Manga and Book Reviews by Michelle Smith
I reviewed this strange, cute, and sad manga for Comics Should Be Good. It’s the story of a fluffy little alien who comes to earth to find a bride. It’s very weird, but the absurdity is of a sort that appeals to me.
You can find that review here.
Little Fluffy Gigolo PELU is published in English by Last Gasp and the first volume is available now. It looks like the series is complete in Japan with a total of three volumes.
Review copy provided by the publisher.
From the back cover:
Dear Citizen:
Thank you for your loyalty. You’ve no doubt noticed that the world is a troubled place. People are apathetic, lazy, unmotivated. You’ve probably asked yourself
WHY ISN’T ANYTHING BEING DONE TO STOP THIS SYSTEMATIC DECLINE?
Rest assured that measures are being taken. Beginning immediately, we will randomly select a different citizen each day who will be killed within 24 hours of notification. We believe this will help remind all people how precious life is and how important it is to be a productive, active member of society.
Thank you for your continued attention and your cooperation and participation…
Review:
In this dystopian tale, Japan has passed the National Welfare Act, designed to help its citizens lead more productive lives by instilling in them the fear of death. To this aim, one in a thousand children entering the first grade is injected with a nanocapsule along with their standard immunizations. This nanocapsule is preprogrammed to rupture in the pulmonary artery sometime between the ages of 18 and 24, killing the person instantly. The identities of the supposedly randomly selected capsule recipients are tracked by the government and 24 hours before the capture’s rupture, a messenger dispatches an ikigami (or death paper) notifying them of their selection. We follow Fujimoto, one such messenger, as he delivers these ikigami and struggles with questions about his work that he cannot express, lest he himself be injected with a capsule.
Rather than focus on Fujimoto exclusively, each volume contains two three-chapter stories about a recipient of an ikigami delivered by Fujimoto and how they spend their final day. In volume one, a store clerk who was bullied in high school uses his final day to exact revenge upon his tormenters and a singer who had chosen an opportunity for stardom over his best friend uses his last live performance to sing his friend’s composition on the radio. In volume two, a director squabbles with his girlfriend over his drug use but tosses aside his big break when she receives an ikigami and a young employee at a nursing home makes a connection with an elderly woman right before he receives his death notice.
Almost without exception, these tales are extremely depressing. The first story in volume two is the worst on that score, but basically, any time you see two people who mean anything to each other in this series, you know that they are about to be torn apart, one way or another. Even the most grim tales manage to offer something optimistic, though. In volume one, the final act of the store clerk is to give advice to another victim of bullying while hearing his own song on the radio inspires the singer’s former partner to take up music again. In volume two, the death of his girlfriend spurs the director to finally clean up his act. It’s only the last story of volume two that is actually uplifting, though, because Takebe, the recipient of the ikigami, is truly satisfied by how much he was able to help the woman in his care, and so dies without regret.
One thing that becomes clear in these stories is that the law is not having its desired effect. No one—with the possible exception of Takebe, who has tried to be his best because that’s his nature rather than due to fear of death—in these stories has become particularly productive. Because only 1 in 1000 people have the capsule, they had believed it wouldn’t happen to them. Some are spurred to action after they receive the ikigami, but others are too paralyzed to do much of anything as their time slips away.
Fujimoto is merely a recurring character throughout and we don’t learn too much about him. It’s clear that his job is taking a toll on both him and his personal relationships, though, and though he succeeds in burying his concerns for a while, they do have a way of returning to the surface. Through his eyes, we see the training seminars given by the government about the process and how the recipients are theoretically entirely random. Fujimoto, however, notices that, in practice, things are rather sloppy, with ikigami arriving at the last minute and with incorrect case notes attached. By the end of the second volume, he’s feeling numb, and a brief flare of hope when he meets a therapist that genuinely seems to be offering solace to the recipients is cruelly extinguished when she reveals that her clients only appear to’ve been calmed because she drugs them.
