romance Archives - Page 9 of 12

Why I dropped Kotoura-san after 3 episodes

Another item knocked off my anime backlog, at least. First Barakamon, now Kotoura-san. If I keep dropping them this quickly, I’ll be done with the list in no time. But I don’t just drop series for the sake of dropping them. I am actively looking for new things to watch and enjoy, and it pains me, not least because of wasted time and bandwidth, when I have to drop things. However as with Barakamon I had my reasons, which I will now proceed to explain.

Reason 1 – One episode was enough. The premise is cute: Girl with power to read minds finds herself alienated from friends and family until she meets one boy who swears to stick by her no matter what. A budding romance begins. It was sweet, it was interesting, but it didn’t need to go beyond episode one because it’s a foregone conclusion how things are going to work out – assuming the opening theme didn’t spoil the romantic developments for you.

Reason 2 – It can’t decide what kind of show it wants to be. Does it want to be a high school romance? A tragic drama? A slapstick high school comedy? No, it wants to be all of the above, but it’s not particularly good at any of them. The romance would have been okay if Manabe didn’t blurt out his love for Kotoura right in episode 2. It was like, you what now? Because it’s easy to understand what Kotoura might see in him, but since when did he start liking her in a special way? What does he see in her? Isn’t he just falling in love with her because the plot demands it?!

The tragic drama part might have been okay as well if it wasn’t sandwiched between the romance slice-of-life and the stupid comedy. As it is, those scenes always seems to come out of nowhere and completely disrupt whatever mood you’ve got going on. You can’t relax and enjoy the show when there’s always some CRAAAAWLLLING IIIIN MY SKIIIIN waiting around the next corner. Especially since with the exception of Kotoura everyone else’s problems seem self-manufactured. Heck, even Kotoura should be old enough and wise enough to keep her mouth shut and hide her powers. Dummy.

Reason 3 – Too much too soon. I already mentioned above how quickly Manabe fell in love with Kotoura and how weird that was. I wonder if things were rushed because it’s a 13-episode series. No idea how long the original manga is. But apart from the confession there’s also this drama with some guys beating up Manabe and Kotoura deciding “It’s all my fault, I have to disappear forever!” and stuff. And it’s only episode 3! Like, already? The characters have barely been established, the ESP club has barely started to know each other and you’re already dropping all this shoujo manga drama on my head? I couldn’t even bring myself to watch episode 4, I was just like ENOUGH.

Reason 4 – It’s rather vulgar. A large part of the so-called comedy in Kotoura-san consists of the male lead fantasizing about her in compromising positions, knowing that she can read his mind. So he’s always thinking stuff like this just to tease her:

First off, I don’t see anything comical about sexual harassment. It’s not like Kotoura welcomes those thoughts, since he specifically does it to discomfit her. I don’t see anything loving or romantic about it either. It’s just crude, vulgar and unwelcome. It made me dread every scene where Manabe showed up, because in addition to his thoughts, he just wouldn’t shut up about perverted stuff. 3 episodes of that was more than enough.

Roundup – Watch over your heart with all diligence, For from it flow the springs of life (Proverbs 4:23).

The further I get in my Christian walk, the stricter I am about the things I will and will not allow into my life. This especially applies to media and entertainment, which is mainly made by unbelievers for unbelievers. “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2), so even if the world says it’s perfectly okay to have a vulgar, foul-mouth, perverted protagonist or says that mentally undressing someone you claim to love is fine, I know better. That’s why Jesus said “You have heard that it was said, ‘YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY’; but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:27-28)

Even if everything else about Kotoura-san was above reproach I would probably have dropped it anyway because of Reason 4. The other reasons just made it easier to do so. Dropped without regrets, unless you count wishing I had just stopped after episode one.

Remember manhua review

Remember how ‘Red Colored Elegy‘ was supposed to be a highly-influential work? When I reviewed it, I noted that I could see how people would be inspired by it, but the keyword was ‘inspired’ – I never expected someone to flat out copy the whole thing. Until I read Remember by Chinese artist Benjamin, that is…

The blurb goes:

What is the fine line that separates love from hate? How can a broken heart heal from a loss so deep? When is letting go of your inhibitions worth risking your life?

International artist Benjamin depicts profoundl moving portrayals of love and loss that get at the core of what it means to throw your heart into life. The artist doesn’t offer any comfort from the despair we all feel in our lives – while we know there is no answer, we are all better off for asking the question… and remembering the struggle.

Actually the real question they should be asking is “What is the fine line that separates inspiration from plagiarism?” I will give Benjamin props for being a pretty good artist (that cover just screams “Buy Me!” doesn’t it?), but when it comes to storytelling he is utterly bereft of ideas. And he is completely aware of it too, if his self-loathing author’s comments are anything to go by.

