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BL Bookrack: Ten Count, Vols. 1-2

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MJ: Wow, it’s been… a long time hasn’t it, my friend?

MICHELLE: I am scared to even verify how long it has been. A couple of years, at least!

MJ: So what’s brought us here today is the boys’ love series Ten Count (volumes one and two ) by Rihito Takarai, published here by SuBLime. From what I understand, the series has reached five volumes (ongoing) in Japan. The third volume is due out from SuBLime next month.

MICHELLE: Would you like to start?

MJ: Sure!

Shirotani is a lifelong germaphobe, resigned to his condition, though it keeps him isolated from others. Fortunately, with the help of his understanding employer, he is able to tolerate his job as secretary to a corporate CEO. It is in the corporate line of duty, then, that he first meets Kurose, a therapist at a local mental health clinic. Kurose notices Shirotani’s condition immediately, and suggests he seek help, but though Shirotani is able to make his way to the clinic, he can’t bring himself to go inside. Acknowledging this difficulty, Kurose offers to help him in a non-clinical capacity, as a friend, an arrangement to which Shirotani eventually agrees. As Kurose slowly helps him accomplish progressively difficult tasks (touching a doorknob with his bare hand, buying a book from a bookstore), the two become close in ways that complicates their relationship and threatens the fragile boundaries between them.

Fans of BL manga don’t need me to explain what that means, or probably why my greatest fear with this series would be that the therapist/patient dynamic (even in the context of them being “friends”) would create a problematic imbalance of power. And it does, though not right away. Had I read only the first volume, this paragraph would be a very different one, gratefully dismissing my fears and filled with satisfied discussion of their slowly-evolving relationship and lots of talk about how that kind of careful development is so rare and wonderful in this genre. Had I read only the first volume, I would have declared a lot of love for this series. Unfortunately, Kurose’s careful handling of Shirotani is abandoned less than two chapters into the second volume, when after declaring his love for Shirotani, he mercilessly forces him into accepting sexual contact (against Shirotani’s clear protestations), which only escalates as the volume continues. In fact, Shirotani’s germaphobia makes the situation even more brutal, as Kurose is not only performing non-consensual sexual acts with Shirotani, but also blatantly ignoring Shirotani’s boundaries regarding skin-to-skin contact without any of the thoughtful consideration he promised as part of their initial arrangement. It’s obvious that the author intended the germaphobia as a metaphorical stand-in for the typical uke resistance so popular in BL, but instead it just feels like piling on.

MICHELLE: What I found most interesting to contemplate is that Kurose does, in fact, give Shirotani opportunity to object. He warns him that he’s going to attempt these kinds of things if they continue to see each other, and asks questions like, “Did you really not like what we did a moment ago?” Sometimes, Shirotani is able to give voice to his objections, but he also holds back his disgust, and I have to think that’s because he doesn’t want to drive Kurose, the only person to whom he has any kind of close relationship, away. How much, then, does Shirotani actually reciprocate and how much is he just desperate to keep Kurose in his life?

If I had faith that Takarai was wanting us to consider this question in a thoughtful way, I’d be fairly happy. But there are a few comments, mostly in bonus stories or author asides, that make me think she is setting up a dominant/submissive paradigm in which Kurose simply enjoys seeing Shirotani squirm, and that is very troubling indeed.

MJ: Yeah, you’re right—he often does ask Shirotani for permission to do something, or for confirmation that he’s enjoying himself, but those check-ins feel pretty empty, considering the fact that he generally moves on with what he’s doing without anything resembling actual enthusiastic consent. And if she’s trying to set up a dominant/submissive relationship, she’s doing it 50 Shades style, which only furthers my discomfort. Kurose’s behavior becomes increasingly controlling over the course of the second volume, by the end of which he has not only violated most of Shirotani’s personal and sexual boundaries, but also has begun infantilizing him to a truly creepy degree. Between declaring a preference for a “childlike” hairstyle and outright asking Shirotani to agree to be “dependent” on him, Kurose has basically given up any pretense of respect or even basic acknowledgement of Shirotani’s agency as an (older!!) adult man. It is a testament to the strength of the series’ first volume that I’m even still reading this thing. But I would be lying if I said that it hadn’t broken my heart.

I understand that rape fantasy is a thing, and that it’s in poor taste to judge other people (especially femme-identified people, who are this genre’s target audience) for such fantasies. And on some level, I even understand a bit why someone’s fantasy might include giving up control, though I’d probably understand that better if we lived in a world where acknowledgement of a woman’s control over her own body was not considered a radical political act. I also understand that it’s, at the very least, pointless to wish for a story to be a different one than what its author wants to tell. I know that I should simply accept that something is not for me and move on. But after a full volume of something that *seems* to be for me, that truth can be difficult to swallow.

MICHELLE: Another thing that strikes me about the questions Kurose poses is how detached and clinical they can seem, even after a sexual act. One example is, “Were you more concerned with the possibility that I found you unpleasant than whether or not you found the situation itself unpleasant?” Leaving aside the tacit admission that he knows Shirotani could’ve been finding the situation unpleasant, attempting to reassert the therapist/patient dynamic at such a moment is, well, kind of creepy.

I’m not ready to give up on the series yet. Like I said, I want to believe Takarai is trying to make a more subtle point here, but I just don’t know. If volume three is more of the same, it might be too much for me, too.

MJ: Upsides of this series that extend beyond its fairly awesome first volume include Shirotani’s sweet, understanding boss, whose constant mindfulness regarding Shirotani’s discomfort and physical boundaries paint a picture of a pretty awesome guy. Similarly, Shirotani’s acquaintance from his company’s sales department, Mikami, proves himself over and over to be a good friend and a stand-up guy. It’s a shame that these characters, who operate without personal motive and truly seem to have Shirotani’s best interests at heart aren’t the people he trusts most. I can’t help but think that if either of them knew what was going on, they’d be the first to jump to Shirotani’s defense and help him get the hell out of the abusive relationship he’s been lured into by Kurose.

MICHELLE: I liked them, too! I really wanted to believe that Shirotani was indeed able to make progress in his therapy with Mikami, as he initially claimed to do, though we later learn he was lying in hopes that he could resume seeing Kurose. Perhaps it was some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way. Like, he tried with Mikami, and had no success, and now he believes that Kurose is the key to moving forward, thus increasing his dependence. He is able to achieve some things for these people in his life, though, like when his desire to find a book to entertain his hospitalized boss results in a successful purchase at a bookstore.

Regarding Kurose and his motivations, do you think there’s still some reveal to come? When he has Shirotani write out the list of ten activities he feels aversion for, with ten being something he thinks he could never do, Shirotani leaves that one blank. Kurose refuses to divulge his reasons for helping Shirotani on his own time until Shirotani fills in that tenth item. Do we already know that it’s because he was falling in love? Or is it something like, “I’m secretly a major sadist”?

MJ: That’s a really good question! I feel like I have no idea. I mean, on one hand, things have gone so far at this point I’m sort of just expecting the usual “tortured uke” trope to continue from this point, with more and more uncomfortable sex scenes and less and less real storytelling. So I’m not as optimistic as I’d like. On one hand, the series obviously continues beyond this, but I wonder if it will continue to really explore and examine this relationship or whether it will just turn to side characters like so many deceivingly-long BL series do.

Your whole first paragraph, though, just reminds me how much I loved the first volume! Gah! I want to be optimistic!

MICHELLE: So do I, and part of me thinks there’s still room for something great to evolve from this. I’m thinking of Tomoko Yamashita’s marvelous The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window, actually, in which no sexual contact has occurred, but in which one lead (Hiyakawa) casually appropriates the body of the other (Mikado) in a way that alarms others but which the affected party chooses not to think too deeply about because with Hiyakawa around, he no longer feels alone or potentially crazy for his ability to see spirits. There are some definite parallels to Ten Count there, but Yamashita is more clearly going into a psychological direction with her story, whereas Takarai seems to be taking a more traditional, explicit route.

I will still read volume three, though. How about you?

MJ: I will probably give this series one more volume, yes, even though I don’t feel as optimistic as I wish I did. Also, I’ll second your shout-out to The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window, which manages to talk about consent more thoughtfully, despite its supernatural premise. In that series, there is at least another character screaming out, “THIS IS NOT OKAY” all the time, so that we’re aware that the author knows there is a problem. It makes all the difference in the world.

MICHELLE: Indeed it does.

MJ: Bottom line, though this series starts off as a thoughtful look at the slow development of a tricky but potentially important relationship between a lonely professional who becomes friendly with a younger mental health specialist, its second volume takes a dark turn, devolving into a tale of emotional abuse, sexual assault, and deeply broken trust. We’ll probably keep reading it, but buyer beware.

