Reviews

By Oh!Great. Released in Japan by Shueisha, serialized in the magazine Ultra Jump. Released in North America by Viz.

We left off last time in the middle of a big melee at a bowling alley, and that’s where we stay for about half of this omnibus volume (it was Vol. 3-4 in Japan), as our ongoing villains begin to show their badassery, and our heroes realize that they really aren’t strong enough right now to do much about it. Not even Maya.

In terms of plot, there is some stuff thrown to us. Aya’s supernatural powers become more clear in these chapters, and it’s noted that her sister does NOT have the same ability – despite apparently being able to turn into a little kid. Of course, with great power comes great responsibility, and Aya’s still a moody teenager – she knows there’s no one to blame regarding Soichiro falling for her sister, but gets jealous anyway, and luckily there’s a handy demon blade to bring out her darker emotions. We don’t get to see what happens with her here, but I imagine it won’t be pleasant.

Then there’s her sister Maya, who gets expelled from school as a consequence of ‘defying’ the executive council at the bowling alley. In the present-day, she’s seemingly trying to do what’s best for the club, despite having ‘I am doomed’ written across her forehead. We do start to get a look at her past towards the end, though, featuring a Maya who has all the bravado of Soichiro – and like Soichiro, gets her ass handed to her. Multiple times. We also meet her brother in the flashback, whose death plays such a huge role in the mentalities of the cast.

To be honest, after 2 omnibus volumes of Tenjo Tenge, the character I probably like and respect most is Chiaki, Bob’s girlfriend, who’s also the only non-combatant. Trapped in the bowling alley with the rest of the fighters, and at one point literally shoved into a locker to protect her, she nevertheless manages to talk Bob down when he’s given an offer by the head bad guy to join them so he can achieve his true potential. What’s more, her confrontation with Maya, and subsequent discussion with Bunshichi shows her trying to come to terms with the aftermath of her rape, and trying to help Bob by understanding exactly how it is things at the school got to this point. I know she’s merely a minor character, but she’s handled quite well.

All this chatter about plot and characterization is deceptive, of course. For all the demon powers, the tragic pasts, and the philosophy of why mankind fights, this is still just a lot of people hitting each other hard, occasionally contrasted with the nudity and fanservice. The appearance of depth does not equal actual depth, and so while Tenjo Tenge is an addictive page-turner, it’s still like eating cake rather than eating steak, no matter how many manly fights are in it.

Oh yes, and Masataka’s comic relief persona gets very old very fast.

By Q Hayashida. Released in Japan by Shogakukan, serialization ongoing in the magazine Ikki. Released in North America by Viz.

It’s really amazing how much I still enjoy every page of this series, considering that there’s so little forward progression in it. Those who get frustrated by a lack of plot are going to get very annoyed very fast reading this volume, which contains a baseball game featuring our heroes, two of the villains, and various zombies… apparently because Hayashida felt like it, who knows? But the game is still a lot of fun.

That’s not to say there’s absolutely nothing happening here – there’s a ton going on. It’s just not immediately plot-oriented. Caiman has figured out by now that Nikaido is actually a sorcerer, and though conflicted, he’s trying not to let that destroy their friendship. Fujita discovers that he can get revenge on Caiman and Nikaido, who killed his partner (remember that opening scene in Vol. 1?) and goes out to do his best, along with tag-along Ebisu. Fujita’s on the cover this time, so seeing him get more to do makes sense, even though he still tends to be a bit of a sad sack who is there for bad things to happen to. Which makes him a good partner for Ebisu, come to think of it, as that’s what she’ there for as well.

Speaking of Ebisu, we continue to discover little bits about her past before getting attacked by Caiman. Turns out her magic is connected to lizard people, so she too could be the one who created Caiman… except that doesn’t appear to be the case. Her magic appears to be quite dangerous, taking over Noi and transforming her into a rampaging lizard woman as well, forcing Shin to take measures against her. Then they have to go find En’s partner in order to save her, in what might be the shippiest scene in the manga to date. Fans of Shin/Noi (of which I am one) will be delighted.

