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Otasukebito Hashiru! chapter 1b

Reading chapter 1b will be enough to give you an idea of the shift in power that characterizes the rest of volume 1 of Otasukebito Hashiru! (おたすけ人走る!). Before and during the entrance exam, Kana held all the cards. She could decide who got in and who stayed out and there wasn’t a thing they could do about it. Once the entrance exam ends and the new students are selected, however, they become the new heroes of the school. Nothing is too good for them, since they hold the future of the school in their hands while Kana is now just another student. Now then, what will they do with their new found power?

I don’t want to spoil the whole story, but if you suspect that Sukesaku Oda with a little bit of power is going to be a serious jerk, you are not far wrong. It was hard not to feel sorry for Kana at time, but she retains just enough selfish and mean tendencies to make it hard to root for either one.That’s all in volume 1. As the series progresses, Oda starts to like Kana more, a rival for her affections appears and she doesn’t seem to entirely hate him any more by the end of the series. Volume 2 is spent on the team’s qualification for the Koshien tournament, with all the wacky hijinks this entails, while Volume 3 is spent on the actual tournament itself.

The series blurb promised that Otasukebito was funny, but I didn’t get any real laughs until volume 3, where Oda inadvertently pisses off the umpires for his match in a cross-dressing incident and then has to deal with the inevitable fall out when they decide to take revenge. A picture speaks a thousand words:

The series becomes a more than decent sports manga in the last volume, featuring a typically long baseball game full of ups and downs, twists and turns and drama galore. It was very interesting stuff, though a little hard to believe in places.

Unfortunately this focus on pure sports and away from the gags and romantic tension that defined the earlier volumes was probably the downfall of the series. All the other characters fell by the wayside as this became a sports manga worthy of Shonen Jump or any other boys’ magazine. Not bad at all, but not the sort of thing you’d see in Margaret Comics. Or maybe there was some other reason for the series to end somewhat abruptly. I thought the characters needed a bit of help in the likeability department, but they got some laughs out of me in volume 3 and the sports component was satisfactory, so I was sorry to see it go. No sense living in the past though, so on to the next series!

Otasukebito Hashiru! manga review

Otasukebito Hashiru! (or: Help comes Running! おたすけ人走る!) is a shoujo sports manga from 1979, written and illustrated by Hikaru Yuzuki. Yuzuki is probably best known for Amai Seikatsu/Sweet Life, the barely worksafe long-running manga about a naive young man who goes to work for a lingerie company.

That is that and this is this. Otasukebito Hashiru is worth a read at best, but it’s not the kind of manga that really sticks in anyone’s memory. The story is simple: PR Academy is an ex-girls’ school on the verge of collapse. To save their skins and get more students, they decide to become famous for sports. But why start from scratch when you can recruit the best (and dumbest) sports students from across Japan? First, though, you have to put them through their paces… with a set of increasingly ridiculous tests.

It could have been good. And I suppose it really was considered funny back in 1979. Now, though, the gags are cheesy and stale and while the art is clean and the story is amusing, the manga suffers most of all from a thoroughly unlikeable cast. The main female, Kana has a short temper, a sadistic streak and a tendency to look down on those who don’t conform to her ideals.

On the other hand Sukesake Oda, the “hero” is a hero in name-only. He’s a lazy, perverted and uncooperative cheat, though those qualities don’t come out till later in the manga. The worst character of all, though, is Kana’s mother the principal, who is willing to do anything (and I mean anything) to see that her plan succeeds. Money comes before everything else, her own daughter included.

As a character manga, therefore, Otasukebito Hashiru! will leave you fuming at every turn. It’s quite amusing as a sports manga, though. Volume 1 ends with one of the most ridiculous ‘tennis’ matches I have ever witnessed, though for people who’ve read Prince of Tennis it will barely be a blip on their radar.

Still, I picked this up because it promised to have baseball in it. And it does, as the team strives to win the national Koshien tournament, the quickest and most reliable way for a school to become famous in Japan. That’s the good news. The bad news is, they only play baseball in volumes 2 and 3 so… yeah. If you want to find out whether they win or not, buy the Otasukebito Hashiru manga on Amazon (and ignore the wacky Google Translate titles).

Ah! Seishun no Koushien manga review

Ah! Seishun no Koushien (ああ!青春の甲子園) is a 7-volume collection of romantic stories by Yamasaki Juuzou and Adachi Mitsuru. As expected of Adachi (though he was only the artist, really), all the stories involve baseball players and, as per the title, the National Koushien tournament, but that’s as far as the sports goes.