Fairy Tail, Vol. 32

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fairytail32Fairy Tail, Vol. 32 | by Hiro Mashima | Yen Press – The Grand Magic Games start in earnest with a game of “The Hidden” where the contestants must discern which of their opponents is real, in a way that makes me think Hiro Mashima was playing a bit of Assassin’s Creed at the time he wrote this story. Gray and Juvia try to win it for Fairy Tail, but the sinister Raven Tail marks them and constantly harasses them until they end the game at the bottom ranks.

From there, the tournament continues into regular combat with Fairy Tail doing their best but due to outside influence both Lucy and Jellal (who is disguised as Mystogan) lose their battles, ending with both their teams in dead last. It all ends, after some other battles from the different competing guilds, with Charle making a dire prediction for their future.

Where I enjoyed the last volume a lot more than I thought I would, this volume was a couple steps backward for me. The biggest problem is that we see exactly why tournament arcs are such a tiresome trope in action manga. It’s nothing but fights for several chapters as we get through all the non-Fairy Tail wizards. That’s not to say the fights aren’t interesting. In fact Mashima does mix things up by including other types of competition, and Lucy and Jellal’s fights are well done. In Jellal’s case it’s a matter of just being really funny, but Lucy’s fight is another matter.

While the outside interference and unfair methods practiced by Raven Tail during Lucy’s fight really make us hate them, I find that the fight falls flat because I am unable to suspend my disbelief that nobody would notice that Flare is threatening Bisca and Alzack’s kid to keep Lucy from fighting back. Are we seriously supposed to believe that these two don’t even bother looking at their kid from time to time? Even if they aren’t worried about her being kidnapped, being surrounded by friends and all, isn’t it common practice for parents to at least glance at their child every once in a while? I’m pretty sure that if I were a parent I would like to keep my child at least in my peripheral vision.

And if they were keeping her in their peripheral vision, how did they not notice the speck of bright red that suddenly appeared in the corner of their eyes! It’s all used to make Natsu look cool, which we’ve had more than enough of, when a different manga artist would have played how obvious the whole thing was as a laugh.

But the biggest problem with the volume is the stretch of individual fights right towards the end. We get the big game, we get Lucy’s fight, but then suddenly we get a bunch of characters fighting that we don’t care about. And while Jellal and Jura’s fight is great, we’ve still been fatigued on fights in general by the end and the volume itself doesn’t leave a good taste in our mouths. So as far as essential volumes of Fairy Tail go this one is not among them. There certainly are worse volumes out there but were I not an avid collector, as most manga fans are, I’d consider skipping this one.

A major problem this time around, even compared to last month’s volume, is the excessive fanservice. The fight with Lucy and Flare is impossible to take seriously solely because most of the panel layout seems to be to show off the assets of the fighters in the most erotic way possible. I don’t like to dismiss Lucy as the fanservice character, since she has had some great moments in the series, but her inclusion in the story is feeling more like she’s the one selling all the copies of this series to a target demographic of teenagers who haven’t figured out how to type the word “hentai” into google.

And yet, complain though I might, I do still enjoy this series. This just happens to be a volume that doesn’t have the useful distraction of good story or humor to distract from Mashima’s descent into complete ecchi artist.

Fairy Tail, Vol. 31

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fairytail31Fairy Tail, Vol. 31 | By Hiro Mashima | Kodansha Comics

After Lucy learns of her father’s fate, she and her friends return to Fairy Tail, where they discover that their seven year absence has put a significant gap between their powers and those of every other mage in the world. To make things worse, Fairy Tail is now the lowest ranking guild in the country. So they decide to enter a tournament to show off their stuff and rise back to the top. But they only have (insert time) to make up for seven years missed time.

Ever since the timeskip, I’ve been wondering why exactly Mashima felt the need to move his story seven years into the future. Fortunately this volume provides somewhat of an answer. What it allows Mashima to do is weaken his characters down from their excessively powerful levels and give them more of a challenge. I won’t say I like the development, but it does have a reason behind it beyond Mashima deciding to change things up on a whim.

This volume we’re introduced to two new Dragon Slayers, Sting and Rogue. For the most part they’re generic bad guys without being fully evil, but there’s something about their cats, Lecter and Froesch, that I just can’t stand. They just manage to have little to no character and yet the bits of character they do have is pure annoyance. And they haven’t even done much this volume!

Fairy Tail goes through phases, usually the beginning phase of an arc is pretty good and it’s not until later that the story starts to fall apart. So for what it’s worth, the story this volume is actually a lot of fun. ANd there are plenty of jokes that actually made me laugh, including a moment where Happy breaks the mood of a dramatic sequence in a way that actually works. It’s rare to see manga authors who know how to pull that kind of humor off so I have to give credit where it’s due.

Whatever you do, if you pick up this volume do not read it in a public place, because we not only get a beach scene, but a hot springs scene as well. If you don’t want people thinking you only read manga with lots of T&A then I recommend making this an “only in my room” reading.

While there are a couple concepts brought up that never see the light of day again I have to admit that I came away from this volume a lot more positive than I’ve been about past Fairy Tail volumes. For fans of the series this is definitely an enjoyable read, while new readers won’t find all that much besides a few jokes. If this was the first Fairy Tail volume you read and you laughed more than once, then I’d certainly recommend checking out earlier volumes.

Demon Love Spell Vol. 1

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I ended up liking Mayu Shinjo’s Ai Ore a bit more than I thought I would after reading the first omnibus volume. The second series settles in as more of a straightforward comedy series, without some of the problematic gender dynamics that were present in the earlier series. Still, Ai Ore didn’t inspire much rereading or long term affection from me. One of my problems was that the male lead of Ai Ore looked nothing like Sakuya from Sensual Phrase. Shinjo has a somewhat limited set of character designs, but when she does hit on a design she does execute it very well. I experienced far too much cognitive dissonance in Ai Ore expecting a Sakyua clone to pop up, only to be disappointed. Fortunately in Demon Love Spell, the demon in question looks like a typical Shinjo hero half of the time!

Miko is a shrine maiden (ha ha!) who isn’t very good at her job. She can’t sense the demons that she battles, so her technique is limited to chanting random spells and hoping that one of them works. She sees all the girls in her class crying over a faithless boy named Kagura. One of the victims jokes that Kagura has to be a demon because no human boy could go through women that fast. Miko makes up for her lack of skill with enthusiasm and she decides to rush off and exorcise the womanizer. Miko fins Kagura kissing yet another girl and starts lecturing him about the dangers of being possessed by an incubus who preys on the sexual desire of women. Kagura finds Miko extremely hilarious until she casts a spell on him and he actually disappears. Miko starts crying because she thinks that she accidentally killed someone when she hears an angry voice yelling at her from the vicinity of her shins, saying that it is impossible that someone like her could bind his powers.

Kagura wasn’t possessed by an incubus, he actually is one of the most powerful incubi around, and now he’s trapped as a powerless chibi version of himself only a few inches tall. Miko and Kagura end up developing a symbiotic relationship. When she’s in contact with him she can actually see the demons she wants to battle. If Miko gives Kagura a tiny amount of affection, his powers kick in and he’s able to help her. Kagura in appearance and demeanor is very much a typical Shinjo alpha male. He’s imperious and demanding, which doesn’t always play very well when he looks like a three inch tall cherub. One of the reasons why I wasn’t able to enjoy Ai Ore as much is that the relationship between the protagonists was a bit unbalanced. Even though this was deliberately done to contrast with the character’s outward appearances, Mizuki was too tremulous and Akira too demanding for me to really root for them as a couple. The personalities of the characters are much more balanced in Demon Love Spell. Miko might not be the best shrine maiden in the world, but she has no problem torturing Kaguya in his chibi form by dressing him up in clothes belonging to an old doll of hers. She decides to fasten Kaguya to a chain and hang him on her handbag to take him to school with her, and she starts lecturing him on proper behavior, saying “Bag mascots aren’t supposed to talk!”

Kaguya is still able to use manifest his regular form and power up when he visits Miko in her dreams, but she doesn’t remember anything the next morning. The incubus helps Miko fend off all the demons that are gathering around her, drawn by the fact that she managed to capture him. As the story develops, it seems like Kaguya is starting to feel genuine concern and affection for Miko. Or perhaps he’s just comfortable with the fact that he’s able to hang out in her cleavage when they enter battle together. Demon Love Spell was a fun comedic version of paranormal romance manga. While the comedy explored in Demon Love Spell is on a bit of a similar wavelength as Ai Ore, I found the characters much more interesting and sympathetic. I think readers who tried Ai Ore and didn’t care for it should give this series a try. I still tend to prefer Shinjo when she is in serious and dramatic soap-opera mode as seen in Sensual Phrase, but Demon Love Spell was quite enjoyable.

