Reviews - Animefangirl!

Daiju no Mound manga review (it’s terrible)

I’m still on a baseball manga kick and I still have a lot of ground to cover. I’ve read some good stuff, some not so good stuff and just recently I read Daiju no Mound (大樹のマウンド) by Masashi Asaki, which is flat out terrible. Unlike something like A Single Match, which is terrible because it makes no sense, or Ayako, which is bad because it’s so trashy, Daiju no Mound is bad because the author doesn’t know the first thing about writing likable characters. Since there are no summaries out there, I’ll have to write one myself this time. Tch.

Daiju no Mound is about a boy in junior high named Daiju. He badly wants to play baseball. However his dad, who pitched at Koshien but ruined his shoulder after going pro and never made it out of the minors, is dead set against Daiju following in his footsteps. In his third year of junior high, however, Daiju runs into the cute manager of a little league team who wants Daiju as their ace pitcher and won’t take no for an answer. Will Daiju be able to run from his destiny?

Of course not. Otherwise the manga would have ended, mercifully enough, after two chapters instead of five volumes. Daiju himself is bland but occasionally stubborn with a weakness for pretty girls, like most shounen heroes. If he was the only character in Daiju no Mound we wouldn’t have a problem. Unfortunately everyone around him just sucks. I’m not going to cover every single character in the series, firstly because this manga doesn’t deserve that kind of coverage and secondly because I have luckily started to forget them all. The worst culprits, who made the manga nigh unreadable, are:

The cute manager, whose name I’ve forgotten: Her sole raison d’existence is to nag, nag, nag, nag, nag, nag x200 Daiju into doing things he usually doesn’t want to do. He had made peace with not being able to play baseball, for example, but she just wouldn’t let it drop. She showed up at his house day after day after day until he joined the little league team.

That was bad enough. But then once it was time to pick high schools, she ignored the school he was planning to go for and dragged him to another high school and nagged, nagged, nagged him – with the help of his team mates – until he finally gave in and went to that school.

Sure it’s his fault for not having the will to stand up to this annoying girl, but she doesn’t make her case easier by being such a noisy, nagging shrew. The author quickly realized what a pain she was and tried to give her some sob story about “Boo hoo, I have a weak heart, my parents don’t want me to be a manager but I love baseball so much, boo hoo” but it only makes her even more irritating, so that plotline is quickly dropped.

The little league coach: I can’t remember his name either, so I’ll call him Coach. It turns out Coach also led Daiju’s dad to Koshien. If that’s the case then he should be aware of the disaster that later befell Daiju’s dad and thus more likely to protect young pitcher’s arms, right? Wrong! Instead Coach goes on and on about finding a pitcher who can be the future of Japanese baseball, but when he finds him what does he do? He promptly begins to destroy Daiju’s shoulder!

Daiju's 'rivals' are deliberate clones of Mashiba and Miyata from Hajime no Ippo. — Daiju’s ‘rivals’ are deliberate clones of Mashiba and Miyata from Hajime no Ippo.

Coach is so focused on winning some little league tournament (which they lose quickly anyway) that he rushes Daiju into playing in the tournament without teaching him a thing about proper pitching technique, without imposing pitch limits, without teaching him anything about protecting himself, nothing.

And when Daiju does come down with a shoulder injury, predictably enough, you would expect Coach to bench him and tell him to take better care of himself, right? Wrong! Instead he follows Daiju from doctor to doctor until they find a quack that okays him playing, then Coach teaches Daiju another pitch he can use while his very badly injured shoulder is healing.

When Daiju finished middle school and moved to the high school level, I thought “At last, he’s going to be paired up with a sensible coach!” You know, someone who knows that protecting a future star means not destroying him in a petty tournament at age 15. But noooo, right after Daiju enrolls a coaching change is announced and here comes Coach again. Nooooo! I stopped reading at that point and jumped to the end. There was no point, really.