We also get some development of Risu, the guy walking around wearing Caiman’s face. But the big development here is Shin, whose backstory is given here. As one might expect, it is rather tragic and filled with blood and gore, but it does serve to underscore how determined Shin can get whenever he’s after something. It’s getting harder and harder to see who the good and bad guys are in this series… there’s just a bunch of guys doing mostly bad things.

It’s not a perfect volume by any means. The baseball game was fun, but does meander a lot. And the way that they got Noi to be attacked by Ebisu’s smoke, with an assistant coming along, tripping, and dumping it all over her, is the worst of sitcom cliches. Still, Caiman’s off to the Sorcerer’s World by himself now, no doubt because a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. I look forward to seeing what happens. Dorohedoro is a series that requires a lot of patience, but I feel that if you hang in there there’s a lot of reward to it.

By Kappei Matsumoto and Hakua Nakao. Released in Japan by Futabasha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Manga Action. Released in the United States by Futabasha on the JManga website.

Sometimes you buy a manga for a striking cover, or because of good word of mouth, or because you enjoyed the works of the author previously. And sometimes you simply have to buy a manga because of the title. That was definitely the case with Anesthesiologist Hana, one of Futabasha’s seinen offerings that, true to its word, is the story of a young doctor named Hana and her days working at a local hospital as an anesthesiologist.

While the precise genre of anesthesia manga may be unfamiliar, it becomes apparent on reading this manga that it’s the latest in a long line of workplace seinen, the sort of story that shows our everyman (or woman, in this case) hero and their struggles as they strive to do their thankless job. There are times when it seems to get overwhelming, or they think about quitting, but that never happens, because they grow to understand the importance of their job, and learn to take happiness in it.

And that’s pretty much what you get here. Hana is a young doctor who’s been with her hospital for about three years, and has come to learn the thanklessness that comes with it. In the first chapter, she even tries to resign, though can’t quite follow through with it. The surgeons she works in the operating room with are either obnoxious jerks who call her incompetent or sexist boors who try to cop a feel. The hours are mind-numbing and they’re constantly short-staffed. She rarely sees the sky, eats cup ramen for most meals, and her love life is zero. Most importantly, the job is thankless; everyone loves the surgeons who perform the operation, or doctors in other fields such as ophthalmology, but an anesthesiologist is only singled out if something goes wrong and a patient is lost.

Nevertheless, Hana manages to keep herself going – mostly. She has a grumpy, cynical older sister friend and a bubbly, more naive younger sister type who are her two fellow female anesthesiologists. Her boss is stern but overall a good-hearted guy. And one of her fellow doctors, though a bit weird and suspicious, is even quite handsome – and seems to notice the good qualities in her, possibly as he feels he’s lost them in himself (he has a somewhat sad backstory). The chapters are mostly episodic, but as the series goes on we do see the cast all banding together to help each other out, much like any good workplace.

There is a lot of focus on the actual ins and outs of anesthesia. Sometimes a bit too much – the manga can get a little dry at times, and it has to be careful not to look like a textbook, a la Stone Bridge Press’s ‘Manga Guide To’ series. I have no medical education, so have no idea how accurate everything really is. But it seems accurate. This isn’t a fantasy comic book world where you can always tell the psychics by their nosebleeds. The manga goes into great detail about exactly hat Hana has to do and watch out for, and the inherent dangers involved. There’s even a chapter discussing drug use, and how it’s not just using drugs properly for anesthesia, but keeping an eye out for drug takers among the staff that can be a problem.

Despite being a seinen title, there’s surprisingly little fanservice – Hana takes a shower in the first chapter, and is quite busty, though not overly so; she’s also groped a couple of times. The author’s notes make it clear that they had an original idea of making the hero a male doctor, but the editors told them to change it to a busty female. Not unsurprising; this kind of story, with all its exposition, earns more charm points by having a cute young woman as our viewpoint character.

Overall, I enjoyed this first volume. It can be very dry at times, and is never going to be incredibly exciting. But I feel I’ve learned an awful lot about anesthesiology, and I want to know more about Hana and her ongoing adventures (is she going to hook up with sexy doctor? Or is he just a mentor figure?). If you like workplace medical shows, give this a try.

By Mayu Shinjo. Released in Japan as “Ai wo Utau Yori Ore ni Oborero!” by Shogakukan, serialized in the magazine Shoujo Comic (“Sho-Comi”). Released in North America by Viz.