I know I’m on a baseball manga kick, but that doesn’t mean I’ll read just anything with ‘baseball’ in it. I read the first two or three chapters of volume 1, then flipped idly through the pages until volume 3 and hated it more with every passing page. After that I stopped reading it, because while I don’t hate romantic series, I do hate those with a foregone conclusion where the writers nevertheless spend way too much time trying to make us wonder “Will they or won’t they?” We know they will.

If I recall correctly, the first story was about the female manager of a baseball club. Junk-o, I think her name fittingly was. She has a crush on the pitcher Shun. Shun’s catcher Dobashi has a crush on Junk-o. Shun has a crush on Junk-o too, he just doesn’t know it yet. But he finds out pretty quickly when she forces her way in to live with him in the name of ‘taking care of him’ when his father moves to Kyushu on business. After that they just play baseball and waffle on and on for a while, and, I’m supposing, eventually get together. Whether they win the tournament or not is another issue, but the story never does anything to make you care about it. Not when the battery and their manager have nothing in their heads but romance.

The second story was even more off-putting. It started out very well with a sweet almost-romance between a girl named Natsuko and a boy named Hongo, who is in the kendo club. Wait, kendo club? But this is an Adachi series! The pitcher always gets the girl! That’s right, so it’s a foregone conclusion that he’s already lost the game. This is only confirmed when the pitcher appears in the form of a Wild Transfer Student, basically Ranma before there was a Ranma. Natsuko starts out a little prickly towards him, but we already know she’s going to waffle back and forth between the two guys and eventually pick the pitcher (because he’s the pitcher in an Adachi series) so, yeah.

I’m going to try to read something a little more drama-free next time. This crap just put me in a bad mood. I should mention before I go that I don’t dislike Adachi manga at all. I read both Cross Game and H2 with enjoyment (while the pitcher didn’t get the girl in the latter, she very definitely preferred him). He’s a great writer now, but his partner in this series, Juuzou Yamasaki, is not quite as good at creating likable characters and believable romances. I’d give this a miss unless you’re a die-hard Adachi fan who will read just about anything he has ever touched.

Fushigi no Kuni no Sen’ichiya manga review

Also known as A Thousand and One Nights in Wonderland, Fushigi no Kuni no Sen’ichiya is Sone Masako’s ancient shoujo classic about a princess who is brought up as a prince to save her life… who later turns into a real prince and lives happily ever after with the help of his magical horse Hendek Atlatan.

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.

Ten yori mo Hoshi yori mo manga review

A classic shoujo romance manga by Akaishi Michiyo. Ten yori mo Hoshi yori mo is at least 35 years old at this point, but a good romance is a good romance. About the only thing “off” is the lack of mobile phones, which made me go “Why don’t you just call him! Oh wait…” many times.

The story is about three high school kids who find themselves with superpowers, the love triangle that develops between them and their quest to find out who they truly are and where those powers came from.

Since it’s that old, I don’t mind spoiling: The girl Mio, and her beloved Sou/Rei turn out to have been Shizuka Gozen and Minamoto Yoshitsune from ancient Japan, finally reunited in the present. The bad guy Tadaomi is Oda Nobunaga reincarnated, meaning he has nothing to do with those two lovers and is just an interloper. He most likely mistook Mio for someone else, but this is never gone into.

The series ends with all three getting shot by policemen who mistake them for monsters. Tadaomi jumps into a fire, and that’s the end of him. Mio and Sou walk into the ocean, where presumably they are finally together in death. It’s possible that Mio used her powers to shield them from the water until they got further away, but not only has she exhausted her powers stopping a tsunami right before, but they have also both been, you know, shot, so it’s unlikely. So yeah, it’s not a very happy ending.

As far as romances go it was good, though. There’s no waffling between lovers, no silly misunderstandings, no petty squabbles between the lovers and lots of love and mutual respect. Mio and Sou find each other early and stay true to each other in the face of adversity. The cast is also kept reasonably small, allowing the story to be focused and fast-paced. I like that. If all shoujo romance series were like Ten Yori Mo, Hoshi Yori Mo, I wouldn’t have a problem with them at all. Except for, you know, the whole miserable ending thing. I still recommend it as a very enjoyable read with memorable characters.