Tag: Shoujo

Akkake no Itoko – Hagio Moto manga review

Grhh…Banana Fish put me off manga for a while, in a way only truly annoying series can do. After a while I went through my collection of one-volume mangas for something new to try and settled on Akkake no Itoko by Hagio Moto. She’s pretty famous in Japan as one of the pioneers of thoughtful shoujo manga like AA’, but she’s not so well known in the west.

Unfortunately this collection of short stories is not one of her best. Maybe, just maybe, all this material was fresh when she published it back in 1970-whatever, but now they’re all silly, stale and shallow. The title one-shot is pretty good though, about a girl who moves to the countryside with her seemingly-Caucasian cousin Noelle (lots of Caucasian-types in this collection) and has to learn that there’s a lot behind her cousin’s happy-go-lucky facade.

The rest of the collection is lame. IIRC there’s this one called “Marmalade-chan” about a girl who looks like a boy, who gets involved with a fashion school and turns out to have been “pretty all along.” The next one is called “Mia” and it’s about a girl with a boy’s name who is put in a boy’s dormitory by accident and has to keep up the facade. It was so stupid I couldn’t read it but hey, maybe she was the first do to that hidden-girl-among-boys shtick, who knows. …And I stopped reading after that, even though the fourth story showed comedic promise I just couldn’t take the simplistic storylines and pat resolutions any more.

Aspiring mangakas might find the last story about mangaka struggling to come up with drafts interesting, but it seemed a little too longwinded to me so I just browsed through it. Still, I haven’t given up on Hagio Moto yet, someday I’ll find out just what it is that makes her special. It’s not Akakke no Itoko, for sure.

Ibara Hime no Oyatsu manga review

In Japanese Ibara Hime no Oyatsu is いばら姫のおやつ, with a translation provided as “The Thorn Princess has Afternoon Refreshments”. A…seinen-ish, shoujo-ish manga by Ishida Atsuko.

I only finished this last week, but I’ve already forgotten the main characters’ names, so you’ll have to forgive me. I’ve read a number of stories where the extras or side stories were better than that main story, but this is the first one where the difference has been so overwhelming.

The first three chapters of this volume, about the titular thorn princess, are okay, but rather bland. The main character Yukihiro lives next to these two sisters, and one of these is really short and immature (i.e. loli), and in the same class as him in high school. In spite of that she’s already gotten herself a reputation for sleeping with any guy who will ask her out. Meanwhile she seems to have some affection for the main character, who has had a longstanding crush on her older sister.

And there’s some ups, and there’s some downs, and the whole thing ends with the loli leaving for Tokyo to become a model, while the older sister gets pregnant by her married boyfriend. It’s very tedious stuff and I was glad to be through with it.

The really good stuff is the 6 or so short stories that follow all that angst. They’re still angsty, but they deal with interesting topics from modern society. One of them deals with a boy’s feelings of abandonment and betrayal when his dad divorces his mother and remarries. Another deals with a young girl (also immature and loli) who withdraws from society after getting mixed up in a homeless man’s suicide. It’s about how she learns to trust again and put it behind her with the help of her aunt who is dealing with all sorts of conflicts of her own.

The last story (the author’s moralist tract), is the first manga short story I’ve ever read that deals with abortion, specifically abortion by a middle school student. It was very interesting reading. The Japanese have had an image for a while about being cavalier about abortion and using it as birth control. This manga speaks against that (“You’re not a monkey, use some protection!”) while also talking about having some self-respect, and not looking for validation or meaning from relationships but rather finding it within yourself. Words for any middle-schooler to live by.

I hadn’t read anything by Ishida Atsuko prior to this, but I liked her sketchy, clean art and simple, impactful stories, so I’ll be picking up more works by her in the future.

Otomen volume 1 manga review

Asuka Masamune is a man with feminine interests: shoujo manga, sewing, cooking, etc. But having been brought up to suppress this instinct and be manly, can he ever show his true self to his crush, Ryo Miyakozuka?

Uhh, of course he can. Some mangaka might have tried to drag this situation out and have Asuka hide his secret for as long as possible for the lulz, but within a few pages this guy is sewing for Ryo and then cooking increasingly elaborate boxed lunches for her. By the end of Otomen chapter 1 everyone in the school knows about this “secret” and both he and Ryo have decided they like each other.

So obviously, this manga should have ended after chapter one. It would have made a great one shot, with everything was out in the open and nicely wrapped-up by the end of it. After chapter one the rest of the volume was all manufactured drama and forced comedy, none of which worked for me. Also it’s really annoying having that Juta Tachibana “friend” of theirs following them everywhere, getting in their way at every step. They’d be fully dating already if he would just butt out. Three’s a crowd, dude!

Anyway, I like your art but knowing when to stop is part of being a good mangaka, Aya Kanno. Stop milking this cow and get a new one. 4/10

Oh, and on a personal note the typesetting was really annoying. Not only did they use my most hated font, Anime Ace, but they also switched fonts between AA and Wild Words from bubble to bubble and page to page for seemingly no reason at all. Very poor showing, Viz.

5 Ai no Rule manga review – Ichijo Yukari

If I’d known 5 Ai no Rule was incomplete when I started it, I would have thought twice about reading it at all. I mean it was good and all, but it got cancelled right when things were getting good, and that’s always annoying. Luckily the author added an afterword that explains how things would have ended, but it’s still not the same.

Anyway, the story is about a girl named Maho Asano, dirt poor and working for a small publishing office. One day her sister Rie, who wants to be a model, runs into a guy named Takami in a bar who gives her a lot of money. When Maho goes to return the money she discovers he’s a top guy in a PR company, and he offers her a job as a copywriter in the new startup he wants to found.

So far, so good, but then things get complicated. It turns out Takami is an expert user and manipulator who is doing everything out of his own shady motives. To that end, when he discovers that Rie is in love with him, he pits her against his fiancee Yuri, with tragic consequences for both girls. Having discovered Takami’s true nature, Maho decides to stick around (you think she’d just quit her job and go back to the countryside but nooo) and “become a woman worthy of him”, I quote. The story ends with Takami on the verge of success, but having lost something very precious to him at the same time.

As expected of something written in 1976 the art is ancient, but the fashions still look good. Maho is a bland spectator of all the colorful drama going on and the reader never gets into her head, but the crazy happenings in the story more than make up for that. It started a bit slow but it really got going after a while, so it’s just too bad that Ichijo Yukari never got round to finishing it.

If you like afternoon soap operas like The Young and the Restless, this is pretty much the same thing without the sex. Enjoy.