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Reviews

Kamisama Kiss 2 by Julietta Suzuki

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From the back cover:
Nanami Momozono is alone and homeless after her dad skips town to evade his gambling debts and the debt collectors kick her out of her apartment. So when a man she’s just saved from a dog offers her his home, she jumps at the opportunity. But it turns out that his place is a shrine, and Nanami has unwittingly taken over his job as a local deity!

Nanami doesn’t want to miss out on the fun when a hot teen idol joins the student body. Tomoe reluctantly agrees to let her go, as long as she conceals her divine mark. After all, what could possibly go wrong at high school…?

Review:
Nanami has been out of school for three months, living in the shrine that is her new home, but the appalling lack of worshippers means her days are very dull indeed. When she sees a TV news story about a famous pop idol transferring to her high school, her school spirit is suddenly reinvigorated and she decides to return, even though Tomoe (her fox-eared familiar) insists she wear a stupid-looking headscarf to cover the mark that identifies her as a tochigami (deity of a specific area of land), lest yokai detect her presence and attack.

The pop idol, Kurama, turns out to be a jerk, but he’s intrigued by Nanami’s ability to resist his charms. The other students aren’t too friendly, either, and tease Nanami about her poverty. Enter Tomoe to save the day, clearing her name when she is accused of theft, delivering a delicious lunch when she’s too poor to afford something from the cafeteria, and generally making it appear as if she’s now under the care of a wealthy family. When Tomoe later finds himself in need, having been shrunk by another deity who has taken over the shrine, Nanami is grateful to be able to give back to him, watching over him as his child’s body struggles to contain his powers. In the end, when the other deity is ousted, Tomoe chooses to reenter into a contract with Nanami.

I’m still unsure exactly what to make of Kamisama Kiss. I definitely like its sense of humor—it’s pleasantly absurd, like when Kurama (who predictably turns out to be a yokai) is chased through the halls of the school by one of Tomoe’s fireballs while in the form of an ostrich—and the supporting cast (like the two onibi-warashi who occupy the shrine along with Nanami and Tomoe), but the main characters have yet to really intrigue me. It’s nice that Tomoe and Nanami are building a more friendly relationship, and that both clearly care about each other, but there’s nothing to really distinguish this development from all the other stories in which two argumentative sorts wind up falling for each other.

I think part of the problem is that I am still mentally comparing it to Suzuki’s other series released in English, the very charming Karakuri Odette. I shouldn’t, because they’re very different types of stories, but every now and then Nanami gets an expression on her face that reminds me so much of Odette that I can’t help myself.

Because Karakuri Odette turned out to be so good, I am reasonably confident that Kamisama Kiss will eventually win me over, but in the meantime I’m left a little bit disappointed.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

A Zoo in Winter

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One of the best-selling manga in the US right now is Bakuman, a drama about two teens trying to break into the Japanese comics industry. Flipping through the first two volumes, it’s easy to see why the series has such an ardent following: Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata have portrayed the characters’ journey not as an aesthetic or introspective process, but as an adventure story in which the boys battle progressively more talented opponents while they work toward their ultimate goal of creating a hit series.

For all its lip service to perseverance and craft, Bakuman is, at heart, a fantasy that trumpets youth, native ability, and confidence as the keys to artistic success. To be sure, Ohba and Obata make a concerted effort to show their characters engaged in the less dramatic aspects of manga-making: brainstorming story ideas, working with an editor, experimenting with unfamiliar tools. These scenes aren’t really meant to chart the boys’ growth as artists, however, but to reinforce the idea that Mashiro and Takagi are naturals.

Jiro Taniguchi’s forthcoming A Zoo in Winter offers a very different perspective on breaking into the manga industry, one in which the principle character engages in a long, complicated, and frequently humbling process of refining his skills. When we first meet seventeen-year-old Mitsuo Hamaguchi, he’s working at a manufacturing company, contemplating a future designing textiles while harboring dreams of becoming an artist. Hamaguchi spends his free time sketching animals at the local zoo, and chaperoning his boss’ wayward daughter on excursions around town.

At loose ends, Hamaguchi visits Tokyo on a whim, landing a position as an assistant to popular manga-ka Shiro Kondo. The work is anything but glamorous: Hamaguchi frequently pulls all-nighters, erasing pencil marks, blacking in objects, drawing speedlines, and copying backgrounds from other assistants’ drawings. Working on Kondo’s manga rekindles Hamaguchi’s own childhood ambition to become an artist, inspiring Hamaguchi to take live drawing classes and start work on his own story — a goal that proves more elusive than Hamaguchi imagined.

Hamaguchi’s emotional development is as fitful as his artistic. Though he’s savoring his independence, he frequently reverts to adolescent behavior whenever he hits a roadblock, wallowing in self-pity when another assistant seems poised to get his big break, for example, or drinking himself into a stupor when his girlfriend moves away. Hamaguchi’s relationship with his older brother is particularly telling: separated by ten years, Hamaguchi continues to view him as a father figure, squirming in embarrassment when his brother visits Kondo’s studio. (“Please, brother, try to mind your own business,” Hamaguchi pleads.) As their visit progresses, however, Hamaguchi marvels at his brother’s ability to chat up Kondo and mix with the bohemian element at the assistants’ favorite dive-bar, gradually realizing that his older brother isn’t as judgmental or rigid as Hamaguchi assumed, just deeply concerned with the family’s welfare.

In another artist’s hands, Hamaguchi’s brother might have been a sterner figure, one who dismissed an artistic career as a frivolous or irresponsible choice. Yet Jiro Taniguchi resists the temptation to make Hamaguchi’s brother into a straw man, instead allowing Hamaguchi to discover his brother’s relaxed decency for himself; Hamaguchi’s epiphany is a small one, but one that brings him a few steps closer to adulthood. Taniguchi manages the difficult feat of honoring the sincerity of Hamaguchi’s feelings while creating emotional distance between Hamaguchi and the reader; we’re not invited to experience Hamaguchi’s embarrassment so much as remember what it was like to learn that our parents were, in fact, just like all the other adults we knew and liked.

What makes these passages even more effective is Taniguchi’s draftsmanship. Though he has always been a superb illustrator, capable of evoking the bustling sprawl of a Japanese city or the craggy face of a mountain, his characters’ faces often had an impassive, Noh-mask quality. In Zoo in Winter, however, the characters’ facial expressions are rendered with the same precision he usually reserves for landscapes and interiors, capturing subtle shifts in their attitudes and emotions. Not that Taniguchi neglects the urban environment; one of the manga’s loveliest sequences unfolds in a zoo on a snowy day. Anyone who’s had the experience of running in Central Park on a rainy November afternoon, or walking a winter beach will immediately recognize Hamaguchi’s elation at having the zoo to himself, and of seeing the landscape transformed by the weather.

It’s the subtlety of the characterizations, however, that will remain with readers long after they’ve finished A Zoo in Winter. The story does more than just dramatize Hamaguchi’s journey from adolescence to adulthood; it shows us how his emotional maturation informs every aspect of his artistry — something that’s missing from many other portrait-of-an-artist-as-a-young-man sagas, which place much greater emphasis on the pleasure of professional recognition than on the satisfaction of mastering one’s craft. To be fair, Ohba and Obata address the issue of craft in Bakuman, but I’ll take the quiet honesty of A Zoo in Winter over the sound and fury of a Shonen Jump title any day. Highly recommended.

Review copy provided by Fanfare/Ponent Mon. A Zoo in Winter will be released on June 23, 2011.

A ZOO IN WINTER • BY JIRO TANIGUCHI • FANFARE/PONENT MON • 232 pp.

A Bride’s Story, Vol. 1

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For nearly 3,000 years, the Silk Road connected Asia with Africa and the Middle East, providing a conduit for the ancient world’s most precious commodities: silk, spices, glassware, medicine, perfume, livestock. By the nineteenth century, when A Bride’s Story takes place, the overland trade routes had been eclipsed in importance by maritime ones that linked China directly with India, Somalia, and the Mediterranean. Yet the Silk Road continued to play a vital role in bridging smaller geographical divides, as the main plot in A Bride’s Story demonstrates.

Set in Central Asia, A Bride’s Story focuses on two clans: the Halgal, a nomadic tribe whose livelihood depends on a mixture of hunting and herding, and the Eihon, farmers with a permanent homestead near the Caspian Sea. The families arrange a marriage between twenty-year-old Amir, the oldest Halgal daughter, and twelve-year-old Karluk, the future Eihon patriarch. As that age gap implies, Amir and Karluk’s union is one of political and economic expedience, designed to help the Eihon clan preserve its territory. Each family has reservations about the match: the Eihon believe that Amir is too old to bear Karluk a good-sized family, while the Halgal want to dissolve the union and betroth Amir to the leader of a neighboring tribe.