Mase’s art is dark and gloomy, as befits the story, but manages to move the story along rather than hinder it. Characters’ faces are frequently distorted into expressions of anguish or other raw emotion, so the art is sometimes a bit unattractive, but again, that still serves the story. One thing I especially like is that most everyone actually looks Japanese. Fujimoto, in particular, has a nice, understated design that looks pretty realistic.
Ultimately, while I’m curious to see whether Fujimoto will be able to continue to rationalize his job or if he’ll become a “social miscreant” and attempt to effect change, I’m not sure if I’ll be continuing with this series. It’s just such a tremendous downer. In fact, I must now seek solace in some girly manhwa as a mental palate cleanser.
Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit is published in English by VIZ. Volume one is out now and volume two will be available in August 2009. In Japan, it’s currently serialized in Young Sunday and six volumes have been released so far.
Review copies provided by the publisher.
After losing her parents in a fire, Nanase Takamine resolved to become a firefighter. Now 21, she has achieved her goal and works as a fire investigator, not actually battling fires directly but determining where and how they started. Three years ago, while she was still a student at the academy, she came upon the scene of a hospital in flames. Rushing inside, she saved the life of a burning man, ignorant at the time that he was actually responsible for setting the fire. After he escaped from the ambulance, taking the lives of a pair of paramedics in the process, his identity as the wanted arsonist Firebug became known. Now, as Nanase is facing some puzzling cases, Firebug has contacted her and, in an effort to repay her for saving his life, provides clues and insights that help in her investigations.
When a story features a young female investigator receiving hints and advice from a notorious criminal, comparisons to The Silence of the Lambs are inevitable. What Fire Investigator Nanase reminds me most of, though, is actually Gosho Aoyama’s long-running mystery series, Case Closed (Viz). You’ve got the rookie investigator spotting things that others with more experience miss and piecing together the elaborate methods used to commit and obscure crimes. Even the little boxes that introduce the suspects and the anonymous way the culprits are drawn pre-reveal are similar. Unfortunately, the cast of suspects is more limited in this series, making for predictable outcomes in most cases.
The cases themselves are mildly intriguing, and certainly fast reads, but I found them to be easily forgettable after I’d put the book down. One story, too, cuts off rather abruptly, with Firebug taking off in a burning car with an arsonist while Nanase, left behind, thinks, “How horrifying.” It took me several pages to realize that the next chapter had moved on to a different case entirely.
Nanase is another problem. She’s plucky and determined as one might expect, but early on she’s portrayed as klutzy and cries frequently. I had been hoping for someone more… badassedly professional, I suppose. Firebug is the real star of the series, wonderfully creepy in his omniscience and equipped with the ability to disguise himself as others in order to get close to Nanase. The moments when he appears before her, managing to elude her attempts at capture while doling out just enough information to get her on the right track, are eclipsed in greatness only by chapter sixteen, “Stalker,” in which he protects Nanase from an assailant in order to preserve her for his own evil purposes.
Tomoshige Ichikawa’s art works well for action sequences, with a good sense of place that makes it easy to keep track of characters’ locations within burned or burning structures. Less successful, though, is the depiction of people. The two adult males that figure most closely in Nanase’s career—her supervisor, Tachibana, and the police arson detective in pursuit of Firebug, Ogata—look superficially similar, with slick-backed black hair, sneering smiles, and arching brows, and it took me a while to be able to tell them apart. Too, there’s a shower scene in which Nanase’s torso is so asymmetrical it looks like she’s missing some bones.
On the whole, I found Fire Investigator Nanase to be a bit of a disappointment. It isn’t bad by any means; it’s simply just not as cool as I was expecting it to be.
Fire Investigator Nanase is released in English by CMX and two volumes have been released so far. It’s complete in Japan with seven volumes.
Review originally published at Manga Recon.
