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Yokai

The Manga Review, 11/4/22

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This week’s biggest news story: Kadokawa has purchased Anime News Network. On November 1st, publisher Christopher MacDonald posted an open letter to ANN’s readership to reassure them that the site’s “editorial independence is contractually guaranteed,” and explain that the biggest changes would be in the site itself, not the content. “KWE will be investing significantly in ANN’s software development,” he noted. “A number of new projects will be launched, and a number of projects that have been stuck in development for way too long will be prioritized.” As expected, reader reactions were mixed, with some posting congratulations, and others voicing skepticism about having a major Japanese publisher as a corporate parent. “Yeah, gonna be tough to trust reviews for Kadokawa stuff now,” opined user Albion Hero. “You can say all you want about ‘we will keep our independence’ but its [sic] been long proven that companies that own sites and magazines don’t like those reviews to be critical of their products… Seen this same song and dance plenty of times in gaming media. All the staff say how good their new corporate overlords are, and how they will keep their independence and all. Then 2 years later all the staff is gone and the site no longer has their original integrity.” They concluded: “Would love to be proven wrong but I’ve seen this story too many times.”

NEWS AND VIEWS

Earlier this week, Seven Seas unveiled a fresh crop of licenses, among them Homonculus, a horror series from the creator of Ichi the Killer; Soara and the House of Monsters, a fantasy manga; and Cat on the Hero’s Lap, a comedy about a warrior whose efforts to save his homeland from destruction are thwarted by a cute cat. [Seven Seas]

In other licensing news, Azuki announced two new acquisitions: BLITZ, a sports manga set in the world of competitive chess, and Zombie Makeout Club, a horror manga about–you guessed it–a teenage zombie. [Azuki]

The October 2022 NPD Bookscan numbers are in, and once again Spy x Family, My Hero Academia, and Chainsaw Man dominated the Top 20 Adult Graphic Novels chart. [ICv2]

Bill Curtis posts a complete list of manga and light novels scheduled for a November 2022 release. [Yatta Tachi]

If you’re an avid sports manga enthusiast, you’ll want to check out the newly launched Sports Baka substack, where you’ll find essays on Hajime no Ippo, Dive!!, Days, Ryman’s Club and more. [Sports Baka]

The Manga Mavericks dedicate their latest episode to Red Sprite, a Shonen Jump title from 2019. [Manga Mavericks]

On the latest episode of Shojo & Tell, Ashley and Asher critique Skull-Faced Bookseller Honda-san. [Shojo & Tell]

Walt Richardson and Emily Myers dissect the October 2022 issue of Shonen Jump. [Multiversity Manga Club]

In keeping with the Halloween spirit, Gee and Ray explore the highs and lows of Junji Ito‘s extensive catalog. [Read Right to Left]

Parents, teachers, and librarians interested in learning more about yokai manga will find Brigid Alverson’s latest article for the School Library Journal a helpful resource; not only does she delve into the history of the genre, she also compiles a list of age-appropriate titles for kids, tweens, and teens. [School Library Journal]

Over at TCJ, Ritesh Babu and Ari Gardner interview Juan Albarran, a Spanish artist who’s currently working with Shoji Fujimoto on Matagi Gunner, a seinen action series about “an elderly rural hunter who proves unexpectedly skilled at video game first-person shooters, and soon becomes embroiled in the colorful world of e-gaming.” [The Comics Journal]

Max explains how BL manga such as Go For It, Nakamura! offered him an alternative model of masculinity. “I could be kind, thoughtful, and cute like the boys in BL anime and manga,” he notes. “Maybe some people wouldn’t understand, but I’d always have BL to reassure me that there was nothing wrong with me, and that it was okay to be myself.” [Anime Feminist]

REVIEWS

It’s a measure of how mainstream Hayao Miyazaki’s work has become that both the New York Times and the New Yorker commissioned reviews of Shuna’s Journey, available in English for the first time this month. Writing for the Times, Susan Napier declares Shuna’s Journey “eerie, enchanting, and surpassingly strange,” while Sam Thielman observes that “Shuna’s Journey moves and surprises because of the reader’s disorientation at being dropped into a world that is both generously detailed and miserly with explanations.”

New and Noteworthy

Complete and Ongoing Series

Yokai Rental Shop, Vol. 1

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Yokai Rental Shop is a classic example of Monkey Paw Theater, in which a foolish person comes into possession of a magical object, uses said object to grant an ill-advised wish, then pays a terrible price for his rash decision. Author Shin Mashiba puts a Japanese spin on W.W. Jacob’s famous story, substituting a nekomata and an okuri-inu for a cursed paw, but otherwise conforms the tenets of the genre. The clientele of Pet Shop Crow seek quick or unwise solutions to everyday problems: one mourns the untimely demise of her favorite idol, another dreads his daily encounter with bullies, and a third worries that her younger sister is trying to steal her boyfriend. To help each client “solve” her problem, shop owner Karasu rents them an exotic pet with special abilities. That pet comes with specific instructions — defy them and the deal goes sideways, resulting in bodily harm or emotional trauma.

I liked this story better when it was called Pet Shop of Horrors.

Part of the problem is that Karasu’s clientele is an unsympathetic lot, especially when contrasted with the characters in “The Monkey’s Paw” or Pet Shop of Horrors. The bullying victim, for example, is so enraptured by his yokai companion’s powers that he explicitly ignores Karasu’s instructions, fantasizing about how he will utilize his new-found strength. Within two pages, however, he realizes the folly of his arrogance, as the okuri-inu metamorphoses into a canid Godzilla with a taste for human flesh. Only a quick intervention from Karasu prevents the chapter from devolving into a gruesome spectacle, though you may wish that Karasu had adopted a more laissez-faire attitude towards his foolish client.

The other major issue plaguing Yokai Rental Shop is that Mashiba doesn’t stick with the monster-of-the-week formula for long. A subplot involving Karasu and his half-brother Hiiragi, a fussy civil servant, takes a detour into InuYasha territory when Karasu makes an important discovery about their father. Mashiba tries milking the brothers’ temperamental differences for laughs, but the jokes don’t land with much force; if you’ve seen one episode of The Odd Couple or read a chapter of xxxHolic, you’ve seen this dynamic executed with more gusto and imagination, two qualities that Yokai Rental Shop sorely lacks.