Amir and Karluk, however, seem more content with the arrangement than their elders. Given their age gap, Amir is more mother than wife to Karluk. There’s a note of urgency and purpose in Amir’s ministrations — she’s keen to prove her worth to the Eihons, especially when Karluk falls ill — but there’s also a genuine warmth and kindness in her gestures. Karluk, for his part, seems very much like a young teenager, intrigued by Amir’s beauty and charisma, but still too uncomfortable in his own skin to be physically demonstrative with her; Amir seems much keener to consummate their marriage, lest she lose her standing with the Eihon clan.

One of the great pleasures of A Bride’s Story is its strong cast of female characters. Balkirsh, the Eihon matriarch, proves Amir’s staunchest ally, fiercely rebuffing the Halgal’s efforts to reclaim Amir with a well-placed arrow. Though Balkirsh never explicitly states why she identifies with her daughter-in-law, the bow-and-arrow scene is telling, hinting at a shared cultural heritage that binds the two women. Amir, too, is a memorable character; she’s a terrific physical specimen, agile and fearless on horseback, but her true strength is her keen emotional intelligence. She accepts her new marriage without complaint, rapidly insinuating herself into the Eihon clan while preserving her own sense of self by introducing Karluk to her family’s customs.

The artwork, too, is another compelling reason to read A Bride’s Story. As she did in Emma and Shirley, Kaoru Mori pours her energy into period detail: clothing, furnishings, architecture. By far her most striking designs are the tribal costumes worn by the Eihon and the Halgal. Mori painstakingly draws embroidery, ornaments, and layers of fabric; watching Amir mount her horse, one can almost hear the swish of her skirts and the jingle of her earrings. Mori is similarly meticulous when rendering the surfaces of common household objects; she etches an intricate floral design into a silver tea set and weaves elegant, delicate patterns into the rugs that grace the walls and floors of the Eihon compound, luxuriating in the artistry with which these items were made.

At the same time, however, the Central Asian setting grants Mori greater license to make her characters move — something she rarely did in the overstuffed parlors  and crowded London streets in Emma and Shirley. To be sure, Mori’s flair for staging dynamic scenes was evident in Emma, when Hakim Atawari made a show-stopping entrance astride an elephant. In A Bride’s Story, however, Mori’s active sequences are less flashy and more fluid; they feel less like dramatic stunts than an organic part of the story, helping the reader understand how physically taxing Amir and Karluk’s labors are while helping us appreciate the scale and severity of the landscape.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of volume one is just how uneventful it is. Kaoru Mori is content to let her narrative follow the rhythms of everyday life, pausing to show us a master carver in his wood shop, or a group of women cooking a meal, or a young boy tending chickens. Yet A Bride’s Story is never dull, thanks to Mori’s smart, engaging dialogue; as she demonstrated in Emma and Shirley, Mori can make even the simplest moments revealing, whether her characters are preparing a manor house for the master’s return or discussing the merits of rabbit stew. By allowing her story to unfold in such a naturalistic fashion, A Bride’s Story manages to be both intimate and expansive, giving us a taste of what it might have been like to live along the Silk Road in the nineteenth century. Highly recommended.

A BRIDE’S STORY, VOL. 1 • BY KAORU MORI • YEN PRESS • 192 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

MMF: Ten things I love about Cross Game

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I’ve already spilled so much cyber ink on Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game (Viz), and I’m sure I’ll continue to do so. Quite simply, it’s one of the finest shônen series I’ve ever read. Heck, it’s of the best comics of any category that I’ve read. Here are ten reasons why I feel that way:

It’s less about baseball than the people who play it. One of the first questions that always arise when a sports manga is published in English is whether or not a reader needs to be interested in the sport in question to appreciate the manga. In the case of Cross Game, fondness for the sport isn’t necessary, and I say that from a place of profound disinterest in our putative national sport. Here’s the thing, as I see it: a creator or creators can tell an interesting story about any subject, no matter how removed from my personal interests, if they approach the material with intelligence and restraint and populate the telling with compelling, complex characters. The cast of Cross Game is undeniably dedicated to baseball, but they’re also invested in their interpersonal relationships with friends and family. Protagonist Ko Kitamura wants to succeed in the sport, but his reasons are specific and deeply personal. Aoba Tsukishima wants to excel in baseball as well, but her efforts are nicely tinged with ambivalence over the limitations a girl faces in that endeavor. They don’t live in a baseball-centric vacuum where nothing else matters. It’s not about baseball; it’s about the ways baseball intersects with characters’ deeper lives.

The pacing is often surprising. One of the first things that struck me about Adachi is the fact that he seems very unconcerned with the kind of traditional, beat-by-beat storytelling that you sometimes find in shônen manga. He can certainly spend chapters examining the progress of a single baseball game, but that progress is layered with so much more than stats and stunts. A good half of the second collection features Ko’s team of second-stringers challenging the coach’s chosen squad. It’s got the kind of narrative weight you’d expect, what with the underdogs stepping up and trying to prove their worth, but there are plenty of unexpected undercurrents. Adachi uses the game to explore the sometimes unsavory politics of team sports. He also uses a perfectly delightful and unexpected narrative device, as Aoba and a mysterious old man watch the game together, immediately establish a rapport, and evaluate the progress with a full and understated grasp of the other’s emotional and personal subtext. The game is fine, but the framing is better, and Adachi entirely skims over what other artists might consider pivotal moments to be documented from every angle and articulated in exhaustive, exhausting detail.

Adachi trusts the intelligence of his readers. Part of the peril of sports manga is that aforementioned exhausting detail, so it’s refreshing to see that Adachi doesn’t fall into that trap. He’s figured out the exact formula for how much exposition his readers will need to understand what’s going on, which means he doesn’t need to resort to the trick of pervasive narration drowning the actual action. He can show instead of tell, which is a disappointingly rare ability in a field that should rely so heavily on showing. Part of it might be confidence, but I think a more significant element is trust in the fact that readers care enough about the characters to remember their motivations and intuit how they drive their behaviors. Clear and persuasive motivations obviate the need for middle-distance monologues about what’s about to or has just happened.

The digressions are as appealing as the primary narrative. Cross Game is one of those titles that fully cohere in spite of seemingly disparate elements. Adachi can wander away from the baseball to pursue side stories and character moments that support the narrative as a whole. Quirky day-in-the-life chapters are charming in their own right and provide a change of pace, but they also give readers a wider view of the characters, which makes them even more likable.

The dialogue is understated. I’d never argue that this is an immovable requirement of good storytelling. I would even concede that the aforementioned middle-distance monologues can make some manga better. Look at the searing, hyper-expressed inner passions of the characters in Kyoko Ariyoshi’s Swan (CMX). All the same, it’s a pleasure to see a more oblique approach. As with Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket (Tokyopop), characters in Cross Game are much more likely to allude to past events than to fully restate them. It’s more in line with the way people actually speak, in fragments and phrases that the people who know them will understand, and those people include readers.

It can be very funny. The humor in Cross Game, like everything else, derives largely from who the characters are. The most aggressively comic character, Senda, is actually funny, which isn’t always a given. This egotistical dork is the type who really can’t accurately assess his own strengths and weaknesses, and Adachi takes at least a little delight in humiliating him. Senda isn’t mocked without at least a degree of fondness, though. Aoba is funny in a subtler way; her set-jaw certainty and pragmatism are amusing in contrast to some of the space cases around her, and Adachi lets her be wrong without scolding her.

It can be very sad. Of course, the thing Aoba is wrong about most often is Ko, but she can hardly be blamed. Early in the series, they share a very specific, very real loss, and it informs their young adulthood in ways that are both mournful and somewhat uplifting. Aoba and Ko have the same pole star, relying on their memories of this person to influence their actions in what they think are positive ways. Of course, those memories also form obstacles between Aoba and Ko, in spite and because of the things they have in common. It isn’t unusual for a shônen tale to have a driving, underlying tragedy, but it’s rare for it to be as grounded and effectively applied as it is here. The notes of sorrow pop up at unexpected but entirely credible moments, and they make the palette of the piece richer.

Adachi brings the mono no aware. It’s that juxtaposition of sorry and comedy blended with wistfulness and self-awareness that categorizes the concept of mono no aware, or “the pity of things,” for me. The characters here are very much invested in the moment, but they’re also cognizant of how fleeting that moment can be. Past, present and future all intersect to influence the characters’ feelings, making them feel truer and more pungent. If there’s a quality that makes me really invest in a story, particularly in a comic from Japan, it’s mono no aware.

