Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

yen press

Skull-Face Bookseller Honda-san, Vol. 1

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If you’ve ever worked a thankless retail job, you’ll appreciate Skull-Face Bookseller Honda-san, a semi-autobiographical look at the ups and downs of customer service. The titular character works in the manga section of a large Tokyo bookstore, helping buyers find the perfect series, doing inventory, and meeting with representatives from major publishers. Some of her adventures are genuinely amusing, as when a handsome male customer requests explicit doujinshi for his daughter, or an American fujoshi explains her penchant for a particular seme-uke dynamic; other chapters are more matter-of-fact, conveying the difficulties of keeping popular titles in stock, or documenting the social and professional interactions among the staff members. Though none of its is laugh-out-loud funny, the artwork is terrific, capturing Honda-san’s sweaty anxiety every time a customer or colleague makes an uncomfortable request of her—no mean feat, given that the artist has depicted herself with a skeleton head and androgynous, apron-clad body. (Her colleagues’ identities have been camouflaged in a similar fashion: one has a paper bag for a head, and another wears a gas mask.) Amanda Haley’s thoughtful translation complements Honda’s crisp illustrations, offering useful context for understanding the unique challenges of selling manga to the general public, and plenty of footnotes to decode the insider shop-talk.

Yet for all the craft with which Skull-Face Bookseller is written, I never fully succumbed to its charms. I found the pacing uneven and the publishing-focused chapters long-winded, especially when contrasted with the snappy staging of Honda-san’s encounter with the international BL brigade. I’m still curious about the series, but would put Skull-Face Bookseller in the same category as Saint Young Men: a comedy that’s better in principle than in practice. Your mileage may vary.

SKULL-FACE BOOKSELLER HONDA-SAN, VOL. 1 • STORY AND ART BY HONDA • TRANSLATION BY AMANDA HALEY • YEN PRESS • NO RATING • 166 pp.

Short Takes: Museum and Phantom Tales of the Night

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I have a confession: I am a complete chicken when it comes to horror movies. I watched Alien through my fingers and made it to the end of Fright Night by staring at the ingredient list on a candy wrapper; even the hot vampires of The Lost Boys weren’t soulful or shirtless enough to fully hold my gaze. But horror manga is another story, as I count Mermaid Saga, Gyo, Tomie, The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, and PTSD Radio among my favorites series. I can’t explain why horror manga doesn’t affect me the same way that movies do–no soundtrack, perhaps?–but I’m glad that I’ve found the intestinal fortitude to read Junji Ito and Kazuo Umezu’s work. Alas, I had less patience with the two most recent horror series I read: Museum, a digital-only offering from Kodansha, and Phantom Tales of the Night, a cautionary tale about a mysterious innkeeper.

Museum, Vol. 1
Story and Art by Ryosuke Tomoe
Kodansha Comics
Rated M, for Mature (graphic violence)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a mask-wearing vigilante kidnaps and tortures his victims in grotesque fashion–feeding them to dogs, severing their ears, tying them to toilets–then leaves cryptic notes that characterize each act as a “punishment,” daring the authorities to catch him. The mystery of who the vigilante is and what motivates him is the main driving force behind Museum, but you might not want to soldier through the carnage for answers to those questions since Ryosuke Tomoe can’t decide if his vigilante is a hero or a monster. Tomoe depicts the violence with such fetishistic detail that the reader is invited to admire the killer’s technique rather than meditate on the true horror of what the character has done. The ugly, utilitarian artwork and  relentlessly dour tone are the nails in the proverbial coffin, underscoring just how unpleasantly banal Museum really is. Not recommended.

Phantom Tales of the Night, Vol. 1
Story and Art by Matsuri
Yen Press
Rated OT, for Older Teens (violence and sexual themes)

Phantom Tales of the Night is the kind of bad manga that’s difficult to review: it isn’t offensive or ineptly drawn, but it’s a chore to read thanks to its poor plotting, muddled characterizations, and maddeningly opaque dialogue. Ostensibly, the series focuses on the Murakamo Inn, where the demonic host cajoles his guests into revealing their secrets. The rules governing how the Murakamo Inn operates, however, are in a constant state of flux, making it hard to pin down what, exactly, Phantom Tales is about. In some chapters, characters share their secrets with the inn’s owner in exchange for having a wish fulfilled, while in others, characters learn a terrible secret about themselves. The later chapters hint at a potentially longer, more complex arc that will play out over several volumes, but the set-up is so abrupt and confusing that it robs the final pages of their full impact–a pity, since Matsuri has a flair for drawing genuinely creepy monsters. Perhaps the most damning thing about Phantom Tales of the Night is that the characters talk incessantly about “secrets” but lack a basic understanding of what a secret really is or why it holds such power—a key failing in a series that is predicated on the idea that secrets are a kind of supernatural currency. Not recommended.

Chio’s School Road, Vol. 1

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With the new school year underway, now seemed like the ideal time to review Chio’s School Road, a gag manga about an average teen with a rich imagination and a talent for getting into trouble. Think of it as a female answer to My Neighbor Seki or Haven’t You Heard? I’m Sakamoto!!, two similar comedies in which a high school student turns out to have some truly astonishing skills.

