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The Saga of Tanya the Evil: Plus Ultra

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By Carlo Zen and Shinobu Shinotsuki. Released in Japan by Enterbrain. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Emily Balistrieri.

So in the afterword to the second volume of Tanya the Evil, the author talks about how much his editors and readers want to see more of the guys in the cast rather than Tanya herself, and how he is adamant about keeping Tanya front and center. And I get that, he’s correct as far as it goes. But I also understand the feelings of the others, because too much Tanya, particularly when we’re smiling and nodding along with her point of view, is not only overpowering but actively harmful to a degree. The Saga of Tanya the Evil works best when it shows us the disconnect between what Tanya is thinking and what the rest of the cast thinks she is thinking, and there are several very amusing moments here where we see that. But it’s not nearly as many as the first book, and pure, unfiltered Tanya, which we get here for long stretches at a time, risks the reader coming over to her point of view. Which is not, I suspect, what the author is going for.

The title is, as are all the titles in this series, Latin, and means “further beyond”. It’s also the national motto of Spain, one of the few countries in Europe that doesn’t have an equivalent here. The “plot” of the second volume reads almost like a book of short stories, and those who expect to see more of Tanya vs. Being X beyond her constant grousing are going to be disappointed. Instead, Tanya and her unit perform like the A-Team, dropping into war zones and magically coming out successful even when they’re unaware of it. We hit the Tanya equivalents of Romania, Norway, and France here, and also take a little bit of time to perform a few wartime atrocities. There are occasional flashforwards to reporters discussing these events as history, and it’s made pretty clear that history is not going to be happy with Tanya’s actions. It’s also made pretty clear the Empire is not going to be on the winning side when the war eventually ends. Now that we’re getting England… sorry, The Commonwealth into it, who knows where the books will take us next?

But again, as I said, there’s a whole lot of Tanya point of view in this book’s 7,963 pages. (That’s a slight exaggeration, but is is punishingly long. Readers may feel better knowing that, although all Tanya volumes are long, none in the future are QUITE as long as this one.) There are a few exceptions – we’re introduced to a new recruit whose job is to boggle in horror at war and Tanya (possibly not in that order), and we also meet a man who looks like he’s being set up as a major antagonist, Anson Sue (whose daughter, god help us, is named Mary Sue)… except he’s promptly killed off without Tanya even knowing who he is, so the whole thing ends up being anticlimactic. We occasionally see some of the Empire higher-ups, or a brief POV of the other side. Even Visha gets very little to do in this book besides be Tanya’s adjutant. The readers want more of the other characters because it provides some balance and different coloring. All Tanya is like eating potatoes every day.

I’m still not ready to drop this series, which is odd given “this is too dark” is the main reason I tend to drop light novels these days. I think Tanya’s odd historical and military tone works in its favor – the book may be filled with ludicrous amounts of discussion of ammo, shells, and the rules of war, but its dry tone sets it at a remove from the actions it describes. And I can’t deny that I find Tanya fascinating, and I’m still not sure how much the author wants us to like her. If you enjoyed the anime (which I admittedly haven’t seen), I can only imagine this is a must buy, as there’s lots of stuff that must have been cut to ribbons in adaptation. As for me, I will read on, but I can’t deny that at the end of the day one word comes to mind reading The Saga of Tanya the Evil: Exhausting.

Laid-Back Camp, Vol. 1

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By Afro. Released in Japan as “Yurukyan △” by Houbunsha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Manga Time Kirara Forward. Released in North America by Yen Press. Translated by Amber Tamosaitis.

Reading this and trying to review it right after New Game! is going to be a challenge. Even though the two series are not all that similar in premise or characterization, they both share that sort of “let’s watch girls do things in a relaxed way” vibe that so many other Kirara titles have. New Game! was about office work and video games, and Laid-Back Camp is about camping. We see a group of four girls with a shared interest, and watch them talk about that interest. The interesting thing is that for most of the cast, talking is what they’re content to do. Another interesting thing is that the cast are for the most part kept separate for most of the book – Rin is a hardcore camper, but camps when and where she does to avoid people. Unfortunately for her, she’s now met Nadeshiko, and so there will be cute interactions in the future. But I was pretty impressed at how long Rin held out.

Give how one of my first exposures to this sort of title was K-On, it’s difficult not to map out Laid-Back Camp’s cast onto the high school band series – only Ritsu is missing here. Rin is one of our heroines, serious about camping and quite good at it. She accidentally runs into Nadeshiko, who is ditzy and flakey but impossible to dislike, and finds that she loves camping as well. Though Rin does not realize it (as Nadeshiko acts years younger than her actual age), they attend the same school, and said school has an Outdoor Exploration Club. With two members. And its room is a supply closet that’s been repurposed. Yes, it’s another club on the verge of failure. Aoi and Chiaki are the members of this club, but to be honest we don’t really get to know them too deeply in this book, which is concerned with Nadeshiko slowly dragging Rin into their inner circle through the power of being a shiny ball of cute.

As you might imagine, the manga is as laid back as its title suggests. There are many shots of the cast (well, mostly Rin) sitting back and looking at lovely scenery. As an advertisement for camping, it’s not bad. There’s also discussion of tents and sleeping bags, and sometimes this feels more like an educational guidebook. I was also very fond of the relationship between Rin and her friend Saitou, which felt very realistic and also very amusing – I loved their text argument. This also allows the series to have a cast member who’s not into camping, which is nice. With all that, the drawback is that the whole volume feels like it’s setting things in place, and two of the four cast members don’t get much to do. This isn’t a series that you’ll be able to tell if it’s a keeper or not with the first volume. That said, I enjoyed myself enough that I’ll pick up Vol. 2. If you want girls relaxing at campsites, Laid-Back Camp lives up to its name.