Another volume of the meant to be fun but mostly incredibly frustrating Ai Ore, where you keep waiting for the heroine to embrace her inner prince and tell Akira where to stick it. But that’s not what’s going to happen here, and instead we’re going to get more and more of Mizuki getting in touch with her inner feminine emotions and learning what love really is. Which, honestly, is mostly fine. As long as Akira’s not being a horrible jerk.

No, really, it’s true. There’s a sequence of about 100 pages or so midway through this volume where Mayu Shinjo stops focusing on how possessive and stifling Akira wants his love to be, and how he will destroy everything about Mizuki’s life in order to make her his. Instead, we get actual fun plots featuring our heroes interacting with the other characters. Mizuki has to pretend to be a yakuza girlfriend. Akira gets sick and Mizuki has to take care of him. Mizuki goes to Akira’s culture festival, and finds him dressed as a catboy. This is really fun stuff. Mayu Shinjo has been writing manga for years, and has none of the newbie’s issues with pacing or padding. And since Akira isn’t being a brat, his relationship with Mizuki is actually enjoyable.

Then there’s the rest of the manga. As I noted in my review of Volume 1, he’d be a perfect horrible shoujo male lead if he weren’t so immature about it. We see here that he comes from a very overprotective family, and was no doubt spoiled rotten. This helps to explain a lot of his behaviors, but doesn’t necessarily make them any better to watch. To be fair, he is a little better here, especially when he finds he has competition in the form of Mizuki’s old childhood friend Shinnosuke, who has returned from university and is (needless to say) smoking hot. And also manly, something which sets Akira’s teeth on edge.

As for those wondering how seriously Shinjo is taking this manga, I would like to point to the helicopter, the boxing match, the shopping trip, the entirety of the yakuza omiai and culture festivals… there’s a lot in here that’s just a hoot, provided you remember to turn off your brain a bit. The humor here is a bit more subtle than Butterflies, Flowers, so it’s not as easy for me to throw off the casual sexism the way it is for that title. But I have to admit it, even if I do want to strangle Akira half the time, Ai Ore! remains a complete page-turner. It’s pretty much exactly what you want from a potboiler – the inability to put it down. Let’s hope the next volume continues that trend, and I’ll try to stop complaining about things that I would rather the author be writing about.

For those who read my reviews by category (like me), I have reviews of Blue Exorcist 3, Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan 4 and Kamisama Kiss 4 in this week’s Bookshelf Briefs.

By Nagaru Tanigawa and Puyo. Released in Japan as “Suzumiya Haruhi-chan no Yuutsu” by Kadokawa Shoten, serialization ongoing in the magazine Shonen Ace. Released in North America by Yen Press.

It always amuses me when I try to review one of these volumes, as one would thinks that a review is designed to tell people whether they would be interested in a book or not, and these Haruhi-chan manga are by definition so narrow in audience scope that I have to add “the only reason you should buy this is if you’ve bought it already.” And yet here I am, reviewing the 3rd volume. Because, as a huge Haruhi fan and someone who loves 4-koma type humor, I continue to find these a hoot.

Given that this is a gag comic, it’s always interesting when I find bits of character development in it. You would think by definition there could be no character development, as the author is constrained by the boundaries of his parent series. Yet this leaves a surprisingly large canvas for building on what has come before. Thus Tsuruya and Mori’s friendly martial-arts rivalry continues, and Nagato’s addiction to games becomes so bad that when forced to give them up by Haruhi (for an eating contest, to give her ‘fighting spirit’), she nearly ends up dead. The manga is also well past the animated episodes as well, so no longer has to worry about the anime outdoing it.

The beginning of this volume is also, I suspect, important for another reason. It’s based off of Disappearance, and so we see the cast briefly styled in the characterizations of that movie. Seeing a rather hapless Yuki, overprotective Ryouko and clueless yet polite Kyon all having hotpot together, you can almost see the lightbulb go on in the author’s head. And now we have The Disappearance of Yuki Nagato, running in Kadokawa’s Young Ace, a spinoff which seems designed to take Disappearance and hit the ‘heartwarming’ button as much as it can. I will be completely unsurprised if Yen licenses this soon as well.