Forty-eight-year-old Hiroshi Nakahara is a businessman with a love of alcohol and little time for his family. One day, in 1998, as he is returning home (hungover) from a business trip to Kyoko, he accidentally boards the wrong train and ends up traveling to Kurayoshi, the town in which he grew up and which he hasn’t visited for many years. With some time to kill before the next train to Tokyo, he wanders around, checking out the building that used to be his family’s shop and paying a visit to his mother’s grave. As he’s asking his mother, “Were you happy?” something mysterious occurs and Hiroshi wakes to discover that he’s back in his fourteen-year-old body but with all of his adult knowledge and wisdom intact. Not only that, the family shop and neighborhood has returned to its previous condition, his deceased mother and grandmother are alive, and the date is still four months before his father’s sudden disappearance.
At first, Hiroshi acts merely as an observer, attending classes and making mental notes on the eventual fates of some of the friends he encounters there. In time, he begins to feel a zeal for learning and exercise that he’d not possessed the first time through his adolescence and relishes a feeling of liberation from his various adult responsibilities. His accomplishments in sports and academics attract the notice of Tomoko Nagase, the prettiest girl in his class, another difference from his past. Nagase has big dreams and it’s in deciding to help her that Hiroshi begins to take a more active part in this second chance he’s been given, resolving too to prevent his father’s disappearance.
Hiroshi doesn’t have an easy time passing as a fourteen-year-old. Aside from his drastic scholastic improvement, he’s singularly unimpressed by some things adolescent boys tend to be keen on (like nudie mags and cigarettes), occasionally lets slip details that he shouldn’t yet know, and demonstrates far more perceptiveness about the adults in his family than he originally did, as we can see in flashbacks of his oblivious past self. His emotional reaction to being scolded by his mother again is very touching and there’s also a particularly nice scene toward the end of the volume where Hiroshi is given the opportunity to ask his grandmother how his parents met, information he’d evidently never thought to inquire about before.
It also seems as if Hiroshi’s experiences reliving his past are going to help him become a better person in the future. When Nagase confesses her feelings for him, he accepts, but it’s abundantly clear that he sees her as a daughter and is still thinking only of how he might help her. After their first date, during which they see a movie involving Men Having Grand Adventures, he insists that women can do the same, and reassures her that a time will soon come when women can be “wonderfully independent.” This is in marked contrast to his treatment of his real daughters; in one of the odd moments where Hiroshi experiences a disembodied glimpse of what’s going on in 1998, his sees his wife and eldest daughter, Ayako, discussing a boyfriend he knows nothing about and declaring that Hiroshi will never consent to let Ayako move into an apartment. “Obviously! A single girl your age can’t go living alone!” he thinks.
Jiro Taniguchi’s art is never anything short of gorgeous, and A Distant Neighborhood is like his other works in that it offers plenty of beautiful landscapes, detailed illustrations of buildings, and a middle-aged protagonist (at least at first). Facial expressions can be a little stiff at times, but I felt that emotion was better conveyed here than in The Quest for the Missing Girl.
The overall feel of the story is initially similar to The Walking Man in that Hiroshi is merely taking in his surroundings without interacting much. Eventually, though, it becomes the most emotional work by Taniguchi that I’ve read. It’s also seriously engrossing; I could’ve read another 200 pages easily.
Review copy provided by the publisher. Review originally published at Manga Recon.
From the back cover:
The medium Kohane-chan has been punched and bruised on national TV, but still her controlling mother is forcing her to go on the air. Now Kimihiro steps between the rebellious young psychic and her raging mother, only to take the beating himself. See the dramatic conclusion of Kohane-chan’s story!
Review:
What a perfect manga to read on a rainy day!
The majority of the plot revolves around Kohane-chan, whom I’ve never been very interested in. After a series of television apperances in which she seems to be inaccurate because lesser psychics can not see all that she can, public opinion turns against her. After being pressured by her mother to be “right,” even if it means lying, Kohane instead basically destroys her own career so that it’ll all be over.
