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Kimi ni Straight manga review

Kimi ni Straight is a collection of one-shots by Yuu Yabuuchi, a shoujo mangaka. She’s not as super popular as some other shoujo writers, but she has had some big hits with Shoujo Shounen, Mizuiro Jidai and Naisho no Tsubomi, which won the 2009 Shogakukan Children’s Manga Award. Looking at Mangaupdates I see other titles of hers that should be known to western fans: Ani-com, Chiko’s Wish (another collection of one-shots), Hitohira no Koi ga Furu, Kimi ga Mai Orite Kita (yet another collection of one-shots), Koi o Kanaderu Kisetsu (even more one-shots) etc. etc.

The Mangaupdates summary of the title story, Kimi ni Straight, goes like this:

Arashiyama Sagano just got beaned on the head by an errant baseball thrown by a rather rude classmate named Awano. This was his method of finding a manager for the baseball team for whom he pitches. Sagano reluctantly accepts and she becomes the team manager. Thing is, Awano’s got game, much like his father who went to Koushien in his time. Is Sagano falling for him?

It’s a bit of a spoiler because it’s supposed to be a shock when Sagano finds out about Awano’s late dad and stuff, but it doesn’t matter because it’s not that good a story anyway. The Kimi ni Straight book is made up of Kimi ni Straight, which is about 100 pages long, and three other short stories all set in winter and called Snow Fantasy 1, 2 and 3. Snow Fantasy 1 and 3 are sweet and likeable, but Kimi ni Straight and Snow Fantasy 2 pissed me off.

What’s wrong with them? They both follow a similar pattern:

1. Boy is a jerk to girl, who dislikes him
2. Boy suddenly acts nice to girl for some reason
3. Girl: *doki doki* What an awesome guy
4. It turns out that boy was being a jerk because he likes girl.
5. Girl falls in love with boy.

And they all live happily ever after. It’s a very predictable pattern and there are 99,000 other shoujo manga out there where a girl falls in love with a jerk, so I don’t see the need to add any more to the pile.

I thought Snow Fantasy 1 and 3 were very sweet because no one is mean to any one. Story 1 features a boy with a hopeless crush on his senpai and Story 3 has a girl with a crush on a boy she sees every day on the bus. They’re mundane, everyday occurrences that could happen to anyone and all the cuter for it.

If either story was turned into a series then there would be all kinds of misunderstandings and evil rivals and some jerkish guy would appear to sweep the main girl off her feet and on and on, but these being simple, happy one-shots nothing of the sort happens. They’re good for cleansing your soul after reading too much blood and gore. The characters are nice (main story excluded), I like the not-dated-at-all character designs and every story has a happy ending, hip hip hurray.

So like most one-shot collections Kimi ni Straight is a bit spotty in terms of story quality. Still the two stories I did like tell me that Yuu Yabuchi’s other manga are worth at least a try because she’s good at writing sweet romances when the mood strikes her. I’ll read some more if I get the chance.

Rannyuu Koshien Foul chapter 3

I really enjoyed Rannyuu Koshien Foul. I like that it has a good mix of serious and silly moments without going too far to either side. Sports is meant to be fun, so sports manga should be fun too, but far too many series take the whole thing too seriously. Then on the other side of the spectrum you have gag series like Mr. Fullswing, which aren’t bad necessarily but can be hard to follow because there are too many gags everywhere you turn. RKF is in the middle. The sports parts are good but everyone’s just out to have fun at the end of the day. I like that. I like it a lot.

I also like the way that those characters who seem a little crazy/wild initially are not really that nutty while those who seems pretty normal actually have hidden crazy sides to them, Yoshimura and Coach Taira in particular. As the series goes on you reach a stage where you think you know the characters well enough that you can predict what they’re going to do next, but they still pull out surprises from time to time. It makes what could have been be a very pedestrian manga well worth following, because you’re not quite sure what Yoshimura is going to do next, or what Yoko is going to pull next, etc. If you’re interested you should definitely grab a copy of Rannyuu Koshien Foul (volume 2 is here) for yourself.

More recently Hideo Iura wrote a manga called ‘Bengoshi No Kuzu‘ that won an award and adapted into a successful J-drama. A law drama doesn’t seem like my sort of thing, but now I have enough faith in his powers of characterization that I’m thinking of giving it a try someday.

Rannyuu Koshien Foul chapter 2

It’s about time, eh? Chapter 1 of the first volume of Rannyuu Koshien Foul ended with Yoshimura getting a call from his crush Sako, who just happens to be dating another guy. What does Sako want? And has the baseball club really been disbanded? Find out on the next exciting episode of Rannyuu Koshien Foul!

It’s a series I’m quite fond of, but I’ll delay a more detailed discussion for yet another day. I like all the characters (even Sako) and when the baseball playing does get underway it’s very fast-paced and yet still satisfying. In the sports manga genre with several mega long-runners that never seem to get anywhere, it’s refreshing to see how much ground Hideo Iura covers in just 2 volumes without making the series feel rushed. TBH I wouldn’t have minded if this series was 5 volumes long, but we’ll take what we can get.

