Unshelved

Ichigenme: The First Class is Civil Law Volumes 1 and 2 by Fumi Yoshinaga

For the Manga Moveable Feast I wanted to read something I hadn’t read before by Yoshinaga, and since I’ve read most of her other series already, the only thing left was some of her yaoi titles. I decided to go with Ichigenme: The First Class is Civil Law.

Tamiya joins a new zemi (seminar group) for law school. Although he’s a hard-working student, he’s ended up in a peer group full of rich kids who devote their time to goofing off. As part of a hazing ritual for third year students Toudou, a long-haired spoiled son of a politician performs an elaborate striptease for his fellow classmates. He winds up by giving Tamiya a kiss in order to distract everyone from making Tamiya strip too. Tamiya’s classmates make casual plans to go to Hokkaido to ski for the weekend. When they invite him along and offer to pay for him, he says that he’ll go along with them if it is something he can pay for but “I don’t want anyone paying for something I can’t pay them back for.” Tamiya’s seriousness and integrity provide a stark contrast to the attitudes of his classmates, and Toudou decides that Tamiya is “pretty cool.”

The first volume centers on the growing friendship between Tamiya and Toudou. When his father is caught up in a political scandal, Toudou is ostracized by all of his classmates except Tamiya. While Toudou is comfortable with his sexuality, Tamiya isn’t quite willing to admit that he’s gay even though he’s never been attracted to women. This manga is one of Yoshinaga’s earlier works, but her facility for creating compelling slice of life stories is in full effect. The students get drunk, avoid studying, have unfortunate run-ins with faculty, and in some cases slowly grow up. Toudou and Tamiya’s relationship progresses slowly, and while they do get physical Toudou is left wondering if Tamiya only wants him to stay over due to the elaborate breakfasts he prepares the next morning. When Tamiya turns down a classmate’s advances saying that he doesn’t think he could ever be with a woman. She says “I’ll…have to tell people, okay?” Tamiya replies that he doesn’t care, and his expression switches from blank to peaceful. He says to himself “Somehow…I feel much better.”

The second volume shows Tamiya and Toudou in a more established relationship. Toudou is breaking away from his family’s expectations and working at a games development company and Tamiya has become a teacher. They struggle with having enough time to spend with each other. Toudou’s younger brother is also the focus of some of the stories in this volume, as he takes up with a professor. The first volume of Ichigenme had a few sex scenes, but was more focused on character interaction. The second volume flips the formula, with sex scenes punctuated by occasional glimpses of the characters going out to dinner, struggling with pressure from work, or dealing with the aftermath of a new haircut.

As a whole, I liked Ichigenme more than most of the yaoi I’ve tried. It doesn’t have some of the problematic genre elements that tend to annoy me in many yaoi titles, like a reliance on rape scenarios or the insistence that the men in the story aren’t really gay, they’re just “truly in love.” Instead Yoshinaga creates stories about believable people who fall in love with each other.

Jmanga.com launched today, an online site that promises to deliver digital content from a variety of publishers. When I saw the site I was delighted to see that they were making some more obscure manga available, but as I investigated further I found myself a little disappointed by their payment model and pricing.

The site is organized by genre, making it easy to browse shonen, shoujo, seinen, and josei manga. The titles available range from manga already available in English (I spotted titles from Viz, Dark Horse, and CMX) to material that hasn’t been translated before. One of the things I was hoping for from Jmanga before it launched was that it would be a good source of josei manga titles. Unfortunately the josei selection is tilted heavily towards the boys love end of the spectrum, without featuring the office lady or paranormal romances I was wishing to read. The seinen section of the site seemed to have the most interesting possibilities for me as a reader. I was absolutely delighted to see that Jmanga had a translation of Ekiben Hitoritabi available. I’d heard about this manga featuring people riding trains and eating bento before, but I’d never expected to be able to read it. It was this title more than anything else that prompted me to sign up as a Jmanga user.