07 Ghost, Vol. 1

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07 Ghost, Vol. 1 by Yuki Amemiya and Yukino Ichihara

I’m always a little curious about license rescues, and I hadn’t read 07 Ghost when it was released earlier by GoComi. I was even more interested when I saw that in Japan the series ran in Monthly Comic Zero Sum, the same magazine that features Saiyuki Reload and Loveless. In manga genre terms, I suppose that 07 Ghost is josei, although it would be a bit hard to tell from the trade dressing that Viz provided, as it isn’t released under any of the Viz sub-imprints and it is labeled as being for teen readers. 07 Ghost is one of those titles that I can see appealing to a wide variety of readers, as it features a nice combination of world-building, a solid protagonist, magical battle scenes, and perky nuns.

Teito Klein is an orphan going to school in an militarized area. Teito and his fellow students are trained in a form of magical combat called Zaiphon, which uses hand gestures to evoke energy. Teito’s acerbic nature and favored status by one of his instructors ensures that he’s just about the least popular student at the Barsburg Military Academy, but he does have a best friend named Mikage whose sunny disposition contrasts with Teito’s more brooding personality. Teito is An Orphan With A Forgotten Past, and when he starts getting flashbacks to memories from his previous life he begins to think that Barsburg isn’t the right place for him anymore. He confronts Aya, who he suddenly remembers as having killed his father. Aya says that Teito is a “slave from Raggs” and puts him in chains. Teito manages a daring escape and winds up in District 7, the City of God. District 7 is filled with handsome priests and pretty but interchangeable nuns. Teito starts to adjust to a different way of life.

There’s a ton of plot explored in this first volume, but overall I thought that the pacing and world building aspects of 07 Ghost were handled very well. Teito’s journey serves as a way to introduce the tricky geopolitical issues of his world, and the fantasy and action aspects of the manga are visually striking. In District 7, the religious order believes in seven ghosts that serve as guardians against evil. The guardians are depicted as hooded figures with dramatic scythes inscribed with runes. When the unconventional priests battle their spells are also depicted as sweeping scythes that cut across the panels of the manga. This results in some action scenes that are a bit more pretty than coherent, but it was still not to hard to follow what was going on. A large cast of characters are introduced but aside from Teito and Mikage the most prominent person from District 7 is Frau, the cynical priest who rescues Teito and sticks around to make sarcastic comments and protect him occasionally. There’s a bit of a Saiyuki vibe with Frau and Teito’s relationship, which makes sense given the source magazine for the manga.

When I finished 07 Ghost I wanted to see what would happen next with Teito’s story. While Teito’s amnesias-orphan status isn’t particularly novel, I enjoyed seeing the world he lives in and it was fun to read a fast-paced fantasy manga. I feel like many of the series I’ve been reading recently develop much more slowly, so 07 Ghost‘s storytelling pace was a nice contrast. The attractive art, fighting priests, and hints of a larger magic/spiritual system to explore all have me looking forward to the next volume. I can see why Viz chose to put out this series again. It has plenty of commercial appeal, but is still quirky enough to be genuinely intriguing.

Review copy provided by the publisher

Give My Regards to Black Jack, Vols. 1-4

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Give My Regards to Black Jack Volumes 1-4 by Shuho Sato

I’m not sure if many people in the English language manga blogosphere have reviewed Give My Regards to Black Jack. I know Kate at Manga Critic covered the first couple volumes. Give My Regards to Black Jack is an interesting example of digital manga, as it is released directly in Kindle format. It is only $2.99 per volume, so it it is also one of the better bargains out there for digital manga. It is a bit ballsy to reference Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack in a modern medical procedural manga, and while there were aspects of the manga that I found very gripping, a story that took up volumes 3-4 made me question if I wanted to continue reading the series.

Saito is a just graduated medical intern, training to be a full-fledged doctor. He has a certain type of relentless optimism and a “can do” attitude that will be very familiar to anyone who has read manga before. Saito’s salary as an intern is so insignificant, he has to take on a night shift in the emergency room at a nearby hospital. Saito is entirely unprepared for the next phase of his life. He finds himself paired with an emergency room veteran for his first shift, and Dr. Ushida doesn’t have the time to babysit the new doctor when car accident victims start rolling in the hospital. Saito romantically assumes that the hospital is providing the best medical care for accident victims, but Ushida quickly disabuses him of the notion that altruism plays any part in what goes on in the hospital. They can bill more for traffic accident victims, so every patient experiencing severe trauma is actually a moneymaker. Saito is wondering if it is morally right to take the higher salary at his part-time job, but when he’s left alone to cover the emergency room he freezes instead of providing treatment because he has no experience doing major surgery. The head nurse has to call in the supervising physician.

The art in Give My Regards to Black Jack is workmanlike, but it doesn’t have that extra flair that would cause me to read the manga more for the art than the story. The accident victims and surgeries are quite detailed. Saito is portrayed as a wide-eyed innocent, while the other doctors sometimes look like detailed caricatures. Ushida looks rather horse-like, for example.

Give My Regards to Black Jack is a very didactic manga, as Saito’s adventures provide the author with plenty of opportunities to expound upon the problems with the Japanese National Health Care system, issues with medical billing, and problems with the hierarchical nature of intern training and hiring. These elements actually appealed to me a little more than Saito’s emotional struggles with becoming a new doctor, because I’m always a little fascinated at the way manga of this type will work random factoids into a larger story.

The second volume shows Saito rotating on to the cardiac care unit and struggling with a patient named Mr Miyamura whose physical condition makes it almost certain that he will not survive his scheduled surgery. The other doctors don’t believe in really giving the patient the full picture of what is going on, but Saito decides that he’s going to try to find a more qualified heart surgeon to treat his patient from outside his hospital, even if the result is political and professional suicide for himself. Saito is helped out by Ms Akagi, a cynical and world-weary nurse who just happens to know one of the best heart surgeons in Japan. Dr Kita is having his own crisis of faith as a surgeon, but meeting Saito causes him to take up the scalpel again.

The third volume opens with Saito dealing with political fallout from his actions, but he still has the time to check up on one of his colleagues who is thinking of dropping out of the program. Michiba’s grandfather is a neighborhood doctor, diagnosing colds and making a pittance of a salary. Michiba doesn’t want to end up like him. But Saito and Michiba see the impact an old-fashioned doctor can have when they go along on a house call to a live-long patient who is dying of terminal cancer.

The next story in this volume featured a situation that I had a great deal of difficulty connecting to as a reader. Saito is rotated on to neonatology, a placement that every intern before him has avoided. He’s assigned to care for premie twins whose parents refuse to bond with them over their fear that they will end up disabled. The father in particular just wants his sons to die, and since he’s a lawyer he is prepared to file suit if the hospital doesn’t withhold treatment from the babies. Give My Regards to Black Jack doesn’t hesitate to wallow in sentimentality but this was one situation where I thought the motivations of the parents wasn’t fully explored, and Saito’s reactions in pushing for the treatment of the infant to the extent where he was exploring parental rights and offering to raise the baby himself were so farfetched that they were unrealistic even for an overly sentimental medical procedural manga. While the reasons for the parents’ reactions were explored, it was really difficult for me to feel any sympathy for them whatsoever, so when the story wrapped up with a somewhat happy ending, it felt both unnecessary and in some ways unearned by the narrative.

This was my first experience buying manga for the Kindle app in my iPad, and it was a smooth reading experience. The pages turn with the orientation of a western book, but the manga itself was unflipped. $2.99 is a bargain for digital manga, and the medical procedural aspects of Give My Regards to Black Jack did appeal to me. I might give another couple volumes a try once Saito has rotated beyond neonatology to see if the rest of the series has more appeal than that particular storyline.

Romance Manga from jmanga.com: The London Game and Forbidden Love With a Prince

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I was hoping to kick off the new incarnation of Manga Report with a triumphant series of reviews this week. Unfortunately I have a horrible cold and am really only capable of communing with my roku box and knitting scarves. But! There is a certain type of manga that I can enjoy when I am too incoherent to actually follow a plot very well, and that is romance manga! Because the plots are so predictable that even someone loopy on cold medication can follow everything without getting lost and the art is often pretty enough to distract me from my kleenex-riddled misery. Romance manga from Ohzora are usually amusing, because they are very similar to Harlequin manga adaptations, but usually the art is much more consistent and well-executed. Both of these titles are available from jmanga.com.