It looks great. Adachi’s art has all of the individual elements that combine to form an attractive book – appealing character design, a facility for rendering people and objects in motion, sly comedic styling, and so on. What strikes me most are the page compositions, which often use a series of small, rigid panels to create a more sinuous whole. That style can be applied to the wide spectrum of tones Adachi routinely incorporates into his story. It’s more than good panel-by-panel drawing; it’s effective staging of those panels into something larger.

There’s an adorable cat. Okay, the cat isn’t central to the narrative, and its appearances are more like Easter eggs – little flashes of cuteness that occasionally pop up. But Adachi draws the cat very well, and he’s restrained in his use of the furry little critter. It adds a nice little touch to the Tsukishima household, making it feel slightly more real than it already does. And, let’s face it, the presence of an adorable cat always makes manga better. See also: Shampoo in Kiyoko Arai’s Beauty Pop (Viz).

So there are the ten reasons I love Cross Game. They’re also the reasons I’m so eager to read more of Adachi’s work. I look forward to seeing other people’s reaction to the series as the current Manga Moveable Feast (hosted by The Panelists) progresses.

 

Moon and Blood, Vol. 1

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If Rumiko Takahashi and Kaoru Tada collaborated on a manga, the results might look a lot like Nao Yazawa’s Moon and Blood, a cheerful mish-mash of slapstick humor, romance, and light horror.

Sayaka, the protagonist, walks into her kitchen one morning to discover that a handsome, imperious teenager named Kai has taken up residence with her family. “He’s the son of an old friend,” dad explains, though no one seems to remember which friend’s son Kai might be or when Kai’s family arranged the visit. Kai promptly enrolls in Sayaka’s school, where he distinguishes himself primarily by sleeping through every class, stirring only to solve a complex equation or dunk a basketball. Though Sayaka is annoyed by her new house guest, she’s also deeply curious about his nocturnal wanderings, as he slips out of the house every night, returning only at dawn. (Gee, I wonder what he could be up to?)

For a manga that covers such familiar territory, Moon and Blood proves surprisingly nimble and charming, poking gentle fun at many of shojo mangadom’s hoariest tropes. The first chapter reads like an affectionate parody of Itazura na Kiss, as Sayaka struggles to adjust to living under the same roof as Kai — he’s as smart and smug as Itazura‘s Naoki — and tries to fend off Takeshi, her big, goofy neighbor who’s adored her since childhood. Moon and Blood also scores points for allowing the reader to figure out what’s happening, rather than relying on an omniscient narrator to explain who Kai is, and why he’s insinuated himself into Sayaka’s home. Better still, Yazawa doesn’t artificially prolong that mystery by insisting the other characters behave like willful idiots; by the end of volume one, Sayaka and her brother are both on the verge of uncovering Kai’s true identity.

Art-wise, the characters boast the same upturned noses and rubbery faces of the Itazura na Kiss gang. The notable exception is Ai, a shape-shifting vampire who looks more like one of Takahashi’s sinister child minions, with her feline eyes, doll-like clothes, and blank, bored expression. (Her cat-form, too, has a Takahashian flair; Ai wouldn’t be out of place in Rin-ne, perhaps as Rokumon’s arch-nemesis.) Though Yazawa’s linework is clean, and her use of tone sparing, Yazawa isn’t quite Tada or Takahashi’s artistic peer; her character designs aren’t as refined as either Tada or Takahashi’s, and her reaction shots distort the characters’ faces and bodies to near-abstractions.

On the whole, however, Moon and Blood is a light, entertaining read that feels like something Tada or Takahashi might have produced in the late 1980s or early 1990s. That’s not a knock on Yazawa; if anything, the story’s character-driven plotlines, bickering antagonists, and horror-lite subplot are a welcome departure from the kind of intense, sexually fraught supernatural romances that are posting big numbers on the New York Times Manga Bestseller List in 2011. Recommended.

Review copy provided by Digital Manga Publishing, Inc.

MOON AND BLOOD, VOL. 1 • BY NAO YAZAWA • DMP • 70 pp. • RATING: TEEN (13+)

Good trash revisited

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This week’s random question has me nostalgic for Go! Comi and hopeful that someone will pick up some of their orphan titles, so I dug up an old Flipped column from August of 2009 that outlined some of my personal favorites from their catalog. To atone for the rerun, I’ll open with the following image:

I can’t believe summer is almost over.  June and July are vague, blurry memories.  Fortunately, there are still a few weeks before Labor Day, so it’s not too late to recommend some good trash for beach reading.  And when it comes to slightly tawdry, highly readable shôjo manga, Go! Comi has a very solid track record.

One of the titles from the company’s 2001 launch, Takako Shigematsu’s eight-volume Tenshi Ja Nai!!, remains one of my favorite examples of mean-girl manga.  Shigematsu combines sleek illustrations with twisty storytelling to concoct memorable soap opera.

Tenshi (or “I’m No Angel!!”) is set in an elite all-girls school, always a promising setting for scheming drama.  It’s protagonist, Hikaru, would like to avoid drama entirely; a brief childhood career as a model made her the target of ruthless bullying from jealous classmates, and she’s tried to keep her head down ever since.  Unfortunately, the school’s registrar gives her a roommate that makes her low-profile strategy impossible.

A budding starlet is the worst possible pairing for Hikaru.  The shared spotlight and jealousy of the student body are bad enough, but this starlet has a secret.  The fetching Izumi is actually a guy, as ruthless and conniving in private as his public persona is sweet and demure.  Izumi needs Hikaru’s help to keep his secret, and he’s not averse to blackmail to secure Hikaru’s cooperation and silence.

With secret identities, schoolgirl rivalries, gender bending, and show-biz ambition, Tenshi is the kind of story that virtually writes itself.  Shigematsu keeps the twists coming and even infuses the story with a reasonable amount of romance, though she never lapses into sentimentality.  Given her spiky cast of schemers, it’s hard to see how she could.

Go! Comi has released two other titles by Shigematsu.  There’s a forgettable one-volume outing, King of the Lamp, about a genie who must help young girls find love.  It’s noteworthy mostly for Shigematsu’s acknowledgement that girls are entitled to have sexual desires and to act on them without punishment or guilt.  More in the sneaky, substantive vein of Tenshi is Shigematsu’s Ultimate Venus, which is currently in release.

It’s another swimming-with-sharks story, this time focusing on an orphan who learns that she’s heir to a corporate dynasty.  After her mother’s death, young Yuzu is shocked to meet her high-powered cougar of a grandmother who wants to groom Yuzu to take over the family business.  Yuzu relies on her mother’s homespun, occasionally hardcore wisdom to foil scheming competitors and keep her head above the blood-filled social waters. (Go! Comi only published five of the nine volumes of the series.)

I would be hopelessly remiss if I looked at Go! Comi’s good trash and ignored You Higuri, a prolific manga-ka who stylishly skates on the edge of good taste.  Like the gifted Fumi Yoshinaga, Higuri rarely seems to allow herself to be confined by the strictures of category.  Higuri may generally aim artistically lower than slice-of-life queen Yoshinaga, but her philosophy similarly seems to be that more is better.  A straightforward fantasy story can always benefit from guy-on-guy sexual tension, and a costume drama is always better with a healthy dose of smut.

Her English-language debut came in the form of Cantarella (Go! Comi), a fictional, gothic look at the scheming Borgia clan.  Given the rich volume of historically documented scandal and sleaze the Borgias offer, it hardly seems necessary for Higuri to gild the lily with demonic possession, but gild it she does.  Budding patriarch Cesare is doomed from birth by his ambitious father, who sells the tot’s soul to the devil to support his own ambitions.

A possessed prince can always use a good right-hand man, and Cesare’s comes in the form of hunky assassin Chiaro.  When your father is the Pope and your moral compass is a hired killer, you know your life is bound to be complicated.  So why not complicate it further by entering into a twisted love triangle with your kept murderer and your own sister, Lucrezia?  History tells us that, glory days aside, the Borgias didn’t end well, and it seems unlikely that Higuri’s version will fare any better, but it’s certain to be juicy. (Go! Comi only published ten of the twelve volumes of the series.)

Having come of age in the 1980s with television shows like Dynasty and Dallas, I’m a sucker for sagas about powerful families full of sociopaths, so Cantarella has a special place in my heart.   That said, Go! Comi has launched another Higuri series that I may like even better, as it is top-to-bottom insane.  It’s Crown, written by Shinji Wada and illustrated by Higuri.