The pricing is one of the most problematic aspects of the site. Jmanga requires you to sign up for a $10 subscription, giving you 1000 points to buy manga with. Initial subscribers get a bonus of 500 points, but 1500 points doesn’t go very far on the site. As a monthly subscriber, you can purchase additional points when you’ve used up what you have. Individual chapters are as much as 290 points and single volumes are 899 points. This is problematic and I think not very sustainable pricing for digital comics. Emanga has single volumes for around $5, and so does the Viz iPad app. I tend to go for bargains when buying digital content. I’m perfectly happy to watch my k-dramas on streaming sites with commercials, without paying for a premium subscription. I tend to buy ebooks for the kindle when there’s a special sale. I buy digital comics through Comixology when they have items on sale. I buy manga on the Viz iPad app when it is discounted, but I do pay full digital price when I’m missing a volume. I would much rather have a “pay as you go” system on Jmanga.com. Being forced into a subscriber model annoys me. I also just do not enjoy reading manga on a web browser all that much, and view the iPad as an ideal method of reading digital comics. I hope an iPad version of Jmanga is going to be developed soon.

I ran through most of my 1500 points in an evening. This is what I read:

Ekiben Hitoritabi

This seinen manga will appeal to anyone who wants to feel like they’re taking a leisurely trip around Japan. Daisuke’s wife sends him on a slow train tour of Japan for an anniversary present. He loves the unique train station bentos he can get at each station that reflect the unique food culture of the area he’s traveling through. Daisuke is a genial guide to this aspect of Japan. He’s a large bearded man with a perpetual smile on his face. He meets a travel companion named Nana. She’s a journalist who is working on an article, and she enjoys eating almost as much as Daisuke does. There’s no real romance here, although Daisuke enjoys spending time exploring bento with Nana. Like many foodie manga, Ekiben Hitoritabi will make you want to eat. Each regional bento is lavishly illustrated, with diagrams pointing out all the different types of food packed into a small rectangular container.

Ekiben Hitoritabi is an exercise in notalgia as a slower, more rural Japan is showcased. Daisuke is riding in sleeper cars and slow trains, making stops along the way to visit hot springs or to buy the best locally made bento. No shinkansens here! Along the way we also get stories Daisuke tells of the unique models of trains he’s riding, local stories about how the railway was constructed, and illustrations of different types of engines. I have to admit, the bento descriptions appealed to me much more than the train history aspects of the manga.
The translation quality for the manga was fine, I didn’t notice any major typos or glitches other than the occasional odd turn of phrase. As with most foodie manga, the art excels in depicting food but Daisuke and Nana had much more fluid facial expressions than I was expecting, with Oishinbo as the main foodie manga I’ve read before. After reading this manga I know that one image will stick in my mind – Daisuke almost in tears hugging a prized bento to his face and Nana laughing at him. Ekiben Hitoritabi is the best type of foodie/travel manga because after reading it I really wanted to duplicate the type of trip Daisuke was on for myself. If you can endure the inevitable craving for bento and longing for Japanese scenery that Ekiben Hitoritabi will inspire, it is well worth the read.

My Sadistic Boyfriend

Switching to one of the few shoujo titles that looked interesting that hasn’t already come out in English, I decided to try out My Sadistic Boyfriend. This is a pretty typical shoujo title with attractive art that I think would appeal to fans of Miki Aihara. Chiaki enrolls in a prestigious school only to be told on the first day that she’s won a lottery and is going to be roommates with the “Prince” of the school, Katsuho. Does he immediatly start putting the moves on Chiaki? Does he have a Jeckyll and Hyde type personality? Is she bewildered yet strangely excited by his unwanted attentions? If you have to ask questions like these, you haven’t read a shoujo manga before! So there is not much new in My Sadistic Boyfriend, but it seems fine for what it is. I just liked the title.