Neither of these deficiencies would be so glaring if the artwork was less perfunctory, but Mashiba’s serviceable character designs and settings do little to imbue the story with its own identity. The shop’s clientele, in particular, are blandly interchangeable; they look like they belong in a government-issue manga about tax returns or recycling, lacking the kind of individuality that might highlight the poignancy of their dilemmas or underscore just how determined they are to get what they want. Even the “turn” in each story — in which the yokai reveal their true natures — is executed in get-the-job-done manner, relying too much on dialogue, smudgy screentone, and slashing lines to suggest what’s happening.

By skimping on these moments, Mashiba misses a crucial opportunity to make the reader feel pity, revulsion, satisfaction, or fear at the outcome of each story; the strongest reaction that any of these scenarios elicits is a shrug of the shoulders. The reader is left wondering why the author even bothered with the horror angle when her true objective seems to be writing a dramedy about a Mutt-and-Jeff pair of brothers—albeit eccentric ones.

YOKAI RENTAL SHOP, VOL. 1 • BY SHIN MASHIBA • TRANSLATED BY AMANDA HALEY, ADAPTED BY JULIA KINSMAN • SEVEN SEAS ENTERTAINMENT • RATED TEEN

Elegant Yokai Apartment Life, Vol. 1

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Elegant Yokai Apartment Life suffers from multiple personality disorder, lurching awkwardly from one situation to the next without comfortably settling into one storytelling mode long enough for the reader to decide if it’s a sitcom, a soap opera, or a horror show.

In fairness to creators Hinowa Kouzuki and Waka Miyama, few stories purely embody a single genre; the labels that the publishing and entertainment industries have coined — rom-com, dramedy — give ample proof that hybridization is a common strategy for enlivening familar plots. For such hybrid forms to work, however, the tonal shifts must be intrinsic to the story, arising naturally from the interactions between the characters and their environment. Elegant Yokai‘s narrative swerves, however, feel more like a desperate attempt to appeal to as many different constituencies as possible: there’s fanservice for guys (a female ghost who wears only panties and a well-placed towel) and girls (a hot onmyoji with a ponytail and a silver fox with an eye patch), yokai drawn from folklore and urban myth, a potential love interest for the hero, a raft of comic-relief characters who get brief turns in the spotlight, a subplot borrowed from a 1983 Afterschool Special, and tragic backstories for several characters just in case the idea of a “ghostly boarding house” doesn’t tickle your funny bone.

The most frustrating part of this narrative abundance is that so much of it feels… extra. Any one of these elements could be excised from the story without fundamentally changing the premise, making room for more character development. That point is crucial: Elegant Yokai‘s lead is less a person than a reader surrogate, walking from one situation to another in a state of mild befuddlement about his supernatural neighbors. Author Hinowa Kouzuki has saddled Inaba with motivations that explain how he ended up rooming with yokai, but hasn’t actually given him any discernible personality traits. Kouzuki and Miyama’s few attempts to flesh out Inaba’s character are clumsy and, frankly, illogical: what well-adjusted person marks his middle school graduation by fighting his BFF in an abandoned lot because he’s “always wanted to do that”? (Shouldn’t Inaba quote one of the rules of Fight Club or something?)

The artwork suffers from a similarly overdetermined quality. The human characters are less drawn than assembled from bits and pieces of other artists’ work — a dash of CLAMP here, a bit of Yuu Watase there — while the yokai have been shamelessly copied from Rumiko Takahashi and Hayao Miyazaki’s oeuvre. Making deliberate allusions to other artists’ work is, of course, a time-honored tradition, but here, these nods feel less like tribute and more like theft; readers tempted to compare Miyama’s art with Miyazaki’s are bound to find hers a poor substitute.

It’s only in the final chapter of volume one that we get a glimpse of what Elegant Yokai might have been. The story trains the spotlight on Inaba’s fellow apartment dwellers Kuga and Shiro, a boy and his dog who were murdered by Kuga’s mother. Once a month, Kuga’s mother — also a ghost — shows up at the apartment building to reclaim her son. Over time, however, her human form has deteriorated and memories have faded, reducing her to a pitiful demonic state, more scribble monster than angry wraith. The frankness with which Kouzuki and Miyama depict her crime prevents these scenes from descending into bathos; these moments are the only ones that elicit an authentic emotional response from the reader, not least because Kuga and Shiro’s predicament has a demonstrable effect on the other characters. Too bad the rest of volume one is such a frantic, disjointed mess.

ELEGANT YOKAI APARTMENT LIFE, VOL. 1 • STORY BY HINOWA KOUZUKI, ART BY WAKA MIYAMA • TRANSLATED BY ADAM HIRSCH • 206 pp. • RATED T (13+)

MMF: GeGeGe no Kitaro

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From the early 1920s through the late 1950s, before television became a fixture in Japanese homes, audiences flocked to kamishibai performances on street corners and parks around the country. A kamishibaiya (storyteller) would pedal from village to village with a butai (small wooden stage) perched on the back of his bicycle. When he arrived in a new community, he would click two sticks together to announce his presence, selling candy to the growing assembly of children. He would then show the audience a series of colorfully painted panels that told a story in much the same fashion as a comic book, narrating as he removed them one at a time from the butai.

At the height of its popularity in the 1930s, nearly five million people attended kamishibai performances every day. There were kamishibai for every demographic: sentimental tales about kittens and orphans for girls, adventure stories about masked heroes and mountaineers for boys, and pulpy mysteries and historical dramas for adults. A small army of artists and writers cranked out new installments of popular stories such as Golden Bat, Tiger Boy, Prince Gamma, and Cry of the Andes, providing an important training ground for such postwar manga-ka as Kazuo Koike, Sanpei Shirato, and Shigeru Mizuki.

A contemporary kamishibaiya performs in front of a butai.

Mizuki’s best-known comic, GeGeGe no Kitaro, traces its roots to the 1930s, when kamishibaiya around Japan performed Hakaba no Kitaro, a supernatural tale about a yokai boy who lived in a graveyard. Though Mizuki didn’t create Kitaro, he was responsible for adapting Hakaba no Kitaro into manga form, publishing his first Kitaro stories for the akabon (rental comics) market in 1959. Kitaro eventually found a home at Weekly Shonen Magazine in 1966, where the editors renamed it GeGeGe no Kitaro. Kitaro proved immensely popular, spawning animated television shows, feature-length movies, and video games, not to mention numerous manga sequels in Shonen Sunday, Shonen Action, and Shukan Jitsuwa.