Daiju’s dad: Parenting is a tough job, no question about it, and being a single dad to a teenager must be even tougher. I want to cut Daiju’s dad some slack, but he made a lot of mistakes in handling Daiju. The first one was making baseball some kind of ‘forbidden fruit,’ which only made it more enticing to the kid. He’s a teenager, after all.

Mistake number two, which was even worse, was not guiding and advising Daiju once the kid inevitably started playing baseball. Daddy must have known first-hand all the pitfalls awaiting a young, highly gifted pitcher. In fact, that’s the very reason he didn’t want his son playing in the first place.

Once he gave tacit approval for Daiju to play, then, he should have done everything in his power to avoid a repeat of his own fate. Check his form, check his diet, check what kind of exercises he’s doing. Impose pitch limits and make him stick to them. Teach him warning signs that mean ‘Stop immediately.’ And when it comes to picking a high school, help him find a school with a baseball team that is active but not overly-rigorous. Basically just take an interest instead of throwing up your hands and walking away. You’re his dad, for goodness’ sake!

Anyway, the characters aside, the manga itself wasn’t remarkable in any way. The art was pretty good (albeit heavily inspired by Hajime no Ippo) and the action was usually easy to follow, but apart from that there’s nothing to recommend Daiju no Mound for. Except, I guess, that it made Masashi Asaki realize that he can draw but he can’t write. Since then he’s made his living as an artist partnering writers like Ira Ishida and Yuma Ando, so you may have seen his work in titles like Shibatora and Psychometrer Eiji.

Since the manga was so bad I’m not going to bother doing a sample chapter. The chapters in this manga are about 70 pages long anyway, so the odds were against it from the start. Most likely I’m not going to do samples of future series either (too much trouble, also it’s illegal) so I’ll spoil the abrupt ending: Daiju’s high school team plays some other team in the Koshien qualifiers and win. They’re probably going to Koshien, but the manga was cancelled just then so we’ll never know how they fared when they got there. The end.

Doing Time manga review

It’s been a while since I read something I actually enjoyed. Doing Time by Kazuichi Hanawa is quite similar to Hei no Naka no Korinai Menmen which I mentioned a few weeks ago, in that it’s a short chronicle of the author’s time spent behind bars. Both titles take a slice of life approach to the subject, showing what happens day in and day out. Who they meet, what they do, what they wear, where they sleep, and so on and so forth. If you read closely you’ll even see Hei no Naka referred to in Doing Time afterward, translated as “Some guys never learn behind bars.”

The similarities are many, but the difference in tone is astounding. Hei no Naka no Korinai Menmen has a puffed up, self-righteous moralizing tone to it while Doing Time largely steers clear of discussions of right and wrong and just focuses on everyday life. Furthermore, since Doing Time is originally a manga, written and drawn by the actual prisoner, while Hei no Naka is a manga adaptation of a novel, Doing Time has a livelier, more vivid and more realistic feel to the art and the details of life.

Comparing the two series would be an interesting exercise, seeing as there aren’t that many autobiographical titles set in prison. It would be an interesting exercise for someone else to do, but today I’m just here to talk about Doing Time. As usual, the summary:

Summary 1: Up to now, Kazuichi Hanawa expressed himself through works of fiction. The fantastic world of tales from the Middle Ages in Japan was his favorite setting. In 1994 Hanawa was arrested for owning a firearm. An avid collector of guns, he was caught whilst testing a remodeled handgun in the backwoods, miles away from anyone, and imprisoned for three years. Forbidden to record any details whilst incarcerated, Hanawa recreated his time inside after his release. He did so with a meticulousness rarely found in comics as every detail of his cell, every meal that was served, the daily habits of his cell-mates and, above all, the rigid regime are minutely noted and bring us into the very mindset of a Japanese prisoner. Made into a live action movie in 2002 by Sai Yoichi (All Under the Moon).