Chio’s School Road is built on a simple but sturdy premise: Chio Miyamo, an average high school student, goes to comic lengths to avoid embarrassment. And by “comic lengths,” I mean diving into dumpsters, hiding in a tree, and giving her best friend a passionate kiss to conceal the fact they were eavesdropping on the popular kids. To be sure, these kind of scenarios are standard comic fodder, but Tadataka Kawasaki takes the gags in such unpredictable directions that the payoffs are fresh and funny without frustrating the reader’s desire to see the dignity-challenged Chio prevail.

In chapter three, for example, Chio stumbles into an alley blocked by members of a biker gang. Her attempt to slip past them goes awry, leading to confrontation in which Chio inadvertently escalates the situation with a nervous stutter. “You pick a fight and then laugh? You got some balls!” the head biker declares, prompting Chio to reveal her “true” identity as Bloody Butterfly, an assassin who’s “out every night packing heat” in the mean streets of Tokyo. The joke, of course, is that Chio is recycling bits of dialogue from her favorite first-person shooter game, delivering her lines with the swagger of a yakuza foot solider — a swagger she can’t sustain as soon as she arrives on school grounds.

The only strike against Chio’s School Road is the fan service. In one particularly egregious sequence, Kawasaki draws a woman’s chest as if two balloon animals were tussling under her sweater. (Seriously, folks: breasts do not look like balloon animals. Not even on a braless woman. No, really.) These panels are noticeable in part because his draftsmanship is otherwise crisp and convincing, creating a vivid sense of the urban neighborhood where Chio attends school, and strong sense of the characters’ personalities. Still, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Chio’s School Road to fans of My Neighbor Seki and Haven’t You Heard? I’m Sakamoto!, as it delivers a steady stream of amusing, weird, and well-executed jokes. Better still, Chio earns its laughs honestly by reminding us that Chio isn’t ordinary at all; she’s just striving to be. Recommended.

Chio’s School Road, Vol. 1
Art & Story by Tadataka Kawasaki
Translated by Alexander Keller-Nelson
Yen Press, 160 pp.
Rated OT, for Older Teens (Sexual and bathroom humor; fan service)

Laid-Back Camp, Vol. 1

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Laid-Back Camp may be the most quintessentially Japanese thing I’ve read this year: it features cute girls doing cute things while imparting information about camping gear. There’s no real plot to speak of, just a meet-cute in the first chapter that introduces seasoned camper Rin to enthusiastic newbie Nadeshiko. Through one of those only-in-manga coincidences, Rin and Nadeshiko attend the same school, where two other girls — Aoi and Chiaki — are struggling to recruit members for their Outdoor Exploration Club. You can guess what happens next: Nadeshiko joins the club and, by dint of her Golden Retriever personality, brings the skeptical Rin into the fold.

Each chapter is built around a skill, a piece of equipment, or a location. In “Mount Fuji and Cup Ramen,” for example, Rin explains how to build the perfect campfire, calling dried pine cones “nature’s premier fire starter,” while in “You Can Only Go Camping If You Have the Gear,” the Outdoor Exploration Club pores over catalogs, debating the merits of down and synthetic sleeping bags. These passages are deftly woven into the fabric of each story, playing a natural part of the girls’ conversations as they plan camping trips. Dashes of humor and breath-taking scenery add welcome nuance to the storytelling, preventing it from tipping into edu-manga dullness or yon-koma hijinks. Best of all, Rin is a genuinely interesting character, a small, self-sufficient kid who likes solo camping trips. Though volume one doesn’t explain how she caught the camping bug, author Afro has done such a good job of fleshing out Rin it doesn’t matter; we can see how someone so introspective and independent would welcome the opportunity to be alone in nature. Recommended, even for those who prefer the Great Indoors.

Laid-Back Camp, Vol. 1
Story and Art by Afro
Translation by Amber Tamosaitis
Yen Press, 178 pp.
Rated T, for Teen

Shibuya Goldfish, Vol. 1

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Shibuya Goldfish falls somewhere along the horror continuum between Sharknado 3 and Jaws: it’s too competently executed to be a guilty pleasure but too predictable to be genuinely scary. Though the premise has serious camp potential, author Hiroumi Aoi settles for a pedestrian approach to the material, trapping his cast in a high-rise shopping center where death lurks around every corner. There are a few glimmers of imagination here and there, but the overall result lacks the visceral punch, humor, or sheer imagination of other entries in the Killer Fish genre.

The story begins in media res, with a shot of Hachiko — Shibuya’s most famous statue — stained in blood. We then cut to an image of a panting, wild-eyed teen staring incredulously at a monstrous goldfish feasting on a pedestrian in the middle of a busy street. “That day was the first time I ever saw someone die,” Hajime solemnly informs us, before a flashback reveals what led up to this gruesome scene.

I won’t lie: those opening pages are a tantalizing hook for a horror buff. Though Aoi doesn’t reveal where the goldfish came from, he sells the Fish-Gone-Wild concept by emphasizing the predators’ size, numbers, and blank-eyed stares, making us appreciate the sheer incongruity of Volkswagen-sized fish swarming through an urban landscape. The goldfish’s penchant for uttering intelligible phrases — “I’m home, mom,” one burbles — adds another layer of mystery to their existence: are they truly sentient or are they merely ghosts, back to haunt the owners that flushed them down the toilet?