Despite its immense popularity in Japan, none of the GeGeGe no Kitaro manga have been licensed for the North American market. In 2002, Kodansha International hired Ralph McCarthy to translate a handful of the Weekly Shonen Magazine stories, collecting them in three bilingual editions. Those volumes are scarce — at least on this side of the Pacific — although I was able to snag the first on eBay for less than $20. (Caveat emptor: Some Amazon retailers are asking as much as $345.00 for a single volume of the Kodansha Bilingual Comics edition.)

Looking through the pages of volume one, the story’s roots in kamishibai are apparent. The first chapter, “Ghost Train,” is a classic example of comeuppance theater: after two Tokyo businessmen abuse Kitaro and his sidekick Ratman, the men find themselves aboard a mysterious train whose final destination is Tama-reien (Tama Cemetery). The pacing suggests a story told at a campfire, allowing the audience to savor the word play (all the stops on the Tama-reien line have eerie names), the description of the passengers, and the two businessmen’s growing sense of terror. Though the pictures carry the weight of the storytelling, Mizuki uses an omniscient narrator to heighten the reader’s awareness of sound. “The skeleton-thin attendant blew his flute, and a tram came screeching into the station like a rickety hearse,” the narrator informs us. “The door rattled open like the door to a crematorium.”

The narrator serves another important purpose as well, filling in the gap between images, just as a kamishibayai would have done in the 1930s. Towards the end of the story, for example, the two men decide to leap from the train, rather than ride it to its final destination. Mizuki draws their awkward jump, then cuts to an image of the ghost train speeding along a dark track, barely distinguishable from the night sky and grassy wasteland it traverses. “Their heads cracked against something hard — rocks, perhaps,” the narrator explains. “A wail of agony splits the air, then all was silence once again.” This statement proves essential to setting up the story’s punchline, bringing the men’s ordeal to a dramatically suggestive end that is deftly clarified in the last four panels.

The second chapter, “The Leviathing,” owes a debt to such kamishibai mainstays as Golden Bat and Prince Gamma, serial adventures that freely mixed elements of science fiction, mystery, and fantasy. In “Leviathing,” Kitaro joins a scientific expedition to New Guinea, where an unscrupulous scientist injects Kitaro with a prehistoric animal’s blood, transforming Kitaro into a hairy, seven-story beast with the head of a whale and the body of a yeti.

As in “Ghost Train,” an omniscent narrator plays an important role in advancing the story, describing the changes in setting, and revealing the limitations of Kitaro’s new form. “Kitaro tried to yell, ‘Father!’, but all that came out was the Leviathing’s roar,” the narrator intones. “He put down his frightened father and walked away.”

Vital as the narration may be, it’s the artwork that underscores the poignancy of Kitaro’s situation. Mizuki draws the Leviathing in a dramatically different fashion when viewed from below than when viewed close-up: from the perspective of a human bystander, the Leviathing is monstrous, with an enormous, gaping mouth and short, grasping arms. Up close, however, he’s a gentle creature, capable of frowning, sighing, and shedding tears. These close-ups help remind us that it’s Kitaro trapped inside this destructive body, unable to communicate with humans or yokai; there’s simply no place for a giant prehistoric creature in such a thoroughly urbanized landscape, a point underscored by the military’s brutal efforts to eradicate Kitaro by driving him out to sea.

Although “The Leviathing” may strike readers as a sci-fi romp and not a ghost story, it illustrates one of the series’ most important themes: displacement. In many of the Kitaro stories, he struggles to find a place for himself — and his yokai friends — in an increasingly modernized world. As Jonathan Clements observes,

Mizuki was one of the first manga creators to deal with the rush of modernity, depicting Japanese ghosts largely as peaceful, gentle creatures forced into action by the encroachment of human civilisation on their remote, secluded places of haunting. In particular, he cited electric light as the main nemesis of spirits from the otherworld, giving his stories an elegiac quality that celebrates Japanese folktale traditions, even as he laments their passing.

Readers familiar with GeGeGe no Kitaro from its numerous film and television adaptations may find the bilingual edition a frustrating introduction to the manga, as many of the series’ colorful supporting players — Daddy Eyeball, Catchick, and The Sand Witch — play minor-to-nonexistent roles in the first volume. Readers interested in manga’s history, however, will find the first volume of the bilingual edition a fascinating window into the pre-war Japanese entertainment industry, offering English-speakers a hint of the stories and storytelling practices that once enchanted Japanese audiences on street corners around the country. Below, you’ll find a short bibliography of articles and books about Kitaro and kamishibai, should you wish to learn more about this famous character’s roots.

For Further Reading

Clements, Jonathan. “Spooky Ooky.” Schoolgirl Milky Crisis. 13 September 2010. <http://schoolgirlmilkycrisis.com/blog/?p=1710>. Accessed 11/6/11.

Kobayashi, Kenji and Kelly Yamamoto. “Kamishibai Theater.” Japanese American National Museum. <http://www.janm.org/janmkids/kamishibai.php>. Accessed 11/7/11.

Kyogoku, Natsuhiko. “Afterword.” GeGeGe no Kitaro, Vol. 1. Trans. Ralph F. McCarthy. New York: Kodansha International, 2002. 123-25.

McCarthy, Helen. “Spooky Kitaro’s Sixth Generation.” Suite 101. 6 May 2008. <http://helen-mccarthy.suite101.com/spooky-kitaros-sixth-generation-a52997>. Accessed 11/6/11.

Nash, Eric. Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2009.

Manga Artifacts: GeGeGe no Kitaro

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From the early 1920s through the late 1950s, before television became a fixture in Japanese homes, audiences flocked to kamishibai performances on street corners and parks around the country. A kamishibaiya (storyteller) would pedal from village to village with a butai (small wooden stage) perched on the back of his bicycle. When he arrived in a new community, he would click two sticks together to announce his presence, selling candy to the growing assembly of children. He would then show the audience a series of colorfully painted panels that told a story in much the same fashion as a comic book, narrating as he removed them one at a time from the butai.

At the height of its popularity in the 1930s, nearly five million people attended kamishibai performances every day. There were kamishibai for every demographic: sentimental tales about kittens and orphans for girls, adventure stories about masked heroes and mountaineers for boys, and pulpy mysteries and historical dramas for adults. A small army of artists and writers cranked out new installments of popular stories such as Golden Bat, Tiger Boy, Prince Gamma, and Cry of the Andes, providing an important training ground for such postwar manga-ka as Kazuo Koike, Sanpei Shirato, and Shigeru Mizuki.