Summary 2: In 1994 the mangaka Kazuichi Hanawa was arrested on firearms offences and sentanced to three years in prison. Once released, Hanawa set about creating this autobiographical record of his life behind bars. The first few chapters relate to his incarceration in jail whilst awaiting trial and the rest of the work covers his actual prison sentance. There is no ongoing plot but, rather, each chapter relates in minute detail the customs and rituals of prison life – food, clothing, rules, work, exercise, bathing and so on and so forth. The only things omitted are the background of the author’s crime, trial, sentancing and release but an interview with the author and a commentary by the anime critic Tomohide Kure (who was involved in Hanawa’s defence) are included to shed some light on these aspects.

Most reviews will note how resigned to his lot and almost content the main character seems, and they’re right. Apart from the first chapter that deals with his nicotine cravings and the chapter about his annoyance at having to yell “Pleeease!” when he wants anything from the guards, his view of prison life seems remarkably positive. He and the other prisoners even look forward with great excitement to certain simple pleasures, like getting a special bread once a month or their New Year’s meal.

I'm going to try folding one of these soon. — I’m going to try folding one of these.

But when you think about it, there’s no reason why Hanawa shouldn’t be content. The Japanese prison he describes seems like a veritable paradise compared to what I know of prisons in other cultures. Your average prisoner in, say, Mali or Bolivia would kill to share a comfy, disease-free cell with only four other people. They get three healthy meals a day, they have running water, their cells are huge and spacious, their cell toilet even has a privacy screen, etc. Heck, lots of people on the outside even in Japan would be glad to have digs like that.

Not only that, but they also have all kinds of privileges that one wouldn’t expect prisoners to get. For example some prisoners have personal shavers. The prisoners also keep bottles (unclear if they’re glass or plastic) of sauce in their cell, surely a potential weapon if there ever was one. They’re even allowed to watch TV – not a TV in a general room but TVs right in their own cells, plus they have access to tons of books and all the latest magazines, as long as they’re considered ‘educational.’

And you might think, well that must be a minimum-security prison for people who haven’t done anything too serious, right? That’s what I thought at first, but later on the story introduces armed robbers and cold-blooded murderers, casually and unrepentantly chatting about their crimes and looking forward to their New Years’ treats just like everybody else. As the author wryly comments on one page, prison is so nice there’s no incentive to go straight!

In a sense, reading Doing Time is a good way to get a sense of Japanese culture as a whole. You learn a lot from the needless bureacracy, the tightly regimented lifestyles (even right down to when to walk, when to trot, when to look out the window and when not to) and the relative freedom and comfort the prisoners enjoy. It’s something only a country with a relatively low rate of violent crime (even taking into account the thousands of crimes the Japanese police hide every year) can get away with. It might be an interesting read for the Japanophile just for that alone.

For everyone else, Doing Time is still a good read, being a rare non-dreary, non-preachy tale of prison slice-of-life. You’ll come away feeling quite upbeat and cheerful, and more than a little hungry after pages upon pages of delicious-looking prison food. It’s been a while since I reviewed something I recommend and would be happy to re-read, but I think most people would have a good time, aha, with Doing Time.

Ayako manga review

Ayako by Osamu Tezuka is supposed to be a classic of the genre by the supposed greatest mangaka of all time. Or so one would suppose to hear the way people go on and on about him. To be honest I’m not that familiar with Tezuka’s works apart from a little Astroboy (the new movie) and a little Black Jack, but if Ayako is anything to go by, I’m not missing much.

Btw, I’m not using the cover as a featured image as I usually do, because the front cover is a naked girl and the back cover is a silhouette of a woman hanging herself. When a ‘classic’ manga has to resort to cheap titillation to sell itself, that should tell you everything you need to know. Anyway, on with the official blurb:

Opening a few years after the end of World War II and covering almost a quarter-century, here is comics master Osamu Tezuka’s most direct and sustained critique of Japan’s fate in the aftermath of total defeat. Unusually devoid of cartoon premises yet shot through with dark voyeuristic humor, Ayako looms as a pinnacle of Naturalist literature in Japan with few peers even in prose, the striking heroine a potent emblem of things left unseen following the war.