Durarara!!, Vol. 9

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By Ryohgo Narita and Suzuhito Yasuda. Released in Japan by ASCII Mediaworks. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Stephen Paul.

I may have mentioned in previous books that I don’t like Orihara Izaya, who is as close as DRRR!! gets to a main antagonist. At this point, I should be writing “Admittedly, he’s not meant to be likeable”, but this is the 9th DRRR!! novel, the first anime had already aired, and Narita is well aware that his fanbase consists of a whooooooooole lot of Shizaya fans. As such, this book is an attempt to give Izaya the closest thing he can get to a sympathetic backstory, as well as flesh out his relationship with Shinra. It’s more successful in the second than the first, in my opinion. Izaya at one point thinks of himself as Shinra as complete opposites, and I can see why. Izaya proclaims he loves all humanity (except Shizuo), but this all-encompassing love does not extend itself to individual humans per se. As for Shinra, he only loves one non-human, and has no use for anyone else. If you like deeply broken twisted viewpoints, Narita is here for you.

The cover features a heaping help of Oriharas, as we also see Izaya’s twin sisters, who provide fanservice for the cover (well, Kururi does), and also have the largest role they’ve had in the books since their debut. We get their origin, so to speak, which (unsurprisingly) turns out to be related to Izaya making a cruel and nasty comment. That said, I was far more amused seeing the two of them flirt with Aoba. Aoba’s function in the story so far has been to sort of be an Izaya-lite, leading Mikado into a path towards darkness. But, as he finds, he’s rather crap at being Izaya (who he dislikes anyway), and Mikado is able to walk the dark path without any help from him. As such, it’s much more fun seeing him as an average high school freshman dealing with two girls coming on far too strong for him. He’s living every teenage boy’s dream, but somehow is more unnerved than anything else.

Mikado is actually absent from this book for the most part, though the ending suggests that this will change for Book 10. The main plot is Izaya supposedly getting kidnapped and worked over by an underground gambling ring led by a sadistic woman named Earthworm. If you read that sentence and thought “yeah right, like Izaya would be kidnapped and worked over”, you’re wrong and yet correct, in that he proves to be in total control the entire time. His hot pot partygoers have also turned into his own personal goon squad, either beating people with martial arts, breaking their digits with hammers, or just using Saika to take possession of them – no, not Anri, but another Saika user we’ve seen before. Add in a group fronting illegal drugs, and you’ve got the usual recipe for DRRR!! chaos.

That said, for all that Izaya fans will love this, this volume felt like one of those that is marking time. This is not at all uncommon with DRRR!!, and frustrated anime fans as well, as it can sometimes take a while for all the plot hammers to fire. Still, I’m sure we’re introduced to some nice payoffs down the road here. As for me? It was a good book, but needed less Izaya being Izaya.

Perfect World, Vol. 1

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By Rie Aruga. Released in Japan by Kodansha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Kiss. Released in North America digitally by Kodansha Comics. Translated by Rachel Murakawa.

We’ve been getting a giant pile of digital-only titles for the last several months, and it can be very difficult to keep up. But the benefit is that we’re getting titles that would not normally get the time of day over here. A good example is this manga which runs in Kodansha’s josei magazine Kiss, involving a young woman who runs into her old high school crush, who’s now in a wheelchair after an accident. Five years ago this is probably the sort of title that I would be tweeting about and saying “see, this sort of thing is what they should be putting out!”. And now they are. And for the most part it’s a good decision, as this is an excellent, thoughtful and romantic manga. The female lead is perhaps a bit too idealized, but when you’re writing a josei romance for young woman about the same age as the heroine, you’re going to accept that.

Kawana is an aspiring interior decorator. One day at a business lunch she runs into Ayukawa, who is an architect from the firm they’re doing business with. He was her old high school crush, and a fantastic basketball player. Much to her surprise, he’s now in a wheelchair. As they begin to work together on projects and reconnect, she starts to realize the problems that need to be overcome for Ayukawa in day-to-day life, as well as the casual denial of ease of access that a lot of other folks who use wheelchairs have. The other problem is that she’s falling for him all over again, and while he’s nice and pleasant enough he’s putting up quite a wall preventing things from going any further, telling her one or two things about his life now (such as incontinence) that might make her pull back. I’m not even sure he does this consciously. But, of course, she is made of sterner stuff.

As I noted above, Kawana is a sweet and likeable heroine, but I sometimes found her going a bit above and beyond – after seeing Ayukawa and his ex-girlfriend have a bittersweet discussion about her upcoming wedding to someone else, she immediately whisks him off to the wedding anyway, because he needs closure. I don’t doubt he does, but this felt a bit rude. For the most part, though, the manga does an excellent job of balancing out the cute romance between the two leads and showing the daily life of a paraplegic, with all the difficulty that this entails, including a higher risk of kidney issues, and bedsores that you don’t notice until they get infected. We also see them interacting with a teenager, who was also a basketball player who now has to be in a wheelchair (and who also has a nice, patient girlfriend) so that Ayukawa can show off a wheelchair basketball league and tell the teen (and the reader) that there is still fun to be had.