A contemporary kamishibaiya performs in front of a butai.

Mizuki’s best-known comic, GeGeGe no Kitaro, traces its roots to the 1930s, when kamishibaiya around Japan performed Hakaba no Kitaro, a supernatural tale about a yokai boy who lived in a graveyard. Though Mizuki didn’t create Kitaro, he was responsible for adapting Hakaba no Kitaro into manga form, publishing his first Kitaro stories for the akabon (rental comics) market in 1959. Kitaro eventually found a home at Weekly Shonen Magazine in 1966, where the editors renamed it GeGeGe no Kitaro. Kitaro proved immensely popular, spawning animated television shows, feature-length movies, and video games, not to mention numerous manga sequels in Shonen Sunday, Shonen Action, and Shukan Jitsuwa.

Despite its immense popularity in Japan, none of the GeGeGe no Kitaro manga have been licensed for the North American market. In 2002, Kodansha International hired Ralph McCarthy to translate a handful of the Weekly Shonen Magazine stories, collecting them in three bilingual editions. Those volumes are scarce — at least on this side of the Pacific — although I was able to snag the first on eBay for less than $20. (Caveat emptor: Some Amazon retailers are asking as much as $345.00 for a single volume of the Kodansha Bilingual Comics edition.)

Looking through the pages of volume one, the story’s roots in kamishibai are apparent. The first chapter, “Ghost Train,” is a classic example of comeuppance theater: after two Tokyo businessmen abuse Kitaro and his sidekick Ratman, the men find themselves aboard a mysterious train whose final destination is Tama-reien (Tama Cemetery). The pacing suggests a story told at a campfire, allowing the audience to savor the word play (all the stops on the Tama-reien line have eerie names), the description of the passengers, and the two businessmen’s growing sense of terror. Though the pictures carry the weight of the storytelling, Mizuki uses an omniscient narrator to heighten the reader’s awareness of sound. “The skeleton-thin attendant blew his flute, and a tram came screeching into the station like a rickety hearse,” the narrator informs us. “The door rattled open like the door to a crematorium.”

The narrator serves another important purpose as well, filling in the gap between images, just as a kamishibayai would have done in the 1930s. Towards the end of the story, for example, the two men decide to leap from the train, rather than ride it to its final destination. Mizuki draws their awkward jump, then cuts to an image of the ghost train speeding along a dark track, barely distinguishable from the night sky and grassy wasteland it traverses. “Their heads cracked against something hard — rocks, perhaps,” the narrator explains. “A wail of agony splits the air, then all was silence once again.” This statement proves essential to setting up the story’s punchline, bringing the men’s ordeal to a dramatically suggestive end that is deftly clarified in the last four panels.

The second chapter, “The Leviathing,” owes a debt to such kamishibai mainstays as Golden Bat and Prince Gamma, serial adventures that freely mixed elements of science fiction, mystery, and fantasy. In “Leviathing,” Kitaro joins a scientific expedition to New Guinea, where an unscrupulous scientist injects Kitaro with a prehistoric animal’s blood, transforming Kitaro into a hairy, seven-story beast with the head of a whale and the body of a yeti.

As in “Ghost Train,” an omniscent narrator plays an important role in advancing the story, describing the changes in setting, and revealing the limitations of Kitaro’s new form. “Kitaro tried to yell, ‘Father!’, but all that came out was the Leviathing’s roar,” the narrator intones. “He put down his frightened father and walked away.”

Vital as the narration may be, it’s the artwork that underscores the poignancy of Kitaro’s situation. Mizuki draws the Leviathing in a dramatically different fashion when viewed from below than when viewed close-up: from the perspective of a human bystander, the Leviathing is monstrous, with an enormous, gaping mouth and short, grasping arms. Up close, however, he’s a gentle creature, capable of frowning, sighing, and shedding tears. These close-ups help remind us that it’s Kitaro trapped inside this destructive body, unable to communicate with humans or yokai; there’s simply no place for a giant prehistoric creature in such a thoroughly urbanized landscape, a point underscored by the military’s brutal efforts to eradicate Kitaro by driving him out to sea.

Although “The Leviathing” may strike readers as a sci-fi romp and not a ghost story, it illustrates one of the series’ most important themes: displacement. In many of the Kitaro stories, he struggles to find a place for himself — and his yokai friends — in an increasingly modernized world. As Jonathan Clements observes,

Mizuki was one of the first manga creators to deal with the rush of modernity, depicting Japanese ghosts largely as peaceful, gentle creatures forced into action by the encroachment of human civilisation on their remote, secluded places of haunting. In particular, he cited electric light as the main nemesis of spirits from the otherworld, giving his stories an elegiac quality that celebrates Japanese folktale traditions, even as he laments their passing.

Readers familiar with GeGeGe no Kitaro from its numerous film and television adaptations may find the bilingual edition a frustrating introduction to the manga, as many of the series’ colorful supporting players — Daddy Eyeball, Catchick, and The Sand Witch — play minor-to-nonexistent roles in the first volume. Readers interested in manga’s history, however, will find the first volume of the bilingual edition a fascinating window into the pre-war Japanese entertainment industry, offering English-speakers a hint of the stories and storytelling practices that once enchanted Japanese audiences on street corners around the country. Below, you’ll find a short bibliography of articles and books about Kitaro and kamishibai, should you wish to learn more about this famous character’s roots.

For Further Reading

Clements, Jonathan. “Spooky Ooky.” Schoolgirl Milky Crisis. 13 September 2010. <http://schoolgirlmilkycrisis.com/blog/?p=1710>. Accessed 11/6/11.

Kobayashi, Kenji and Kelly Yamamoto. “Kamishibai Theater.” Japanese American National Museum. <http://www.janm.org/janmkids/kamishibai.php>. Accessed 11/7/11.

Kyogoku, Natsuhiko. “Afterword.” GeGeGe no Kitaro, Vol. 1. Trans. Ralph F. McCarthy. New York: Kodansha International, 2002. 123-25.

McCarthy, Helen. “Spooky Kitaro’s Sixth Generation.” Suite 101. 6 May 2008. <http://helen-mccarthy.suite101.com/spooky-kitaros-sixth-generation-a52997>. Accessed 11/6/11.

Nash, Eric. Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2009.

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.

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 Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Kekkaishi

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I have a challenge for all you Shonen Jump readers: pick up a copy of Kekkaishi. It may not be as sexy as Death Note, or as goofy as One Piece, or as battle-focused as Bleach, but what it lacks in flash, it makes up in heart, humor, and good old-fashioned storytelling.

