Shoujo Archives - Page 2 of 4

Kouya no Tenshidomo (Miriam) manga review

If you read enough shoujo, you might have come across a manga named “Miriam” by Kyoko Hikawa. If you do a little digging around, though, you will realize there is no such manga named Miriam in Japanese. The fan-translators took three series: Kouya no Tenshidomo, Jikan wo Tomete Matteite and Sorenari ni Romantic, wiped out their titles and renamed them all Miriam after the main character.

That’s why you’ll see some places list it as a 7-volume manga, even though it’s actually 3 for Kouya (or two if you buy the bigger Hakusensha edition), 3 for Jikan and 1 for Sorenari. MangaSync did a good job with the translation and editing otherwise, but this was a really unnecessary, unwise and uncalled for change on their part, so I hope other fan groups never followed suit.

Now that we’ve got that all cleared up, what is ~~Miriam~~ Kouya no Tenshidomo all about? It’s a shoujo manga set in the Wild West that follows the adventures of a plucky, precocious 8-year old named Miriam as she tries to protect her beautiful adoptive mother Grace from the attentions of the slimy, cowardly Mr. Harnbag.

At least that’s the manga Kyoko Hikawa set out to write, but then her mistake was introducing three young men first, Card, Joel and Douglas, and having them do the bulk of the work in getting things done. Hikawa set out to make a manga with a strong female character who was also a child, and I still think it could have been done, but she wrote the story in such a way that the guys had no choice but to take center stage with Miriam playing a mainly supporting role – or even getting in the way through her stubborn recklessness – and Grace being all but completely useless.

But that’s okay, as long as the manga is good. Is it? Well it has a lot of things going for it. The unusual setting for a shoujo is one. I haven’t read much manga set in the Wild West, much less shoujo, so that’s a start. The child heroine in the midst of adults is also quite rare. They usually tend to be paired with other children.

Kouya no Tenshidomo also has a fair amount of action without actually being violent. This is a bit of a spoiler, but deaths are extremely rare, even in situations where you would expect there to be a few deaths. Obviously the good guys want to avoid becoming murderers, but the bad guys seem to have inexplicably bad aim while also managing to avoid hitting any innocent passersby. Thanks to that the manga manages to have a very feel-good atmosphere to it, which I like.

The art is neat but nice-looking. Nothing too special, and I did think Hikawa could have done more with the backgrounds and signs and stuff to make the series seem more “Wild Westy” but it turns out she was sick for a while when she wrote it so I guess she did her best. Either way the action is easy to follow, the story is short and well-told – this is the bad guy, these are the good guys, here’s what we’re gonna do. It’s a short satisfying experience and well worth the read for people who like unusual shoujos.

Except! The fly in the ointment! Spoilers follow for romantic developments…

The relationship between Douglas and Miriam starts too soon! She’s only 8 years old, for goodness’ sake! I can buy an 8-year old having a crush on an older teen, but WHY ON EARTH is he falling in love with her at that tender age? She’s 8, and she’s drawn even younger!

But she’s 8 years old now!!

Stop that, you pedo! So there were a lot of really creepy scenes with Douglas thinking about how much he wanted to see Miriam and vice versa and on and on and on. It made the 2nd and 3rd volumes a little uncomfortable to read because I was just thinking “Help!! Police!!” all the time.

At least the two sequel series Jikan wo Tomete matteite and Sorenari ni Romantic deal with Miriam and Douglas’s relationship at a more sensible age. It’s not the age gap that’s the problem, after all. It’s that she’s only 8 years old!!! I think the author had been reading too much Thorn Birds when she wrote that subplot in. Please don’t write anything like this ever again, Kyoko Hikawa, kthxbye.

Long story short, Kouya no Tenshidomo is a short, light read as long as you don’t mind that the lead male is a pedophile. It’s still a nice change from the usual (the rest of the manga is a change from shoujo series I mean, not the pedo hero being a change from non-pedo heroes) so give it a try if you get the chance.

Snow Fantasy short story 1 and 3

As promised in the post about Kimi ni Straight, I have uploaded the two short stories I did from one of Yuu Yabuuchi’s short story collections.