Where Shibuya Goldfish falls short is the human dimension. Hajime is the only character who’s properly fleshed out, an earnest, slightly awkward high school student whose dreams of becoming a filmmaker are dashed by the catastrophe. The other characters are more placeholders than people, dropped into the story to generate conflict or provide useful information about goldfish behavior before dying. In recognition of their liminal status, Aoi only bestows names on a small fraction of the cast, one of whom — the beautiful, bitchy Chitose Fukakusa — is such a vile male fantasy that the introduction of two more competent, sincere female characters in chapters two and three barely erase the memory of Fukakusa’s manipulative behavior and panty flashes.

The other fundamental issue with Shibuya Goldfish is the artwork, which juxtaposes photo-realistic backgrounds and fish with generic character designs. The tension between these two modes of representation ends up robbing volume one’s creepiest scenes of their dramatic impact, as the full horror of what happens to several characters is muted by Aoi’s blandly rendered faces and bodies; the grotesque bodily deformations that make Junji Ito, Hideshi Hino, and Kanako Inuki’s work so arresting barely elicit a “yuck!” in Aoi’s hands. It’s a pity these moments don’t land with more oomph because Shibuya Goldfish flirts with an interesting idea: the notion that a pet as small, helpless, and disposable as a goldfish might be the downfall of humanity, punishing us for our reckless treatment of other living things. Perhaps Aoi will delve into the monsters’ origins in future volumes, but the so-so execution of these foundational chapters didn’t reel me in. Your mileage will vary.

SHIBUYA GOLDFISH, VOL. 1 • BY HIROUMI AOI • TRANSLATED BY KO RANSOM • YEN PRESS • 242 pp. • RATED OT (OLDER TEEN) FOR LANGUAGE, NUDITY, AND VIOLENCE

Star Wars: Lost Stars, Vol. 1

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Remember the good ol’ days when a new Star Wars movie took three years to make, and no one was certain that George Lucas was going to get around to Episodes I, II, and III? I miss those days; new installments felt like a cause for celebration and not a dutiful obligation, and the films were an irresistible mixture of bad acting, thrilling space battles, and earnest conversations about the Force. When I’ve felt a twinge of nostalgia for my childhood Star Wars experience, I’ve found the manga adaptations of the original trilogy much more satisfying than the current batch of Disneyfied films. So I was curious to see what an original Star Wars manga might look like: would it explore new territory, or simply recycle the same plot points, a la The Force Awakens, Rogue One, and The Last Jedi?

Turns out that Lost Stars is to Star Wars what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet, a retelling of an iconic story from the perspective of two peripheral characters. Many of the most famous moments from George Lucas’ original trilogy appear in Lost Stars — the capture of Princess Leia, the annihilation of Alderaan, the ice battle on Hoth — though the framing of these events is new, seen through the eyes of two young Imperial pilots: Thane Kyrell and Ciena Ree, both of whom enrolled in the Imperial Academy hoping for adventure and a better way of life.

The inclusion of these famous scenes is a double-edged sword; they provide a handy point of reference for the Star Wars greenhorn while simultaneously pandering to the hardcore fan by faithfully recreating iconic images, characters, and dialogue from A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. There’s a dot-the-i quality to them that suggests that Yusaku Komiyuma was more concerned with nailing down the original details than imagining how Thane or Ciena would perceive — or participate — in these events. The other problem with these scenes is that they’re more dramatically interesting than Komiyuma’s brisk but flavorless adaptation of Claudia Gray’s novel. The most thoughtful elements of Gray’s work — particularly the class politics on Thane and Ciena’s home planet Jelucan — are presented in a bald fashion that reads more like CliffNotes than honest-to-goodness fiction, while important scenes of character development are too compressed to give us a sense of who these star-crossed lovers really are. The net result is a comic that successfully bridges the aesthetic worlds of Shonen Jump and Star Wars without achieving its own distinct identity as a manga or a Star Wars story. Your mileage may vary.

Star Wars: Lost Stars, Vol. 1
Original Story by Claudia Gray
Art and Adaptation by Yusaku Komiyuma
Yen Press, 192 pp.
Rated T, for teens

Short Takes: Delicious in Dungeon and Golden Kamuy

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Today’s reviews come to you courtesy of Patriot’s Day, my second favorite Massachusetts-only holiday. (The first is Evacuation Day, a thinly-disguised attempt to give Boston’s civil servants permission to skip work on St. Paddy’s.) For your consideration are volume four of D&D cooking extravaganza Delicious in Dungeon, and volumes three and four of everyone’s favorite backwoods culinary adventure Golden Kamuy. Looking back on food manga’s early history in the US, who could have predicted that readers would be feasting on such a wide array of titles in 2018, from Sweetness and Lightning and What Did You Eat Yesterday? to Giant Spider & Me: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale, Food Wars!! Shokugeki no Soma, and Toriko. Maybe the North American market is finally ready for an Iron Wok Jan renaissance…

Delicious in Dungeon, Vol. 4
Story and Art by Ryoko Kui
Translated by Taylor Engel
Yen Press, 192 pp.
Rated T, for Teens (13+)

If the first volume of Delicious in Dungeon was about assembling a posse, and the second and third about turning monsters into meals, then the fourth is about friendship — specifically, the strong emotional bond between Laois, Marcille, and Falin — and revenge, as the gang finally comes face-to-face with the Red Dragon. The showdown takes place inside a walled city whose narrow, maze-like streets give them a strategic advantage over their Godzilla-sized foe. And as exciting as the fight is, the real payoff is what follows, as Laois and Marcille discover that bringing Falin back from the dead isn’t a simple proposition. It’s in these moments that Ryoko Kui proves a more deft storyteller than we initially realized, effortlessly shifting gears from comedy to drama without mawkishness or cheap jokes. Instead, we’re allowed to contemplate the real horror of being eaten alive — as Falin was — and the real possibility of a character dying for good.