The premise of Kekkaishi is simple: Yoshimori Sumimura, a seemingly unremarkable fourteen-year-old boy, is a kekkaishi, or barrier-master. When he isn’t consuming unhealthy amounts of coffee-flavored milk, dozing off in class, or baking architecturally magnificent cakes (one of his pet obsessions), he’s patrolling the grounds of his school, which sits atop the Karasumori, a locus of magical energy that proves irresistible to ayakashi (demons) looking to augment their power. Yoshimori traps unwanted visitors within cube-shaped barriers, then vaporizes them, barrier and all.

Joining him on patrol are his sixteen-year-old neighbor Tokine Yukimura—a more disciplined kekkaishi whom Yoshimori secretly adores—and a small complement of demons that includes two dog spirits, Madarao and Hakubi, and a half-human, half-ayakashi, Gen Shishio. Further complicating matters are the families themselves: the Sumimuras and Yukimuras detest one another. Though their clans have been tasked with protecting the Karasumori for nearly 500 years, the oldest generation carries on an energetic feud, making it difficult for Yoshimori and Tokine to work together harmoniously. In short, Kekkaishi reads like an entertaining mash-up of Bleach, InuYasha, and Romeo and Juliet. (Or maybe Romeo Must Die. Take your pick.)

Each volume unfurls at a brisk clip, in part because Tanabe doesn’t feel the need to explain the entire mythology of the Karasumori site all at once. Nor does she resort to the kind of lazy, expository dialogue found in many shonen series with complicated backstories. (You know the kind: “As you know, Tokine, we’ve been combating ayakashi together for almost a year, and our faithful demon dog sidekicks have played an indispensable role in helping us rid the site of ayakashi. Don’t you think, childhood friend and neighbor of mine?”) Instead, Tanabe reveals details about the Karasumori site’s past gradually as she introduces new characters and confronts her principal cast members with new demonic challenges. In fact, the kekkaishis’ greatest adversaries—the Kokuburo, a group of powerful demons whose plan for world domination involves taking over the Karasumori site—don’t even appear in the first volume of the series.

What makes Kekkaishi such a joy to read is Yellow Tanabe’s consummate skill as both an illustrator and storyteller. Her artwork is clean and attractive, with bold lines and nicely composed pictures. Though her character designs are immensely appealing—and seem ready-made for the inevitable assortment of lunchboxes, t-shirts, shijikis, and coffee milk drinks that the series inspired—it’s her action sequences that really shine. Kekkaishi is one of the few shonen series where the fight scenes are (a) dynamic (b) thrilling (c) easy to follow (d) essential to the plot and (e) just the right length. There’s also a wonderful sense of play in Tanabe’s combat. Yoshimori and Tokine use kekkaishi not only as traps, but also as aerial stepping-stones that allow them to pursue demons mid-air.

There’s another appealing—and slyly didactic—aspect to these fight scenes as well. Though Yoshimori possesses greater spiritual powers than Tokine, it’s Tokine who frequently saves the day. Why? Because she practices creating barriers with the same diligence as she does her homework. Yoshimori, on the other hand, struggles to master his powers, sometimes embarking on marathon training sessions and other times neglecting to practice at all.

Kekkaishi offers readers more modest pleasures as well. Tanabe creates a colorful cast of supporting characters that include Yoshimori and Tokine’s sparring grandparents, who prove surprisingly spry for a couple of sexagenarians; Yoshimori’s father, who reminds me of James Dean’s apron-clad dad in Rebel Without a Cause; Masahiko Tsukijigaoka, a genial ghost who was a baker in life; Heisuke Matsudo, a nattily-dressed friend of Yoshimori’s grandfather with a specialty in weird science; and Mamezo, the grouchy guardian spirit of the Karasumori site who looks a bit like Kermit the Frog on a bender. Tanabe’s villains are a less colorful and distinctive bunch than, say, Naraku’s various incarnations, but I find that refreshing. For once the hero—and pals—are as vivid and appealing as the bad guys without having sordid or unnecessarily complicated backstories.

Like all shonen series, Kekkaishi suffers from an occasional dry spell. In volumes seven and eight, for example, the series seemed to have lost its mojo; I found the fight scenes tedious and felt Tanabe had fumbled in her depiction of Tokine, who went from being an appealing, competent character to a mere tag-along. But Tanabe quickly righted the ship in volume nine, introducing new characters, fleshing out the Kokoburo’s motives for capturing the Karasumori, staging some ecological intrigue at the Colorless Marsh, and revealing that Yoshimori’s dad has some demon-busting skills of his own. Though volume nine features two dramatic fight scenes, it’s the quieter, character-building moments that really shine, raising the emotional stakes by revealing unexpected facets of the heroes’ personalities; what happens in volume ten is all the more devastating because Tanabe makes us care deeply about her characters’ welfare.

If I still haven’t persuaded you that Kekkaishi is more fun than a barrel of demon monkeys, let me sing the praises of Yellow Tanabe’s omake. I don’t usually read sidebars or gag strips for reasons that David Welsh so aptly summarized in a memorable blog entry:

The content is generally pretty repetitive. They’re working really hard, and they’re sorry they’re behind on their fan mail. This volume isn’t as good as they’d have liked, but they’re trying, and reader support keeps them going. They wish they had a kitty. That sort of thing.

Tanabe’s omake steer clear of the usual bowing and scraping before the fandom. Instead, she depicts herself as a slightly tubby penguin with a perpetual scowl and an implacable panda for an editor. Not much happens in a typical strip, but the back-and-forth between penguin and panda is amusing and, for anyone who’s ever been on the receiving end of editorial criticism, all too true. She also has a lot of fun explaining her creative decisions:

And if you’re still on the fence, let me pull out my trump card: Kekkaishi is complete. Done. Finished. Finito.

After a successful eight-year run in Weekly Shonen Sunday, the series wrapped on April 6th with the publication of its 334th chapter. And by successful, I mean successful in Japan, where the series inspired a 52-episode television series and a robust assortment of video games, and nabbed nabbed the 2007 Shogakukan Award for Best Shonen Series. Here in the US, however, Kekkaishi has barely made a ripple. VIZ has been making a concerted effort to promote the series, featuring sample chapters on its Shonen Sunday website, licensing broadcasting rights to Cartoon Network, and releasing two budget editions: one digital (for the iPad), and one print. (Look for the first three-in-one edition on May 3, 2011.) I’m not sure why Kekkaishi hasn’t caught on with American audiences yet, but now is a great time to jump into this addictive series. I dare you not to like it!

