Tag: one-shot

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.

Bench – one-shot by Masashi Kishimoto

A one-shot manga by Masashi Kishimoto, author of Naruto. I haven’t read any Naruto in roughly 8 years, but I liked it in the early days so the author is okay in my books. The blurb on mangaupdates is as follows:

Transfer student Yamaguchi Tsutomu has just joined the baseball team. Yamaguchi is overweight and can’t run very fast, so the coach places him on the “D” team. Unlike the “A” team which is has nothing but aces, the “D” team is filled with baseball misfits who don’t expect to see any playing time. Despite this setback, Yamaguchi is determined not to give up his dream of someday becoming a pro second baseman! 

The story behind Bench itself is… boring. I like baseball well enough, and I like stories about underdogs doing their best. That’s the story behind 90% of shounen manga anyway, so I might as well like it. But this story isn’t funny or interesting and it doesn’t go anywhere. The D-team does really suck, the A team bullies them for sucking, the main character shouts them down with garbage about Effort and Love of Baseball! But in typical Kishimoto fashion, the D-team suckers are also (ex-)elites, which makes them the same as the A-team and defeats the whole point of the “effort and love” story they have going on there. Why am I not surprised?

Anyway, the two D-team elites end up having a challenge against the A-team, but since they’re both elites it doesn’t matter who wins either way. It’s good this was a one-shot, because there’s no room for continuation. Two guys who were good and suffered temporary setbacks find a way of working around those setbacks. It sounds really heartwarming when you put it that way, and it might have stayed that way if Kishimoto hadn’t insisted on making the A-team A-holes and bringing up his [elite]-vs-[normal]=(elite wins and normal might as well not bother) theory again. In the end defeat = friendship, but the same goes for 99% of all other shounen manga so no surprises there.

Well, it was worth a read at least. I regret reading the online version though. It doesn’t read very well, and they got the Oh/Hanshin reference wrong right off the bat. The reason it’s a problem that Oh (the character) is a Hanshin fan is because he has the same name as the most famous Yomiuri Giants player of all time (Sadaharu Oh), and the Giants and Hanshin are bitter rivals. It’s like someone named George Best being a Manchester City fan, or someone named Babe Ruth being a Red Sox fan. Or something like that. I’m not too good at sports history.

Now, a minor mixup like that doesn’t affect the manga as a whole, but it doesn’t inspire faith in the translation either, especially when it’s so literal. “Anti-athlete’s body.” “Overly-serious tub of lard.” “As the ex-A team ace with a crushed shoulder.” “4th-seater.” (shouldn’t that be “cleanup?”) There should be smoother ways to put it than that.

Disclaimer: Translation is hard work, the translators are doing this for free and in a very short amount of time because they’re rushing to beat other releases (the fools), I make mistakes in my own writing and translation all the time. I’m just saying, that’s why I like to read manga in the original Japanese where possible. I was too lazy to hunt down a raw today, but stuff like this shows me that it’s worth the extra effort.

Aqua Planet Chronicle Blue

What appears to be a series of short stories by Masaru Oishi. The cover is nice, but Aqua Planet Chronicle Blue (碧 水惑星年代記) is really boring. I made it through half of the first story about the guy who wants to bonk his older stepsister while his younger stepsister wants to bonk him before giving up. I hate that kind of story, especially when it’s told in a slow, whiny, self-conscious way. Also the pen-and-ink art style may be popular these days, but I don’t think it fit the mood this time (i.e. I don’t like it) Next!