If I’ve made volume four sound like a bummer, rest assured it isn’t. Seshi gets his turn in the spotlight with a weaponized assortment of kitchen tools, while the rest of the gang endures its share of fumbles and miscommunications on the way to catching their dragon adversary. Though I suspect the next volume of Delicious in Dungeon will revert to a monster-of-the-week formula, that’s OK; Kui has firmly established her dramatic and culinary bonafides in volume four, leaving the door open for more character development in the future. Recommended.

Golden Kamuy, Vols. 3-4
Story and Art by Satoru Noda
Translated by Eiji Yasuda
VIZ Media
Rated M, for Mature (18+)

Midway through volume four of Golden Kamuy, Asirpa builds a fox trap in the woods. “Do foxes taste good?” Sugimoto inquires. “No, not really,” Asirpa replies. “Tanuki have more fat in them and taste a lot better.” With a twinkle in her eye, she then asks, “But Sugimoto, don’t you want to try eating a fox?” A mildly exasperated Sugimoto replies, “You know, I’m not out here to try all the delicacies in Hokkaido.”

There are two ways to read this exchange: as a tacit admission that the cooking elements of Golden Kamuy sometimes occupy more real estate than the battles, or a tacit admission that the series is more compelling as a study of Ainu culture than a bloody frontier adventure. I vote for the second interpretation, as the series’ frequent detours into the food, medicine, and mythology of the Ainu are fascinating, offering a window into a culture that has been largely hidden from Western view. Golden Kamuy is on weaker footing, however, when focusing on its secondary characters and subplots. None of the other gold-seekers are fleshed out as carefully as Asirpa and Sugimoto, despite Satoru Noda’s efforts to give each villain a unique motivation for wanting the treasure. The newest baddie — Kazuo Hemni — exemplifies this problem to a tee: though he’s been given a particularly grisly backstory to explain his murderous proclivities, he’s such a textbook sociopath that he barely rises above the preternaturally-calm-and-savage type.

The art, too, sometimes has a perfunctory quality; in several scenes, Noda’s use of a Photoshopped background doesn’t mesh well with the hand-drawn elements, resulting in an awkward collage. Noda’s use of perspective can also be a distraction. He has difficulty drawing bodies to scale, especially when he’s depicting Asirpa and her family, some of whom look more like Smurfs than people in their head-to-body ratio.

Still, the camaraderie between Asirpa and Sugimoto, and the well-staged action scenes more than compensate for the occasional roughness of the execution or flatness of the characterizations. Golden Kamuy continues to entertain, horrify, and educate in equal measure — something I can’t say for any other manly-man manga that’s currently being published in English. Recommended.

Silver Spoon, Vol. 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited:

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

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

Baccano!, Vol. 1

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There are two things you need to know before you read this review. First, I’m a ride-or-die Godfather II fan, the kind of person who’s obsessively watched Robert DeNiro’s performance as the young Don Corleone more times than I can count. Second, I am not a Light Novel Person, despite my repeated efforts to embrace the format.

I disclose this information because Baccano! is a manga adaptation of a light novel series set in Prohibition-era New York, where rival families — one from Sicily, one from Naples — run guns, booze, and card games. That meant there was a 50% chance I’d love this series, since the premise screams “Manga Godfather!”, and a 50% chance I’d hate Baccano!, since the manga was conceived as a tie-in product for the novels’ hardcore fans. What I didn’t expect, however, was just how inept the adaptation would be; I assumed that my objections would be to content or characterization, not a sloppy, hole-filled (holy?) narrative. Shinta Fujimoto’s storytelling, however, is serviceable at best and amateurish at worst, cramming too many events and characters into volume one. The result is a jumbled mess of introductions, reunions, and exposition masquerading as conversation; I spent as much time backtracking two or three pages as I did moving forward, relying on the Wikipedia to demystify poorly explained plot twists, not the least of which is that some characters are immortal. 

Superficially, the artwork seems more polished than the narrative, but a close examination reveals just how perfunctory Fujimoto and Katsumi Enami’s character designs really are. The Martillos and Gandors are so blandly drawn that nothing about them reveals about the characters’ ethnicity, social standing, or profession, let alone the time period in which the story unfolds. The same is true for the physical environment. A few establishing shots depict fire escapes and brick buildings, but Fujimoto seldom provides much in the way of period detail, nor does he convey just how densely settled Little Italy was in the 1920s.

His lazy world-building is most evident in chapters two and three, when Firo Prochainezo, a foot soldier in the Martillo Camorra, tracks an assassin through the tumult of the San Gennaro Festival in much the same fashion as Don Corleone pursues Don Fanucci in The Godfather II. In Coppola’s hands, these scenes are bursting with the activity of brass bands and puppeteers re-enacting San Gennaro’s martyrdom, a vibrant pageant of Sicilian Catholic tradition. In Fujimoto’s version, however, the festival looks about as exciting as a high school pep band rehearsal, with a few token shots of musicians and festival goers. Worse still, Fujimoto has difficulty making these scenes an organic part of the story, inserting them into a potentially suspenseful cat-and-mouse game that unfolds in the alleyways of … well, it’s supposed to be Little Italy, but honestly, it looks as much like Sesame Street as any real city.