Haruhi gets a bit more to do here as well, not being confined by Kyon being the narrator. She still doesn’t get to participate in anything supernatural, but she still manages to come up with the weird ideas she’s famous for. My favorite chapter was likely the one where she tells everyone to try their hand at drawing a manga, with herself as the editor… then ends up spinning in a chair, bored out of her skull, while everyone else is doing things and she has to wait for them. There’s also some lovely ship tease between her and Kyon during Setsubun, when an argument about bean-tossing ends up turning into a tickle fight, which is innocent but doesn’t look that way. “I don’t think you should be doing sexy things!”

Mikuru probably gets the least to do here, but honestly, that’s true of the source material as well. And it’s lampshaded in a fantastic intro (in color) by Asahina’s older self. Bitter about the fact that she only gets to appear once in the entire volume, she sets about recasting the entire Haruhi franchise with herself in all the lead roles. Including Koizumi. Kyon is the exception, probably so he can make the tsukkomi response. Poor Asahina! Hang in there!

The drawbacks to this series are the same as prior volumes – it’s entirely dependent on its humor, so when it’s not funny there’s nothing else. Likewise, if you don’t like Osaka-style 4-koma gags, you’ll hate it. But I’m pleased to see the Haruhi-chan spinoff has become a world of its own, one where Taniguchi can turn into a giant 50-foot demon, Halloween can feature Haruhi wearing an eye mask straight out of 20th Century Boys, and Asakura can spend over an hour trying to kill Yuki and Kimidori-san with knives. OK, that last sounds like it might actually work in the real continuity. But in context, it’s extra goofy. As always, recommended highly to those who would get it anyway.

By Ema Toyama. Released in Japan by Kodansha, serialized in the magazine Nakayoshi. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics.

I’m pleased to see that we’re getting the second and final omnibus of this quiet, down-to-earth shoujo series from Kodansha. It has a satisfying conclusion, though I admit that I think I liked it better when the series was focusing on Sumino trying to open up and make new friends. This final volume deals more with Sumino’s romantic love triangle, and it’s simply not as interesting.

We left off with the manga trying to confuse us more about the two online friends in Sumino’s blog, and whether one or both of them were the two guys at her high school. It should come as no surprise to learn that one of them is, nor should it be too much of a surprise to find it’s a bit of a role reversal. I was rather surprised to find that the other online friend was completely unrelated to Sumino’s life in every way, and in fact lives in Osaka. It was a reasonable fakeout that I appreciated. (It also led to a mostly boring side story at the end, but hey, can’t have everything.)

We do also see Sumino clash with the schoolgirl bully who hounded her in Volume 1, Aya. I liked this as well, if only for a look at the mentality of this sort of person. Aya’s already been ostracized by her classmates, and has pretty much already ‘lost’. But she’s bullying Sumino, because, well, that’s what she does. And there’s still these unresolved feelings inside her that need to come out somewhere. The resolution of their fight was cliched, but still rather heartwarming. Although I will admit I could have done without ‘the sunflower in my heart isn’t bent!’. There’s cheesy and then there’s just corny.

But the majority of the volume is dealing with which guy Sumino is going to choose – Hinata, the sweet, caring boy that she’s already grown close to, or Teru, the harsher but sexier type whose words gave her more encouragement? Needless to say, this also leads to a rift between the two boys, who are now after the same girl. I found this more interesting for Teru’s backstory than anything else – he’s a certain type of shoujo boy that if this were a title for teens rather than young girls might be the lead – a jerkass sort who tries to encourage the heroine in an oblique way. Hinata, unfortunately, comes off as rather bland in comparison, though he did get more attention last volume.

Overall, it’s a nice, sweet manga, but it’s still hard not to compare this with Kimi Ni Todoke and find it wanting. No new ground is broken, and after a first volume focusing on broadening our heroine’s world, it all comes down to the standard love triangle. It doesn’t really put a foot wrong, and if you like this sort of genre it’s an easy title to recommend. But you might want to grade it on a bit of a curve.

By William Shakespeare. First published in Britain in 1623 by Edward Blount, William Jaggard, and Isaac Jaggard. Review copy from ‘The Arden Shakespeare: Third Series’, edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. Revised Edition.