Remember is made up of two short stories. The title story ‘Remember’ deals with a Struggling artist with a bad attitude, girl who loves him for no reason, he pushes her away until she does go away and then he hates himself even more than ever, the end. I really didn’t need to summarize that, I should have just pointed to the original story, which for all its flaws does a better job at conveying the doomed relationship and almost, not quite, making the characters relateable.

Anyway, this struggling artist submits story after story to a comic publisher only to have them turned down because they’re not enough like Japanese manga. “Chinese readers don’t want originality! They want plagiarized Japanese manga!” the editor straight-up tells him. So it’s ironic – or maybe meaningful – that the story itself is a straight-up copy of Red Colored Elegy, with better art and with the sex cut out or made ambiguous to avoid censorship.

Is this how low Benjamin had to sink to get his work published in China? Maybe. But what is more likely is that he put that scene in just to cover his inability to write a Chinese manhua that would be accepted by editors. “See it’s not me, it’s the editors, they forced me to plagiarize! Left to my own devices I could totally write a great story!” If that’s the case, why is the copy even worse than the original?

Besides, the Remember collection includes a second short story as well, about students in art school being bullied, but it’s crap. I read about a third of it and then just skimmed through it because it was just more self-loathing navel-gazing twaddle. He probably copied that from a Japanese manga as well, I just don’t know enough manga to spot which one.

In any case, by that time the nice art had lost its effect on me and all of Benjamin’s shortcomings as a writer were on display for all to see. Rambling, incoherent ‘I’m so deep and nobody understands me’ characters dot the pages like so many teenagers at an emo concert. They’re all flat one-note characters – ‘quirky girl’, ‘misunderstood artist’, ‘unreasonable editor’ – one defining characteristic carries them through the whole story. Even in a short story you should be able to flesh characters out a little more than that, especially in slice-of-life kind of stories where enjoyment depends on getting under the character’s skins.

Benjamin can draw, there’s no question about that, but unless he can learn to write as well it really doesn’t profit him very much. The fact that the manga goes for less than $2.00 on Amazon despite being out of print should tell you everything you need to know about that. Still I’m not a mean person, and I can see some budding talent there. I’d advise him to work on his writing skills if he really want to make it as a mangaka (manhuajia?). Failing that, there’s nothing wrong with being a dedicated artist and illustrator, since he does have the skills to back that up. Good luck, Mr. Plagiarizer!

Boy meets Girl ~Mound no Shoujo~ manga review

No, I hadn’t forgotten that I was on a baseball manga kick. I’m slowly weaning myself off it and reading other stuff in increasing amounts, but I’ve still got a mountain of baseball manga left to try. Currently on the chopping block: Boy meets Girl ~Mound no Shoujo~(～マウンドの少女～) by Natsuko Heiuchi.

It’s a bittersweet sports romance story about a short little leaguer named Fumitake Morita (Moritake for short) who has a huge crush on his little league team ace, a tall girl named Shiori Kanzaki. Unfortunately Moritake suspects and becomes increasingly certain that Shiori has a crush on the catcher/clean-up of one of their rival teams. What, if anything, is he going to do about these feelings he has for her?

Along the way Shiori herself has to deal with the changing balance of power on the team as the boys reach puberty and begin to grow taller and stronger faster than she can keep up. Moritake especially starts out as a shrimp who can’t even hit a double, much less a triple, but by volume 2 he’s hitting home runs and batting better and running faster than ever before. Shiori meanwhile hits a slump and begins to contemplate quitting baseball altogether. And on top of all that there are rumors her family might be moving away soon. What’s going to happen to this hurdle-fraught relationship? Does Moritake stand a chance with Shiori?

Heh, find out for yourself, I’m not telling. :-p I recommend you read it for yourself, seeing as it’s only 2 volumes long with full furigana. Moritake’s character is well-fleshed out and easy to relate to while Shiori – and the rest of the cast, come to think of it – remains an enigma until the end, but that just makes Moritake’s feelings for her all the more understandable. He’s a kid trying to be an adult and stumbling in all the typical kiddult ways, it’s just too cute.

As a bonus the baseball action is pretty good as well. The ending of the final game was predictable as most baseball manga final games tend to be, but the matches are fun to read, the art is clear and simple and the action is always easy to follow. And there were some moments where I went “What’s gonna happen next?! *doki doki*” but since the focus in Boy meets Girl is on the relationships rather than the game, such moments were few and far between.

If I write any more I know I’ll end up spoiling the ending so I’m going to stop here. I enjoyed it as a short, sweet baseball romance series that made its point and got the feelings across without resorting to the constant arguments and unnecessary melodrama that frequently characterize other baseball romance series (*cough*Adachi*cough*). If you’re not looking for anything deep and just want something you can read, enjoy and forget, give Boy meets Girl a try and see if you like it.

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.

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.