About the best I can say for Baccano! is that it clocks in at a mere 160 pages; anything longer would seem as eternal as the characters themselves. I know I’m not the intended audience for this manga, but the series’ die-hard fans — those who read the novels and watched the anime — surely deserve a more artful tie-in than this disastro totale.

BACCANO!, VOL. 1 • ORIGINAL STORY BY RYOHGO NARITA, ART BY SHINTA FUJIMOTO, CHARACTER DESIGN BY KATSUMI ENAMI • TRANSLATION BY TAYLOR ENGEL • YEN PRESS • 160 pp. • RATED T, FOR TEEN (LANGUAGE, VIOLENCE)

A Polar Bear in Love, Vol. 1

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Don’t be fooled by the cute cover: A Polar Bear in Love is neither gag strip nor conventional rom-com about an improbable couple overcoming their differences. It’s a fitfully amusing, sometimes melancholy reflection on what it’s like to fall in love for the first time, filled with the awkward moments and misunderstandings that all dating newbies experience.

The set-up is simple: Polar Bear falls head-over-paws for Lil’ Seal. Lil’ Seal, for his part, is understandably terrified by Polar Bear’s declaration of love and suffers violent tremors and visions of his imminent demise. Author Koromo complicates this one-joke premise, however, by revealing that both Polar Bear and Lil’ Seal are male, and that neither of them are old enough to understand what it means to be in an adult relationship. Polar Bear, for example, labors under the impression that it’s normal for people to eat their loved ones. While that sounds like a cutesy, kids-believe-the-darndest-things punchline, Polar Bear’s belief is rooted in a fundamental law of the Arctic: the strong eat the weak. His own experiences with love, loss, and scavenging tug — OK, yank — on the heartstrings in an unexpected way, revealing the extent to which his carnivorous instincts are complicated by his desire for friendship.

The art, too, is deceptively minimalist. Both Polar Bear and Lil’ Seal are rendered as thick outlines against a wintery landscape, an artistic decision that allows Koromo to deform her characters for maximum humorous effect, but also underscores the fact that their white fur coats are intended to camouflage them from one another. Though the characters’ conversations are distinctively human, their physical movements are not; even when Polar Bear clasps Lil’ Seal to his chest in a tender embrace — a seemingly anthropomorphic moment — Koromo poses Polar Bear firmly on his haunches, capturing the muscular weight of his enormous hind quarters, and emphasizing the disparity between his size and Lil’ Seal’s.

But is it good, you ask? I’m not sure. There’s a brisk efficiency in Koromo’s artwork and a few delightfully absurd moments that illustrate the major gap between what Polar Bear says and what Lil’ Seal hears — an apt metaphor for what happens when two people try sorting out their feelings for one another. The story never finds a consistent rhythm or tone, however, lurching between somber reflections on arctic survival and antic scenes of Polar Bear glomping Lil’ Seal. The same is true of the characters; in some scenes, their chatter pegs them as worldly seven- or eight-year-olds, while other conversations make them seem like jejune high schoolers.

What I can say, however, is that I was genuinely surprised by A Polar Bear in Love. The manga didn’t follow any obvious formula, and wasn’t afraid to explore dark or weird emotional terrain in the service of character development. I wish I’d laughed more, or found the narrative less circular, but I won’t lie: a few scenes made me sniffle and feel protective of Polar Bear, despite his penchant for over-the-top pronouncements and bone-crushing hugs. His sincerity carried me past volume one’s weaker moments, and made me curious about what’s next for him and his harp seal pal.

A POLAR BEAR IN LOVE, VOL. 1 • STORY AND ART BY KOROMO • TRANSLATED BY TAYLOR ENGEL • YEN PRESS • 160 pp. • RATED A, FOR ALL AGES

Kakegurui: Compulsive Gambler, Vol. 1

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Kakegurui: Compulsive Gambler resists easy labels, combining elements of a tournament manga, high school drama, and instructional comic. The plot focuses on Yumeko Jabami, a wealthy girl who transfers to Hyakkaou Private Academy, one of those only-in-manga institutions where the curriculum emphasizes poker and roulette instead of reading and writing. Although Jabami seems demure, her pleasant demeanor turns to maniacal resolve at the first mention of gambling. Within hours of arriving at Hyakkaou, she’s engaged in a high-stakes game of rock, paper, scissors with another student, betting ¥10,000,000 on the outcome. (When in Rome, I guess?)

To make the contest more exciting, author Homura Kawamoto adds a few novel rules, transforming a simple set of challenges into a complex game of chance involving cards, ballot boxes, and voting. He also raises the dramatic stakes by initially portraying Jabami as impulsive — even foolish — in her decision to stake ¥500,000 on a single face-off. By the end of the game, however, we realize just how cunning and observant Jabami really is, as she not only triumphs over her snotty opponent Saotome, but does so by figuring out how Saotome was cheating and using that information against her.