Wada is one of those seemingly rare male manga-ka who work primarily in shôjo, though his works (like Delinquent Girl Detective) often seem to favor an action-adventure bent.  Wada and Higuri’s respective sensibilities seem to blend perfectly, creating a freakish, addictive fusion of hardboiled violence and secret-princess sparkle.  Here’s the plot:  a plucky orphan learns that she’s actually a lost princess of a wealthy island nation; she also learns that she has a brother, half of a pair of ruthless mercenaries who break out the big guns to protect her.  Some hearts are set aflutter even as others are blown, still beating, from the chests of rival soldiers of fortune by military-grade ordinance.

The princess crushes on the boys.  The boys may or may not be crushing on each other.  Schoolgirls squeal at trained killers.  Skyscrapers explode.  Bloodthirsty assassins fail in their task because the princess is just so darned nice.  In other words, Crown is a nutty, freewheeling mash-up of manga clichés drawn from whatever category strikes Wada and Higuri’s fancies. It’s delightful.

I should note that guilty pleasures aren’t the only things Go! Comi does well.  I’ve already written at length about Setona Mizushiro’s After School Nightmare, and the publisher has made some nice choices with sweeter, more sentimental shôjo.  Yuu Asami’s A.I. Revolution (five of seventeen volumes published) offers old-fashioned science fiction with a romantic bent, and Toriko Gin’s Song of the Hanging Sky (two of six volumes published) is a potent, beautifully drawn fable.

 

Blood Alone, Vols. 1-3

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In his essay Moe: The Cult of the Child, Jason Thompson argues that one of the most pernicious aspects of moe is the way in which the father-daughter relationship is sentimentalized. “Moe is a fantasy of girlhood seen through chauvinistic male eyes,” he explains, “in which adorable girls do adorable things while living in questionable situations with adult men.” The idealized “daughters” found in Kanna, Tsukuyomi: Moon Phase, and Yotsuba&! adore their “fathers” in an uncritical fashion, showering them with affection and trying — often unsuccessfully — to play the role of wife and mother, in the process endearing themselves to both the hero and the reader with their burnt meals, singed shirts, and sincere desire to please.

Blood Alone provides an instructive example of this phenomenon. The story focuses on Misaki, a young female vampire whose appearance and mental age peg her as an eleven- or twelve-year-old girl. Misaki lives with Kuroe, a twenty-something man who’s been appointed as her guardian — though in Yotsuba-eqsue fashion, the circumstances surrounding their arrangement remain hazy in the early volumes of the manga. When we first meet Kuroe, he seems as easygoing as Yotsuba’s “dad,” a genial, slightly bumbling man who supports himself by writing novels and moonlighting as a private detective. And if that isn’t awww-inducing enough, Kuroe’s first gig is to locate a missing pet, a job that Misaki takes upon herself to complete when Kuroe bumps up against a publisher’s deadline.

As soon as Misaki’s cat-hunting mission goes awry, however, we see another side of Kuroe: he’s handy with his fists, quickly dispatching a rogue vampire who threatens Misaki’s safety. Small wonder, then, that Misaki has a crush on her guardian; not only is he the kind of sensitive guy who writes books and rescues kitties, he’s also the kind of guy who goes to extreme lengths to protect his family.

If that were the extent of their relationship, Blood Alone would provide enough heart-tugging moments to appeal to moe enthusiasts without offending other readers’ sensibilities, but Masayuki Takano plays up the romantic angle to an uncomfortable degree. The most unsettling gambit, by far, is Kuroe and Misaki’s penchant for sleeping in the same bed together. That a grown man would even entertain such behavior is disturbing enough, but what makes it particularly egregious is that Kuroe rationalizes this arrangement because Misaki is afraid of “ghosts and monsters.” I think we’re supposed to find this endearing — a vampire who’s afraid of the dark! — but it serves to infantilize Misaki even more than her little-girl dresses, terrible cooking, and fierce jealousy of Sainome, the one adult woman in Kuroe’s life. If we only saw things from Misaki’s point of view, one could make a solid argument that Masayuki Takanao is deliberately showing us things through a distorted lens, but Takano’s narrative technique simply isn’t that sophisticated; Kuroe’s behavior — his solicitousness, his guilt — suggests that Misaki’s understanding of their relationship isn’t as far off the mark as an adult reader might hope.

This kind of confusion extends to other aspects of the manga as well. About one-third of the stories fall into the category of supernatural suspense. The dialogue favors information dump over organic revelation of fact, while the plot frequently hinges on characters suddenly disclosing a convenient power or revealing their vampire connections. Yet these chapters are more effective than the slice-of-life scenes, blending elements of urban fantasy, police procedural, and Gothic horror into atmospheric stories about vampires who use the anonymity of cities to hide among — and prey on — the living.

The rest of the series, however, is jarringly at odds with the suspenseful mood of these stories; we’re treated to numerous chapters in which very little happens, save a Valentine’s Day exchange of chocolates or a jealous spat. As a result, the series feels aimless; whatever overarching storyline may bind the supernatural element to the domestic is too deeply buried to give the series a sense of narrative urgency.

Art-wise, Blood Alone boasts attractive, cleanly executed character designs and settings, but stiff, unpersuasive action scenes. Backgrounds disappear when fists fly, and the bodies look like awkwardly posed mannequins, their legs and arms held away from the torso at unnatural angles.

The most distinctive element of the artwork is Takano’s willingness to abandon grids altogether, creating fluid, full-page sequences in which the characters’ faces play a similar role to panel boundaries and shapes in directing the eye across the page. In this spread, for example, Sainome gently teases Misaki about her relationship with Kuroe:

The undulating lines and overlapping images give these pages a pleasing, sensual quality, but what’s most striking is the way in which the strongest lines on the page point to Misaki’s eyes and mouth, showing us how difficult it is for Misaki to conceal her feelings for Kuroe. The wordless sequence below — in which Misaki waits for Kuroe to join her on a date — works in a similar fashion, using the direction of Misaki’s gaze to lead us through the proper sequence of events:

Though these two scenes are gracefully executed, they point to the biggest problem with Blood Alone: Misaki and Kuroe aren’t portrayed as ward and guardian, or brother and sister, but as star-crossed lovers whose age and circumstance make it impossible for them to fully express their true feelings for one another. Some readers may find their unconsummated romance heartwarming, the story of a love that can never be, but for other readers, Misaki and Kuroe’s relationship will be a deal-breaker, a sentimental and uncritical portrayal of an inappropriate relationship between a young vampire and her adult protector.

Review copy provided by Seven Seas.

BLOOD ALONE, VOLS. 1-3 • BY MASAYUKI TAKANO • SEVEN SEAS • 600 pp. • RATING: TEEN (13+)

From the stack: Maoh: Juvenile Remix vols. 4 and 5

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The good news: there’s nothing wrong with Maoh: Juvenile Remix (Viz) that Kazuya Minekura couldn’t fix. The bad news: Maoh: Juvenile Remix was created by Megumi Osuga.

Maoh, based on a story by Kotaro Isaka, has an interesting plot. A corporation is undertaking a neighborhood revitalization plan that basically involves razing the place and displacing the residents to make room for luxury high-rises. The corporation is opposed by a group of vigilantes led by an enigmatic and ostensibly charismatic figure named Inukai. Caught in the middle of these two forces is a high-school student named Ando who has the minor psychic power of being able to put his words into the mouths of others.

The story is packed with corrupt officials, hired killers, angry mobs, and generally seedy types. There are attempts at moral complexity and the angst of personal choice in a crumbling world. There’s a reasonable sprinkling of homoeroticism.

In other words, it reminds me of Minekura’s Wild Adapter (Tokyopop). Unfortunately, it also makes me wish I was reading Wild Adapter instead.

The main problem with Maoh is its leaden sincerity. Ando makes Hamlet look like a type-A personality, and his use of his “ventriloquism” is generally awkward and hard to follow. (How does forcing people to quote Kamen Rider protect you from mob violence?) The dialogue is almost always overblown, and Ando’s droning internal monologues may make you wish someone else was putting words in his mouth.

The promising plot is generally sacrificed to spectacle. The people of Nekota City seem even more prone to mob mentality than the denizens of Springfield, and it’s supposed to be chilling here instead of goofy and ironic. Inukai and his vigilantes seem to have no credible moral position, and their opponents in the Anderson Group are just greedy, which equates to “bad.” There are interesting arguments to be made in a story like this, but it’s just a frame for bombast in this case.

The quality of the art varies quite a bit. Some chapters have a sleek competence that resembles a combination of Takeshi Obata and Naoki Urasawa. A lot of the time, the pages seem like they’ve been finished in a hurry. I would describe the character design as patchy; I’ve seen many a manga assassin look ridiculous and still be terrifying, but Osuga doesn’t strike that balance. Some of the crowd scenes display too-strenuous attempts to achieve visual variety and end up looking like a community theatre musical chorus that was asked to provide its own costumes. Even the homoeroticism doesn’t help, as it frequently seems inadvertent, unless Osuga is trying to suggest what a cute couple Ando and his younger brother might be.