This is a revised version of an essay that originally appeared at PopCultureShock on 5/14/07.

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Kekkaishi

by

I have a challenge for all you Shonen Jump readers: pick up a copy of Kekkaishi. It may not be as sexy as Death Note, or as goofy as One Piece, or as battle-focused as Bleach, but what it lacks in flash, it makes up in heart, humor, and good old-fashioned storytelling.

The premise of Kekkaishi is simple: Yoshimori Sumimura, a seemingly unremarkable fourteen-year-old boy, is a kekkaishi, or barrier-master. When he isn’t consuming unhealthy amounts of coffee-flavored milk, dozing off in class, or baking architecturally magnificent cakes (one of his pet obsessions), he’s patrolling the grounds of his school, which sits atop the Karasumori, a locus of magical energy that proves irresistible to ayakashi (demons) looking to augment their power. Yoshimori traps unwanted visitors within cube-shaped barriers, then vaporizes them, barrier and all.

Joining him on patrol are his sixteen-year-old neighbor Tokine Yukimura—a more disciplined kekkaishi whom Yoshimori secretly adores—and a small complement of demons that includes two dog spirits, Madarao and Hakubi, and a half-human, half-ayakashi, Gen Shishio. Further complicating matters are the families themselves: the Sumimuras and Yukimuras detest one another. Though their clans have been tasked with protecting the Karasumori for nearly 500 years, the oldest generation carries on an energetic feud, making it difficult for Yoshimori and Tokine to work together harmoniously. In short, Kekkaishi reads like an entertaining mash-up of Bleach, InuYasha, and Romeo and Juliet. (Or maybe Romeo Must Die. Take your pick.)

Each volume unfurls at a brisk clip, in part because Tanabe doesn’t feel the need to explain the entire mythology of the Karasumori site all at once. Nor does she resort to the kind of lazy, expository dialogue found in many shonen series with complicated backstories. (You know the kind: “As you know, Tokine, we’ve been combating ayakashi together for almost a year, and our faithful demon dog sidekicks have played an indispensable role in helping us rid the site of ayakashi. Don’t you think, childhood friend and neighbor of mine?”) Instead, Tanabe reveals details about the Karasumori site’s past gradually as she introduces new characters and confronts her principal cast members with new demonic challenges. In fact, the kekkaishis’ greatest adversaries—the Kokuburo, a group of powerful demons whose plan for world domination involves taking over the Karasumori site—don’t even appear in the first volume of the series.

What makes Kekkaishi such a joy to read is Yellow Tanabe’s consummate skill as both an illustrator and storyteller. Her artwork is clean and attractive, with bold lines and nicely composed pictures. Though her character designs are immensely appealing—and seem ready-made for the inevitable assortment of lunchboxes, t-shirts, shijikis, and coffee milk drinks that the series inspired—it’s her action sequences that really shine. Kekkaishi is one of the few shonen series where the fight scenes are (a) dynamic (b) thrilling (c) easy to follow (d) essential to the plot and (e) just the right length. There’s also a wonderful sense of play in Tanabe’s combat. Yoshimori and Tokine use kekkaishi not only as traps, but also as aerial stepping-stones that allow them to pursue demons mid-air.

There’s another appealing—and slyly didactic—aspect to these fight scenes as well. Though Yoshimori possesses greater spiritual powers than Tokine, it’s Tokine who frequently saves the day. Why? Because she practices creating barriers with the same diligence as she does her homework. Yoshimori, on the other hand, struggles to master his powers, sometimes embarking on marathon training sessions and other times neglecting to practice at all.

Kekkaishi offers readers more modest pleasures as well. Tanabe creates a colorful cast of supporting characters that include Yoshimori and Tokine’s sparring grandparents, who prove surprisingly spry for a couple of sexagenarians; Yoshimori’s father, who reminds me of James Dean’s apron-clad dad in Rebel Without a Cause; Masahiko Tsukijigaoka, a genial ghost who was a baker in life; Heisuke Matsudo, a nattily-dressed friend of Yoshimori’s grandfather with a specialty in weird science; and Mamezo, the grouchy guardian spirit of the Karasumori site who looks a bit like Kermit the Frog on a bender. Tanabe’s villains are a less colorful and distinctive bunch than, say, Naraku’s various incarnations, but I find that refreshing. For once the hero—and pals—are as vivid and appealing as the bad guys without having sordid or unnecessarily complicated backstories.

Like all shonen series, Kekkaishi suffers from an occasional dry spell. In volumes seven and eight, for example, the series seemed to have lost its mojo; I found the fight scenes tedious and felt Tanabe had fumbled in her depiction of Tokine, who went from being an appealing, competent character to a mere tag-along. But Tanabe quickly righted the ship in volume nine, introducing new characters, fleshing out the Kokoburo’s motives for capturing the Karasumori, staging some ecological intrigue at the Colorless Marsh, and revealing that Yoshimori’s dad has some demon-busting skills of his own. Though volume nine features two dramatic fight scenes, it’s the quieter, character-building moments that really shine, raising the emotional stakes by revealing unexpected facets of the heroes’ personalities; what happens in volume ten is all the more devastating because Tanabe makes us care deeply about her characters’ welfare.

If I still haven’t persuaded you that Kekkaishi is more fun than a barrel of demon monkeys, let me sing the praises of Yellow Tanabe’s omake. I don’t usually read sidebars or gag strips for reasons that David Welsh so aptly summarized in a memorable blog entry:

The content is generally pretty repetitive. They’re working really hard, and they’re sorry they’re behind on their fan mail. This volume isn’t as good as they’d have liked, but they’re trying, and reader support keeps them going. They wish they had a kitty. That sort of thing.

Tanabe’s omake steer clear of the usual bowing and scraping before the fandom. Instead, she depicts herself as a slightly tubby penguin with a perpetual scowl and an implacable panda for an editor. Not much happens in a typical strip, but the back-and-forth between penguin and panda is amusing and, for anyone who’s ever been on the receiving end of editorial criticism, all too true. She also has a lot of fun explaining her creative decisions:

And if you’re still on the fence, let me pull out my trump card: Kekkaishi is complete. Done. Finished. Finito.