Stopper Busujima manga review

Quick comments on Stopper Busujima by Harold Sakuishi, since I’m still on a baseball manga kick. The Stopper Busujima story summary goes like so:

A professional baseball manga by Harold Sakuishi, the author of Beck.

Taiko Busujima is a powerful young pitcher looking to make it into the Japanese big leagues, but what he didn’t count on was being signed to the Keihin Athletics, the cheapest and worst team in the league. Can he help turn the Athletics around and (gasp) win the pennant?

A gripping, edge-of-your-seat story loaded with Sakuishi’s brand of wacky humor.

It does have some wacky humor in it, but I don’t know about the “gripping, edge-of-your-seat part. For one thing, much of it is way too unrealistic. This wouldn’t be a problem for a sports manga like Prince of Tennis which doesn’t even try to be realistic, but for a manga that uses many real-life characters, half of the things that go on just don’t make any sense. First off, it’s bizarre enough that an untried, untested pitcher with a history of causing trouble like Busujima even got signed professionally in the first place.

But having been signed, it makes zero sense for him to be immediately sent up to the majors. It almost never happens in real life, and when it does it almost never works out. And rookies who do immediately go to the majors are those considered almost perfect in technique, stamina, etc, none of which Busujima possesses. With that 160 km/h pitch, he’s actually a huge danger to all those around him because of his lack of control. No team, no matter how desperate would put him in their first team immediately.

The second problem with Stopper Busujima is Busujima’s personality… or lack of one. We don’t often get into his head, and when we do he isn’t thinking much. That’s fine in the beginning because he’s made out to be a rough, dumb, instinct-type kind of character. That makes it much more amusing watching other characters react to him.

Now there’s no way he could get through the whole series without any character development, but Sakuishi just went too far and basically neutered the guy. By volume 5 he’s a shadow of his former self, reduced to a normal good-guy typical shounen hero. Hard-working, cares about his team, serious to a fault, etc etc. He’s barely the same character any more so it’s really boring.

Third problem, and the reason why I didn’t bother continuing after volume 5 is that there are too many characters and it’s not interesting any more. In the space of a few short chapters Sakuishi introduces all kinds of new characters when he hasn’t even finished dealing with the old ones yet.

Shimizu, for example, is made out to be so important in the beginning and then he just completely disappears for several volumes. I even forgot he existed! So while some mangaka can juggle a huge cast and keep them all relevant, Harold Sakuishi doesn’t seem to be one of those. The writing is on the wall that the manga is just going to go downhill from that point onwards, so I bailed out while the going was good.

Last problem: introducing the ‘cool older brother’ after 5 volumes. It worked for Naruto and for Inuyasha and in general it’s a successful enough trope that it shows up all the time, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. And it would be one thing if the older brother came back when Busujima was still wild and crazy Busujima, but he’s all Sasuke at that point so it’s like, meh. Boring.

Having said all that, it’s not like Stopper Busujima is a bad manga. It has its good parts, especially in the early days when Busujima is still trying to find his feet and hasn’t become the mega-phenomenon he’s beginning to turn into by volume 5. There’s some humor in there, and baseball manga set in the pros is usually much more interesting than high school manga for me because there’s a wider range of topics they can deal with. High school baseball always has some girl or another in it and there’s always Koshien to aim for, blah blah blah. Whereas the sky’s basically the limit for manga set in the pros.

tl;dr Stopper Busujima is worth a read for the first few volumes if you like baseball manga and crazy characters, but after that it’s only worth continuing if you like typical shounen developments in your seinen manga.

Rannyuu Koshien Foul chapter 1

Rannyuu Koshien Foul (乱入甲子園ファウル) is a seinen high school baseball manga by Hideo Iura. It tells the tale of Naoto Yoshimura, a naive high school freshman who joins his high school baseball team in the hopes of making it to Koshien. Why? Because of a girl. There’s only one small problem: the Irokawa High baseball team is filled with cranks and weirdos of every shape and form. Do they stand a chance in hell?

Heh heh, good question. It’s a 2-volume manga so the odds are against them, but I won’t tell you how it ends. I encourage you to seek it out and buy it if you can (volume 2 is here) because it’s funny and interesting stuff and I particularly like the characters. In most baseball manga everyone feels like an extra except the main character and one or two others, but even though it’s so short everyone in Rannyuu Koshien Foul (except one who is supposed to be overlooked) gets plenty of time in the spotlight.

But we can discuss the details of the series at a later date. Incidentally it seems the real title of the manga is Foul and the [Rannyuu Koshien] part is supposed to be kind of in brackets or something like that. Typical bizarreness for a typically bizarre series. ‘Rannyuu’ means ‘run-in’ and Koshien stands for the National High School Baseball Tournament, though you probably know that if you’ve ever read a baseball manga before. So Rannyuu Koshien Foul = Baseball Tournament Run-in Foul, more or less. What could it mean? Does it matter? Read the manga and find out for yourself!