Maoh badly needs some of Minekura’s polish and slyness, but it has neither. It’s just lumpy and overly serious, with a waffling protagonist who lacks urgency. Hard as it tries to simulate it, Maoh lacks the sex appeal it needs to really be something.

(Based on review copies provided by the publisher.)

 

Lychee Light Club

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David: Kate and I were both planning on writing about Usamaru Furuya’s Lychee Light Club, which arrives courtesy of Vertical this week, and we decided to pool our critical resources. It’s… quite a reading experience, and I think Kate and I have different overall responses to the book. First, though, Kate, would you like to take a stab at summarizing the plot?

Kate: If I were at a cocktail party, and someone I didn’t know very well asked me to describe Lychee Light Club, I might say that it’s about a group of teenage boys who are just beginning to go through puberty. They’ve formed their own secret organization with elaborate rules and rituals, and go to extreme lengths to conceal their activities from outsiders. Among those activities: building Lychee, a robot who’s programmed to find beautiful girls and bring them back to the clubhouse. Not long after his activation, however, Lychee develops a conscience, forming a bond with one of his kidnapping victims and turning against his creators.

Of course, that summary makes Lychee Light Cub sound more coherent and less violent than it is; the boys deal with threatening figures by raping, torturing, and dismembering them, acts that Usamaru Furuya draws in exquisite detail. There’s also a great deal of internal conflict within the Lychee Light Club, as several charismatic boys vie for control of the group. And in true Lord of the Flies fashion, the boys begin turning on each other with a savagery that’s genuinely disturbing.

How’d I do?

David: I think you did very well. It’s a fever dream of adolescent power fantasies manifesting themselves as abominable realities. I think there’s always an element of that in Furuya’s storytelling, and I don’t always have a lot of patience for it. I tend to find that his work is characterized more by flashes of brilliance than sustained craftsmanship.

In this case, though, and in spite of the really strenuous efforts to be shocking, I found this to be the most coherent work of Furuya’s that I read. It’s packed with undeniably revolting moments, but it holds together in ways that something like Genkaku Picasso didn’t. Whether that coherence compensates for the unsavory content is an entirely different question, obviously.

Kate: I wonder if the story’s coherence can be attributed to the fact that Furuya adapted Lychee Light Club from a pre-existing work. (For folks who haven’t read the English edition, Furuya based the story on an experimental play called Tokyo Grand Guignol.) Perhaps working from someone else’s storyline helped Furuya concentrate more on plot mechanics, something he definitely had difficulty doing in Genkaku Picasso. It certainly makes me curious to see what he’ll do with Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human.

As for the unsavory content… I don’t even know where to start. I understand that the story is intended to be dark satire, to reveal just how hysterical and silly young adolescent boys can be, especially before they know how to approach and interact with girls. But I have a hard time getting on board with that kind of satire when it requires the characters to grossly abuse girls and women. And I have an even harder time embracing that kind of plot device when the author eroticizes the violence against female characters. I’m thinking, in particular, of an early scene in which the boys capture one of their teachers. Though we’re meant to see that the boys’ behavior is a symptom of their depravity, the scene in which they kill her is charged with a thoroughly unpleasant, sexual energy: they fondle her, they strip her, and then they vivisect her, inspecting her internal organs with prurient interest. As a female reader, my own revulsion was so strong that it was hard to push past that scene.

David: That scene definitely constructs a high barrier to the work. I almost wonder if it got so gruesome so early to inform the audience that this was what they were likely to get, and that they might choose to flip past those chapters as they appeared in Manga Erotics F. An issue that may compound the problem of the frankly repulsive acts these kids perpetrate is that, while Lychee Light Club is more structurally coherent than some of Furuya’s other works, that doesn’t mean that it has a sound and consistent philosophy. On one hand, I’m not a fan of entertainments that try and paint aberrant depravity as generational malaise, and this book certainly doesn’t attempt that. But it doesn’t really present any other explanation aside from the malignant influence of a charismatic psychopath. And that’s a problematic starting point for other reasons.

But I’m glad you mentioned the work’s theatrical origins side by side with its offensive content, because the theatricality was key to my appreciation of what I feel like Furuya is doing here. One of the striking things about the book was the very specific theatricality that I took away from it.

By that, I don’t mean that it was melodramatic or extravagant, but that it seemed wedded to certain theatrical conventions. Furuya kept using compositions that suggested proscenium staging to me, a sort of one-set gore opera not unlike Sondheim and Prince’s Sweeney Todd or the sewer scenes in Phantom of the Opera. Even the strange flatness of character and event, no matter how horrible, seemed like a conscious aesthetic choice that a theatrical troupe might assume as their distinguishing shtick. I’m not saying it justifies the gratuitous violence, particularly when it was sexualized, but it did add a layer of distance for me, and it added a certain degree of fascination.

Kate: I agree; the characters’ interactions with one another — especially the boys’ group dynamic — feel like pure stage business, which makes it easier to interpret their behavior as ritual or schtick. I also agree with you that there’s something aesthetically appealing about the way Furuya emphasizes the story’s theatrical roots, both in the way he frames the action and in the way he moves his characters around the “stage”; the boys’ ceremonies reminded me of something out of Young Sherlock Holmes — well, if that movie had been made by Leni Riefenstahl, and not Steven Spielberg.

And yet…

I’m still struggling with my reaction to the way the female characters are treated. Kanon endures less sexual and physical humiliation than the other female characters, yet she’s so saintly that it’s hard to see her as anything more than an adolescent fantasy figure. Maybe that’s the point, but Furuya’s treatment of the other female characters is so despicable that it’s hard to know whether he’s condemning the boys’ behavior or just shrugging his shoulders and saying, “Gosh, that’s just how young teenagers are.”

David: I’m glad you mentioned that shrug, because I view it as a consistent problem in this sub-genre of fiction. When I was in college, it seemed like there was a minor flood of independent films about how awful and amoral teen-agers are, and my consistent reaction to them was always, “Yes? And?” I’ve never thought that merely identifying the depths to which any group of people can sink isn’t sufficient purpose for fiction, no matter how well it’s crafted. When it resorts to a vérité approach to that material, whether it’s a movie like River’s Edge or a graphic novel like Ayako, I feel like there’s nothing to respond to but the bleak appraisal, and that’s always unsatisfying. Lychee at least has the absurd theatricality to elevate it.

But, as you say, that’s not going to be enough to mitigate the effect of violence, particularly the violence against women. And Kanon is a problematic female lead in the sense that she’s very much in that gray area between ambiguous and under-developed. I kept hoping that there was more to her behavior, as I would occasionally detect some suggestion of a larger pattern to her actions, but that never really cohered into anything meaningful. She influenced the outcome of the story, but that was less through agency than it was a result of an incongruous female presence, which is hardly the same thing as an active female character. Does that make sense?

Kate: Absolutely — I think you’ve put your finger on why I struggled so much with the story, even though Kanon is intended to be a sympathetic figure.

Switching gears, I wanted to ask you what you thought of the artwork.

David: I’ve always been taken with Furuya’s art, even when it’s in service of this kind of material. He strikes a really impressive balance between realism and stylization, I think, and that was definitely my impression here.

One thing I have to mention, which is minor but struck me repeatedly in this book: the odd blush that he applies to boys’ lips. It’s such a strange little detail, but I always notice it, and I always find it unsettling in a productive way, at least in this book. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but it landed in this place where it suggested both innocence and horror.

Kate: That small detail with the boys’ lips harkens back to what you said about Lychee Light Club‘s theatricality; it’s as if the characters are wearing stage make-up to make them look even younger and more androgynous.

And speaking of the boys’ appearance, one of the things I found most interesting about Lychee Light Club is the way in which Furuya channels the spirit of Suehiro Maruo. When I first flipped through the book, I was struck by how many of the characters reminded me of an image that appears in Frederick Schodt’s Dreamland Japan. It’s a picture of three schoolboys — one holding a sword, one playing a flute, and one cocking a baseball bat — from Maruo’s Itoshi no Showa (My Beloved Showa Era). Each of the boys represents a different period in modern Japanese history (the Meiji, Taisho, and Showa eras, respectively), and at the end of the story, when a new “sibling” is born into their family, “they take off their masks and reveal themselves as monsters.” Schodt goes on to quote critic Inuhiko Yomota, who characterizes Maruo’s style as “a museum of 20th-century kitsch art” for the way in which Maruo synthesizes Nazi symbolism, traditional Japanese woodblock prints, and Taisho and Showa-era graphic design into a coherent visual language.