I was kind of wondering why this story was occupying center stage, but then the words of Kohane’s mother hit home. Though her mother had been wishing for something day in and day out, it had never come true. This is a direct parallel to Watanuki’s current situation. Last volume, he learned that his entire existence may be a dream, but if he wishes hard enough, it might become reality. Now he’s confronted with proof that—if one has the wrong kind of wish, a hurtful wish—that’s not so easy to achieve.
Still, he’s determined to try and to not take for granted the people with whom he comes in contact, which results in him being much nicer to Doumeki than before. I particularly love the scene where Doumeki is chastising Watanuki for allowing Kohane’s mother to hit him while at the same time Watanuki is inquiring about how many rice balls Doumeki would like and what he’d like inside them. It seems like a small thing, but Watanuki has never so graciouly offered to fulfill Doumeki’s culinary requests in this manner.
I’m still pretty confused about what exactly Watanuki’s situation is. Is he living in a dream, peopled by dream characters? Or is he dreaming that he is part of reality, and only certain people can see him? He was concerned, for instance, that the receptionists at the television studio where Kohane’s appearance was being broadcast would not be able to see him. It’s possible he’s right, as a member of the production team later says, “Get Kohane and her mother off screen” when Watanuki is there, too. Perhaps they saw him merely as superfluous, but perhaps they didn’t see him at all.
Like the previous volume, quite a lot of intriguing information is revealed in the final few pages. Yuuko also remarks that, “Very soon, that time will finally come.” Could it be that an end is in sight?
Robots and humans continue to die in this second volume of Urasawa’s re-imagining of Osamu Tezuka’s classic Astro Boy story, “The Greatest Robot on Earth.” Gesicht travels to Japan where he meets with Atom, another of the seven strongest robots allegedly being targeted. After accessing Gesicht’s memory chip, Atom is able to assist the Japanese police as they work a similar case and discovers the common factor between the human victims. Meanwhile, Gesicht continues to warn other robots on the list while questioning mysterious gaps in his own memory.
While volume one did a good job of setting up the plot and the world, volume two really gets the ball rolling. There’s action and plot twists aplenty, as well as answers to questions that only serve to beget more questions. I certainly can’t complain when a story proceeds to go somewhere, but I still missed the “robot interest” stories that made the first volume so stellar. There were a few touching moments scattered throughout, but mostly the focus was on plot advancement.
Urasawa’s art is uniformly excellent, as usual. I’m a big fan of the futuristic city scenes, but perhaps my favorite thing in this volume is actually Atom’s hair. No matter which way he turned, Tezuka’s incarnation of Astro Boy always had two triangles of hair poking up. Atom’s case is far subtler, more like tufts really, but it’s definitely there. I love attention to detail like that.
Review copy provided by the publisher. Review originally published at Manga Recon.
I reviewed the first volume of this well-regarded series for Comics Should be Good. Check it out!
In the Astro Boy story “The Greatest Robot on Earth,” available in the third volume of Dark Horse’s edition of the Astro Boy manga, a power-hungry sultan creates a robot named Pluto and gives him instructions to destroy seven other powerful robots that could challenge Pluto’s claim to the title of King of the Robots. Pluto dutifully carries out his orders but bears no personal animosity for his opponents. The story is notable because Pluto and the other robots are highly sympathetic characters, though some are more fleshed out than others.
In this reimagining of “The Greatest Robot on Earth,” Naoki Urasawa is, in many ways, adhering closely to the original story, though he adds new layers and provides additional background for some of the robots that get less attention in Tezuka’s version. Where the original presents the story from the perspective of Astro Boy and addresses the question of what attributes really make a robot great, Urasawa’s approach is more like a sci-fi mystery novel. His protagonist is Gesicht (Gerhardt in the original), a highly-advanced robot detective with sensors that allow him to make Holmesian pronouncements about crime scene details. He’s investigating two cases with striking similarities: the killing of a much-beloved robot named Mont Blanc and the murder of a human involved with a movement to preserve the existing robot laws. The evidence seems to indicate a robot culprit is responsible for both deaths, even though robots are forbidden to harm humans, so Gesicht pays a visit to the last robot known to have violated this prohibition. It’s there that he first hears the name Pluto and learns that he himself might be a target.