What really puts this chapter over the top is the artwork. Toru Naomura stages the contest like an extreme sporting event, using her entire bag of tricks to convey the contestants’ intense effort — sweatdrops, speedlines, split screens, sound effects — and mimicking the kind of camera work that ESPN trots out for the X Games. The fluid, inventive layouts are also key to making these betting matches come to life, artfully illustrating the rules of play without too much speechifying; even the most inexperienced Go Fish player could follow the game and calculate Jabami’s odds of winning. Naomura’s most effective gambit, however, is the way she draws Jabami’s face. When Jabami is playing her cards close to the vest, her eyes resemble dark, placid pools, but when she’s trouncing the competition, her eyes go supernova, turning into a set of concentric, fiery rings that mimic the line work in Saul Bass’ iconic Vertigo poster:

For all the swagger with which Jabami’s first match is staged, it’s clear that Kawamoto is more interested in the mechanics of gameplay than in the development of three-dimensional characters or the introduction of new plot twists. Each of the subsequent chapters follows the same basic pattern as the first, with Jabami besting her opponent after blowing the whistle on her for cheating. Then there’s the fanservice: Naomura never misses an opportunity to draw an extreme mammary close-up or a glimpse of underwear. And ugly underwear, I might add; Naomura’s artwork is solid, but her application of plaid screentone is so clumsy that it screams MacPaint.

Despite these shortcomings, volume one of Kakegurui is a fun, trashy read that has the good graces not to take itself too seriously. I’m not sure if the premise is strong enough to sustain my interest for more than a few volumes, as the series’ cast of schemers, cheaters, and sadists seem doomed to repeat the same patterns of behavior from chapter to chapter. I put my odds of continuing with Kakegurui at 3 to 1, but other readers may find the psychological combat between Jabami and her opponents enough to persevere through seven or ten installments.

KAKEGURUI: COMPULSIVE GAMBLER, VOL. 1 • STORY BY HOMURA KAWAMOTO, ART BY TORU NAOMURA • TRANSLATED BY MATTHEW ALBERTS • YEN PRESS • 240 pp. • RATING: OT, FOR OLDER TEENS (16+)

Girls’ Last Tour, Vol. 1

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Was Tsukumizu an architect in a previous life? That question lingered with me as I read volume one of Girls’ Last Tour, a sci-fi manga that unfolds in a not-too-distant future filled with crumbling infrastructure and empty cities. Tsukumizu details the physical environment with precision, from sagging girders and abandoned cranes to pockmarked skyscrapers, broken trestles, and rusting water tanks. The sense of loss is palpable on every page, whether the principal characters are surveying an airplane “graveyard” filled with rusting turboprops, or searching for safe passage through a partially flooded city. Though we don’t learn what caused the devastation, Tsukumizu’s vivid illustrations suggest that the world we’re seeing was torn apart by violence.

If only the characters were rendered with such specificity! Yuuri and Chito — the “girls” of the title — are opposites: Yuuri is the brawn, Chito the brain. Both are so focused on their own survival that we have little sense of who they were before the apocalypse, or what brought them together. That in itself isn’t a fatal flaw; Robert Redford’s character in All Is Lost, for example, had no obvious backstory to explain why he was sailing by himself, or who might miss him if he drowned at sea. Yet the movie was compelling, as Redford’s character was painfully aware of his own vulnerability, and the unlikeliness of being rescued. In Girls’ Last Tour, by contrast, the dramatic stakes are low; many chapters revolve around simple activities — jerry building a hot tub, finding a place to sleep — that don’t reveal much about either girl’s personality, or the dangers they face.

The one exception is a story arc spanning chapters six, seven, and eight, in which Yuuri and Chito meet a cartographer who’s been diligently mapping an unnamed city. When an accident scatters Kanazawa’s maps to the wind, his anguish at their loss generates a visceral jolt of emotion. “I may as well fall with them,” he declares, a statement that Chito and Yuuri forcefully reject before dragging Kanazawa to safety atop a tower. As they peer out over the city, their bodies dwarfed by sky and buildings, the darkness gives way to a brilliant patchwork of lights that illuminate their faces and the rooftops around them — a potent reminder that the city once teemed with life.

Tsukumizu frustrates the reader’s efforts to make sense of the characters, however, by drawing Chito and Yuuri as a pair of affectless automatons. Yuuri’s comments about the lights indicate that she’s genuinely moved, but her face and her body don’t register any emotion; she might as well be discussing what she had for dinner, or whether railroad ties make good firewood. Perhaps the flatness of her delivery is meant to convey just how weary she is, or how pragmatic she must be to survive, but the banality of her conversations with Chito suggest that Tsukumizu had some difficulty creating characters as sharp and memorable as the world they inhabit.

The bottom line: Your mileage will vary: some people may appreciate the series’ absence of dramatic conflict, while others may find it a little too measured to be engrossing. I’m on the fence about this one; on the strength of the final story arc, however, I’ll be picking up volume two.

GIRLS’ LAST TOUR, VOL. 1 • STORY AND ART BY TSUKUMIZU • TRANSLATION BY AMANDA HALEY • YEN PRESS • RATED T, FOR TEEN (13+) • 162 pp.

 

Delicious in Dungeon, Vol. 1

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Food manga comes in two flavors: the tournament series, in which a brash young baker or chef enters cook-offs that stretch his culinary skills to the limit, and the food-is-life series, in which family, friends, or colleagues prepare food together, resolving their differences over tasty dishes. Delicious in Dungeon straddles the fence between these two types by combining elements of a role-playing game, cooking show, and workplace comedy. Expressed as a recipe, the formula for volume one might look something like this:

2 cups Dungeons & Dragons
1 cup Iron Wok Jan
1/2 cup Toriko
1/2 cup Oishinbo
1/2 cup What Did You Eat Yesterday?
2 tbsp. Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma
2 tbsp. Not Love But Delicious Foods Makes Me Happy!
Dash of Sweetness & Lightning

Though that recipe sounds unappetizing — the manga equivalent of a herring-and-banana smoothie — Delicious in Dungeon is surprisingly good.