The Larceny Log of Zampei the Cloud Snatcher

If you are a fan of Golgo 13’s Takao Saito, Jmanga is the site for you because it hosts a ton of his titles. The Larceny Log of Zampei the Cloud Snatcher is exactly what you’d expect from a Saito title set in historic Japan about the greatest womanizing thief ever. Zampei meets with a female client who wants him to steal a sword in a hot springs. Being a Saito hero, the details about the job and an incredible amount of exposition are spread over several pages while Zampei abruptly has sex with his client. I was truly amazed at the amount of backstory and details about the sword she wanted Zampei to steal the woman was able to convey considering the variety of positions she was contorted into. Even though Zampei is an awesome thief, he does have a fear of snakes which causes some complications when he goes out on the job. This title had by far the worst translation of the three titles I sampled. There were misspellings and word transpositions (faminine for feminine) that were really obvious.

The flash-based manga reader functioned ok, but sometimes lagged a bit when loading pages. I enjoyed the way I could toggle between English and Japanese in the reader. This seems like a potentially useful tool for Japanese language students.

After trying Jmanga out these are my hopes for the future:

• More variety available for shoujo and josei titles. I would also like to see authorized translations for some of the many orphan series we have that were left untranslated in the US. I would like to pay to read many of the unfinished series that were previously licensed by CMX.
• A better, more reasonable pricing scheme and subscription model. I signed up, but I’m not going to continue to subscribe for many months unless my points go further. They need to either lower prices or have some crazy sales for additional points in order to match what other manga companies are currently offering.
• Development of an iPad app

As a first try, there are aspects of Jmanga that are very promising. Being able to get series online from so many different publishers is certainly something to be excited about. I hope that in the next few months they work on some of the issues they had at the launch.

Fumi Yoshinaga is the topic of the Manga Moveable Feast for August. Ooku is by far her most artistically ambitious work, and while I enjoy and appreciate it very much, it doesn’t conjure up in me the same feelings of fondness as some of her other series like Antique Bakery and Flower of Life. Ooku’s more complex alternate history framework ensures that the series moves around telling different stories, without the leisurely time devoted to the slice of life character-based interaction that Yoshinaga excels at.

The sixth volume of Ooku focuses on the Shogun Tsunayoshi. Her unrealistic edicts of compassion for animals make her unpopular with her subjects, and she struggles with naming a successor. Even though she’s caught up in the machinery of government, it is the small human considerations that drive her decisions. Though her father is senile, she doesn’t want to name an heir who he opposes. After an assassination attempt, Tsunayoshi is strangely unmoved, not wanting to make an effort to live anymore. She finds brief comfort in the arms of Senior Chamberlin Emonnosuke. The tension between the official history of the shogunate and the events that actually happened is always present, as the third person narration hints at rumors the reader is shown to be true.

The second story in this volume introduces Sayko, a man so desperate to get away from his abusive mother that he clutches at the possibility of entering the service of the next Shogun Ienobu. He regards the Valet of the Chamber Akifusa as his savior, falling in love with her. One of the underlying themes of Ooku is the way power twists and changes normal human relationships. Akifusa has Sayko trained in all the gentlemanly arts of the samurai, and then tells him that she’s been grooming him for the role of the Shogun’s concubine. When Sakyo sees Ienobu sitting with her official consort, he thinks “These two people should have grown older in happy harmony, with nothing to come between them. Instead, because as Shogun she must produce an heir, her highness must lie with the likes of me…’Tis a wretched thing…”

The constraints posed on the characters by the structure of society and the office of the Shogun ensure that the best anyone can hope for is a moment of fleeting happiness. I put this volume down wondering if the most recent shogun Yoshimune will be able to enact some reforms after spending so much time learning about her predecessors.

Review copy provided by the publisher

Horror manga is generally not my thing. I do appreciate it when I stumble across it, but I’ve never felt the urge to collect all the volumes of a horror manga series. I am glad I tried out this volume of Scary Book, just because I haven’t read much Umezu before. This volume features two stories: “The Mirror” which shows what happens to a vain rich girl when the reflection she admires has a mind of her own and “The Demon of Vengeance” which has an almost inspiring story of revenge.