The result of Urasawa’s story tweaks is nothing short of amazing. I am by no means a fast reader, but with an almost cinematic feel for scene and pace, the pages of Pluto just fly by. This isn’t a story that gets bogged down by its own weight. Even when Urasawa takes the time to flesh out a character—as in the touching tale of North No. 2, a robot formerly used in war who gradually becomes indispensable to a crotchety composer—the momentum doesn’t suffer. Urasawa extends this humanizing treatment to robots with more machine-like visages, as well. There’s one memorable sequence where, as the wife of a police bot receives news of her husband’s death, Urasawa devotes three panels to a close-up of her face, acknowledging the presence of the grief that she is facially incapable of expressing.
Urasawa’s seemingly limitless arsenal of character designs is on full display in Pluto, though the percentage of people with huge noses is still higher than normally occurs in nature. Like Monster, Pluto is set in Germany, so it’s a bit like coming home to see the Düsseldorf tag on a scene. It’s a futuristic Düsseldorf, though, with multi-tiered highway systems and seamlessly integrated bits of swanky new gadgetry.
The packaging itself is quite nice, with an innovative spine design, larger trim size, satin finish, French flaps, and color pages. And though Viz isn’t responsible for the title font and the way the “U” looks just like Pluto’s horns from the original story, it’s still really cool.
While it’s not necessary to have read “The Greatest Robot on Earth” to enjoy and understand Pluto, I still recommend doing so. It makes Urasawa’s achievement all the more impressive to see what he started from and, without it, you might miss out on some of the impact of various scenes. Seriously, I got geekbumps at least twice.
Pluto is still ongoing in Japan with six volumes released so far. In English, it’s licensed by Viz.
Review copy provided by the publisher. Review originally published at Manga Recon.
When asked whether I’d like to contribute a guest post to Comics Should Be Good, I said, “I’d be delighted!” In fact, I’m actually going to be doing an occasional feature for them called Blue Moon Reviews, so please check it out! Here’s my first review for them!
Thanks again to Danielle Leigh and Brian Cronin for the opportunity.
After eighteen action-packed volumes of murders, secret organizations, suppressed memories, and the most exciting book donation ceremony known to man, Naoki Urasawa’s Monster has come to a close. With its multitudes of well-developed characters, unique setting, expressive art, and interwoven plot threads, the tale of Dr. Kenzo Tenma, a gifted surgeon who is out to stop a murderer whose life he saved in the operating room, has been a rich and rewarding reading experience. It can be hard to have faith that such an ambitious undertaking will hold together, however, and I wouldn’t blame anyone who had put off reading it until they’d heard whether all of the lingering questions had been satisfactorily answered in the end.
Well, the answer to that question is “mostly.” Throughout the course of the series, various people have played a part in the creation of the monster that is Johan. Unfortunately, anyone expecting the final volume to provide a conclusive explanation for exactly how he turned out the way he did will be disappointed. Some additional insights are revealed, though, which at least will give readers a basis upon which to come to their own conclusions.
On the positive side, several of my other questions were unambiguously addressed. On the whole, I found the conclusion of the series to be a satisfying one. In a volume full of important scenes, my favorite moments were those between Tenma and his pursuer, Inspector Lunge, who’s quite the fascinating character. The penultimate chapter also catches up with a few characters who haven’t been seen in a while; I can’t think of anyone whose fate was left to dangle.
While Monster is not without flaws, they are far outnumbered by its virtues. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this series to anyone.
Review originally published at Manga Recon.
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