I think that “museum” metaphor is an apt way to describe Furuya’s style as well. In Short Cuts, for example, he proved that he could mimic just about any manga-ka’s style in service of a good joke; he pokes fun at Leiji Matsumoto and Osamu Tezuka with beautifully drawn panels that not only reproduce the characters from Galaxy 999 and Astro Boy, but also the sensibility of those comics — the linework, the density of images, the application of screentone. In Lychee Light Club, Furuya does something similar with Maruo’s work, though the prevailing spirit is different: the character designs, extreme violence, and “unmasking” of the boys in the final act of the story seem like explicit homage to Maruo, rather than a playful jab at established masters.

David: That’s so interesting, and it helps some things click for me. I think I noticed a similar kind of curatorial bent in Furuya’s Palepoli strips in Secret Comics Japan. I always find creators more interesting when they have a wider frame of reference, so to see Furuya fusing theatrical conventions and Maruo homage with his own sensibility is very satisfying, in a way. I just feel like artists are almost always automatically better when they have interests beyond their specific creative spheres and when they can drawn on these interests to inform their work while still maintaining their specific point of view. The ability to synthesize a range of elements from all over high and low culture while still creating something unique is quite impressive to me.

Of course, if it’s in service of fairly repulsive material, that may not be enough to salvage the reading experience. It did for me, but I certainly understand that it probably won’t for many, many people. Which brings me to a tricky question: to whom would you recommend this book, if you would recommend it at all? It’s interesting to me that Vertical would publish a book like this. There’s certainly been no shortage of aggressively shocking material in their other releases (Felipe Smith’s Peepo Choo and Tezuka’s MW and Ayako come to mind), but Lychee Light Club seems to be on a different taste plane altogether.

Kate: Good question — and one I feel unqualified to answer, since a formulation as glib as “fans of Suehiro Maruo’s work!” only addresses a tiny fraction of Lychee Light Club‘s potential audience. But if I had to take a stab at recommending it, I’d say it would be of interest to anyone who was intrigued by the darker stories in AX: An Alternative Manga Anthology (e.g. Kaizuichi Hanawa’s “Six Paths of Wealth”).

David: I think that’s an excellent answer. I like it even better because I don’t have an answer of my own.

On the subject of marketing, I noticed an intriguing tag line in Vertical’s house ad for Jiro Matsumoto’s Velveteen and Mandala, which asserted that “the manga renaissance continues.” I quite liked that sentiment, particularly as it relates to Vertical’s catalog. It’s ambitious, and not every book is right for every reader, but Vertical does make very ambitious choices, and their selection does have something for many different demographics, from kids who like funny cats to hardcore otaku.

 

Hikaru no Go 21-23 by Yumi Hotta and Takeshi Obata

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Nearly seven years after it began, the English edition of Hikaru no Go has finally reached the final volume. I was originally both curious and skeptical about the final arc of the series, in which Hikaru and long-time rival Akira Toya represent Japan in the first Hokuto Cup (against China and Korea), but this was mostly because I’d liked where the anime chose to bring the story to a close. Having now finished the manga, though, I find it comes to quite a satisfying conclusion, after all.

Volume 21 wraps up the qualifying rounds, with a few final moments of character insight for Ochi—who, even though he wins his game, can’t stand the thought that he’d be the weak link on the team—and Waya, who realizes he hasn’t got Ochi’s pride, and was relieved not to have to play against tougher opponents. Once the Japanese team is set, consisting of Hikaru and Akira plus Yashiro, a player from the Kansai go Association, they spend the days leading up to the tournament crashing at Akira’s house, staying up all night studying game records and devouring the bento boxes Hikaru’s sweet mother prepared for them. (Hikaru treats his mother somewhat dismissively here, but after learning that Yashiro receives no support from his parents regarding his career, he has a change of heart and sort of, kind of invites her to watch him play.)

Right before the tournament begins, Hikaru learns that one of the Korean players, the handsome Ko Yong Ha, has made disparaging remarks about Shusaku, who was actually, of course, Sai. While Akira wonders why Hikaru takes the insult so personally (he will never actually learn the answer), Hikaru gets all fired up and ends up getting in a tough spot in his first game against China. There’s a nice moment where he realizes he’s going to have to stage his own comeback—“There’s nobody else here to do it”—and though he fails, his performance is impressive enough to convince Kurata, the Japanese team leader, to agree to Hikaru’s request to play in first position against Korea, so he can challenge Ko Yong Ha head-on.

For Hikaru, of course, this isn’t about personal glory. It’s about honoring Sai’s legacy. “The whole reason I play Go is…” he starts to say, but he doesn’t complete this thought until later. While he and Ko Yong Ha play a riveting game—and how awesome is it to see a packed crowd raptly following the analysis of the game, including familiar faces like Tsutsui (looking rather foxy, I must add)?—Toya Meijin and Yang Hai, the leader of the Chinese team, talk about Sai, the mysterious player who appeared on the Internet a few years ago, and indulge in some fanciful speculation that he might’ve been the spirit of Shusaku.

It’s kind of neat that they got it right, but will never know it, and it’s wonderful that Sai was responsible for reinvigorating a genius player like the Meijin, and inspiring who knows how many others. Indeed, though Hikaru ends up losing the game by a close margin (I actually love that the Japanese team didn’t cruise to an unlikely victory), his performance is shown to inspire a pair of insei and in this way, Sai’s legacy continues.

As Hikaru explains, he began playing go “so I could link the distant past to the far future.” The conclusion of the series, though open-ended, shows that he is succeeding in this goal, even though his current match ended in defeat. As Akira wisely points out, “It doesn’t end here, y’know. In fact, it’s barely started.” This idea is echoed by the lovely cover to the final volume, on which Hikaru and Akira gaze with clear eyes at the path that lies ahead.

For more discussion of Hikaru no Go, please check out the commemorative roundtable at Manga Bookshelf!

Spice and Wolf, Vol. 4

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At some point in your childhood, a well-meaning adult — a parent, a teacher, Mr. Rodgers — exhorted you “not to judge a book by its cover.” I’m not as diligent about following that advice as I should be, though I have enough experience as a consumer to correctly guess a book’s contents and intended audience from the packaging. Every now and then, however, I completely misjudge a title, as I did with volume four of Spice and Wolf. The cover suggested a fantasy-adventure in a medieval setting — perhaps something along the lines of Claymore — but the story read more like an economics textbook with sexy illustrations.

Ostensibly, Spice and Wolf focuses on the relationship between Holo, a six-hundred-year-old wolf god, and Lawrence, a twenty-five-year-old human. The two meet cute when Holo stows away in Lawrence’s wagon, looking for a ride to her homeland of Yoitsu. Though they’re temperamental opposites — Holo is crafty and impulsive, Lawrence is deliberate and careful — the two discover that they make good business partners; Holo’s ability to manipulate trading partners complements Lawrence’s financial acumen and risk assessment skills.

That’s not a bad premise for a manga; in the right hands, Holo and Lawrence’s travels could be the basis for a smart social satire or an engaging comedy. Unfortunately, the script frequently requires Lawrence to explain the finer points of loans, currency, and inventory control to Holo, expositions that are about as much fun to read as a chapter from Modern Management: Concepts and Skills. Holo’s responses are equally stultifying; in one scene, she cheerfully tells Lawrence, “It’s my intention to pay you back with interest. That means the more I borrow, the more you profit.” Ace student, that Holo.

These tedious exchanges about interest rates and guild politics are occasionally interrupted by comic interludes, usually prompted by Holo’s discovery of a stash of booze or Holo’s decision to groom her tail, an elaborate procedure that requires her to assume a number of fetching poses as she preens. If there was any chemistry between Holo and Lawrence, these scenes might not feel so completely perfunctory, but they serve little purpose beyond catering to the male reader’s gaze. Worse still, the story lacks any sense of urgency or purpose; the dramatic climax of volume four involves Lawrence discovering that he bought a wagon’s worth of worthless armor. There’s more at stake in a typical episode of The Apprentice, and they’re hawking salad dressing and mattresses.

Yet for all my criticisms of Spice and Wolf, I can see why the series has a devoted following. The artwork is immaculate, with clean lines, appealing character designs, and meticulously rendered landscapes, buildings, and urban markets; Keito Koume’s crowd scenes bustle with activity, as characters negotiate deals and flirt with each other, bringing the walled medieval towns to vivid life. The supporting cast, too, boasts some memorable characters. In volume four, for example, Lawrence and Holo cross paths with Norah, a shepherdess whose pleasant demeanor masks a complicated personal history. The volume closes with a bonus story showing us Norah’s visit to a local town, followed by a difficult night when she and her dog Ennek hide from Church authorities. It’s a simple mood piece, but it’s tense and effectively staged, hinting at the broad — even overreaching — power invested in religious authorities.