The book had a larger number of endnotes to it, with more explanation of things that “manga fans” would already know. I suspect Kodansha knows this might sell well to an outside audience who doesn’t normally read manga. I agree. It’s not perfect, but I am absolutely ready to read more about this world.

Skip Beat, Vol. 40 by Yoshiki Nakamura

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Skip Beat Volume 40 by Yoshiki Nakamura

The cover of this volume made me happy, because it has been a little while since Kyoko and Moko were hanging out together! As a consequence this volume is decidedly light on Ren, but as always there are trade-offs and compromises in both life and manga. Skip Beat is such a long-running series that is so well-done that even when plot elements are used over and over again I find myself looking forward to what new spin Nakamura will put on the situation. When I realized that there would be a big audition coming up, I was curious to see how Kyoko would handle it with all the progress she’s been making to become more sure of herself and her acting.

Kyoko and Moko are up for a part in a ninja-related series, so there’s an impressive training montage where they have to visit a master of stage fighting and learn all the technique they need to be believable on the screen. The drama about the audition is amped up even more when Kyoko learns that she’s competing for the part against one of Ren’s former co-stars. An additional element of mystery is layered on with the return of Koenji, who has a psychosomatic illness after being in a bad accident. Kyoko heads into auditions with Ren’s manager on her side as well. Nakamura does a great job setting up a variety of story elements with a new beginning, making Skip Beat! still feel fresh 40 volumes in.

I Saved Too Many Girls and Caused the Apocalypse, Vol. 7

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By Namekojirushi and Nao Watanuki. Released in Japan as “Ore ga Heroine o Tasukesugite Sekai ga Little Mokushiroku!?” by Hobby Japan. Released in North America digitally by J-Novel Club. Translated by Adam Lensenmayer.

I was somewhat taken by surprise by the ending to this volume, as I kept reading and thinking “shouldn’t things be wrapping up soon?” It wasn’t until I got right near the end that I realized this would be Little Apocalypse’s first two-parter, something that should have been mnre obvious given this book features four heroines but only two of them are on the cover. It might be frustrating to wait till the 8th book too, as this volume actually ended up being one of the strongest in the series to date. The author has realized there’s only so far he can go with parody, and has moved on to deconstruction, which is a far richer vein. He’s also gotten better at juggling the heroines – sure, some are still missing or deliberately left out, but the balance we get here shows he’s thinking “who needs more attention?”, so Harissa gets a larger role here, as does Tsumiki. The series is beginning to mature… as much as a series like this can.

As I said, we stack up four different heroines in this book, and they are of a wide variety: an idol singer who’s getting tired of the grind; a psychic (which is a much broader term in Japan than it is here) on the run from a yakuza-like psychic gang; a (seeming) former hero sealed in the depths of an alien dungeon; and a sylpheed (wind fairy) dealing with a zombie infestation. It’s a tall order even for someone like Rekka. Fortunately, his current harem is not at war with each other (that’s supposedly in the future), and he is thus able to use them as sort of a mobile army. Thus, he and a team of girls go off to try to solve one issue, and Hibiki and another group try to work on the psychic problem. I really liked this, and enjoy that (for the most part) there’s not really much rivalry between the girls when serious events are happening. We also get lampshaded how weird everyone is when Rekka explains who he is to the idol and is surprised she DOESN’T know about magic.

The other highlight of the book is a bit of a spoiler, but I want to discuss it anyway: what happens when Rekka fails? And how do we define failure? The sylpheed rejects Rekka because her sister (who we saw in the prologue) is already dead – she died before Rekka even arrived in her world. As R points out, that doesn’t mean that the story is over, and Rekka is working on another aspect of it by trying to fix the zombie thing. But Rekka fixing the stories usually ends with everyone happy (and happily in love with Rekka), and that doesn’t seem like it’s going to work out this time around. Now yes, I am very familiar with the genre, and would not be too surprised if a magical sister-saving solution popped up in Book 8. But it’s still a good question to ask: what if Rekka fails? Can he deal with the aftermath of NOT saving someone’s story?

The book ends with everyone in trouble, and we’ve got to wait a bit till the next one. But Little Apocalypse in general has been qa quick, light, fluffy read. It’s nice to see it gain a bit of added depth.

A First Look at Starving Anonymous

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Have you been checking out Kodansha Comics’ digital-only and digital-first releases? I have, and I love this initiative: it lets me sample dozens of series that might otherwise never see the light of day in North America. Rugby manga. Karuta manga. Really weird horror manga. Medical drama. Josei. As you might expect, there’s a good reason why no one was clamoring to bring out print editions of, say, Deathtopia, but lurking among the pedestrian, the awful, and the amateurish are gems such as Dragon Head, PTSD Radio, Shojo FIGHT! and Tokyo Tarareba Girls. This week, I previewed one of Kodansha’s most recent digital offerings, Starving Anonymous, which, according to Kodansha’s editorial staff, is “an intense dystopian horror thriller in the apocalyptic vein of Dragon Head and Attack on Titan, from the team that brought you zombie actioner Fort of Apocalypse.”