The London Game by Harumo Sanazaki

The London Game

This is the story of Maximilian Rochefort, a commoner with an impressive fortune and equally impressive eyebrows, and Eleanor, the unmarried only princess of a tiny European country that has fallen on hard times. He proposes a game to her – she’ll convince him that the royal family is worth saving and he’ll rescue her. Maximilian and Eleanor knew each other briefly several years ago, and a party at a country house provides an opportunity for them to spend some more time together despite Maximilian’s antagonistic attitude. Unfortunately there are groups of other rich social climbers hanging around. Maximilian quickly determines that Eleanor’s country is basically auctioning her off to the highest bidder, and she’s utterly unaware of what is happening around her. Maximilian asks if she’s ever watched the news or read a tabloid and Eleanor says that her only reading material is “the front page of the Financial Times” because her father has always encouraged her to make appearances at charity functions instead of learning about current events. Maximilian yells “Are you an idiot?! It should be a crime to grow up this naive and unsullied! Think a little bit about who you are!” I found this scene very amusing, because all too often heroines in romance manga are idiots and no one calls them on it. Eleanor grows up a little bit and Maximilian stops acting aggressively petulant. Sanazaki’s art is detailed, lush, and a little bit stylized which is exactly the type of illustration I tend to look for from romance manga. I enjoyed the backup story about a vengeful ex-boyfriend “Flames of Love in the Aegean Sea” much less because it was a bit too rapey (in the old 1980s romance novel sort of way) for me.

Forbidden Love With a Prince by Rikako Tsuji

Forbidden Love With a Prince

This was a fun single volume story about an aspiring actress named Sherry who is studying in a tiny European country (there are so many of those in romance manga) when she has an encounter with a handsome yet slightly weird young man named Ernest at her part-time job working in a cafe. He tries a slightly cheesy pickup line on her and she dismisses him. They meet in a park and Ernest woos Sherry in the undercover way commonly practiced by princes of tiny European countries who don’t wish to reveal their royal natures to their crush objects. Ernest and Sherry’s dating activities include foiling bank robberies and accidentally getting handcuffed together. Sherry’s career begins to take off and Ernest vanishes from her life. When Prince Ernest attends Sherry’s new play, she finally realizes who he is. Sherry then has to make a decision – should she continue with her career or become a queen? Tsuji is very good at portraying facial expressions and body language, and it was particularly interesting to see the way Ernest is open and enthusiastic when he’s undercover and then turns much more stiff and formal when he’s in his role as a Prince. The story took up the whole volume of the manga, and I was amused to see that there were little touches with character introductions which highlighted the possibility of a number of spin-off stories featuring Ernest’s friends and relatives.

Romance manga might not be great literature, but it is the perfect thing sometimes when one wants to be diverted and distracted by the spectacle of pretty people falling in love. Both of these volumes are good examples of the genre, and I’m glad that Jmanga.com has stepped up to translate so much romance manga in recent months.

Electronic access provided by the publisher.

Strobe Edge Volume 1 by Io Sakisaka

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Strobe Edge Volume 1 by Io Sakisaka

I’m always curious when Shojo Beat announces a new title, and from the brief description I’d read of it Strobe Edge sounded appealing. While some of Shojo Beat’s recent offerings (Jiu Jiu and Devil and Her Love Song) have a bit of an edgy take on the genre, Strobe Edge is more of a straightforward high school love story.

Ninako is the heroine of Strobe Edge, and she is almost painfully naive. She blindly believes whatever salespeople tell her, and when she consults with her friends at school she allows their opinions to override her own feelings. She has a perpetually surprised look in the first chapter of the manga. As Ninako deals with her first romance, she begins to grow in awareness. All of Ninako’s friends expect that she’ll be going out with her childhood friend Daiki any day now. Daiki seems like a nice, boy-next door type who constantly finds excuses to check up on Ninako at school, unaware of the torrent of feminine gossip that he’ll unleash as soon as he disappears. Ninako cares for Daiki deeply, but she doesn’t even contemplate having any romantic feelings for Daiki until her friends tell her that she likes him. Ninako’s credulity is a bit hard to take, but Sakisaka manages to portray her personality as so fresh and innocent, I was willing to give it a pass in this first volume.

Ninako’s friend-determined destiny with Daiki is derailed when she keeps noticing the main crush object for all the girls, Ren Ichinose. Ren is cool and detached, so of course he’s the most popular boy in school. Ninako manages to have a conversation with Ren when he accidentally breaks her cellphone charm and then brings her a girly butterfly one as a replacement. She treasures it even though she’s not usually into super-feminine things. Daiki notices Ninako’s heightened interest in Ren and asks her if she’s a big fan of his, and she explains it by saying that she views him as if he was a model in a magazine, not someone she likes. But as Ninako keeps encountering Ren randomly on the subway back from school, she begins to see that he’s actually a very kind person instead of the aloof idol she envisioned. When she has a sprained ankle, he pretends to be asleep and deliberately misses his stop so he can walk her home. This is shoujo manga though, so of course there are plenty of additional complications for Ninako to deal with as she discovers her first love.

Sakisaka’s art is expressive and assured, and while I sometimes got a little tired of Ninako’s surprised face, she does certainly look like a sympathetic shoujo heroine. The character designes for the main and supporting cast are varied, making it easy to distinguish between all the characters. Sakisaka wrote at the begining of the volume that her goal in this manga was to capture “the sensation you feel in the window of time between one event and another,” and I think that Strobe Edge pulls it off. Ninako’s inner thoughts gradually become more self aware, and Sakisaka is very good at portraying the excitement and agony of accidentally sitting close to one’s crush object. One thing that I appreciated in Strobe Edge was that it was relatively angst free in terms of having evil protagonists. Daiki starts acting a bit erratic, but both he and Ren seem like basically good people. Even though Ninako’s friends have been pushing their own ideas of what her first relationship should be, when she makes a decision they are generally supportive. Reading a manga with basically nice characters just seems relaxing and refreshing at this point. Of course this is a 10 volume series, so I’m expecting an evil male model or an evil secret fiance to show up at some point. For now though, I’m going to be checking out this series with the hope that Ninako’s journey to self-awareness continues.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Adventures in the Key of Shoujo: Sailor Moon, Vol.1

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Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Vol. 1 | By Naoko Takeuchi | Published by Kodansha Comics USA | Rated: T, Ages 13+

“I’m… the pretty guardian in a sailor suit! Guardian of love and justice! Sailor Moon!”

Working on a simple premise… (Follow my logic, would you?) If you took a squad of girls, magical powers, tokusatsu-style fighting, and a viciously unassuming story arc and threw them into a blender, what would you get? My-Hime, that’s what. But before My-Hime—before all that—there was Sailor Moon, an archetypal series that influenced the entire genre of magical girls within manga and anime. To this day, Fred Patten states that it introduced the idea of the magical girl team into the medium’s subconscious. The brainchild of artist Naoko Takeuchi, the sheer weight of its importance leans heavily on everything that came after it.

Simply put, the Great Ruler of the Dark Kingdom wants energy leeched from humans and the Legendary Silver Crystal that goes with it. With that, they can rule the world. All that stands between them and success is a small, black cat called Luna (who can talk and has a mark on her head in the shape of a crescent moon) and a team of fourteen-year-old girls who wear exaggerated versions of Japanese school sailor outfits and have magical powers, and whose code names are taken from the names of the planets in the solar system. Leading the team is a complete klutz named Usagi Tsukino who takes on the persona of Sailor Moon. Also into the mix goes Tuxedo Mask, a young man who dresses in a gentleman’s evening attire and wears (you guessed it) a mask. He likes to help Sailor Moon, but he has his own reasons as well. The girls are soldiers (or senshi) in a war against the enemies of love, truth and justice. And so the board is set, the players are moving, and the game can begin.

So why has it taken this long to write the review, seeing as I received the manga over two weeks ago? I think it’s the awe in which the series is held. Sailor Moon has a fanbase that rivals even Dragonball or Evangelion. Dragonball is an interesting title to compare, in terms of its Western audience. For the most part, the perception is that Dragonball found a large male audience and Sailor Moon, a large female audience. I say “perception” because market analysis can only tell you so much. But it’s unfair to label Sailor Moon as Dragonball for girls, as I once did. The two series are worlds apart in their execution, tone and setting. Yet, I cannot discount the idea that each gender can find something in both stories that resonates with them.