Volume one plunges us into the action, pitting a team of warriors and spell-casters against an enormous dragon. Though all six fighters are experienced, they’re so compromised by hunger that they make silly mistakes that result in one member getting eaten. When the team regroups, two members defect to another guild, leaving just Laois, a knight, Chilchuck, a “pick-lock,” and Marcille, an elf magician. The three resolve to rescue Laois’ sister from the Red Dragon’s belly, but their chronic lack of funds forces them to adopt a novel cost-saving strategy: foraging for food inside the dungeon instead buying supplies for the mission.

The trio soon learns that catching and cooking monsters is harder than it looks. Despite the astonishing variety of creatures and man-eating plants that inhabit the dungeon, almost none appear to be edible: some have stingers or hard shells, while others are so disgusting that no one can imagine how to prepare them. When Senshi, a dwarf, volunteers his culinary services, the group is pleasantly surprised by his ability to transform the most unpromising specimen into a delicious array of soups, tempuras, and jerkies. Even more impressive is Senshi’s ability to improvise the tools he needs to make gourmet dishes; he’s the D&D answer to Angus MacGyver.

Subsequent chapters follow a similar template: the group enters a new area of the dungeon, encounters new monsters, and devises new ways to cook them. What prevents this basic plotline from growing stale is Ryoko Kui’s imaginative artwork. Every chapter is studded with charts and diagrams illustrating the dietary habits of dungeon crawlers and the unusual anatomy of dungeon dwellers, from slime molds to basilisks. These meticulous drawings provide a natural jumping-off point for Senshi to wax poetic about the flavor of dried slime, or describe the safest method of harvesting mandrakes.

By contrast, the backgrounds resemble the kind of generic settings of early computer RPGs, providing just enough detail — cobblestone hallways, winding staircases — to establish each location. That allows Kui to lavish attention on the monsters and people — a wise decision, I think, since the artwork plays such a vital role in establishing each character’s personality and powers. Marcille, for example, is a worrywart, her semi-permanent frown mirrored by the angle and shape of her ears. Though her peevish monologues suggest that she’s food-phobic, her slumping posture and clumsy attempts at spell-casting tell a different story: Marcille feels superfluous, and longs for an opportunity to demonstrate her usefulness to the group. Chilchuck, by contrast, is small and nimble; his child-like size belies his maturity and skill as a locksmith and minesweeper, while his cat-like movements remind us that he’s not fully human. (The other characters refer to him as a “halfling.”)

If the series’ rhythm is predictable and the jokes sometimes obvious — one character declares that basilisk “tastes like chicken” — the specificity of Kui’s vision keeps Delicious in Dungeon afloat. Every chapter yields a funky new monster and an even funkier recipe from Senshi — all rendered in precise detail — while the script has the rhythm of a great workplace sitcom; it’s a bit like watching The Office or WKRP in Cincinnati, but with jokes about the merits of giant scorpion meat instead of arguments about the annual Christmas party. I don’t know if I’d want to read 10 or 20 volumes of Delicious in Dungeon, but I’m eager to see where the next installment goes.

DELICIOUS IN DUNGEON, VOL. 1 • BY RYOKO KUI • RATING: T, FOR TEEN (13+) • YEN PRESS

Kiss & White Lily for My Dearest Girl, Vol. 1

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It’s been some time since Experiments in Manga has hosted a guest post, but my friend Jocilyn was once again inspired and is back to review one of the more recently released yuri manga, the first volume of Canno’s Kiss & White Lily for My Dearest Girl. (Also if you’re interested, you can find some of Jocilyn’s non-manga writings over at her delectable tea blog Parting Gifts!)

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Kiss & White Lily for My Dearest Girl, Volume 1Seeing Canno’s name on the cover of a book in English feels like quite the sea change. Not only is she somewhat obscure with only one full manga series and a couple of one-offs and anthology contributions to her name, her writing style also leans heavily toward the heart-throbbingly romantic yuri (which English publishers have traditionally avoided as being too risky/niche). Also, although not an uncommon setting for yuri manga, Canno’s Kiss & White Lily for My Dearest Girl is the first genre title in English in a decade (i.e. Hakamada Mera’s Last Uniform and Hayashiya Shizuru’s Hayate X Blade, neither of which are exactly realistic), to give us a long look at dorm-life in a prestigious all-girls’ school. Finally, in case those weren’t enticing enough reasons, “Ano Kiss” has been translated by the matchless Jocelyne Allen, easily the most talented and enjoyable manga translator in the industry (and kind of my personal heroine). Hands down, Kiss & White Lily was my most anticipated manga of the year, and it has not disappointed.

To briefly summarize the plot, Ayaka Shiramine was told as a child that a 95/100 was an unacceptably low grade and ever since has never settled for anything less than no.1 in her class. Enter Yurine Kurosawa, a genius transfer student who can work academic and PE miracles with seemingly zero effort, who’s constantly seen sleeping in class. Indignant of the presumptuous upstart, Shiramine tries even harder than usual but still only manages second place on their midterms. In a fit of pique, Shiramine rips up her 98/100 test in front of Kurosawa declaring “It’s no good unless it’s perfect. If only you weren’t here, I would still be no.1” Kurosawa who had initially been impressed and quite smitten with Shiramine, amps up the rivalry and lords her superiority over Shiramine as a means to get closer to her. Before long Kurosawa has stolen Shiramine’s first kiss and being somewhat tsundere, Shiramine goes into total denial mode before being caught in a compromising position by her roommate cousin. Naturally, being a yuri manga, the cousin represents a B-story involving the boyish star of the track team and a hotly akogared sempai. Yada Yada Yada.