Emi lives in a mansion with an elaborate mirror. She loves standing in front of it, but as she grows older she starts to feel uneasy. She has a boyfriend, and is admired for her looks, but she’s old fashioned and affected in her mannerisms. When Emi’s boyfriend Mitsugu attempts to be physically affectionate with her she dumps him, then returns to her house where she keeps having horrible accidents, as if the mansion is trying to destroy her. Things get even worse when she has a dream about her reflection coming out of the mirror to strangle her only to wake up to see that her evil doppleganger is loose in the world, systematically destroying Emi’s life. The premise of an evil mirror twin might seem simple, but I was impressed by the way Umezu wrung every opportunity for psychological humiliation out of this story. Emi finds herself dating the class nerd, she fails at school for writing backwards, Mirror Emi takes her place with her family, and Emi finds herself wandering around town in shabby clothes only to find that no one is capable of recognizing her as a rich beautiful girl anymore. Even though Emi isn’t a particularly likeable character, I did like seeing that she starts taking action against Mirror Emi as the story progresses, she isn’t content to see her life taken over by a supernatural entity. Umezu’s illustrations are effective in portraying the creeping sense of menace that pervades the story as Emi finds herself fearful of mirrors or any reflective surface. He relies on stark black and white contrast often, saving details for when he is focusing on extra horrifying images, like Mirror Emi’s expressions of hatred.

“The Demon of Vengeance” is the story of a vassal who finds his life destroyed and manages to live in order to inflict the most horrible revenge on the lord who betrayed him, even when you might think that it might be physically impossible for him to do anything. I won’t say much because I don’t want to give anything away, but there were some moments in this story that were almost hilariously over the top in their deception of righteous anger. One of the things that is fun about Umezu is that people are fully committed to their emotions. No one is mildly afraid or angry, they are more scared than anyone ever has or ever will be again! Scary Book was a pleasant change of pace from my usual manga reading.

Oresama Teacher is rapidly becoming one of my favorite shojo series due to the fact that it isn’t like most of the other manga in the Shojo Beat imprint. Instead of exploring teen romance, this manga focuses on dumb comedy. Even though many of the characters are idiots, they are also endearing because their idiocy stems from personality quirks that also make them strong. Mafuyu is going away for high school in an attempt to put her juvenile delinquent past behind her, but she finds out that her teacher Takaomi is her long-lost neighbor who trained her in all of her fighting techniques.

In the third volume of Oresama Teacher, Mafuyu goes home to visit her old gang. She’s curious to see how they’re doing without her leadership, and she misses her friends. Mafuyu gets caught up in her old school rivalries and winds up kidnapped with her two former sidekicks, the enthusiastic Kanagawa and the masochistic Maizono. There is nothing that better expresses the differences between Oresama Teacher and more typical shoujo manga than a great scene of Mafuyu lecturing her former lackeys about the proper way to position one’s hands when being tied up by kidnappers. She gives a full on mini-tutorial about techniques to escape binding, then realizes that her instructions are useless because the boys are already tied up. She breaks the boys out, only to be pushed aside as they face their confrontation with their rivals. Mafuyu wonders about the nature of their friendship, only to realize that everyone’s acting unconcerned about her help because they need to stand up for themselves on their own. This was actually a cute message, delivered with a light touch along with Mafuyu’s humorous MacGyver-like fighting techniques.

One of the reasons why I like Oresama Teacher so much is that there isn’t very much conventional romance in it. Mafuyu may be a hardened juvenile delinquent, but she has very little idea what to do about the opposite sex, other than registering that she may have confusing feelings for someone before she moves on to give an enemy a well-deserved beatdown. The fourth volume of the manga brings back Mafuyu’s gender swapped disguise as Natsuo when Takaomi announces that the Public Morals Club has to fight the Yojimbo club. Mafuyu is worried about Hayasaka’s fighting abilities. He’s good at fighting but is so single-focused that he lets himself get hurt. As Natsuo, Mafuyu tries to teach Hayasaka how to dodge and block and think more strategically in a fight. Hayasaka doesn’t seem to be clued in that Natsuo and Mafuyu are never in the same place at the same time, and look alarmingly similar.