That’s not a bad description of Starving Anonymous; if you can imagine an Eli Roth remake of Soylent Green in all its gory, sadistic intensity, you’ll have some idea of what it’s like to read Yuu Kuraishi and Kazu Inabe’s latest effort. Like the 1973 Charlton Heston film, Starving Anonymous takes place in a heat-ravaged future where supplies are scarce, birth rates are plummeting, and people are crowded into fewer and fewer cities. The series’ protagonist is I’e, a normal high school student whose life is violently upended when he’s snatched off a bus and deposited at an enormous industrial facility where the main product is — you guessed it — people.

A concept this potentially repulsive lives or dies by the thoughtfulness of the execution, and it’s here where Kuraishi and Inabe stumble. The writing is efficient but artless, establishing the direness of the world’s condition through news flashes and pointed conversations but revealing little about I’e; he’s more a placeholder than a character, a collection of reaction shots in search of a personality. The artwork, by contrast, varies from slickly generic — Tokyo apparently looks the same 50 years from now — to willfully ugly; once inside the factory, Inabe draws rooms and conveyor belts filled with distended bodies, rendering every roll of fat and bulging eye in fetishistic detail. If Kuraishi and Inabe were trying to make a point about the ethics of factory farming, or the evils of overconsumption, that message is quickly shoved aside in favor of a more conventional escape-from-prison plot in which I’e and a group of young, healthy rebels fight their way to the outside. Nothing in the first chapter suggested that Starving Anonymous has anything on its mind other than characters doing and seeing horrible stuff, so I’ll be passing on this one.

Starving Anonymous, Chapter 1
Story by Yuu Kuraishi, Art by Kazu Inabe, Original Concept by Kengo Mizutani
Kodansha Comics
Rating: OT (Older teen)

New Game!, Vol. 1

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By Shotaro Tokuno. Released in Japan by Houbunsha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Manga Time Kirara Carat. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Jenny McKeon. Adapted by Jamal Joseph, Jr.

I have joked before about the tendency of trends in the Japanese manga and light novel industry, and over here in North America as well. The piles of vampire manga, the buttloads of zombie manga, the oddly weird Alice in Wonderland deconstruction mangas, etc. But one that has been around forever, and likely will be long into the future, is “a group of cute girls do cute and funny stuff in a 4-koma”, aka the Azumanga Daioh clone. The series are of various types – mostly in school, but some (like this one) in a workplace, and sometimes there may be a token man. But for the most part, that describes an endless number of series that have essentially the same premise and audience, and generally also succeed about the same way – “that was cute”. They also sometimes have yuri subtext, though that isn’t a requirement. It even has its own magazine devoted to the genre, Manga Time Kirara Carat. And now we have New Game!.

New Game! stars Chiyo-chan… sorry, Aoba, who looks like she’s a 7th grader but has actually graduated high school and headed into the workforce – in this case, a game company, where she’s starting off designing characters. The rest of the team consists of Kou, the “ladette” sort of woman who’s the main character designer; Rin, the art director and team mom who seems to have an unrequited crush on Kou; Hifumi (character design), who is painfully shy but also rather cute (and apparently a heavy drinker); Yun (also character design), who I didn’t get much of an impression of except she has a heavy accent; and Hajime (motion), who seems overearnest and a bit hyperactive. The bulk of the first volume shows us Aoba fitting into the team, learning how they do things, and designing background NPCs for the fantasy RPG they’re working on.

New Game! is cute. I enjoyed it as I read it. That said, a lot of the actual humor has difficulty sticking in your head after you move on. The one joke I recall is also, oddly, the most out of character, when Kou amuses herself by having Aoba finish the design of a character that’s clearly based on herself (which Aoba doesn’t realize), who is an NPC who’s there to start the plot and then get killed, much to Aoba’s horror. Apart from that, there’s a few workplace gags that touch on the insane hours these jobs entail, and some character development showing Aoba settling in but still being somewhat hapless. As I noted above, Rin seems to have a crush on Kou, and this occasionally comes up, mostly when she’s frustrated that Kou isn’t picking up on it. It’s all standard stuff, but I did find it quite enjoyable. I will note that, once again, the decision to translate a heavy Kansai (I’m assuming) accent as something out of the ordinary doesn’t always work well. Yun saying “Wot’s all this, then?” and calling someone a “tosser” took me right out of the manga and made me notice the effort, which it shouldn’t.

Despite having forgotten much of the manga a few minutes after reading it, I was pleasantly amused enough that I’ll get the next book. If you enjoy cute girls doing cute things with no plot to speak of, New Game! is an easy buy.

Obsessions of an Otome Gamer: Elementary School Years

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By Natsu and Shoyu. Released in Japan as “Ongaku de Otome wa Sukuenai” by the author on the Syosetu website. Released in North America digitally by Cross Infinite World. Translated by Charis Messier.

I’d never really read a Cross Infinite World novel before now. They specialize in both novels geared towards young women and also going directly through the author, i.e. most of the books published were published on the Syosetsu original fiction website, or various equivalents, rather than going through a publisher. (That said, the author has had published work as well.) But nothing had really caught my attention until the announcement of this series. I love visual novel-style storytelling, and I love classical music, so I was delighted to see the two combined. As I started to read the book, I was expecting things to be very light and fluffy, with the occasional warped sense of humor. I was surprised at several plot and character choices the book made, though. I was even more surprised by a plot twist that I will do my best not to spoil (yes, really) about one-third in. And I was not surprised but a bit taken aback by the length. This book is HUGE.