My failing was that I decided that girls could like Dragonball but boys couldn’t like Sailor Moon, because there was nothing there for them to latch onto. I think what set me on that foolish path was the God-awful treatment that Sailor Moon received at the hands of DIC Entertainment when the animated version of the story came to European English-speaking shores. DIC made it sound like the most girly of enterprises (something no self-respecting angsty teenager would be caught dead liking), where the girls were all airheads and the villains were dead simple. The show was never going to attract a boy who had grown up with He-Man. It was not going to happen for me. And so, I ignored it.

But the fanbase, as I’ve said, is relentless. Every time you look at cosplayers, someone is dressed as Sailor Moon. So I would speak with people who talked about the story as if it was manna from Heaven. They ranged from cosplayers who said the series was their gateway into anime, to those who had been reading the manga since the 1990s TOKYOPOP editions. Interestingly, the anime breaking into North America is credited by many as the event that destroyed the grip the male, 15-25 demographic had on driving anime sales in America since the 1980s. Today, the market leans more heavily toward female fans than male fans of anime, manga, and J-Culture, so it’s a testament to the series that it had and still has that effect on the fans.

Still, I’m confused about Sailor Moon. Mostly because I cannot figure out where Takeuchi is going with it in this first volume, or indeed if she’s got some kind of plan going even here in the opening act. On the surface, Usagi is a airhead more concerned with being a girly girl, hanging out with her friends, and playing video games at the local arcade than entertaining the notion that she should be doing anything to save the world. Even when she accepts being Sailor Moon, she still doesn’t want to be put into scary situations by Luna. It makes for a nice intro to the character for whom we will ostensibly be rooting for the next however many volumes. The spoken-diary entries that Usagi has are something to behold. She tells us every single time a new chapter starts who she is, where she is from, what recently happened, and what is happening now. I know that this is because of the fact that Sailor Moon was serialized in Nakayoshi Magazine—to keep new readers in the loop, Takeuchi wrote those in—but the aftereffect is that Usagi comes across as even more bubbly, and this is a good thing.

The tone of the fight that the Sailors are in and the opposition that the author sets is one of innocence that can only be derived from a teenager’s perspective. When I was 14, the people who had it in for me in school wanted to beat me up and throw water over me, but they didn’t want me dead. For all the Dark Kingdom’s mwah-ha-ha-ha and general evilness, I cannot take them seriously. They are defeated by a dunderhead every single time. Then the dunderhead gets her own team of crack commandos and the bad guys get trounced, again and again, by a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who only got their powers recently. Even when they are vanquished, the villains treat it like “Bah! Another setback!”

Some people would argue that Sailor Moon has a lot of evidence of plot conveniences for the sake of convenience; I counter the argument because the same evidence is rather exculpatory in nature. To explain, while I want to say that the whole “You are destined to become a team of magical fighting girls!” thing is a little too convenient, the truth is that’s how all good quest stories start and since I don’t really have a problem with them, I don’t have a really big problem with Sailor Moon doing it, either. So the girls are destined to be a team of superheroes not because they were destined to be so, but because Luna had been keeping an eye on all of them. The same can be said for the items that the senshi use to defeat the forces of darkness. Usagi, we have established, plays video games at the arcade. She gets prizes every time she gets a high score. These items look very suspicious and don’t look like the usual tat, if you get my meaning. However, throughout this smoke-and-mirrors routine I can see a kind of epic gathering of heroes (the girls being recruited) and figures of cruelty and infamy (Dark Kingdom’s minions) moving around and cannot wait to see what happens next.

Artwork-wise, I cannot say enough good things about it. From Usagi’s transformation sequence to Luna’s little interstitial at the start of one of the chapters telling us who’s in the team, its biographical details and any allies and enemies, the art is really sweet and genuine to look at. Graceful and elegant, it still has its quick thumbnail drawings of our heroes and heroines to speed us through a page. There are real examples in the pages that Takeuchi is using mise-en-scène* to build a colorful and coherent stage that her actors are moving around. The whirling fog that surrounds our heroes when the enemy has the upper hand or when the senshi reveal to the villain (and, by extension, the audience) their power and become light-filled are but two such examples. The moments of tranquility when Tuxedo Mask dances with and around Sailor Moon are wonderful. Even as a battle-hardened, knowledgeable young man of 30, I can understand the feeling of falling for someone and feeling like the whole world stopped for that moment. Takeuchi gives her leads a distinctive look and you’d never confuse one Sailor Senshi for another, even in their uniforms. Plus, she never makes the fact that they dress in sailor outfits into something crass. With the supporting cast it’s a little more difficult to keep an eye on who’s who but I don’t mind that so much at this point, as they don’t contribute much.

It’s interesting, both in terms of storytelling and, of course, artwork, to see the different types of girls who get recruited into being Sailor Senshi become staples of magical girl stereotypes. There’s the ditzy girl, the smart girl, and the girl who works at the shrine. I don’t doubt that I’ll see even more types emerge as the series goes on. While Sailor Moon didn’t invent these types for the most part, it perfected them. The chief bad guys are also designed this way: they have been around before but never in this context and setting. The more I reread this volume, the more I wonder if I’ve been wrong about a great number of shows and manga that I’ve passed by simply by having a prejudiced opinion. As an aside, the translation by William Flanagan is spot-on and I’m, as always, grateful for the liner notes at the back to make sense of the nuances within Japanese culture.

Ultimately, Sailor Moon works because you get swept up by the story. The idea of battling evil-doers over rooftops or in exotic locations with brave allies and with nothing more than the power you have inside of you is something we know from when we were little and read fairy tales. Later we dismiss such stories as mere whimsy. Usagi and her friends are living in a fairy tale and I can and will wholeheartedly continue to embrace this whimsy for as long as it lasts.

* Mise-en-scène is a French term which literally means “placing on stage” and refers to the art of placing elements (actors, props, sets, lighting) in front of the viewer in order to immerse them in the story. Where the actors are placed within a scene and how they move in the scene are also elements within mise-en-scène.

Review copy bought by reviewer

Black Jack, Vols. 12-13

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In the mold of Kate and David’s recent co-review of Salvatore, Kate takes the lead along with David and MJ, in a collaborative look at Tezuka’s Black Jack.

Black Jack, Vols. 12-13 | By Osamu Tezuka | Published by Vertical, Inc. | Buy at Amazon

KATE: One of the things that strikes me most about Black Jack is its consistency: every volume has one or two dud stories, but on the whole, the series is uniformly good, even when Tezuka is essentially repeating himself with a theme-and-variation on an earlier plot. If you were going to point to one story in volumes twelve or thirteen as an example of what Tezuka does best, what would it be and why?

DAVID: While I agree that it’s a consistently entertaining series, I do have a clear favorite from these two volumes. It’s “A Night in a Cottage” from the 13th volume. Black Jack is out driving on a lonesome road at night, and he meets a very pregnant woman who’s harboring a great deal of emotional pain. There are some great twists in this story, which I won’t spoil, but what I like best about it is how Tezuka constructs things so that Black Jack’s mythology is stripped away. The woman knows nothing about Black Jack’s notoriety, so he can abandon some of his public posture, and readers can see what parts of his personality endure when he isn’t playing for an audience. It’s really written well, and it’s kind of a gift for fans of the character.

MJ: I don’t know if I can say that this story is what Tezuka does best, because it feels a little atypical for the series, but I’d say my favorite here is “The Pirate’s Arm.” It’s the story of a student gymnast whose arm develops gangrene. Black Jack must amputate the arm, but he replaces it with a prosthetic that appears to have the ability to talk. Frequently, the series’ more heartwarming stories aren’t necessarily its best, but this one really works for me. It’s surprisingly subtle, with a real payoff in the end.

DAVID: I liked that one a lot, partly because I could imagine it providing inspiration to future mangaka.

KATE: Both of those stories were on my short list, too, though my favorite was “Wildcat Boy,” from volume 12. It’s no secret that Tezuka loved the movies, and “Wildcat” is a thoughtful tribute to two cinema legends: Francois Truffaut and Satyajit Ray. As one might guess from the title, the story features a patient who was raised by ocelots — at least, that’s what I think they are — and views human beings with suspicion. You don’t need to know anything about “The Wild Child” or “The World of Apu,” however, to appreciate the story, as it’s a compelling, if slightly ham-fisted, meditation on that age-old question: is civilization really man’s natural state? Like many “Black Jack” stories, the final twist reveals Jack to be wiser and more attuned to the natural world than his money-grubbing might suggest.

So far, we’ve focused on specific stories we liked. Were there any stories in volumes 12 or 13 that you felt didn’t work? If so, why?