One of my favorite moments in this volume was the depictions of torturous mental calculations Mafuyu does about Hayasaka’s fighting abilities while she’s thinking in class. She stares at him intently, throws her head down, bangs on her desk, mopes, and then indulges in an evil smirk when she hits on her training plan. Hayasaka looks mystified and then both confused and alarmed.

Both volumes end with a Mafuyu/Takaomi story. In one, she’s forced to stay over at his place when she accidentally gives her house key to the school’s bancho. In another, they go to the beach with complications as Mafuyu doesn’t even remember that she can’t swim until she’s floating on a swim toy in deep water. While the prospect of a student/teacher relationship isn’t a plot point that comes up very often in the manga that gets translated here, it is hard to picture anything happening with Mafuyu and Takaomi at this point in the series. Takaomi is so manipulative and evil, yet weirdly protective when it comes to Mafuyu actually suffering any harm.

I enjoy Oresama Teacher a lot more than other shoujo humor titles. There’s something about the juxtaposition of all the dumb, character based humor and violent fights that just has me much more invested in wanting to know what will happen to the characters even after four volumes.

Review copies provided by the publisher.

All titles available on emanga.com.

Married by Mistake by Takako Hashimoto and Renee Roszel Wilson

I didn’t realize when I started this that it is a further book in a series with a harlequin manga I read earlier, To Marry a Stranger. In this book, the heroine of To Marry a Stranger has been impregnated by her husband with an eye patch. Helen starts having contractions near the infamous “Mansion of Love” so of course she and her sister Lucy are stuck with having to deal with a sudden home birth in the romantically cursed house. Lucy manages to assist her sister with having twins in the space of a panel. Let me tell you, I’ve had twins and it doesn’t happen that quickly! Lucy is exhausted after assisting her sister and thinks back about her fiance Stader, who kept postponing their marriage. This Stadler guy is no prize as in Lucy’s memory he appears with wavy hair and an odd sort of cravat. Do not trust a man wearing a cravat unless you live in the early 19th century, ladies. Lucy is woken by Jack, a man with intense eyebrows and a decent suit who is wearing a tie instead of a cravat. This looks promising.

Lucy mentions the legend that if a woman spends the night of her birthday at the mansion of love, the first man she sees the next day will be her destined love. It is the day after her birthday, and Jack looks both befuddled and horrified. He’s Lucy’s ex-stepbrother and he has loved her for a long time. It turns out that Lucy’s horrible cravat-wearing fiance has decided to get engaged to an actress and travel to Lucy’s hometown in a fit of cravat-inspired cruelty. Lucy’s family promptly decides that Lucy has to pretend to have a fiance for revenge and Jack is just the person for the job. The art in this adaptation is really much better than the typical Harlequin manga title. The backgrounds might be sparse, but the character designs are distinct and attractive. What I found most amusing was the wacky facial expressions of Lucy’s family as they cheer on her fake romance. I was especially amused by the antics of Lucy’s one-eyed brother-in-law Damian who was the tortured hero in To Marry a Stranger, as he keeps popping up in chibi form with a big grin to cheer on his sister-in-law. In conclusion, men with cravats are bad, but men with eye patches or suits are good. This is what I’m taking away from this Harlequin manga.

