that anyone really needs me to sell NANA to them but the truth is I will enjoy writing this, and if it encourages one or two more people to jump on the NANA bandwagon, that will thrill me.
NANA is the story of two young women, both named Nana, who meet on the train to Tokyo and, through a series of coincidences, end up becoming roommates in an old seventh-floor walkup. In many ways that apartment, number 707 (“Nana” in Japanese means “seven” by the way), is nearly as important a character as the two Nanas themselves.
Written and drawn by Ai Yazawa (author of Paradise Kiss, among others), NANA contains some of the most authentic human beings I have so far encountered in manga. Yazawa’s characters are rich and complex, each just a little bit (or more than a little bit) broken as most of us humans are, and because of this, their relationships with each other and their choices, both good and bad, feel so real, they could come straight out of the reader’s own life. It would be so easy for a story like this, which focuses mainly on relationships, to fall into soap opera-like melodrama but the intensely real characters save it from doing so, time and time again. This is especially surprising in a manga where a good portion of the characters are rock stars.
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From the back cover:
S-Class quests are so dangerous that one false move means certain death! Now loose cannon Natsu, rookie Lucy, and nearly powerless Happy have embarked on a stolen S-Class quest, setting out for the Demon Island. Can anyone stop them before they get themselves killed?
Review:
Sigh. Well, the resolution to the cliffhanger of Erza’s arrest was completely lame, as was the conclusion of her duel with Natsu. It felt like the mangaka suddenly lost interest in that plot line.
The S-Class quest wasn’t all that much better. I’m definitely not the ideal shounen audience, since I tend to get very annoyed with characters who do things they’re not supposed to and then get into perilous situations as a result. The lack of foresight also bothered me. It was bad enough Natsu hatched this hare-brained scheme, but Lucy continued to go along with it even after learning it would likely result in her expulsion from the guild she had been so desperate to join back in volume one. And evidently felt hardly a qualm about doing so!
Ultimately, their quest lead to various angsty revelations about Gray’s past which Mashima admitted including in an attempt to lure more female readers. About the only good thing in this volume was the introduction of a cool new guild member, Mystogan, whose power is to put everyone to sleep. Ironically, that was the one bit that didn’t have me yawning.
Zen has no memory of the last twenty years, and doesn’t much care. The back cover, with its line “he can’t remember if he’s a killer or a hero,” erroneously leads one to anticipate a story of an amnesiac’s quest for identity. In reality, Blank Slate is all about the action.
The story takes place in the country of Amata, which was invaded and conquered in a war two decades earlier. The occupying government honors justice and order and employs a fleet of bounty hunters to eradicate all manner of undesirables. Zen is a notorious criminal and has committed every kind of crime imaginable. His philosophy is, “I do whatever I want. If it gets in my way, I smash it.”
I had a really tough time getting into the first chapter. It’s the stand-alone tale of a bounty hunter sent to kill Zen who instead joins him on a murderous spree of destruction and ruin. It wasn’t the best introduction to the setting or characters, and I found it very dull. The real serialization of the story commences in chapter two, and the improvement is immediate. From this point, there is a continuous plot focusing on the tensions between the native Amatans and the occupying Galayans and featuring kidnappings, prison breaks, and lots of guns. It’s pretty interesting, and I was surprised by several twists in the story.
Aside from the abundant bishonen, there’s nothing stereotypically shojo about Blank Slate. Zen is as heartless as they come and kills casually. Most of his victims are aggressors or authority figures, but he’s not above threatening the life of a child who could expose his hiding place. His companions are more sympathetic, particularly Hakka, a righteous doctor who has fallen into evil to protect something important to him.
The art style is visually clean, a necessity in a title like this where the story is enough to be puzzling over. Most of the character designs aren’t anything special, but Zen is really quite spectacularly pretty. This isn’t achieved through any gimmick of flowing hair or sparkly eye but simply with a beautifully drawn facial structure that’s quite stunning. I’ve reviewed a lot of manga, and never before have I devoted three full sentences to how pretty some guy is. Trust me on this.
Blank Slate certainly isn’t the best thing I’ve ever read, but the story it’s spinning is entertaining enough that I will surely be returning for the second and final volume due out in December.
Review copy provided by the publisher. Review originally published at Manga Recon.
From the back cover:
When Mary Jago donates her bone marrow to help a complete stranger, the act bonds her with the young man who lives from her transfusion. He will change Mary’s life in ways she could never imagine.
But every act has consequences, often unforseen. Mary’s generosity returns her not only love, but also its opposite. She finds herself in danger from both the middle class world she belongs to and the world of the dispossessed and deranged.
Review:
The Keys to the Street follows several different characters. In addition to Mary Jago, there’s Roman (a middle-aged man who became a vagrant as a way to deal with personal tragedy), Bean (a spry, elderly dog-walker with an eye for opportunities to blackmail his clients), and Hob (a young drug addict who beats people up for cash). Each is interesting and complex in their own right (though Mary is annoyingly weak in dealing with her overbearing ex), and Rendell skillfully and gradually weaves their lives together in an intricate way.