MJ: I really liked that story too, Kate. And if it’s ham-fisted, I think it might be necessarily so. Though I think we three tend to appreciate subtlety a great deal, I suspect Tezuka knew his readers well.

As for stories that don’t work well here, the first that jumps to mind for me is “A Challenge of the Third Kind,” in which Black Jack is summoned to operate on an alien. While the concept is not so far out of line with the leaps of logic the series establishes as standard, there’s a line crossed here somewhere that strains that standard to the point of exasperation. Even as a gag manga, I had difficulty enjoying that story, and I’m a pretty generous reader when it comes to this kind of fantasy.

DAVID: As for low points in these two volumes, I’d pick “Looking Good” from volume 12. For me, a good Black Jack story must include one of these three things: sufficiently gruesome medical content; an emotionally compelling patient; or creepy Pinoko antics. “Looking Good” had none of these things, and, beyond that, it didn’t really have much in the way of internal logic.

It’s about a thug who’s running a protection racket on local school festivals, which is potentially hilarious, whether you like school festivals in manga or not. (I’m very much in the pro-festival camp, though that doesn’t mean I don’t relish them when they go very wrong.) It seems like the story never quite came together on basic terms, nor did it live up to its goofy potential.

KATE: I’m with MJ: I find Tezuka’s forays into science fiction and the supernatural kind of clumsy. I can believe that Black Jack would operate on himself in the Australian outback or perform a full-body skin graft because both acts are proof of his surgical mojo. But when it involves aliens or ghosts? Too gimmicky for me; those stories suggest a “very special Halloween edition of House, MD” or a Scooby Doo episode. (Just add meddling kids and stir!)

“The Cursed Operation,” which appears in volume 13, is a good example of what I mean. After a mummy arrives at a hospital for x-rays, strange things start to happen. Jack scoffs at the doctors and nurses who refuse to carry out their duties, declaring his intent to clear the hospital’s surgical backlog by operating on several patients at once. Strike one: the spooky happenings are neither scary nor funny. Strike two: Tezuka has already used the “operating on a bunch of people at once” plot in earlier volumes. Strike three: Tezuka tries to freshen up the “operating on a bunch of people at once” plot by including the ancient mummy as a patient. As a result, the story feels perfunctory; it’s the kind of story that Tezuka could produce on autopilot, and it shows; there’s nothing remotely surprising or interesting about the outcome.

Shifting gears a bit, I wanted to ask you about the art. Do you have a favorite scene or character from volumes 12 and 13? What makes it work for you?

DAVID: I was very taken with “Death of an Actress” in volume 13. The character design is delightful, and I always love Tezuka’s way of rendering a beautiful woman. I enjoy that because that beauty is very much in Tezuka’s unique style. If you held these beauties up against more conventional renderings of that kind of woman, they wouldn’t stand a chance, but within this context, it conveys. I also love the Hollywood glamor of the story, the fading glory, and the cruel, showbiz cynicism that comes across very efficiently. It’s not the flashiest piece in either volume, but I thought the drawings worked really well with the content.

MJ: David, I agree very much with what you say here about the way Tezuka draws a beautiful woman. I think I have a special fondness for his rendering, maybe because it’s unconventional.

That said, I do have a favorite scene of my own. It’s from the story you mention earlier, David, “Night Cottage.” There’s a wordless page near the end, when Black Jack is waking up in the cottage that is just so expressive. The morning sun pushing through the trees, Black Jack’s moment of panic when he realizes his companion is gone–I think it’s a beautifully crafted scene. Also, I especially enjoy the character of Black Jack when he’s *not* in control, so this brief, silent moment is one I like a great deal.

KATE: For me, it’s all about the character designs. Tezuka is often accused of being too “cartoony” (whatever that means), but in Black Jack, his flair for physical exaggeration works exceptionally well. Tezuka is able to pack a tremendous amount of information into his character designs, which allows him to jump into each story with a minimum of exposition. Going back to “Wildcat Boy,” for example, we almost don’t need to be told that Apu has been raised by wild animals; it’s evident in the way Tezuka draws Apu’s hands, which look more like claws than fingers, and Apu’s teeth, which are sharp and pointed. Even as Black Jack attempts to “civilize” Apu, the boy never loses his feral appearance; in a nice touch, he arches his back and hisses.

MJ: I think it’s true that Tezuka’s style is “cartoony,” but I also don’t think of that as a negative. The ability to evoke a fully-realized character using broad strokes is part of his genius, as far as I’m concerned. It’s depressing to me that this something people cite as a problem with his work.

DAVID: Speaking of character design, I’m compelled to mention something I always mention when I write about this series: Pinoko. I love her. She’s so creepy and sad, yet strangely cute. If I had to vote for my favorite kid sidekick of all time, she’d win by a mile, because she’s so very, very wrong on so many levels.

MJ: Oh, I so agree, David. I think we’re reminded of that especially here in “Teratoid Cystoma, Part 2,” in which Black Jack is asked to operate on a cystoma similar (but not quite similar enough) to Pinoko in her original form. I’m struck here by how much she’s treated like a child, and maybe even how much she acts like one, in a story that serves as such a clear reminder of her origins.

KATE: Even though I’m firmly in the anti-Pinoko camp, I also found “Teratoid Cystoma, Part 2” quite moving. Pinoko’s desire to have a friend (or “brother,” as she says) who shares the same history is surprisingly touching; it underscores just how unnatural and isolating her situation is, and how misunderstood she feels. Jack’s reaction, too, is oddly affecting; though he balks at playing Pinoko’s father, his desire to protect her from disappointment is evident in the delicate (and somewhat deceptive) way he tries to manage her expectations about the operation.

So what I guess I’m saying is that “Teratoid Cystoma, Part 2” might be on my short list of great Black Jack stories, even though I’m not a Pinoko fan.

And is it just me, or does Pinoko sound oddly like Sean Connery in the English translation?

DAVID: I can honestly say I’ve never made the Connery connection.

KATE: Itsssh those schlurry “ess” sounds that irresistibly reminds me of Connery.

MJ: I can definitely see the Connery connection, though I think in my head she’s a bit more… Cindy Brady. Probably Connery is preferable. :D

DAVID: I’m entirely behind the Cindy Brady comparison. They both seem to not be quite human and make me uneasy.

KATE: As our heated debate over Pinoko suggests, Black Jack really belongs to the world of pop culture more than many of Tezuka’s other mature works. There’s a pulpy, operatic quality to the stories in Black Jack that reminds me of my favorite television shows, and I get the feeling that’s exactly what Tezuka intended. I love his more self-consciously literary works, too, but Black Jack is probably his most entertaining series, and the easiest to recommend to civilians and continuity freaks, as anyone — and I mean anyone — could pick up either volume 12 or 13, read a story, and get the gist of the series.

Images Copyright © Tezuka Productions. Translation Coypright © Vertical Inc.

Chi’s Sweet Home, Vols. 1-2

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Chi’s Sweet Home, Vols. 1-2 | By Konami Kanata | Published by Vertical, Inc. – Chi’s Sweet Home is the very sweet story of a lost kitten who is rescued by a family whose apartment building does not allow pets. Originally serialized in Kodansha’s seinen magazine, Morning, it is endlessly cute and monumentally charming. What’s immediately striking about the series, however, is how much more it is than just a “very sweet story.”

Even from the very beginning, there is a darker side to this tale. Chi spends nearly half of the first volume trying to get back to her mother, while her tiny kitten memories slip away, bit by bit. Though she eventually settles in happily with her new family, her first days with them are mainly spent in panic, a truth of which they are entirely unaware.

This is a recurring theme throughout the first volume of the series, not Chi missing her mother, per se, but the lack of effective communication between humans and cats. In volume two, this is taken a step further, when Chi meets an older neighborhood cat who warns her not to trust humans too much.

“And what does ‘twust’ mean?” Chi asks.

“To think they’re your kind. Cuz they aren’t your kind,” the cat replies. “I scratch their backs, they scratch mine.”

Not that this cynical tone reflects the author’s intent. It’s made clear throughout that whatever lack of understanding may exist between Chi and her human family, the love is real, and certainly Chi’s innocent acceptance of her humans’ love and care makes her a much happier kitty than her jaded counterpart appears to be. But what’s also clear is just how vulnerable cats are to the whims and choices of their human caretakers, who may not know or care how well they are serving the needs of their feline houseguests.