The year is 1949. Crushed by the Allied Powers, occupied by General MacArthur’s armies, Japan has been experiencing massive change. Agricultural reform is dissolving large estates and redistributing plots to tenant farmers—terrible news, if you’re landowners like the archconservative Tenge family.

For patriarch Sakuemon, the chagrin of one of his sons coming home alive from a P.O.W. camp instead of having died for the Emperor is topped only by the revelation that another of his is consorting with “the reds.” What solace does he have but his youngest Ayako, apple of his eye, at once daughter and granddaughter?

Delving into some of the period’s true mysteries, which remain murky to this day, Tezuka’s Zolaeqsque tapestry delivers thrill and satisfaction in spades. Another page-turning classic from an irreplaceable artist who was as astute an admirer of the Russian masters and Nordic playwrights as of Walt Disney, Ayako is a must-read for comics connoisseurs and curious literati.

All right, let’s get one thing out of the way first – this is no “sustained critique of Japan’s” blah blah blah anything. For the first three or four chapters, yes, Tezuka does cover some of the tensions brought about by the occupation and the conflicting interests of conqueror and subject.

But that’s just in the very beginning, after that Ayako devolves into a bodice-ripping page-turner in the vein of Sidney Sheldon or V.C. Andrews. Sex, incest, betrayals, conspiracy, more sex and then Tezuka throws in a typically Japanese nonsensical downer ending and bam, we have a classic.

The tl;dr version of the story is that Ayako, the title character is born when Ichiro Tenge offers his wife Su’e up to his dad Sakuemon in exchange for an inheritance. Ayako is unlucky enough to learn too much of a crime committed by her uncle/half-brother Jiro Tenge and is locked away in a basement for 23 years to keep her quiet.

During that time she manages to have an affair with her uncle/half-brother Shiro Tenge, but she eventually breaks out, makes her way over to Jiro, acts crazy for a while, hooks up with the son of Jiro’s sworn enemy and then everybody except Ayako dies in a cave-in caused by Shiro, his way of purging the land of the treacherous, incestuous Tenge clan.

All that took about 600+ pages, but as I said it was quite the page-turner in a train-wreck kind of way, so I read the whole thing in one night. And I suppose it IS a classic, in the way some of Sidney Sheldon’s books are classics – classics of beach literature, that is. I’m comparing it to Sheldon’s stuff because Ayako contains the same mix of sex, crime and tragedy that he was so famous for.

If that’s the kind of drama that appeals to you, Ayako is right up your alley. It’s a different kind of classic from what I was expecting, but I suppose 70’s manga fans like a good twisted drama as much as the next person, which is why this manga is (undeservingly, IMO) famous.

For all that the main character is female, though, the women in this manga come across very poorly indeed. It might have been deliberate, to show how post-war Japan was, and in many ways still is a man’s world. Either way the women in Ayako are all helpless victims and sex objects relegated to one of two roles: housewife or whore (and in one unfortunate case, both).

Oh, but it gets worse. Not only are they helpless whores and housewives but also any attempt they make to break out of those roles is almost immediately punished with death as if to say “Stay in the kitchen/bedroom, woman!”

For example Su’e, Ayako’s mother, spends years as a quiet housewife and the family patriarch’s sex slave. When she finally tries to leave with Ayako, her husband kills her. End of her story.

Then there’s Jiro’s temporary squeeze Michiko (or was it Machiko?). She’s fine when she’s obediently sleeping with military officers on his orders, but the minute she tries to rebel against that, boom kaboom! No more Michiko.

Or let’s take Naoko, the Tenge little sister who spends years as a dutiful housewife. The minute she tries to get revenge on Jiro for killing her old boyfriend she gets drawn back into the family cesspit and alas, no more Naoko.