Snow Fantasy 1 is about a boy in love with his senpai. Can he muster up the courage to tell her how he feels? And how does she feel about him?

Snow Fantasy 3 is a cute little story about a girl with a crush on a boy she meets on the bus every day. The only problem is she only knows his name and class. How can she get closer to him?

I liked both stories as I said last time because they’re both relatively rare in the shoujo manga world. Shoujo manga from a boy’s viewpoint isn’t that common, much less one dealing with a younger boy and an older girl (even though I did review a rather crappy one called Futari no Kimochi a while ago). And even though he wears glasses and looks like your everyday harem anime protagonist, Ina is far from a wishy-washy pushover. While it’s great that both stories are relatively short so they’re over before the mangaka has a chance to ruin them, I’d like to read slightly longer manga of the same sort someday.

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.

Iruka-chan Yoroshiku chapter 2

I think chapters one and two of Iruka-chan Yoroshiku are more than enough to give a sense of much of the rest of the series is about. Iruka is really played up as shockingly good at every sport in the world, so while I hope later volumes will counter this by eventually introducing someone she can’t beat, it doesn’t seem like that kind of series.

For a while I was reading it for the romantic content, but even that didn’t pan out too well. Yes, Haruumi does become a bit dull as I mentioned in my last post, but in a way that was refreshing because in 99% of shoujo manga in the last 20 years the nice, good boy never gets the girl. Not that I’m an expert or anything on shoujo manga, because I tend to drop them pretty quickly when the so-called hero starts acting like a jerk.

But still, returning to my point, Haruumi was a nice guy and that was cool. At the start of volume 2 (spoilers) it is revealed that Haruumi and Iruka (and most of the rest of the cast) actually met for the first time 6 years ago, and that’s when the romance between H and I actually started. They all forgot each other quickly, but still it’s totally meant to be right? …Right. So there’s no point reading any further. I plugged away at the series for another volume, but when everything is so obvious and the sports content isn’t exactly lighting my world on fire, there’s no need to keep going. Ze endo.

Iruka-chan Yoroshiku manga review

Iruka-chan Yoroshiku (いるかちゃんヨロシク) is a sports/romance shoujo manga by Masaru Urakawa. It ran in the mid-80s for 7 volumes, though I’m not sure of the exact timeline. There was a first series of 4 volumes, then it got renewed for another 3 and ended. The story is simple: A Wild Transfer Student Appears! If you’ve read manga for any length of time you must have encountered the Wild Transfer Student type. They’re cool and unusual and good at everything and somehow they get away with doing all kinds of wacky things that a normal student would never dream of. Wish fulfillment at its finest.

It’s the same with Iruka-chan Yoroshiku, where by virtue of being the principal’s granddaughter and extremely good at sports in a school that values athletics, Iruka Kisaragi basically runs roughshod over school rules and basic moral decency all in one go. In chapter 1, for example she antagonizes the school bully and not only refuses to apologize but actually physically attacks her and her lackeys. Oh sure there are all kinds of mitigating circumstances and Iruka herself isn’t a bad person, but she ranks rather low on the likeability scale as far as protagonists go.

The supporting cast is similarly bland. They may start out with their own agendas and personalities but by volume 3 the whole school is virtually a huge Iruka fanclub. Which isn’t all that strange, since Kurashika Academy explicitly values athletic ability above everything else. It makes for rather boring reading though.

What about the romance? It’s all right if you like foregone conclusions. And if you like the fact that Haruumi Yamamoto, the main guy, is basically Mr. Perfect. While he does show a few prideful and competitive traits early on, these are stripped away quickly leaving him as more or less Ken to Iruka’s Barbie. Bleh.

Well, then how is Iruka-chan Yoroshiku as a sports manga? Not bad at all, actually. I picked it up because it was labeled “baseball” on Mangaupdates, but as of volume 3 the only thing they have played is girls’ softball. It’s probably a mislabeling caused by someone who just flipped through the raws and didn’t actually read it. The softball and soccer games Iruka takes part in are moderately interesting and easy to follow, albeit rather heavy on the generic sports drama. But since Iruka-chan Yoroshiku is a romance/character manga and the romance and characters are both rather flat, it’s worth a quick read but not much more than that.