As a long-time cat owner, mangaka Konami Kanata hits upon one of my greatest worries over the years–that, thanks to the communication barrier, my pet may be unhappy or even ill without my knowledge. Kanata’s message is a reassuring one. Though this may indeed be true, she says, speaking through Chi’s innocent, wide eyes, it’ll all be okay as long as there’s love.

This gentle touch is just what the doctor ordered for overly-anxious adult readers, but it also serves as a real teaching tool for new cat owners, especially the very young. A child reading Chi may even find herself schooling her parents on “what kitty really wants.”

And children will read Chi’s Sweet Home. Published by Vertical “flipped” left-to-right and in full color, Chi’s Sweet Home is the family-friendly manga we’ve all be waiting for. Its tiny feline protagonist is uniquely poised to appeal to readers of all ages, and even very young readers will find its image-heavy narrative easy to follow. Kanata’s simple, expressive art tells her story so clearly, it’s a series most of us could probably follow even if Vertical had printed it in the original Japanese.

That said, I’m glad they didn’t, because their adaptation is truly dear. Though Chi’s cartoonish, childlike speech (based by Kanata on Tweety from Looney Toons fame, according to translator Ed Chavez) might have easily come off as cloying or contrived, alongside Kanata’s jubilant artwork, it’s just plain cute. The language is clear and true to its characters, both human and cat. From translation to paper quality, these books were obviously produced with care. Each volume is a delectable treat for the senses. All warm ambers and sweet pastels, Kanata’s artwork dances brightly over crisp, white pages, within a soft, matte cover that is even pleasant to the touch.

At the heart of it all, though, is Chi. She’s feisty, sweet, surprisingly poignant, and possibly the very key we’ve all been looking for to help bring manga into non-otaku western households. On Christmas morning this year, my family’s getting Chi’s Sweet Home. How about yours?

Review copies provided by the publisher

Antique Bakery, Vols. 1-4

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Antique Bakery, Vols. 1-4 | By Fumi Yoshinaga | Published by Digital Manga Publishing | Rated YA (16+)

As I begin this article, I find myself struck by the impossibility of saying anything about Antique Bakery that hasn’t already been said.

Undoubtedly Fumi Yoshinaga’s most celebrated work, at least on this side of the Pacific, this story of four men working in a western-style patisserie in Tokyo first hit US shelves in 2005, three years after completing its original run in Japan’s Wings magazine. The series is a Kodansha Manga Award-winner, a 2007 Eisner nominee, and entirely deserving of both.

Yoshinaga utilizes all her greatest strengths in this manga, rich characterization, rambling dialogue, and a deep love of food. The descriptions of the bakery’s various specialties is enough to make any pastry-lover swoon (enhanced by DMP’s scratch ‘n’ sniff covers). Her gift for gab brings this corner of Tokyo alive–especially the bakery’s customers, who wander in from all walks of life. Where Yoshinaga really outdoes herself, however, is with her delightful quartet of male leads.

The first volume begins with introductions, though it jumps around quite a bit in the story’s timeline. We meet a teenaged schoolboy who confesses his love to a male classmate, only to be brutally rejected; a similarly-aged schoolgirl who admires a braver girl from afar; a brilliant young boxer whose career has abruptly ended due to a physical defect; and a weary salaryman who finds an evening’s solace in the works of J.S. Bach and a shortcake from the department store bakery.

These disparate characters are finally brought together at the bakery “Antique.” Two of them are customers (the schoolgirl and the salaryman) who find their way to their neighborhood’s new bakery with a mixture of surprise and delight.

The others are inhabitants of the bakery itself. Yusuke Ono, the boy whose heart was crushed so cruelly in junior high, is the bakery’s genius pastry chef. The boy who rejected him, Keiichiro Tachibana, is its owner. And the boxer, Eiji Kanda, is Ono’s promising apprentice.

As the series goes on, each of these characters’ histories is further revealed, including their relationships to each other and the journeys that led them to the Antique. Ono’s story is told first, which, despite its rather dramatic beginning, is by far the least tragic. As it happens, his devastation over Tachibana’s rejection serves as a springboard to a new life of self-awareness and sexual freedom that takes him to Paris and back again.

Kanda’s tale is much sadder, though his love for sweets has at least given him a chance at a new career. Tachibana’s journey, however, is both somewhat tragic and opaque, its path forever altered by his childhood experience as a kidnapping victim.

The bakery’s fourth personality, Chikage Kobayakawa, Tachibana’s childhood friend and bodyguard, is not introduced until the second volume, and though his status as a bumbling hulk might normally doom him to a role of perpetual comic relief, he is actually one of the most poignant characters of the bunch.

Though much of the series maintains a slice-of-life sensibility, chronicling daily business at the bakery, broken up by various events and small personal dramas, the series’ final volume takes a more dramatic turn, as a new rash of child kidnappings commands Tachibana’s involvement.

Though this is undeniably the most plot-driven section of the series by far, it is still heavily rooted in characterization, as its main purpose is to reveal more about Tachibana’s motivations and to move him along to the next stage of his life. While this shift in tone seems rather sudden, it provides some unexpected momentum for the series’ final volume, while uncovering much substance within Tachibana, ultimately to great effect. It’s quite telling that the cover art for the fourth volume is the only one in the series to portray just one character.

Praising this series may be easy, but categorizing it is not. Western readers frequently classify it as yaoi, but that label seems woefully insufficient and even misleading. Though its cast certainly contains gay characters (more who actually identify as gay, frankly, than most yaoi I’ve personally read), romance is minimal and hardly the point.

This is not coy, homoerotic fantasy, nor is it anything approaching pornography. And, “Yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi” (No climax, no point, no meaning)? Utterly inappropriate when applied to this series.

This is not a negative statement about yaoi, by the way. I’m a fan, after all. This series just seems so far removed from anything in that genre, that calling it “yaoi” makes as much sense to me as categorizing Detroit Metal City with NANA because they’ve both got characters in bands. From the evidence I’ve seen (including the stack of BL manga sitting here in front of me), yaoi sits squarely in the romance genre. Antique Bakery simply does not.

What Antique Bakery has going for it is an impressively rich cast of major and minor characters, both gay and straight, male and female, upon which it places a lens much broader than can reasonably be allowed by romance. Its strength is its lack of any particular focus, unless you count a delightful obsession with sweets.

Lack of focus, however, does not constitute a lack of specifics. Each of the characters is fully-formed, regardless of what else is going on–even the ones who appear for only a chapter or two. And the series’ main characters are beautifully fleshed-out, even those with the most comedic roles.

Yoshinaga’s artwork is as unique and expressive as usual, though she makes particularly strong use of wordless panels in this series. The nearly three full wordless pages devoted to Tachibana’s reaction to his own cruelty to Ono (from a flashback in volume four) are some of the most affecting in the series.

However you choose to classify it, one thing is clear. Like the many cakes and pastries described within its pages, Antique Bakery is a delight few can resist.

Ooku, Vols. 1-3

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Ooku, Vols. 1-3 | By Fumi Yoshinaga | Published by Viz Media | Rated M (Mature)

In this alternate history of Edo-period Japan, an incurable disease has wiped out much of the nation’s male population, leaving women to take up traditional men’s roles, including that of shogun.

As this series is structured, its first volume begins eighty years after the disease’s initial outbreak, at which point the male population has declined by 75% and women have become firmly fixed in their new roles. The second and third volumes then return to the beginning of the outbreak, which finds the nation in a panic–desperate to maintain male rule, even to the point of delusion, if that is what is required.

This structural choice is, frankly, brilliant. By removing any real question about the outcome of events that occur during the second and third volumes, Yoshinaga allows herself (and the reader) to focus on the process, which really shows her off to her greatest advantage. Though the universe is dense and the language even more so (needlessly, to some extent, thanks to an unfortunate choice in its English adaptation), this arrangement allows for a great deal of slow, masterful character development and an emphasis on human relationships and the psychology of political theory.

The story revolves around the workings of the Ooku, the harem of Edo Castle, in which the shogun’s wife, servants, and concubines reside. Traditionally inhabited by thousands of women, this number is shown to have been shifted to men in the first volume of this series, each bound into service of the shogun–an especially decadent arrangement in a nation with a male-female ratio of 1:4.

Though each of the series’ first three volumes focuses heavily on the lives of young men entering the Ooku (some of whom are there of their own free will, others… not so much) the overarching story is that of the evolution of a powerful female shogunate.

Volume one, the story of Mizuno, whose understated appearance catches the eye of the new, no-nonsense shogun, exhibits a rather fascinating society in which this is already firmly in place. Yet it is even more compelling to watch this society emerge, slowly and painfully, from its deep, patriarchal roots over the course of the following volumes.