First off, let’s get one thing clear right off the bat: no matter how much lovers of Shakespeare want it to be, and try to rewrite history to make it so, this is *not* the final play that Shakespeare wrote. Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen, both co-written with John Fletcher, followed this, as well as the lost play Cardenio (also with Fletcher). There’s no denying that it would be awesome if we could read the play as an allegory of Shakespeare’s playwrighting and the final speech as his retirement form the stage. But that’s not what actually happened.

This is not to take anything away from The Tempest. There’s a reason people want it to be Shakespeare’s last play – it’s fantastic, easily his best ‘romance’ and among his top plays, with some superb dialogue, especially from the magician who many say was Shakespeare’s self-portrait, Prospero. It has a lovely palindromic structure, and some supporting roles that an actor can really sink their teeth into in the form of the island’s two natives, Ariel and Caliban. And, despite many saying that she’s just a passive girl who does whatever her father tells her to, there’s more teeth to Miranda than one might expect if played in the right way.

I must admit when I first read this in college I did not get any colonial subtext at all – most of my classes were not dedicated to finding the political or social themes in Shakespeare’s work, merely focusing on the plot and language. But apparently there’s been a lot of discussion about how much Shakespeare was influenced by colonial trips England was taking to the Bermudas, so much so that some used to describe this as Shakespeare’s American play. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but certainly the conflict between Prospero and Caliban has been what many directors enjoy focusing on as the centuries have passed.

As times and mores change, the way we view the three main characters also develops. Caliban was a hulking, ape-like villain at times, but has also been portrayed as something of a noble savage – though one has to be careful not to make him too noble, given how he willingly admits to attempting to sexually assault Miranda shortly before the play began. Likewise, while it is tempting to keep to the symmetries of Shakespeare’s play by portraying Ariel as the light to Caliban’s dark, this does not necessarily make him any less of a servant – and many excellent productions have focused on Ariel’s truculence when dealing with Prospero, and his joy once freed.

As for Prospero himself, his character seems to have experienced a similar trajectory to Shakespeare’s, as so many scholars and readers saw Prospero’s magic and arts as Shakespeare’s discussion of his own writing. And, as the ‘bardolatry’ of the earlier centuries has given way to a more balanced look at Shakespeare’s life and works, so Prospero is not viewed with the rose-colored glasses anymore. He can be surprisingly petulant and stubborn, even in his final speech, and it’s possible to read his decision to leave behind his magic and return to the real world as a particularly bitter pill to swallow.

I’ve talked before about how I would stage a production of the play I’ve just read, but unlike Shrew and Merchant, I have less to say here. Certainly there would be a few more special effects needed than I’m normally used to in my Shakespeare – I’ve mostly performed the comedies – but that shouldn’t pose too much of an issue. Other than that, though, just reminding the actors that they need not necessarily lock themselves into one interpretation on their first reading, an to let their own view of the character come about during rehearsals and multiple readings. I hope that this would allow the ambiguities I prize so much in Shakespeare to shine through.

I feel I haven’t said as much as I normally do about this play but, slight controversies about Prospero and Caliban aside, there’s not as much controversy here as in the prior plays I’ve reviewed. This is the last truly great play Shakespeare ever wrote – Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen are interesting yet flawed, I would say – and anyone who loves the theater or language should read it if they have not already. As for this Arden edition, it’s great to read if you want to hear about the backstory of the play and get into the nitty gritty of Shakespearean scholarship – I loved the discussion about whether a speech should be assigned to Miranda or Prospero – and reads smoothly. This edition also updates it to cover the last 10 years or so of Tempest discussion, including the recent Helen Mirren version.

When I first saw the solicit for this title, I admit I didn’t pay it quite as much attention as I could have. Between the chronological archives Dark Horse has started and the hardcover collections by artist, there has been a glut of old Archie re-releases, with more coming every month. This one was a chunky 400-page paperback from Archie’s own publisher, though, and about the size of its Double Digests. Despite its rather uninspiring cover art (which remains a weakness), I decided to give it a shot.