Caribbean Desire by Cathy Williams and Takane Yonetani

The cover for this looks good, because it appears that there are wind machines blowing the male and female leads’ hair in opposite directions. Unfortunately the inside of this manga doesn’t feature the goofy fun I tend to prefer in my Harlequin manga adaptations. Emma arrives on an island to interview the rich businessman Alastair for his biography. She develops an intense dislike for the Conrad, the man currently running Alastair’s company. Emma has a secret connection with Alastair’s family, but will she reveal her secret before it is too late? And what will she do with her growing attraction to Conrad? The storyline was as predictable as Harlequins usually are, but there wasn’t really any humor to lighten things up. The art and adaptation were pretty typical, with stiffly posed characters and sketchy backgrounds. This wasn’t a good title to read right after Married by Mistake!, because it really suffered in comparison.

Marriage Wanted by Debbie Macomber and Eve Takigawa

Savanna is a wedding coordinator with an injured leg. Dash is a divorce attorney who has given up on love. Together they find love through a marriage of convenience, as one always does in Harlequin romance world. I tend to enjoy Harlequin manga very much when the art has a vaguely 1980s aesthetic. Even though this adaptation was produced in 2005, I still see a bit of a retro feel to the art with Dash’s square jaw and Emma’s bright eyes. Savanna is convinced the she’ll never find love because her limp makes her unattractive to men. Dash comes into Savanna’s store and proceeds to lecture her about the meaninglessness of weddings when he finds out that she’s planning his little sister’s wedding. Dash and Savannah spend more time with each other and decide to enter into a marriage of convenience when he needs a wife to get a promotion and she needs a husband to get her parents to stop being so overprotective. There wasn’t much humor in this title, but the art was better than average and it was fun seeing Dash and Savanna argue with each other over the value of marriage.

Access to electronic copies provided by the publisher.

Black Blizzard by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

I haven’t read Tatsumi’s critically acclaimed The Push Man or A Drifting Life, so I’m probably starting at the wrong place by reading the earlier Black Blizzard. This manga has a pulpy appeal and when you consider that it was produced in the 1950s when the author was 21, it is pretty amazing.

Black Blizzard opens with a piano player frantically practicing. His fingers are jittery and drops of sweat are flying off him. A man in a fedora and trenchcoat enters the room. The piano player is expecting him. He collapses on the piano, saying “I killed someone, but it can’t be…it can’t be true!” The story picks up again with a train moving through a desolate winter landscape. The piano player is now handcuffed to a hardened criminal. There’s a crash, and the criminal takes the opportunity to escape, dragging the hapless musician along with him. They move through a blizzard trying to evade capture and take refuge in a desolate cabin together. The criminal is keen on sawing the musician’s hand off so the duo can separate, but the piano player objects. He starts telling the sad story of how he wound up handcuffed to a murderer, beginning with his involvement with a circus girl with a lovely voice. The escaped prisoners grow more frantic to detach from each other, leading to a surprising bargain and a plot twist that requires a healthy tolerance for contrived endings.

Tatsumi’s art style is sparse and dynamic. The characters are rendered with just a few effective lines for their facial expressions. The blizzard is depicted with slashing diagonal lines, making it easy to picture the horrible winds that buffet the escaped prisoners. Tatsumi relies on some straightforward square and rectangular grids but he varies his perspective often for effect – focusing on a face, a broken glass, and the snow building up on a deserted building. The production by Drawn and Quarterly plays up Black Blizzard’s pulpy heritage. The pages are tipped in yellow, and the jacket copy imitates the text you’d see on an old noir paperback. This manga is flipped, which I adjusted to ok. What I found distracting was the way the sound effects were handled. In some places the sound effects are left in the Japanese, with a note providing translation but on most pages the sound effects are translated. The original sound effects just looked so much more stylish on the page even though the translated effects mimicked the same style.

This wintery crime manga was a perfect thing to read on a hot summer night. The ending of the manga wrapped up things a bit too nicely, but I put the book down amazed that this was the work of such a young creator. There’s an interesting interview with Tatsumi in the back of the book that provides some background on the creation of the book. It was interesting to hear that single volume manga like Black Blizzard was produced for the rental book market in 1950s Japan.