That the Church’s power and history remain mysterious four volumes into the manga points to the series’ biggest problem: most of the interesting conflicts in Spice and Wolf are so deeply buried beneath the commercial shop-talk that they barely register at all. As a result, Spice and Wolf reads more like Project X: Cup Medieval Noodle than a proper drama; what it desperately needs is a high-speed wagon chase, sword fight, or — dare I say it? — a love scene to goose the proceedings.

Review copy provided by Yen Press. Volume four of Spice & Wolf arrives in stores on May 31, 2011.

SPICE AND WOLF, VOL. 4 • STORY BY ISUNA HASEKURA, ART BY KEITO KOUME • YEN PRESS • 192 pp. • RATING: MATURE

From the stack: Ai Ore! vol. 1

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Who could have predicted that the comic I read this week that really made my skin crawl wasn’t Usumaru Furuya’s Lychee Light Club (Vertical)? No, that dubious honor goes to Mayu Shinja’s Ai Ore! (Viz). It manifests the kind of dreadful sexual politics I secretly hoped for from The Beautiful Skies of Hou Ou High, providing a handy reminder that one should always be careful about the wishes one makes.

It begins with an all-girl rock band losing its lead singer and the subsequent application of a boy for the vacant spot in the line-up. The band members are all sexy and androgynous, and they’re idols at their all-girl high school. The would-be singer is delicate and feminine, and his classmates have declared him the princess of their all-boy academy. Mizuki, the de facto leader of Blaue Rosen, is reluctant to admit Akira to the band. She doesn’t think she’s particularly fond of guys, but Akira is persistent. In fact, he’s creepily persistent. One might even say he doesn’t take no for an answer.

His desire to join the band is driven mostly by his obsession with Mizuki, and her repeatedly expressed disinterest doesn’t really penetrate Akira’s disconcerting determination. He’s one of those “just a matter of time” love interests who keeps acting like the girl’s already fallen for him (or that she doesn’t have a say in the matter). In spite of her formidable demeanor, Mizuki can’t seem to effectively fend off Mizuki’s persistent advances. Worse still, and obviously, she doesn’t really want to.

This is the part where I start ranting like an old prude, but dynamics like this really bother me. I hate the whole “I know what you want better than you do” précis, and I think it sends a horrible message. I really hate unwanted physical affection being presented as romantic or, even worse, cute. I hate when female characters are repeatedly put in peril so their stalker love interests can save them and look marginally better by comparison. And I hate Akira.

I find him repulsive. Part of this is due to the way that Shinja draws him. She’ll give Akira close-ups, narrated by Mizuki talking about how cute or ardent he looks. I think he looks demented in these panels, but maybe I’m just projecting my interpretation of his behavior on his appearance. It’s certainly partly because of the horrible lines he uses on Mizuki. (“Instead of singing about love, drown yourself in me.” “I came to take advantage of… your sadness, Mizuki-Chan.” “Don’t  you like me licking you?”) But mostly it’s just his obnoxious, menacing behavior. His final acts of the volume go so far beyond the pale that the second should begin with him being sent to jail.

Listen, I’m not naive enough to think that this kind of thing doesn’t have its audience, and I certainly don’t think that I’m going to make any difference by bitching about it. But when my primary response to a romantic narrative is “Nobody who actually loves you would treat you that way,” then it seems worth noting, at least for the record.

(Based on a review copy provided by the publisher.)

 

5 Reasons to Read InuYasha

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InuYasha was the first comic that I actively collected, the manga that introduced me to the Wednesday comic-buying ritual and the very notion of self-identifying as a fan. Though I followed it religiously for years, trading in my older editions for new ones, watching the anime, and speculating about the finale, my interest in the series gradually waned as I was exposed to new artists and new genres. Still, InuYasha held a special place in my heart; reading it was one of my seminal experiences as a comic fan, making me reluctant to re-visit InuYasha for fear of sullying those precious first-manga memories. VIZ’s recent decision to re-issue InuYasha in an omnibus edition, however, inspired me to pick it up again. I made a shocking discovery in the process of re-reading the first chapters: InuYasha is good. Really good, in fact, and deserving of more respect than it gets from many critics.

What makes InuYasha work? I can think of five reasons:

1. The story arcs are long enough to be complex and engaging, but not so long as to test the patience.

There’s a Zen quality to Rumiko Takahashi’s storytelling that might not be obvious at first glance; after all, she loves a pratfall or a sword fight as much as the next shonen manga-ka. Don’t let that surface activity fool you, however: Takahashi has a terrific sense of balance, staging a romantic interlude between a demon-of-the-week episode and a longer storyline involving Naraku’s minions, thus preventing the series from devolving into a punishing string of battle arcs. The other great advantage of this approach is that Takashi carves out more space for her characters to interact as people, not just combatants; as a result, InuYasha is one of the few shonen manga in which the characters’ relationships evolve over time.

2. Takahashi knows how to stage a fight scene that’s dramatic, tense, and mercifully short.

‘Nuff said.

3. InuYasha‘s villains are powerful and strange, not strawmen.

Though we know our heroes will prevail — it’s shonen, for Pete’s sake — Takahashi throws creative obstacles in their way that makes their eventual triumph more satisfying. Consider Naraku. In many respects, he’s a standard-issue bad guy: he’s omnipotent, charismatic, and manipulative, capable of finding the darkness and vulnerability in the purest soul. (He also has fabulous hair, another reliable indication of his villainy.) Yet the way in which Naraku wields power is genuinely unsettling, as he fashions warriors from pieces of himself, then reabsorbs them into his body when they outlive their usefulness. Naraku’s manifestations are peculiar, too. Some are female, some are children, some have monstrous bodies, and some have the power to create their own demonic offspring, but few look like the sort of golem I’d create if I wanted to wreak havoc. And therein lies Naraku’s true power: his opponents never know what form he’ll take next, or whether he’s already among them.

Sesshomaru, too, is another villain who proves more interesting than he first appears. In the very earliest chapters of the manga, he’s a bored sociopath who has no qualms about using InuYasha’s mama trauma to trick his younger brother into revealing the Tetsusaiga’s location. As the story progresses, however, Sesshomaru begins tolerating the company of a cheerful eight-year-old girl who, in a neat inversion of the usual human-canine relationship, is dependent on her dog-demon master for protection, food, and companionship. Takahashi resists the urge to fully “humanize” Sesshomaru, however; he remains InuYasha’s scornful adversary for most of the series, largely unchanged by his peculiar fixation with Rin.

And did I mention that Sesshomaru has awesome hair? Oh, to be a villain in a Takahashi manga!

4. InuYasha‘s female characters kick ass.

Back in 2008, Shaenon Garrity wrote a devastatingly funny article about the seven types of female characters in shonen manga, from The Tomboy to The Little Girl to The Experienced Older Woman. I’m pleased to report that none of these types appear in InuYasha; in fact, InuYasha boasts one of the smartest, toughest, and most appealing set of female characters in shonen manga. And by “tough,” I don’t mean that Kagome, Kikyo, and Sango brandish weapons while wearing provocative outfits; I mean they persist in the face of adversity, even if their own lives are at stake. They’re strong enough to hold their own against demons, ghosts, and heavily armed bandits, and wise enough to know when words are more effective than weapons. They’re not adverse to the idea of romance, but recovering the Shikon Jewel takes precedence over dating. And they’re woman enough to cry if something awful happens, though they’d rather shed their tears in private than show their pain to others.

5. The horror! The horror!

Takahashi may have the coolest resume of anyone working in manga today; not only did she study script writing with Kazuo Koike, she also worked as an assistant to Kazuo Umezu — an apprenticeship that’s evident in the early chapters of InuYasha. In between Kagome and InuYasha’s first encounters with Naraku are a handful of short but spooky stories in which seemingly benign objects — a noh mask, a peach tree — are transformed by Shikon Jewel shards into instruments of torture and killing. Takahashi’s horror stories are less florid than Umezu’s, with fewer detours into WTF? territory, but like Umezu, Takahashi has a vivid imagination that yields some decidedly scary images. Here, for example, is the demonic peach tree from chapter 79, “The Fruits of Evil”:

Takahashi doesn’t just use these images to shock; she uses them to illustrate the consequences of ugly emotions, impulsive actions, and violent behavior, to show us how these choices slowly corrode the soul and transform us into the most monstrous version of ourselves. (Also to show us the consequences of substituting human bones and blood for Miracle Gro. Kids, don’t try this at home.)