Several homeless people have been killed in the London park that all these characters frequent, and information concerning the deaths and subsequent investigation is parcelled out as each person becomes aware of it. The mystery is never actually the driving focus of the story. There are also subplots concerning Mary’s budding relationship with the man who received her bone marrow and Roman’s gradual realization that he’s ready to rejoin the “respectable” world.
Rendell does a great job with all the characters and tidily wraps up all the plot threads in the novel’s conclusion. My very favorite thing, however, is how she gives readers all the clues they need to put things together for themselves. Rather than spell out the significance of a particular cardigan or a funeral, for example, she allows readers to work out the meaning on their own. I spent a while wondering what the deal was with Mary’s new fella, and it was while I was standing at the sink peeling potatoes that I realized that I had all the information I needed already.
Also, this is the kind of book one keeps thinking about even while peeling potatoes.
The Keys to the Street was a recommendation from Margaret, to whom I am grateful. She mentioned two other books by Rendell that are particular favorites, and I shall be reading those in the near future.
Note: Quite a lot of detail is given on the environs of London’s Regent’s Park and I found it helpful to consult a map. I’ve included the link here for any who might be interested.
I’ve been doing a lot of staring at the blank page lately, and it’s been apparent in this blog perhaps more than anywhere. I’ve been under an unprecedented amount of stress in both my personal and professional lives lately, and it’s definitely taking a toll on my productivity. This has led to such soul-soothing activities as media bingeing (lately that’s been NANA in all forms) and creating pointless blog pages with photographs of each of our pets (oldest-to-youngest): Dorrie, Lucy, and of course, Kino. I feel a lot of guilt, however, towards those of you who keep clicking over here in search of real content.
I may not be writing, but I have been reading a lot recently. I’ve started using Google Reader, which has made keeping up with my blogroll a lot easier. A few links to share: …
A quick question for those who read this blog via RSS feed. I currently have this set to show only a short preview of each entry on RSS feeds. I did this because originally the majority of those reading via RSS were on LiveJournal, and LJ users tend to prefer short entries with a cut on their friends pages, especially if the entry includes large images, which mine occasionally do. It was also a handy way to obscure spoilers from immediate public view. Now that this journal is mirrored on LiveJournal, however (allowing me to insert LJ cuts right into the entries), I think most LJ readers view it that way instead. So for the rest of you, which do you prefer on your RSS feeds, a preview or the full entry?
I’ve been a bit stressed and over-taxed lately, and I keep sitting down to try to write something vaguely intelligent about manga for this blog, but as I’ve been pretty wrapped up in Nana lately, everything seems to come out as, “Ode to Nobu.” Heh. This is why I don’t write reviews. I can write passionately about certain aspects of a manga, but I fail at well-rounded, critical writing.
In lieu of brilliant reviews or scintillating commentary, I instead offer up a photo of my husband’s (early) birthday present. It will slay you all with its cuteness and make you forget what this entry sorely lacks.
Her name is Kino.
This also does not amount to “scintillating commentary,” but I guess I will talk a moment about Tsubasa chapter 201 and xxxHolic chapter 167 since they are receiving a sound thrashing in most corners of the internet I frequent, and I’m a bit perplexed about that.
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A couple of months ago, I wrote up a little entry to discuss what I don’t like about yaoi, which turned out to be a great thing for me, bringing forth a whole slew of very nice folks with recommendations. I’ve found some titles I can enjoy in the genre, and made a few new friends, too! One odd side-effect, however, is that people have somehow gotten the idea that I’m a yaoi fan. Just this week, in fact, I’ve received two yaoi-related requests from readers passing through.
The first was a request from an author to review her yaoi e-book. Since I read a very small amount of yaoi, and rarely write proper reviews of anything, I have recommended that she may want to seek out a more suitable voice, though if she really wants me to do it, I’ll try. The second, was a request from a woman who is working on her Master’s thesis, asking me to link to a survey on yaoi, and to quote the following text:
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From the back cover:
Sweet 16-year-old Ann returns to rural Shimane from Tokyo for the summer, eager to reconnect with her boyfriend Daigo. But will the allure of their close friends—wealthy brother and sister Fuji and Shika—sunder the romantic ties that have bound Ann and Daigo since they were 12?
Review:
I didn’t like this volume quite as much as the first two because it was missing that special feeling of nostalgia. Instead, it focused mostly on relationship and family angst, which was entertaining in its way, but didn’t elicit the bittersweet vibe that usually elevates this title above its fellows.
There was more focus on the Tsukishima siblings in this volume, which was welcome, as both of them separately tried to break free of the stifling mold their family has imposed upon them. Ann and Daigo begin by being worried about the Tsukushima in their town, but it’s probably only a matter of time until things escalate. I’m not really looking forward to that happening, since it will cause so much pain all around, but it will undoubtedly be interesting.
I’m also looking forward to farther down the line chronologically; will the series depict Ann in her early twenties, and follow right up to where she is as the story begins? That would be really neat.
Although these chapters here were not the best, the cliffhanger ending was pretty cool and I’m definitely looking forward to volume 4.
