I had a very busy month or so (for the first time in a few years) involving a week+ long parent visit and wedding on one side of the family followed immediately by an unrelated week+ long parent visit and wedding on the other side of the family, so I fell behind a lot on posting notes about stuff and probably didn’t read as much as usual besides.
Anyway, now it’s all quiet again!
(I believe I’ve ちゃんと put spoiler tags where appropriate even under the drop downs).
月刊コミックビーム 2023年1月号 and 2023年２月号
I was plugging away at my probably rash attempt to get start following 月刊コミックビーム a while back. I recall the general flow of reading these so far being enjoying the new EVOL chapter and being varying mixes of intrigued in the rest. Willingness to struggle through what’s going on to read a chapter vs. telling myself I’ll catch up via tankoban at some point definitely comes and goes.
The most memorable thing from these issues is a 読切 called ありのまんまのあなた by ふじちか that I wanted to quickly share with a non-Japanese-reading friend since it’s pretty good and very gender-y, and so I tried a new, faster method for the purpose of just transcribing out all the dialogue in a text file and sharing it with the screenshots. It definitely went a lot faster (though that might be partly since it’s not particular complex and I wasn’t invested in getting anything perfect), so if I ever want to share more stuff with them in the future I’ll probably try just going this route before or instead of actually writing out the translated dialogue.
新連載 from these issues are 【ヒーローハラスメント】ニシヤ康隆 about a hero who’s really nervous about accidentally committing various kinds of ハラ while trying to help people, which I’m not particularly into, and 【ヒーローハラスメント】ニシヤ康隆 which seems like a Promised Neverland-ish story about an institute for gifted youngsters that seems like it’s got a mysterious dark secret or two.
伯爵と妖精 あいつは優雅な大悪党
I read this out loud with valkow and Bri who is elusive. Reading a novel for the first time slowly every week or so with two people who have both read it before while also trying to pay attention to grammar and kanji readings and stuff is an unusual and fairly disorienting way to experience the story, but I enjoyed it! The core of the book (and presumably the series) seems to me to be the fun dynamic between the perpetually Too Much Edgar and the alternately earnest and justifiably fed up Lydia, and that’s indeed endearing (and a lot of the most fun stuff to read out loud). The other characters and the fantasy adventure itself aren’t anything to sneeze at either though. And at the end of the day I’m on board for a book that brings along a new foe.
I’m curious to see how things develop through the (many) further volumes.
がんばれゴエモン〜ゆき姫救出絵巻〜
This is a Super Famicom game (Legend of the Mystical Ninja on the SNES) that I’d never played before but had absorbed a little bit of information about.
It’s neat! It sorta comes across to me as a step on the road between Kunio-kun and the Yakuza series, since it’s got that mix of brawling and moving along the story (such as it is) with copious extremely goofy and tongue-in-cheek side activities, from doing part-time jobs to mazes. My favorite of these was a quiz minigame, which are always a lot more thrilling in a second language like this (I succeeded at it first try, woohoo).
The very silly tone and creativity put into this mixed-up period piece world are really lovely and fun. That said – … I did end up stopping halfway through. The main stumbling point for me was the difficulty, and the mechanic where you lose range on your main weapon if you get hit. I really hated having to either self-consciously maintain full health and be tempted into save states, or else be stuck with a poor, stubby attack (I don’t like this mechanic in certain Zelda games either). Once I felt like I got what the game was about (around halfway through?), I got antsy to move on and did so, although I’m sure I left some fun gags and hijinks on the table behind me.
犬神家の一族
I’m sure I already talked plenty about this in the book club threads for it, but it’s in my review notes todo list, so I guess I might as well put some kind of summary down.
This was much anticipated by me, because seeing MinovskyArticle tweet about the famous movie adaptation shortly after I was seeing a real chance of results in learning to read Japanese put the book, the author, and Japanese mysteries in general on my radar, and made it probably among the first prose novels specifically on my radar to read in Japanese. But no need to rush, so I read the Kindaichi novels preceding it (although they’re all standalone).
In that specific context, I’d say it was a little bit disappointing, just since it wasn’t extraordinary in accordance with the outsized amount its reputation preceded it for me, but it was plenty satisfying I thought as a good Kindaichi novel, which certainly isn’t anything to sneeze at in my book.