One thing that surprised me was the decision to have the entire book take place when our reincarnated heroine, Mashiro, is between the ages of seven and twelve, something that I blame on the light and hard to read font on the front cover, which meant I missed the subtitle. She’s the reincarnation of Rika, a young woman who was obsessed with an insanely difficult otome game called Hear My Heart, where you not only had to make the right romantic choices with regards to the two guys (one outgoing and arrogant, one sullen and introverted), but you also had to compose music – and if the music wasn’t good enough, you failed. That’s a high bar to clear. She then sees a poster advertising a remake of the game… and falls into an open manhole and dies. (This would be the warped sense of humor I mentioned above.) As Mashiro, she recalls her previous life when she’s seven years old and just your average elementary school girl who folds origami of Angkor Wat in her spare time. Now she’s in the game world, and has met Kou and Sou, the two heroes, as young boys. But is the game world what she really wants from life?

While Mashiro is eighteen years old in her head (at times – it’s lampshaded that this isn’t consistent, and is actually an important plot point), she and the two boys are young kids, and despite the occasional schoolkid flirtation, the book maintains those boundaries. Of course, this doesn’t mean we don’t get a heartfelt confession or two, but you may relax and not have to worry about kiddie makeouts. There’s also a heavy emphasis on classical music and piano, as Mashiro burns with a sudden desire to learn the piano, at first because she wants to meet the guy she liked from the game, but her love rapidly becomes genuine and all-consuming. The book helpfully tells us the names of the pieces she’s working on, and you could make an excellent Spotify playlist if you liked. Mashiro is a prodigy, though she may not be aware of it. And there’s also that spoiler, which revolves around her best friend Kon, who is Kou’s sister – and also reincarnated into this world from a previous one. Mashiro only has memories of the first version of the game. Kon played the remake, but not all of it. Is she really what she seems? And can Mashiro really avoid being a heroine?

The writing and plotting can get immensely wordy at times – I understand this was actually edited down from the original text, but it’s still super long, about twice the size of your average light novel. That said, I never found myself counting pages till it was over. Mashiro is a fun heroine, savvy when needed, clueless also when needed. There’s also a surprisingly deep look at how reincarnation into another world would work when you retain some of your own memories. The book ends with Mashiro graduating and moving on to Middle School, which I imagine will take up Book 2 of the series. If you’re looking for a nice romantic book with hidden depths, or love shoujo and visual novels, this is a fantastic read.

Dragon Half, Vol. 1

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By Ryusuke Mita. Released in Japan as two separate volumes by Fujimi Shobo, serialized in the magazine Dragon Magazine. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Andrew Cunningham. Adapted by David Lumsdom.

In another world, this sort of title would have been licensed around the time it came out, back in the late 1980s/mid-1990s, when its art style and sort of humor were far more common and appreciated, and the anime had become a cult classic due to its over the top humor and pacing. Of course, back in 1994 or so when the Dragon Half OAVs came out, and the manga had just finished its run, the “manga scene” did not really exist as such – we’re talking a time when Mai the Psychic Girl was the hot thing, and Ranma 1/2 was still in 32-page pamphlet form. Still, what goes around comes around, and a lot of the cliches that were ripe for mocking in the late 80s RPG/fantasy scene are still ripe for mocking. And thus, despite artstyle and personalities that remind me a bit of Urusei Yatsura, Dragon Half manages to be a heck of a lot of fun, which is surprising given that humor titles tend to wear out faster in omnibus format.

I must say, the cover does the title no favors – Mink is a lot more dynamic than the passive little girl figure we see there. She’s the daughter of a human adventurer and a dragon, who can helpfully turn human when she wants to. As such, Mink has certain advantages like super strength and flight, but also has teenage girl obsessions, such as the teen idol (and also adventurer) Dick Saucer. (Yes, he’s named Dick Saucer in Japanese.) Unfortunately, Mink is half-dragon, and Dick is dedicated to killing dragons. Poor Mink! Can her feelings ever get through to him? Well, no, but nobody really cares, because the plot is just an excuse for Mink and her two friends (the airhead “bi-curious” Lufa and the childish always-armored Pia) to go around having adventures and making fun of everything that 80s RPGs and bad fantasy novels had to offer.

Everything in Dragon Half is subservient to the humor – and there are a lot of laughs, all of the “broad comedy” variety. If you’re looking for subtlety, look elsewhere, but if people getting hit with rocks is your thing, you’re in the right place. Surprisingly, Mink ends up being the “straight man” for much of the volume, using her semi-superpowers to bail her foolish friend out of trouble (yes, friend – Pia usually just goes along with things, but Rufa is actively harmful most of the time). She’s be in danger if the villains were any threat at all, but from the evil princess who’s really a slime in disguise to the soldier who brags that the tiny size of his brain is an advantage, Mink can usually do pretty well for herself. Towards the end of the volume (as the author notes) there are one or two stories that actually have a semi-serious tone, but fortunately they fit in pretty well, and more jokes are just around the corner.

This is the first of three omnibuses schedules, and is filled to the brim with extras such as color pages, promotional artwork, and author commentary. It’s a good title if you like humor, a great title if you enjoy mocking old-school games, and essential if you’re nostalgic for the late 80s-early 90s style of manga art and characterization.

