Also known as A Thousand and One Nights in Wonderland, Fushigi no Kuni no Sen’ichiya
That’s the cliff-notes version. It’s hard to get across in so few words just how fun and silly and heartwarming this manga is. A lot of the fun comes from the “Thousand and One Nights” part, where the author plays around with all kinds of fairy-tales and concocts new ones as she goes along. For example Snow White is actually every bit as bitchy and competitive as her stepmother, and Sleeping Beauty is actually a hideous hambeast who is convinced she’s the hottest creature on the planet (and who never gets round to falling asleep). It’s a colorful, magical world full of ghosts, fairies, dragons, immortals, magical earthworms and more.
At the center of all this is our star, Seblan. Probably the first manga character ever with full-blown Gender Dissociative Disorder. In fact, calling him a man in a woman’s body is an understatement, because he’s even more manly than his uncles he grows up with. When a ridiculously convenient dragon’s curse turns him into a man for real, he hardly skips a beat.
Throughout the series, it’s Seblan’s job to roam the world getting into one scrape or another so that his horse Hendek can rescue him with his supernatural knowledge of just about everything. There’s pretty much nothing Hendek does not know and he always manages to save the day somehow. Equus ex Machina, shall we say?
And yet they make such a great team that they’re impossible to dislike. Honest, headstrong, foolish Seblan charges into adventure with wise, longsuffering Hendek backing him up. Together they manage to pull off feat after feat of derring-do across the land. And the best part is, almost no one ever dies. I can probably count on one hand the number of bad guys who were killed off for real in the series, Seblan and Hendek usually managing to trick or trap them somehow and get their way. That’s what contributes to making it such a happy, feelgood series when it’s all said and done.
The one fly in the ointment? The characters of Milty, Seblan’s wife. Ditsy blonde with the IQ of a dead sparrow. Far too much of the series is spent on matters concerning her. First Seblan has to win her hand in marriage. Then he has to save her when she gets kidnapped. Then about 50% of the series consists of Seblan trying to convince her that babies don’t come from a stork (I could feel his blue balls from here). Eventually she gets a clue and settles down a bit, but she still managed to almost get him killed by moving his body when she was expressly told not to. What an idiot.
A fun, happy series all around though. The art is lovely too, for such an old series. I’ll be paying more attention to Sone Masako’s other stuff from now on.