Kiss & White Lily for My Dearest Girl, Volume 1, Chapter 2I won’t belabor the obvious parallel to Kare Kano in overall plot. Kurosawa’s utter genius and complete ambivalence to nearly everything that doesn’t involve Shiramine is oddly cute and compelling. One scene that paints Kurosawa as particularly superhuman had me in stitches for a while the first time I read it, but I won’t spoil it for you here. Although Shiramine might be outwardly cool and dissembling toward Kurosawa, when they’re alone together she manages to unwittingly send all the right signals. As with its inspiration, the honor students’ relationship is all blushes and awkward but swoon-worthy and adorable.

Kiss & White Lily variously waxes exciting shoujo romance and lighthearted school girl fun in an enticing mixture. Although Canno does tend to use a lot of screen tones to the point of necromancing Kare Kano, her art style is very cute and emotive, moreso reminiscent of Shimura Takako. I very much enjoyed the gorgeous full-color introductory pages Yen was good enough to reproduce. Naturally Kiss & White Lily’s translation is nigh seamless perfection. I honestly cannot produce a single gripe this time. A thoroughly fabulous read!

Ne Ne Ne, Chapters 1-4

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Ne Ne Ne sounds like E.L. James fanfic: the lead character is a virginal lass who’s forced into an arranged marriage with a sexy, mask-wearing man twenty years her senior. The actual story, however, is much less kinky than my capsule summary would suggest. Like millions of other nineteenth-century couples, sixteen-year-old Koyuki and thirty-seven-year-old Shin begin their married life as strangers, their union one of familial expediency rather than romance. Each entertains different ideas about what constitutes a proper marriage: for Koyuki, being married means homemaking and child-rearing, while for Shin, being married means mindful companionship. Most of their conflict stems from Koyuki’s immaturity, as she bursts into tears every time she burns a meal, tumbles off a ladder, or ruins one of Shin’s yukatas.

Though Koyuki’s bungled chores and teary monologues scream “moe,” Ne Ne Ne retains a core of emotional honesty that’s missing from other rom-coms about clumsy young girls and their older male admirers. The secret lies with the manga’s nuanced portrayal of Koyuki and Shin. Artist Daisuke Hagiwara does a fine job of showing us the degree to which the characters’ ages influence their expectations about married life, using small gestures — a shrug of the shoulder, a chaste kiss, a longing glance — to reveal how carefully the two are approaching their new roles. Author Shizuno Totono also raises the question of sex, hinting at the characters’ mutual attraction while acknowledging the moral and ethical dilemmas posed by Shin and Koyuki’s age gap.

Ne Ne Ne isn’t all angst and meaningful glances; Totono and Daisuke dish out plenty of jokes and sight gags, too, going to great lengths to demonstrate that Shin never takes his mask off. (Not even when he’s doing the laundry! Or snoring on a futon!) Shin’s mask serves a legitimate purpose beyond generating jokes and occasional moments of erotic tension, however: it’s a symbol of his profession — priest — and his connection to the supernatural world. In one of the story’s loveliest scenes, Shin gives Koyuki an impromptu lesson on how to spot yokai. Koyuki’s face conveys her profound sense of wonder at seeing her first dragon, and her delight at forging a small but meaningful connection with Shin — something she’s struggled to do in their more routine interactions as husband and wife.

Totono and Daisuke are less successful at wringing humor out of the couple’s interactions with supporting players. These characters are two-dimensional at best, defined by a single trait or habit that determines how they react to Koyuki and Shin’s marriage. Their brash neighbor Shouta, for example, cracks wise about the age gap between Shin and Koyuki — at one point, he implores Koyuki to marry him “when that old guy dies” — but his comments are anachronistic; it’s hard to imagine a young man in Meiji-era Japan finding an arranged marriage unusual, or speaking to his elders with such blatant disregard for etiquette. Koyuki’s father is similarly two-dimensional, a walk-on role whose main function is to defend his daughter’s chastity with comic fury. (He forbids Shin to consummate the marriage until Koyuki turns 20.) As with Shouta, these scenes don’t contribute much to our understanding of the period setting or the family dynamics that brought Shin and Koyuki together; they do, however, remind us that Shin is waaaaaaaay older than Koyuki.

If Totono and Hagiwara sometimes seem too intent on proving to the reader that Ne Ne Ne is more than just a pervy tale about an old guy in a mask and his child bride, the manga nevertheless manages to be funny, sweet, and honest about the challenges of marital life — something I didn’t expect from a story with such a ludicrous premise. Recommended.

Yen Press is simultaneously publishing the English-language edition of Ne Ne Ne as it’s released in Japan. As of March 20, 2017, four chapters are available. They can be purchased individually or as a package through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Book Walker, ComiXology, Google Play, iBooks and Kobo.

NE NE NE, CHAPTERS 1-4 • STORY BY SHIZUKO TOTONO, ART BY DAISUKE HAGIWARA • YEN PRESS • NO RATING (APPROPRIATE FOR TEENS 13+)