It’s not *quite* a Best Of – the publisher is trying to give a historical overview of the titles the company put out, and thus you’ll see stuff here of lower quality that nevertheless gives a broader look than just a bunch of Archie love triangle stories – but it’s actually a very decent effort. The stories all have as many credits as they were able to locate, and a short paragraph either saying why they felt this story deserved to be in the book, why this ‘sort’ of story typifies Archie and his friends, or the occasional celebrity blurb. Each decade gets about 50 pages, ending with the Life With Archie years that we’re getting right now.

As for the stories I mentioned above, we see many of the other titles Archie put out over the years that weren’t Archie. Some are famous enough to stand on their own – it’s nice to see the first Sabrina comic here, as well as a couple of Josie and the Pussycats stories (though I’d like to have seen something from the early, pre-band Josie years). And then there’s things like Wilbur, Ginger, and That Wilkin Boy, all of which try unsuccessfully to duplicate Archie’s formula with writing and characters that simply aren’t as good. Still, it’s interesting to see them here (we even get a glimpse of the infamous Super Duck) as a sign that it wasn’t just recently that Archie would try lots of different ideas to see what stuck – they were *always* doing it.

As for the Archie stories themselves, they are solid and readable – this is more of the Best Of that the title led me to expect. In particular, every time you see Bob Bolling credited you are in for a real treat. He’s got 3 stories in here, two featuring his specialty – The ‘Little Archie’ Archie as a kid strips – and they’re all brilliant, with two of them dredging out memories in me from when I was a small boy reading digests myself. Seeing Little Archie drag Betty through Riverdale’s worst outgrowth in order to put off her obsession with him – only to have it backfire and end in one of the most heartwarming moments in the history of the series – is beautiful. Likewise, one of his stories with adult Archie shows Betty misunderstanding seeing Archie and Veronica after he was just on a date with her, and spiraling into a blue funk. Archie’s solution requires a major deus ex machina, but we don’t care, as it’s simply so sweet. There needs to be a Bolling collection asap.

We do get a few stories we’ve seen reprinted many times over the last two years – Archie’s debut, the first appearance of Veronica, that Reggie with the football game – but that’s simply as the archive has skewed heavily towards the 40s and debuts, and you can’t really leave them out. But there’s other fascinating stuff here – some Katy Keene and Archie pin-ups, a few Jughead Dipsy Doodles, and of course Archie in the early 1970s taking the time to explain his growing media empire to the reader. We also get a few reminders that it wasn’t just experiments with other characters or series that didn’t work out for Archie. Witness Jughead’s pin that makes him irresistible to women, or ‘The New Archies’ trying to split the difference between Archie and Little Archie, or even things like Alexandra from Josie having magical powers – which, naturally, she uses for evil.

The book ends with a few stories that are right up to date. We get a Life With Archie from the current series, the only comic in here longer than 6 pages (by design, the editors admit), as well as a very funny Reggie comic about an anthropomorphic personification of his ego – and you can imagine how big it is. Kevin Keller even gets mentioned as a new breakout character – although his sexuality is not mentioned, FYI. And lastly, we see they’re still trying new things – the very last strips are one-page gag comics featuring Jinx, a teenage version of the bratty L’il Jinx from decades earlier.

There’s things I wish we’d seen in here – I’d have liked a few of the more serious 70s-style political stories, and I’d have loved one of the old ‘Betty Cooper is insane’ stories that the web has highlighted. But really, you can’t do a best of for Archie in only 400 pages – there’s simply too much. What you can do is give a sampler and show that Archie has, for the past 70 years, been doing what it’s doing today – writing fun, likeable stories and then finding ways to market them in any way possible. And if that defines Archie as a business more than a character, that’s not to say that the character is weak. You’d never have lasted 70 years without people loving Archie and his friends, and this collection shows why everyone loves them. As a history, it’s fine, and I would not mind seeing a second volume in a similar vein.

You can leave out That Wilkin Boy next time, though.

By Makiko. Released in Japan by Futabasha, serialized in the magazine Women’s Comic Jour. Released in the United States by Futabasha on the JManga website.