The two women who do survive the whole fiasco, Ayako herself and her stepmother/grandmother, seemingly only do so because they don’t bother fighting against their roles or against the men in their lives. The stepmother because she never even attempts to resist and Ayako because she gave up after a brief struggle. Sure she runs away from home eventually, but it’s all a matter of jumping from the care of one man (Shiro) to another (Jiro) and to another (Hanao). Just when the manga is about to get interesting, when Ayako is finally all alone, it ends. So… yeah.

Long story short, if you want something tasteful and classy, don’t get Ayako. If you want a trashy page-turner that will leave a bad taste in your mouth and leave you wondering what’s so great about Osamu Tezuka, get Ayako. End of story.

Hipira children’s book review

Hipira is a more of a regular children’s book than a manga in terms of presentation. However it IS written by Katsuhiro Otomo, the mangaka behind Akira (which I read a few years ago and which was surprisingly good for something I expected to be overrated) and besides nothing says I only have to review anime and manga here, so there we get. Plus the happy, heartwarming story and colorful art makes a nice change from all the ‘alternative’ stuff I read last week. Here’s the book summary:

In the vampire city of Saruta [referred to as Salta in the story itself], the sun never rises and all the vampire children love to stay up late. Hipira is a precocious young vampire whose best friend is a fairy named Soul, and their games, pranks, and adventures are extraordinary even for the inhabitants of this supernatural city.

Normally I quite hate vampires and werewolves and zombies and that sort of things (especially zombies. But also vampires. And werewolves) but I make exceptions for cute stories where nobody gets hurt or killed. In fact Hipira is just a regular children’s book about a regular ~~kid~~ vampire. The way the first page even starts “My name is Hipira. The truth is, I’m a vampire. Everyone better be really afraid of me!” just makes the whole thing cute. Though it would have been a nice twist if the very next page showed him murdering and devouring innocent village-folk the way ‘real’ vampires are wont to do.

So what does Hipira do? Well I don’t want to spoil the whole book (not this time, anyway), but there’s a mysterious castle in the town of Salta where the Town Elder lives. No one knows what goes on in there, so Hipira takes it upon himself to get to the bottom of this monumental mystery.

He stumbles upon an experiment to send vampires to hell (because hell is heaven for vampires) which fails at the last moment, leaving Hipira with a new buddy called Soul. Together they go around playing pranks on the townsfolk and saving a forest from a giant toad and other such tales of derring-do. The book comes to a rather abrupt end after only a few episodes, which makes the book feel rather incomplete. That’s the main problem I had with the book.

The other problem is that the text is slightly ‘translatey’ sometimes. I try not to criticize translations too much because I translate myself and there’s always room for improvement. But still, a few lines in the book felt off.

Maybe it’s because there’s so little text that every line stands out. Or maybe because those few “off” lines don’t follow the style one would expect of a children’s book, i.e. short, precise sentences, simple language, not using two words when one would do, that sort of thing.. Either way lines like “The reason being that” instead of just “Because” or “The truth is, I’m a vampire!” instead of just “I’m a vampire!” or “Mom and Dad haven’t gotten up yet” instead of “Mom and Dad are still asleep” and odd phrasings like “Light is spilling out” (?) stick out like sore thumbs.

Those are the only things I can really criticize. The art by Shinji Kimura is gorgeous with lots of little details both on the characters themselves and in the backgrounds, which are especially lovely (apparently he’s famous for his background art). The story ended too quickly for the characters to be really fleshed out. Soul in particular doesn’t get up to much, but we do learn enough about the main characters and the world they live in to tickle the imagination. So yeah, it’s a little short on substance but with art that beautiful, who cares?

tl;dr Hipira itself wasn’t that great a book story-wise, but I’d love to read more in the same art style. Or maybe a cartoon? It could work!