Silver Spoon, Vol. 1

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The title of Hiromu Arakwa’s latest series is a pointed reference to Kansuke Naka’s The Silver Spoon: Memoir of a Japanese Boyhood. First serialized in the pages of the Asahi Shimbun in 1913, The Silver Spoon traced Naka’s journey from childhood to adolescence through a series of vignettes that recalled turn-of-the-century Tokyo in vivid detail, describing both the bustle of its modern neighborhoods and the rustic isolation of its western regions, a contrast underscored by one of the book’s most important events: Naka’s move to rural Tokyo. “For me to be born in the midst of Kanda was as inappropriate as for a kāppa to be hatched in a desert,” he declares, viewing the country as a place of rebirth.

Yuugo Hachiken, the fictional protagonist of Arakawa’s Silver Spoon, undertakes a similar journey, moving from Sapporo to the Hokkaido countryside, where he enrolls at at Ooezo Agricultural High. Though his peers chose the school for its curriculum, Hachiken chose it to escape the college prep grind — cram schools and high-stakes tests — and his parents, who seem indifferent to his misery. His competitive streak remains intact, however; he assumes that he’ll be the top student at Ezo AG, sizing up his classmates’ mastery of English and geometry with all the condescension of a prep school boy in a backwoods schoolhouse.

Hachiken’s path to redemption predictably begins with a rude awakening: there’s no spring break and no sleeping in at Ezo AG, where students rise at 4:00 am to muck stalls and harvest eggs. Adding insult to injury, his cosmopolitan prejudices are challenged by his peers, who are more ambitious, motivated, and knowledgable than he is; in one of the volume’s best scenes, Hachiken’s elation turns to despair when he overhears his classmates discussing the transformative effect of somatic cell cloning on the Japanese beef market. “Are they speaking in tongues!!?” he fumes, rivers of sweat pouring down his ashen face. “Are you guys smart or stupid? Make up your minds!!”

After a series of humiliating trials, Hachiken makes tentative steps towards fitting into the community and finding his purpose. His incentive for trying a little harder is, unsurprisingly, a girl — specifically Aki Mikage, a pragmatic, cheerful soul whose horse-wrangling skills, can-do attitude, and endless patience with dumb questions endear her to Hachiken. Though she’s instrumental in persuading Hachiken to join the equestrian club, her main role in volume one is to help Hachiken overcome his sentimental ideas about farm life, encouraging him to see the farm as a factory or business rather than a collection of cute animals.

This bracing dose of reality is one of the manga’s strengths, preventing the story from devolving into a string of sight gags and super-deformed characters screaming and flapping their arms at the sight of poop. Near the end of volume one, for example, Mikage invites Hachiken and fellow classmate Ichirou Komaba to the Ban’ei Racetrack to watch a draft horse pull, an outing that quickly turns somber when they stumble upon a horse funeral in progress. “Some souls are thrust into a cruel existence where there are only two options, life or death, simply because they happen to be born livestock,” Mikage’s uncle observes — a statement that makes a deep impression on Hachiken, who’s just beginning to realize that many of the piglets and chickens he’s raising will be on someone’s dinner table in a matter of months.

The racetrack episode also highlights Silver Spoon‘s other secret weapon: its terrific supporting cast. Though Hachiken, Komaba and Mikage’s more serious conversations dominate the chapter, one of the series’ most memorable personalities — Nakajima, the equestrian club supervisor — makes a cameo appearance as well. Nakajima exemplifies Arakawa’s gift for creating visually striking characters whose goofy, exaggerated appearances belie their true nature. He looks like a Bodhisattva but acts like a gambler, a tension that plays out almost entirely on his face. When riding a horse or encouraging Hachiken to join the equestrian club, for example, his eyes are half-open, framed by two semi-circular brows that suggest a meditative state, but when he visits the race track, the thrill of betting brings a maniacal gleam to his eyes, pulling his eyebrows into two sharp peaks. He even dresses the part of a Saratoga regular, trading his pristine riding outfit for a trenchcoat — collar popped, of course — and low-slung fedora.

As this comic interludes suggests, the twists and turns of Hachiken’s evolution from sullen teen to happy young man are dictated more by shonen manga convention than fidelity to Naka’s The Silver Spoon — there are 200% more jokes about cow teats and chicken anuses — but the sincerity with which Arakawa captures the emotional highs and lows of adolescence shows affinity with Naka’s writing. Hachiken’s mopey interior monologues and fumbling efforts to connect with his classmates are as authentic as Naka’s own reminiscences; both convey youthful angst without irony, embarrassment, or “the layered remembrances of adulthood” (Kosaka). And for readers more interested in laffs than literary references, there are plenty of those, too; Hachiken spends as much time hanging out with ornery ruminants as he does ruminating, all but ensuring a bumper crop of manure gags in volume two. Highly recommended.

Works Cited:

Arakawa, Hiromu. Silver Spoon, Vol. 1, translated by Amanda Haley, Yen Press, 2018.

Kosaka, Kris. “A misanthropic memoir from Meiji Era Tokyo.” The Japan Times, 26 Sep. 2015, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2015/09/26/books/misanthropic-memoir-meiji-era-tokyo/#.Wres_5PwY1g. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.

Twinkle Stars, Vol. 5

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By Natsuki Takaya. Released in Japan as three separate volumes by Hakusensha, serialized in the magazine Hana to Yume. Released in North America by Yen Press. Translated by Sheldon Drzka.