Well, JManga is finally open, and there was no way that I wasn’t going to get a title or two to test out, even if the prices are currently ludicrous, and the flash reader content means you are essentially paying for the right to read rather than buying an actual manga. That said, my goal was to find titles that I would never otherwise see here. The two companies who debuted with the most unseen manga were Futabasha and Kadokawa Shoten. Sadly, Kadokawa was all hype but no delivery as of yet, with no previews or chapters. Futabasha (who are clearly one of the big powers behind this site) had real content, and not just stuff already out in the US. So I picked two titles, one seinen and one josei, and began to read.

I will note that this manga is listed under the ‘seinen’ tag on JManga, but I’m pretty sure this is incorrect: it runs in Futabasha’s ‘Women’s Comic Jour’, a mystery-themed magazine whose covers and content definitely look like josei. The author, Makiko, has been drawing it since 1998, and it’s still running, with 14 volumes.

The story takes place sometime in the Edo period of Japan. We meet a young woman, Oyou, who’s trying to drink sake in a local bar. Unfortunately, she’s got a reputation as creepy and terrifying, and the bar owners beg her to leave as she’s driving away their business. (They also beg her not to curse them.) On her way out, she runs into a young man – literally. She knows a pickpocket when she sees one, though, and grabs him before he can get away. Though Saji, the thief, finds her weird, he’s also attracted to her, and offers to take her back to his place for some sake – and maybe get lucky, he thinks.

However, this isn’t just a romance. It’s a supernatural mystery title, and the mood overall is that of unease. Young men have been found frozen to death in greater numbers than usual this winter, and there’s a very good reason for this. And when Saji’s old childhood friend winds up the latest victim, he’s determined to get to the bottom of things. Luckily for him, Oyou is the titular Urameshiya, a woman who can see and, to some extent, control ghosts, spirits and monsters. And while this has made her a hated loner and outcast in the village, it also makes her a powerful spiritual detective.

There’s only 3 chapters available in this volume, but don’t worry, they add up to a full 200 pages – each story is lengthy and goes into detail. I wouldn’t call the stories horror, necessarily. This is a supernatural mystery with tinges of romance. I was actually rather surprised at the latter, as I was expecting this to be more along the lines of a ghost of the week type of story, with Oyou and Saji mostly being sounding boards to figure out the mystery. But the mysteries aren’t very mysterious. What works best throughout the volume is the prickly relationship that develops between Oyou and Saji, two lonely people used to being shunned by society who can’t quite have a normal romance. Oyou in particular is quick to act uncaring and cool around Saji, despite her obvious growing feelings. The two become lovers almost immediately – another sure sign this is josei – but Saji is going to have to get used to his lover being from the ‘show, don’t tell’ school of affection.

The first story deals with a vengeful ‘snow woman’ type, but the second one gets a lot more explicit, and reminds me to warn folks that this is not a title for anyone under 18. It deals with a girl who has a ‘vagina dentata’, so to speak – or “a nice set of chompers”, as Oyou points out in one of the few actual funny bits in a mostly serious book. Oyou’s solution to the problem is also fairly explicit, but works quite well. Unfortunately, solving the girl’s own personality is a much harder task, and not one Oyou particularly wants to try. The third story introduces a new male into the mix, a bratty fox spirit who goes to great lengths to make Oyou his – even if it means killing Saji off. This is the longest story of the book, and probably also the best – there’s no mystery here, so the romance is allowed to develop more, and the ending is fantastic. Best of all, no cliffhanger ending here, which is good, as only Volume 1 is available at this time.

The art is fairly typical ‘pointy chin’ style, being neither exceptional nor distracting. Oyou is conveyed very well, giving the impression of a woman wise beyond her years, one who’s been hurt a few too many times. As for the translation, I’ve heard that others have found titles that are more unsuccessful in that regard, but this one was just fine – no obvious awkward spots, and despite being in the Edo period it did not attempt to use anything other than modern speech. It’s very serviceable.

Overall, this wasn’t completely amazing, but was pretty much exactly what I wanted from JManga anyway. A title I’d never even heard of before, in a genre that hasn’t generally knocked it out of the park over here (mystery romance for young women). And the result was quite satisfying, and left me wanting to get the next volume to see if Saji can get Oyou to open up to him any more – and also to see what sorts of yokai might show up next. Anyone wanting to get a good look at what Futabasha is offering for US readers would be advised to check this out, even if JManga is still clearly a work in progress.