Red colored elegy manga review

Drawn & Quarterly strikes again! But at least Red Colored Elegy isn’t anywhere near as unpleasant and as nonsensical as yesterday’s A Single Match. Red Colored Elegy is supposedly a very influential work in the history of alternative manga and narrative-wise at least I can see why. The blurb on the back of the book is unusually long and effusive, but since I’d rather spend time talking about my thoughts about the manga rather than what it’s about, I’m going to type it out anyway:

Seiichi Hayashi produced Red Colored Elegy between 1970 and 1971, in the aftermath of a politically turbulent and culturally vibrant decade that promised but failed to deliver new possibilities. With a combination of sparse line work and visual codes borrowed from animation and film, the quiet melancholy lives of a young couple struggling to make ends meet are beautifully captured in this poetic masterpiece.

Uninvolved with the political movements of the time, Ichiro and Sachiko hope for something better, but they’re not revolutionaries; their spare time is spent drinking, smoking, daydreaming, and sleeping – together and at times with others.

While Ichiro attempts to make a living from his comics, Sachiko’s parents are eager to arrange a marriage for her, but Ichiro doesn’t seem interested. Both in their relationship and at work, Ichiro and Sachiko are unable to say the things they need to say, and like any couple, at times say things to each other that they do not mean, ultimately communicating as much with their body language and what remains unsaid as with words.

Red Colored Elegy is informed as much by underground comics of the time as it is by the French Nouvelle Vague, and its cultural referents range from James Dean to Ken Takakura. Its influence in Japan was so large that Morio Agata, a prominent Japanese folk musician and singer songwriter, debuted with a love song written and named after it.

So that’s it for the content. To spoil a bit, Ichiro and Sachiko break up near the end. She moves on (or attempts to) with a coworker or hers while Ichiro slouches around getting drunk and complaining about how miserable he is – even though he’s the one who scuppered their chances at getting back together with his uncooperative attitude. Needy, whiny and unfaithful though Sachiko may be, she can definitely do better than Ichiro so their breakup is a happy ending, of sorts.

But as I said, I can see how this would be influential. The story is told in a vague, disjointed manner, but there’s a sequence to the events, there are recurring characters, things move from Point A to B in a meandering but inevitable way. As long as you make your point in the end, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying the process.

Plus I bet the “sparse artwork” style must have been a great inspiration to mangaka who can’t draw all over Japan. Interesting characters can cover mediocre art much better than bad characters/story-telling can make up for good art. That said, Seiichi Hayashi does show at several points that he’s an excellent artist when he wants to be. The idiosyncratic design choices seem to be a deliberate decision. And of course if your manga becomes a hit, critics will find something nice to say about the art no matter how bad it is. In fact it might become your signature feature, as with the author of Akagi/Kaiji.

Third source of inspiration: the blah-ness and dreariness of Sachiko and Ichiro’s relationship. Though sadly enough such depictions haven’t caught on as much as I would like. I’m probably reading the wrong kind of manga and should try more alternative manga (…no.) but romantic relationships in manga tend to be either over-the-top lovey-dovey with some stupid misunderstandings thrown in or thoroughly dysfunctional from start to finish but they stay together because he’s the hero and she’s the heroine.

Red Colored Elegy instead paints a realistically bleak picture of a relationship that’s going nowhere. Go to work, work work work, drink after work, come home, work some more, argue, sleep together or not sleep together, wake up the next day and start all over again. Except nothing in life ever stays the same, so external events (particularly the death of Ichiro’s father), internal conflicts and their own personal demons all conspire to drive the couple apart, most likely for good. Is that realistic or what? Not saying happy, normal relationships are any less ‘real’ but

That said, I have an innate dislike for stories about cohabiting couples, since I am morally opposed to that practice. Putting my beliefs aside, though, I think Seiichi Hayashi made an excellent case against irresponsible shacking up just by depicting Ichiro and Sachiko’s dreary everyday existence. Their lack of planning, lack of responsibility, lack of commitment despite their physical relationship, lack of exclusivity and their relationship’s abrupt end is all one big “Babies shouldn’t be making babies!” advertisement, whether it means to be or not.

That doesn’t mean I enjoyed Red Colored Elegy, though. It might be interesting for avant-garde manga buffs or people looking for a short manga light on dialog. That’s about it, really.