Endings are important, and often affect how we view the rest of the work in retrospect. Which is sometimes annoying. If you love fourth fifths of a thing, but it doesn’t stick the ending, can you really say that the whole is a failure? No, of course not. The journey to get there was spectacular. But you can say that the ending makes the series a disappointment. And I am sad to say that I felt the ending to Twinkle Stars made the series as a whole a disappointment. This is not to say I did not enjoy myself as I read it. Indeed, the first third of this omnibus was wonderful, featuring Chihiro and Sakuya finally bonding and going out on sort of dates and getting beyond all the past trauma of their lives to admit their love is wonderful. And then you hear “Sakura woke up”, and everything falls apart.

And yes, I am aware that falling apart is exactly the author’s intention. Indeed, a lot of the following volume is also excellent, showing the poignant agony of Chihiro giving up everything in order to be with Sakura, and Sakuya’s horrible pain, which she manages to work through, because she’s stronger now, thanks, in part, to Chihiro. The reactions of the others are also pretty much on point and in character. For Kanade, it’s the sympathetic ear of an adult. For Hijiri, it’s a punch, because she is the reader right now. So much of this depends on the reader being just as angry at Chihiro as the rest of the cast is, even if they don’t always show it as blatantly. The problem is that Sakura’s past was not as large a part of the story as the author intended. Indeed, I forgot she existed for volumes at a time.

That said, the good outweighs the bad for me with this final plot twist, and the emotions are well conveyed. The problem is the resolution, which feels very much like “you have this many pages to wrap everything up”. Takaya says this wasn’t the case – in fact, she says she went a volume over what she planned – but Chihiro’s revelation to Sakura as the manga draws to a close – that he’s still in love with Sakuya, and is there to make sure that Sakura gets better and nothing else. Which… would be fine, if he hadn’t kept that fact from everyone else, over the course of several years that the series timeskips forward to. Sakura, to be fair, does seem like she’ll fall apart if he’s away from her, and even after several years still seems fragile when she and Sakuya finally meet (she also still continues to use third-person when she speaks about herself, a “cutesy” Japanese thing that translates badly to English, in my opinion).

And so in the end our main couple don’t have time for much more than a reunion and tears before we hit the end. It’s very… unsatisfying. That said, before that, we had some excellent Takaya storytelling, and I’d say this is my second favorite story of hers. And let’s face it, I definitely prefer this to the trainwreck that is Fruits Basket Another, but I’ll save that rant for when it comes out in the summer. If you’ve been enjoying Twinkle Stars, there’s no reason not to get this final volume, even if I found the ending less than it could have been.

The Master of Ragnarok & Blesser of Einherjar, Vol. 1

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By Seiichi Takayama and Yukisan. Released in Japan as “Hyakuren no Haou to Seiyaku no Valkyria” by Hobby Japan. Released in North America digitally by J-Novel Club. Translated by Amber Tamosaitis.

I think we may finally have hit saturation point where I have simply read too many isekai books in a row. This is not surprising, given that I doubt the average light novel company expeects a reader to try to keep up with ALL the titles they put out. Still, it’s hard not to feel a certain jaded malaise as one reads Master of Ragnarok. I was having particular difficulty not comparing it to other series that came out after it in Japan but before it over here in North America. Not that I think Ragnarok has been influential in any way. But it’s hard not to see “isekai guy struggles with how to properly run a kingdom” and not think of Realist Hero, just as it’s hard not to see him save the day with his smartphone and not think of… well,Smartphone. That said, both of those titles try to subvert the norm in at least one or two ways, while Ragnarok is quite happy to play it straight.

(Also, parenthetically, what is it with Japanese isekai and the throne room pose? Almost always, it shows the hero looking satisfied and smug when in the actual book itself he’s nothing of the sort – that’s the case here as well. I just wonder how it got so popular. Robert E. Howard? John Norman?)

Our hero, Yuuto, goes to visit a shrine with his childhood friend and not-quite-girlfriend Mitsuki and, due to a superstition gone horribly wrong, ends up summoned to another world. What happens next… is quickly elided, as we timeskip forward to see he has already gained the trust of most of the kingdom and rules over them all. Admittedly a somewhat odd way to handle thing, but I suppose the author did not want to get bogged down in the “introductory” scenes that plague a lot of isekai. It also helpfully allows him to skip a lot of character development. Now he’s leading his clan into battle with the help of his buxom and intelligent female advisor, who wants to get into his pants; his devoted bodyguard, who we briefly see was cool to him when he first arrived but somehow is now his most loyal fan; a tsundere engineer (no, really, that’s about it); and the princess of the clan he just conquered, who slowly begins to realize how awesome he is.

How is he so awesome? Well, he still gets smartphone reception – somehow – near the mirrors where he was summoned from. He can’t go back, but can talk to the childhood friend, who he now realizes he was in love with (hence the rest of the harem isn’t getting anywhere, at least not now) and he can also download books to his not-Kindle. Thus he saves the world and rules the kingdom by applying modern warfare and concepts to this dark ages-ish period. As I said earlier, if you saw “In Another World With My Smartphone”, just the title, and wondered what the hero would be doing with his smartphone, this is what you’d come up with. Likewise, if you heard about Realist Hero without seeing it, you’d imagine him fighting a lot more battles as a general (as Yuuto does here) and not quite as many civics lessons (though both heroes are fond of, sigh, Machiavelli’s The Prince.)

This isn’t poorly written, and no one’s all that aggravating. It has 14+ volumes in Japan, and apparently an anime is coming soon, so it has fans. But usually I can at least summon something that makes this stand out from the pack and makes a reader want to continue. That’s not happening here. This IS the pack. If someone asks “what’s an isekai?”, this is an ideal book to give them. But have them branch out afterwards to more compelling titles and concepts.

Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest, Vol. 5

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By Ryo Shirakome and Takayaki. Released in Japan as “Arifureta Shokugyou de Sekai Saikyou” by Overlap. Released in North America digitally by J-Novel Club. Translated by Ningen.

After a few volumes of pretending to be your standard “reader surrogate gains immense powers and a wide variety of women” isekai story, Arifureta has settled down as it finally realizes the type of story it wants to tell, which is a messianic narrative. I’m not actually being facetious here, we have seen seeds of this before, but they come to full flower here. Hajime is here to save the world by being badass at it. Those who believe will be rewarded, those who do not believe will get their asses kicked. We see one of his believers doubt herself in this volume, and Hajime makes it very clear that this is no easy task – believe in him and stop stewing in self-hatred, or get out. Needless to say, we know which choice she makes. We also see Hajime go up against the powerful Church, which regards him as a heretic, and a demon who may as well be filling in for Lucifer. Subtle this ain’t.

Shizuka’s on the cover, but doesn’t appear much, though we do see her bonding with the princess of the royal family, who I had honestly forgotten. Most of the book is taken up with Hajime getting Myu back home, which also involves conquering not one but TWO of the remaining dungeons. Kaori is left behind for one of them as support, which seems quite sensible given that this is the MAGMA DUNGEON, but she comes along on the water dungeon crawl, which leads to her crisis of faith I mentioned above. Said crisis of faith is resolved by Hajime showing that he cares about her by threatening an entity that’s possessed her – indeed, most of the harem’s self-esteem issues are resolved by simply having the undemonstrative Hajime pat their head or vow to protect them or somesuch. In all honestly, as Hajime notes, he’ll basically do whatever they say, but I suspect the typical “I hate OP harem guys” fan won’t mind as Hajime is stoic rather than friendly.

We get a lot more background on the past of the world Hajime and company have been brought to here, and find that if we’re headed for a massive Holy War, it won’t be the first. I suspect the next volume will have Hajime’s group divert their plans to save Aiko, who is being imprisoned and tortured for believing in Hajime. No, really. As I said, if you don’t accept this as a messianic narrative, it may be hard to get past its inherent ridiculousness. Oh yes, we also meet Myu’s mother, who the author admits is straight up a ripoff of Alicia from Aria, and who clearly would be quite happy to be an addition to Hajime’s harem, though I’m not sure it will actually happen. It would be nice to have an “ara, ara” sort in the harem. In any case, the next volume will be as action-packed as this one, I imagine, thoguh knowing Hajime, he is unlikely to be crucified and die for anyone’s sins. Recommended for fans of ridiculously overpowered guys and the women who adore them.

Also, “Fish-san was a fishmancer.” I’ll just leave that there.

Sweet Blue Flowers, Omnibus 3

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By Takako Shimura. Released in Japan as “Aoi Hana” by Ohta Shuppan, serialized in the magazine Manga Erotics F. Released in North America by Viz. Translated by John Werry.

Everyone wants to read about the awkward pangs of unrequited love. Will they feel the same way? Will they hate me? Will this destroy our friendship? But it has to be said, and Sweet Blue Flowers does a very good job at conveying this, the issues don’t magically go away after you’ve started dating. Admittedly Akira’s acquiescence is somewhat lukewarm, which is no doubt why Fumi is feeling this way. But let’s face it, Fumi is the sort of person to overthink things anyway, and these sorts of worries DO stick around. Communication does not necessarily become easier when you’ve confessed. In many ways it’s harder. And of course if you want to keep dating, you have to keep yourself interesting and fun, because what if your partner gets bored with the real you? Sweet Blue Flowers may not be getting any closer to resolution of its main romance, but it certainly knows how to convey its painful emotions.

Sweet Blue Flowers does feature an awful lot of relationships between girls, but unlike some other series of this ilk, they aren’t every single relationship. There are men in this world. Indeed, sometimes the reader thinks that the man is the better choice – Ko breaks up with Kyoko here, and you can’t blame him, but I honestly do hope that she gets it together and gets back together with him, as he’s a good guy, and her pining away is not getting her anywhere. It’s weird to feel this way in a yuri manga, where the nature of fandom tends to regard any man who might get in the way of a relationship between two women as evil. We also have different types of relationships here – Akira and Fumi start to date, but it’s very vague, and you get the sense they’re doing it so that Akira can figure things out more than anything else. Some of the girls in the school are clearly in an “akogare” situation that they’re going to grow out of, but some are not – one of the minor characters outright says she’s a lesbian, and Akira’s teacher is in a happy relationship with another woman. This isn’t just yuri’s classic “Story A“. (Well, OK, sometimes it is.)

Sweet Blue Flowers, of course, also has the same issues that it’s had before. Shimura’s character designs are too damn similar, and I find myself struggling to tell some of the girls apart, which makes it harder for me to remember the plotlines. Akira and Fumi’s teenage passion and fears are endearing but also exhausting, especially given this is an omnibus of two separate volumes. And I have to confess, I don’t like Yasuko all that much, and was irritated when she showed up again. Her going to England really helped this series find its feet. That said, this is still a very good volume, and since I believe it ends with the fourth book, there’s no reason for you not to get it so that you can wallow in panga of young love once more.