After a successful eight-year run in Weekly Shonen Sunday, the series wrapped on April 6th with the publication of its 334th chapter. And by successful, I mean successful in Japan, where the series inspired a 52-episode television series and a robust assortment of video games, and nabbed nabbed the 2007 Shogakukan Award for Best Shonen Series. Here in the US, however, Kekkaishi has barely made a ripple. VIZ has been making a concerted effort to promote the series, featuring sample chapters on its Shonen Sunday website, licensing broadcasting rights to Cartoon Network, and releasing two budget editions: one digital (for the iPad), and one print. (Look for the first three-in-one edition on May 3, 2011.) I’m not sure why Kekkaishi hasn’t caught on with American audiences yet, but now is a great time to jump into this addictive series. I dare you not to like it!

This is a revised version of an essay that originally appeared at PopCultureShock on 5/14/07.

Kamisama Kiss, Vols. 1-2

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Has Japan experienced a recent surge in pachinko-related child abandonment? I ask because Kamisama Kiss is, by my count, the fourth manga I’ve read in which a parent (a) racks up gambling debt (b) angers his creditors and (c) skips town, leaving his son or daughter to deal with the consequences. Nanami, Kamisama‘s plucky heroine, comes home from school to discover an eviction notice on the kitchen table alongside a hastily scrawled letter: “I’m going on a trip. Sorry. Don’t look for me. Dad.”

With no place to go — apparently, she has no relatives or friends with a couch — Nanami begins camping out in a local park, where she rescues a nervous man from an aggressive dog. As an expression of gratitude for “saving” him, Mikage offers Nanami a place to stay. What Nanami doesn’t know is that Mikage is the deity of a small, decrepit shrine, and is responsible for maintaining it, hearing visitors’ prayers, and warding off evil spirits — responsibilities he passes on to Nanami by planting a kiss on her forehead.

Once ensconced in the shrine, Nanami meets Mikage’s familiar, a haughty fox demon named Tomoe. You don’t need a PhD in Manga to guess what sort of chap Tomoe is: he’s good-looking, perpetually cranky, and quick to insult his new boss. The two bicker constantly about issues great and small, from Tomoe’s snotty tone of voice to Nanami’s inability to defend herself against demons. Over time, however, the two form a reluctant partnership, pledging to protect the shrine together.

If the story feels a little shopworn, the characterizations are vivid and engaging. Julietta Suzuki does a credible job of showing us how Nanami and Tomoe discover that they’re more alike than different; as their antagonistic banter reveals, both are stubborn, loyal, and concerned with other people’s welfare. Making those tart exchanges more entertaining is the fact that Nanami and Tomoe are equally matched; Nanami isn’t as verbally adroit as Tomoe, but she’s perfectly capable of tricking or browbeating him into following her orders.

Where Kamisama Kiss runs aground is in the predictability of its plotting. Every crisis — a threat to the shrine, the introduction of a romantic rival — builds to a crucial moment in which one character realizes that he or she can’t do without the other. Of course, neither is willing to label those feelings as love, forcing the story into an indefinite holding pattern in which the leads teeter on the brink of romance for dozens of chapters. Even the introduction of demonic rivals doesn’t do much to distract from the obvious plot turns, though it does provide Suzuki a swell excuse to draw fancy kimonos, angel wings, and androgynous boys. (I particularly liked the tengu who hid in plain sight by pretending to be a teen idol. Now I’d read a manga about him.)

I liked Kamisama Kiss, but found it totally forgettable — the umpteenth story in which characters from two very different worlds fall in love in spite of their differences. To be sure, there’s a certain pleasure in seeing an author put her romantic leads through their paces, but Suzuki adheres so strictly to the opposites-attract formula that the story practically writes itself.

Review copies provided by VIZ Media, LLC. Volume two will be released on March 2, 2011.

KAMISAMA KISS, VOLS. 1-2 • BY JULIETTA SUZUKI • VIZ • RATING: TEEN (13+)

Kamisama Kiss, Vols. 1-2

by

Has Japan experienced a recent surge in pachinko-related child abandonment? I ask because Kamisama Kiss is, by my count, the fourth manga I’ve read in which a parent (a) racks up gambling debt (b) angers his creditors and (c) skips town, leaving his son or daughter to deal with the consequences. Nanami, Kamisama‘s plucky heroine, comes home from school to discover an eviction notice on the kitchen table alongside a hastily scrawled letter: “I’m going on a trip. Sorry. Don’t look for me. Dad.”

With no place to go — apparently, she has no relatives or friends with a couch — Nanami begins camping out in a local park, where she rescues a nervous man from an aggressive dog. As an expression of gratitude for “saving” him, Mikage offers Nanami a place to stay. What Nanami doesn’t know is that Mikage is the deity of a small, decrepit shrine, and is responsible for maintaining it, hearing visitors’ prayers, and warding off evil spirits — responsibilities he passes on to Nanami by planting a kiss on her forehead.

Once ensconced in the shrine, Nanami meets Mikage’s familiar, a haughty fox demon named Tomoe. You don’t need a PhD in Manga to guess what sort of chap Tomoe is: he’s good-looking, perpetually cranky, and quick to insult his new boss. The two bicker constantly about issues great and small, from Tomoe’s snotty tone of voice to Nanami’s inability to defend herself against demons. Over time, however, the two form a reluctant partnership, pledging to protect the shrine together.

If the story feels a little shopworn, the characterizations are vivid and engaging. Julietta Suzuki does a credible job of showing us how Nanami and Tomoe discover that they’re more alike than different; as their antagonistic banter reveals, both are stubborn, loyal, and concerned with other people’s welfare. Making those tart exchanges more entertaining is the fact that Nanami and Tomoe are equally matched; Nanami isn’t as verbally adroit as Tomoe, but she’s perfectly capable of tricking or browbeating him into following her orders.

Where Kamisama Kiss runs aground is in the predictability of its plotting. Every crisis — a threat to the shrine, the introduction of a romantic rival — builds to a crucial moment in which one character realizes that he or she can’t do without the other. Of course, neither is willing to label those feelings as love, forcing the story into an indefinite holding pattern in which the leads teeter on the brink of romance for dozens of chapters. Even the introduction of demonic rivals doesn’t do much to distract from the obvious plot turns, though it does provide Suzuki a swell excuse to draw fancy kimonos, angel wings, and androgynous boys. (I particularly liked the tengu who hid in plain sight by pretending to be a teen idol. Now I’d read a manga about him.)