It is here that Yoshinaga displays a new talent for creating cold, self-serving, and even cruel characters who are complex enough to be, not just interesting, but actually relatable. And she does it just about as far out of her comfort zone as possible.

There is nothing warm or quirky about Ooku. Life inside the shogun’s chambers is nowhere near casual or even remotely lighthearted. Even Yoshinaga’s earlier stabs at period pieces (such as Gerard & Jacques or Garden Dreams) are inappropriate for comparison, so great is the difference in weight and complexity.

With the preservation of the Tokugawa shogunate as paramount within the Inner Chambers, even the nation’s appalling health crisis can be seen in a positive light, so long as it weakens families that might otherwise represent a threat to the current government. When impoverished farmers must abandon their fields to dodge tithes they can no longer afford, make a law that binds them to the land for life. Should famine strike, offer several days of free gruel, not with the purpose of relieving hunger, but to quell the seeds of rebellion. Above all, nothing is more important than producing appropriate progeny to keep the Tokugawa family safely in power.

This is the world of the shogunate, illustrated here without nostalgia or apology, yet populated with characters Yoshinaga is able to make her readers care about and occasionally even like.

The greatest downside to this series is its English adaptation which, in an effort to create formal-sounding speech, utilizes an awkward, quasi-17th-century style (referred to among critics as “Fakespeare”).

Though I personally was able to acclimate just a few pages in, even for me this has the disadvantage of dampening what is typically my greatest joy in Yoshinaga’s writing–her glorious abundance of dialogue. As a result, though Yoshinaga is as talky as ever, much of her delightful spark is gone.

While this may be an inevitability in such a politically dense story, the characters’ stilted manner of speech makes it difficult to know for sure. That said, there is not a single moment in this series so far that has not engaged me fully–quite a feat under the circumstances.

On the other hand, Yoshinaga’s artwork is more stunning than ever, employing a level of detail in costuming and background unusual for her work, yet retaining the elegant simplicity characteristic of her clean, expressive style. Her visual storytelling here is sophisticated and straightforward, with restrained panel layouts that suit the period and setting.

As a fan of Fumi Yoshinaga, josei manga, and the Viz Signature imprint, there is no question that a series like this, even just in theory, is a very exciting work. Fortunately, this truth extends beyond the theoretical and into the actual. Ooku is beautiful, engaging, and a very exciting work indeed. It is also challenging and ambitious enough to garner some real respect for josei manga in western fandom at last. And for that, I’m truly grateful.

Review copies provided by the publisher.

Garden Dreams

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Garden Dreams | By Fumi Yoshinaga | Published by Digital Manga Publishing | Rated T (Teens 13+)

Garden Dreams tells the story of Farhad, a young boy orphaned by the Crusades, who is rescued from the desert by Saud, one of his own people who has lost his family as well. The two make a living as traveling musicians, which eventually brings them to the estate of a foreign baron.

This visit will transform both of their lives, reuniting Saud with a loved one he thought long gone and providing Farhad with a new family and a place to call home.

Though Farhad’s story is the thread holding this manga together, the volume is actually a series of short tales, including a substantial look into the baron’s tragic past. This structure reads like a bit of a tease, with everything folding into a story-within-the-story by the end.

Though this isn’t exactly a bad thing, it does create a sense of distance between the reader and the characters unusual in Yoshinaga’s work. Absent is the intimacy offered up by series like Flower of Life, Antique Bakery, or Ichigemne…, replaced instead by the detached feel of an external narrator.

With this in mind, it’s no surprise that Yoshinaga’s normally chatty dialogue is subdued here as well, though this may be due to the period setting as much as anything else. Her style shines best with casual conversation, and there is little of that in this volume. That said, each of the stories has a classic, fairy-tale quality that is a pleasure in itself. There’s no lack of touching moments here, either, beginning from the manga’s opening pages.

Perhaps the most moving of these tales is the least like a proper story at all. In the volume’s final chapter, a letter is received from the baron’s adopted daughter, who earlier in the book had fled into the night with Farhad’s “brother” Saud. Weary of his inability to accept loss, the baron asks Farhad to commit suicide with him. Though this may sound horrid to the extreme, it’s actually quite poignant and so delicately drawn, it actually brought tears to my eyes.

Yoshinaga’s artwork brings out the best in these stories, which might otherwise fade quickly from memory. Her use of panel layouts to convey emotion in these particularly reserved characters is, frankly, quite stunning. Though I might miss the easy expressiveness of her talky, modern-day tales, it is a pleasure to watch the way in which she is able to bring forward strong feeling using other means.

Garden Dreams is by no means Yoshinaga’s best work, but its quiet meandering displays some true charms of its own.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

All My Darling Daughters

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All My Darling Daughters | By Fumi Yoshinaga | Published by Viz Media | Rated T+ (Older Teen)

Yukiko, nearly thirty and still living at home, is shocked when her widowed mother announces her sudden marriage to a young actor she met at a host club. Suspicious and resentful, Yukiko struggles to hold on to her place in her mother’s life as her entire world shifts around her.

Through a series of interconnected short stories, mangaka Fumi Yoshinaga explores the lives of Yukiko, her friends, her mother, and her grandmother, and how they all relate to one another. Though the stories extend to women in various circumstances–planning their careers as young girls, seeking a husband through arranged marriage, even carrying on an affair with a college professor–what most strikes a personal chord with me is Yoshinaga’s reflections on mothers and daughters as portrayed within three generations of Yukiko’s own family.

The first story begins with a short scene between a teenaged Yukiko and her mother, in which her mother, Mari, rails at her for slovenly habits and general lack of consideration. When Yukiko protests, “You’re just taking your frustration out on me!” her mother replies, “You’re right. That’s exactly what I’m doing! And what’s wrong with that? Parents are human. Sometimes they have bad moods!” Though the truth of that is not something Yukiko wants to hear, when all is said and done, she comes to the realization that all her mother really wants is to be served a cup of tea.

What’s so effective about this scene, is that despite being told from Yukiko’s point of view, Yoshinaga easily reveals the frustrations and vulnerabilities of both characters, as well as their core affection for each other.

Later, when Mari’s new husband, Ohashi, moves in, all of these vulnerabilities become even more prominent, as Yukiko stubbornly refuses to like him (which even she can admit is out of pure resentment). This story’s final image, after Yukiko has announced that she will move in with her coworker boyfriend, is a beautiful representation of the relationship between mother and daughter and all the complexity that entails.

Near the end of the volume, Yukiko gains further insight into her mother’s character through some conversation with both her grandmother and her new, young stepfather. What she discovers, of course, is the terrifying truth behind all parenting, which is that the greatest damage is often inflicted with the best intentions.

Having recently discussed another story of mothers and daughters, Kim Dong Hwa’s The Color of… trilogy, I’m struck by the contrast in how they are portrayed. That these stories are very different is certainly to be expected. After all, Kim’s story is set at least a hundred years earlier in an entirely different culture. What’s a bit stunning, however, is how much of this is due to simply to a difference in perspective.

While Kim views the relationship between mother and daughter from the outside, through a lens of reverent nostalgia, Yoshinaga explores the same relationship from a place of intimate understanding. Without the veil of nostalgia as an obstacle, Yoshinaga is able to create fully-realized characters who exist together, not just as mother and daughter, but also as roommates, friends, enemies, nagging burdens, and pillars of support. Though so much of their complicated relationship remains unspoken, it is all there–some lurking just beneath the dialogue, and even more within Yoshinaga’s spare, expressive artwork.

Perhaps it isn’t fair to expect such deep insight into the mother-daughter relationship from a male writer, but I’ll admit it is the lack of complexity in Kim’s portrayal that keeps me from enjoying his series as much as I might. If nothing else, this highlights what makes Yoshinaga’s work so strong, and prompts me to hope that she’ll continue to write more stories about women.

Though I’ve spent most of my time here focusing on the overarching story of Yukiko and Mari, the volume’s other stories are effective as well, particularly one that traces the path of one of Mari’s junior high friends from her youthful ambitions to the adult life she ultimately settles for.

Only one story feels slightly out of place–that of a college professor friend of Ohashi’s who finds himself wrapped up in a relationship with a masochistic student–mainly because it is the only story in the book not told from the perspective of a female character. Yet even this manages to fall into place by the end, as Yoshinaga muses on the value of imperfection and personal idiosyncrasy.

To say that this manga speaks to me on a very personal level seems like a fairly obvious understatement, but I’ll say it anyway. All My Darling Daughters is a must-read for grown-up women everywhere.

Images © Fumi Yoshinaga. Review copy provided by the publisher.