What Takahashi does better than almost anyone is walk the fine line between terror and horror. Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe, author of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), was one of the first writers to argue that terror and horror were different states of arousal. “Terror and Horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them,” she wrote in an 1826 essay, “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” Critiquing Radcliffe’s work in 1966, Devendra P. Varma explained that difference more concretely: “The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse.” And that’s exactly where Takahashi operates: she gives us tantalizing, suggestive glimpses of scary things, then keeps them obscured until the denouement of the story, allowing our imaginations to supply most of the grisly details. We read her work in a heightened state of awareness, which only intensifies our pleasure — and revulsion — when the true nature of Kagome and InuYasha’s foes are revealed.

* * * * *

If you haven’t looked at InuYasha in a while, or missed it during the height of its popularity, now is a great time to give it a try. Each volume of the VIZBIG edition collects three issues, allowing readers to more fully immerse themselves in the story. And if you’re a purist about packaging, you’ll be happy to know that VIZ is finally issuing InuYasha in an unflipped format — a first in the series’ US history.

The dreary skies of Hou Ou High

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When I do my “pick a dubious manga” polls, I have two preferred outcomes in mind. The first is that I’ll be pleasantly surprised by a manga that sounds questionable, finding a nugget of gold in an unexpected place. The second is that the book will be even worse than it sounds and that I’ll be able to unleash a bitter diatribe on something that’s offended one of my core values. The worst potential outcome is that I’ll merely be bored.

Unfortunately, the first choice in this series of reader-generated selections achieves that last result. Arata Aki’s The Beautiful Skies of Hou Ou High (Digital Manga) is garden-variety bad. Oh, it’s very bad, I assure you, but it’s not memorably bad.

It’s about a young lesbian whose mother contrives admission to an elite, all-boys’ school in the hopes that the complete immersion in a sea of wealthy dreamboats will burn the gay out of her daughter. (“The students are all fat-cats!” Mom crows. “If she gets pregnant, then we win!”) Aki doesn’t stage a train-wreck of skin-crawling sexual politics like Jun Yuzuki did with Gakuen Prince, mostly because I suspect Aki isn’t writer enough to conceive of a plot outlandish (or consistent) enough to be that awful.

Instead, we get a lot of quirky classmates out of central casting who harbor an inexplicable fascination with our heroine, Kei, whose defining characteristic is her stupidity. (“She really is an idiot,” Kei’s younger sister notes. In a moment of what’s later revealed to be understatement, her mother calls her “dimwitted.” “Man, everything about you is weak,” her first friend at school concludes.) Manga has a rich history of endearingly dumb protagonists. Kei Saeba is not among their number. She’s frantic and grating and dull, and her stupidity is so generic that it’s hard to invest any interest in it.

What passes for an ongoing subplot isn’t especially promising. The school’s administration has been blackmailed into admitting Kei, and they basically want her gone. (Sympathies, gentlemen!) The director is terrified of potential scandal involving a girl secretly attending the prestigious school, but he’s equally concerned with concealing his own secrets. I could go on, but I don’t care. Even a little.

I don’t care about stupid Kei. I don’t care about the blurry boy harem that Aki is assembling for her. I don’t care if the headmaster arranges for her to be tossed into a deep, icy well.

I do care about the fact that Digital Manga couldn’t be bothered to include translation notes for the volume, as at least knowing what some references were would have given me something to think about besides the manga I was trying to read. But no, all I had to work with were dull characters, inane plot developments, and a tone that couldn’t even work up the energy to offend me.

Blue Exorcist, I’m sorry I ever doubted you.

 

Manga Artifacts: Rumiko Takahashi’s Rumic Theater

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Most American readers know Rumiko Takahashi through her work in Shonen Sunday, but Takahashi has a foot in the seinen world as well. Maison Ikkoku ran in Big Comic Spirits from 1980-87, alongside Area 88 and Wounded Man, while short stories such as “To Grandmother’s House We Go” and “One Hundred Years of Love” appeared in Big Comic Spirits‘ sister publication Big Comic Original. In Japan, Takahashi’s seinen shorts have been collected into four volumes: 1 or W, The Tragedy of P, The Executive’s Dog, and Red Bouquet. Here in the US, however, only two have been translated into English: The Tragedy of P, which was re-titled Rumic Theater (1996), and 1 or W, which was published as Rumic Theater: One or Double (1998). (N.B. One or Double includes a handful of shonen and josei stories that appeared in Shonen Sunday and Petit Flower, respectively.)

These two translated volumes showcase Takahashi’s ability to work in almost genre. There are sports comedies (“The Grandfather of All Baseball Games”), domestic dramas (“Hidden in the Pottery,” “House of Garbage,” “The Tragedy of P”), rom-coms (“The Merchant of Romance,” “The Diet Goddess”), pop-culture spoofs (“Shake Your Buddha”), and ghost stories (“To Grandmother’s House We Go,” “One or Double”). As with Takahashi’s work in Shonen Sunday, many of these stories fold supernatural elements into everyday situations. In “Extra-Large Size Happiness,” for example, a woman’s relationship with her mother-in-law is strained by the sudden and frequent appearance of a household spirit that only she can see, while in “Reserved Seat,” a ghostly grandma takes possession of her grandson’s body so that she can honor her season tickets at the Takarazuka Revue.

Takahashi is a master at establishing her premise in just a few pages, allowing plenty of room for character development and broad comedy without compromising narrative momentum. One of the reasons Takahashi can be so economical is that she invests even the smallest moments with telling detail, making sure that every aspect of a character’s behavior is consistent with the story’s premise. In “Excuse Me for Being a Dog,” for example, the hero — who turns into a shiba inu whenever he suffers a nosebleed — acts like a canine even in his human form: he investigates an abandoned book bag with his nose, curls his lip at strangers, and recoils in the presence of pungent odors. Takahashi doesn’t make a big deal of these behavioral tics, but their inclusion in the story elevates Shiro’s condition from a wacky plot contrivance to a fundamental aspect of his existence. (OK, it’s also a wacky plot contrivance.)

Takahashi’s deep affection for her characters also contributes to the stories’ success. Though they bicker and tease and goad one another, the characters’ good will and mutual affection is seldom in question, even when their judgment is. Takahashi is as generous with her least sympathetic characters as she is with her leads, allowing them moments of wisdom and decency that often challenge the other characters’ perception of them. In “The Story of P,” for example, a man agrees to care for his eccentric client’s pet penguin, despite the fact the Hagas’ apartment complex doesn’t allow pets. For most of the story, Mrs. Haga plays cat-and-mouse with her neighbor Mrs. Kakei, the head of tenants’ association and a reputed animal hater. (Mrs. Kakei keeps tabs on the other tenants, notifying the management of any pet violations.) Yet in the last pages of the story, we learn that Mrs. Kakei has complicated, emotional reasons for ratting out her neighbors that stem, in part, from a genuine concern for animal welfare and not a humorless love of rules.

Art-wise, Takahashi produces some of the cleanest, most accessible layouts in manga. Her characters’ faces are easy to read, and her scenes are staged for maximum clarity and emotional impact; no one times a scare or a punch line better than Takahashi. Even more striking is the sense of mischief and play that informs her artwork. The elderly heroine of “One Hundred Years of Love,” for example, gains the ability to fly after surviving a near-death experience. Takahashi draws the old woman astride an enormous crutch, soaring over an urban landscape. At first, Mrs. Hoshino mutters about the weather, but soon she embraces the possibilities of flight, buzzing an unsuspecting eight-year-old apartment dweller:

 

That same sense of mischief is evident in “Extra-Large Size Happiness,” in which a giant yokai pops into the frame — directly behind the frazzled heroine’s mother-in-law. Readers familiar with InuYasha‘s Shippo and Myogi will immediately recognize this round, genial figure:

The similarities between this nameless yokai and Myoga could be construed as a flaw or weakness of Takahashi’s style, but there’s an argument to be made that Takahashi employs a “star system” of her own. Granted, Takahashi never constructed a neat theoretical framework to explain the recurrence of certain characters in her stories, as Osamu Tezuka famously did for his. Flipping through the pages of Rumic Theater, however, it’s easy to imagine these characters as actors who specialize in certain types of roles, retaining something of their own “off-screen” personality and appearance in every story; as David Welsh observed in his recent essay on Ranma 1/2, “The fun is in seeing the specialists find variations on their distinctive themes.” And here, in Rumic Theater, the fun comes from seeing Takahashi’s regulars tackle more grown-up themes — marital discord, neighborhood politics, growing old — than might otherwise be permissible in the context of a long-form adventure such as InuYasha or Ranma 1/2 .