I liked Kamisama Kiss, but found it totally forgettable — the umpteenth story in which characters from two very different worlds fall in love in spite of their differences. To be sure, there’s a certain pleasure in seeing an author put her romantic leads through their paces, but Suzuki adheres so strictly to the opposites-attract formula that the story practically writes itself.

Review copies provided by VIZ Media, LLC. Volume two will be released on March 2, 2011.

KAMISAMA KISS, VOLS. 1-2 • BY JULIETTA SUZUKI • VIZ • RATING: TEEN (13+)

Dororo, Vols. 1-3

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dororo1If Phoenix is Tezuka’s Ring Cycle, Wagnerian in scope, form, and seriousness, then Dororo is Tezuka’s Don Giovanni, a playful marriage of supernatural intrigue and lowbrow comedy whose deeper message is cloaked in shout-outs to fellow artists (in this case, Shunji Sonoyama instead of Vicente Martin y Soler), self-referential jokes, pop-culture allusions, fourth-wall humor, and a bestiary of bodacious demons.

Its hero, Hyakkimaru, is born under a black cloud, thanks to a deal his father, Lord Daigo, struck with forty-eight devils: in exchange for political and military power, Daigo allowed each demon to claim one of his unborn child’s body parts. After his son’s birth, Daigo places Hyakkimaru in a basket and, against his wife’s wishes, sets the baby adrift on a river. A kind doctor rescues and raises Hyakkimaru, eventually building him a new body that transformed the legless, armless boy into a fighting machine equipped with an exploding nose and sword prostheses. It doesn’t take long, however, before Daigo’s minions begin attacking Hyakkimaru and menacing Dr. Honma. In an effort to spare his mentor’s life, Hyakkimaru bids farewell to Dr. Honma and embarks on a quest to reclaim his body from the demons who aided Lord Daigo.

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Dororo, Vols. 1-3

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If Phoenix is Tezuka’s Ring Cycle, Wagnerian in scope, form, and seriousness, then Dororo is Tezuka’s Don Giovanni, a playful marriage of supernatural intrigue and lowbrow comedy whose deeper message is cloaked in shout-outs to fellow artists (in this case, Shunji Sonoyama instead of Vicente Martin y Soler), self-referential jokes, pop-culture allusions, fourth-wall humor, and a bestiary of bodacious demons.

Its hero, Hyakkimaru, is born under a black cloud, thanks to a deal his father, Lord Daigo, struck with forty-eight devils: in exchange for political and military power, Daigo allowed each demon to claim one of his unborn child’s body parts. After his son’s birth, Daigo places Hyakkimaru in a basket and, against his wife’s wishes, sets the baby adrift on a river. A kind doctor rescues and raises Hyakkimaru, eventually building him a new body that transformed the legless, armless boy into a fighting machine equipped with an exploding nose and sword prostheses. It doesn’t take long, however, before Daigo’s minions begin attacking Hyakkimaru and menacing Dr. Honma. In an effort to spare his mentor’s life, Hyakkimaru bids farewell to Dr. Honma and embarks on a quest to reclaim his body from the demons who aided Lord Daigo.

Hyakkimaru soon acquires a traveling companion: Dororo, a pint-sized pickpocket with a big mouth and a bad attitude. Despite Hyakkimaru’s efforts to rid himself of Dororo, the kid bandit vows not to leave Hyakkimaru’s side until he gets his hands on one of Hyakkimaru’s swords. The two wander a war-torn landscape, stumbling across fire-ravaged temples, starving villages, bandits, profiteers, homeless children… and demons. Lots of them.

dororo2Though much of the devastation that Hyakkimaru and Dororo witness is man-made (Dororo takes placed during the Sengoku, or Warring States, Period), demons exploit the conflict for their own benefit, holding small communities in their thrall, luring desperate travelers to their doom, and feasting on the never-ending supply of human corpses. Some of these demons have obvious antecedents in Japanese folklore — a nine-tailed kitsune — while others seem to have sprung full-blown from Tezuka’s imagination — a shark who paralyzes his victims with sake breath, a demonic toad, a patch of mold possessed by an evil spirit. (As someone who’s lived in prewar buildings, I can vouch for the existence of demonic mold. Lysol is generally more effective than swordplay in eliminating it, however.) Hyakkimaru has a vested interest in killing these demons, as he spontaneously regenerates a lost body part with each monster he slays. But he also feels a strong sense of kinship with many victims — a feeling not shared by those he helps, who cast him out of their village as soon as the local demon has been vanquished.

dororo3For folks who find the cartoonish aspects of Tezuka’s style difficult to reconcile with the serious themes addressed in Buddha, Phoenix, and Ode to Kirihito, Dororo may prove a more satisfying read. The cuteness of Tezuka’s heroes actually works to his advantage; they seem terribly vulnerable when contrasted with the grotesque demons, ruthless samurai, and scheming bandits they encounter. Tezuka’s jokes — which can be intrusive in other stories — also prove essential to Dororo‘s success. He shatters the fourth wall, inserts characters from his stable of “stars,” borrows characters from other manga-kas’ work, and punctuates moments of high drama with low comedy, underscoring the sheer absurdity of his conceits… like sake-breathing shark demons. Put another way, Dororo wears its allegory lightly, focusing primarily on swordfights, monster lairs, and damsels in distress while using its historical setting to make a few modest points about the corrosive influence of greed, power, and fear.

If I had any criticism of Dororo, it’s that the story ends too abruptly. Neither hero has reached the end of his journey, yet neither seems firmly resolved to continue his quest; they simply part ways at Hyakkimaru’s suggestion. I’m guessing that Tezuka was avoiding the obvious, sentimental conclusion suggested by a major revelation in volume three, but even that would have been better than slamming on the brakes at an arbitrary point in the narrative.

Weak ending notwithstanding, Dororo is one of Tezuka’s most accessible series, free of the historical and cultural baggage that can be an obstacle to enjoying his more ambitious, adult stories. If you haven’t yet explored Tezuka’s work, have found titles like Apollo’s Song too fraught for your tastes, or are wondering why this somewhat corny, boy-versus-monster manga beat out critical favorites like Monster and solanin in this year’s Eisner race, Dororo makes a perfect (re)introduction to Tezuka’s unique storytelling style. Highly recommended.

This review is based on complimentary copies provided by Vertical, Inc. for the purposes of a review. I have not received any form of compensation from Vertical, Inc. in exchange for publishing my opinion of this book.

DORORO, VOLS. 1-3 • BY OSAMU TEZUKA • VERTICAL, INC. • NO RATING