And something especially cool happened with it for me: I’d picked up the habit of taking notes on these books, since there’s always a convoluted family tree that factors into the mystery, and I’d stopped reading in the middle of one for a bit once and had to backtrack, so taking notes (and insisting to myself on handwriting the kanji for every name) is a little bit of rare handwriting practice for me and prevents that from happening again. And anyway, once I got to the point where it was clear the mystery was going to be resolved, I was thinking about it and figured I had all the clues, might as well try to unravel the mystery. So it’s the first time I’ve ever bothered to do it with a mystery novel, but I ended up spending quite a chunk of time pondering, and put together a theory attempting to explain everything… which made the conclusion where the famous detective explains everything much better than I did totally work for me, since I was well familiar by that point with the difficult things to explain, and felt satisfied in the explanations given, with some simple bits of reasoning behind them that I just had’nt hit on. I don’t think it’s the kind of thing I could sustain with just any mystery novel, but it really did make ending this one special! To describe abstractly the shape of the mystery… it’s less of a “this one big twist solves everything” kind of mystery and more of a “there’s a whole bunch of sticking points and just one solution that zippers through them to unravel the whole thing” kind of mystery, and making my own poor, catching zipper made me I suppose suitably impressed at Kindaichi’s smooth, relatively elegant zipper.
This completes a queue of 5 in my backlog system, comprising the Kindaichi books in order after 本陣殺人事件 up to this one (which I specifically wanted to get to): 獄門島, 夜歩く, 八つ墓村, 死仮面, and 犬神家の一族. Of those, 獄門島 is still definitely my favorite, for the atmosphere, and since I was still new enough to reading that there was a sense of discovery and freshness still. 八つ墓村 is really good too (although it sorta veers away from mystery into adventure), and 犬神家の一族 feels like “classic” in the sense of representing the general type of stories these mysteries tell (and by being the most famous). I liked 夜歩く too but barely remember 死仮面. The one-two punch of 本陣 and 獄門島 right when I was most susceptible to getting sucked into them really put me over the moon for Yokomizo; now I would say in concluding the queue that’s come down to a more regular amount of appreciation, but I’d still be plenty game to read lots more from him (slowly, over time). I haven’t commissioned a new backlog queue though… I guess I’ll see what the club ends up doing. Or I did pick up the collection with the short story that got adapted into a Nobuhiko Obayashi movie…
I still haven’t gotten around to finishing the (seemingly extremely) famous Inugami movie adaptation. I do think I’ll get a kick out of it when I do though!
四十九日のお終いに
Asa Tanuma is far and away my personal favorite discovery from reading Harta, and that’s mainly because I encountered their work via two short stories I loved, and then recognized the name for a series announcement and loved that too! All over the course of some handful of months. So it’s really cool to have an Asa Tanuma shorts collection along with the first volume of いやはや熱海くん.
It’s got the two shorts I had read before (0ne of which fully readable in the digital preview!) as well as a handful I hadn’t.
It’s been quite a while (and a busy while) since I read through it, and I recall that it was somewhat difficult still to see past the ones I already knew to the new ones (I get the impression Tanuma is at the start of their career so the ones I’d seen were the most recent and the most polished), and Tanuma’s style can also make it difficult (in a mostly good way) to fully track exactly what to concretely take away from scenes, both because stories tend to revolve around conversations and ambiguous relationships, and because everyone speaks in realistic Kansai dialogue that usually isn’t exactly directly about the subject at hand. Which is to say that I don’t remember a lot of specifics now, but when it works it really works for me!
The title story is definitely the most polished and complete as a standalone interesting thing alongside the two stories I was familiar with, and it centers on a guy at a bit of a crossroads in his life following his father’s death, and his relationship with a childhood friend. It’s good! And definitely shows a direct connection into stuff the author’s put into いやはや熱海くん (and not just that the main character looks a lot like Atami-kun).
The other new-to-me story I remember standing out is one that centers heavily on the station-specific door jingles that play on the Osaka Loop Line, especially because of how evocative that made the sense of place. I remember it being fun to put on a youtube video and follow along with the characters for a bit…
Please buy several copies of this one – I want this author to be successful! 
BANANA FISH (3-11) and ANOTHER STORY
The bulk of Banana Fish didn’t end up following the format I thought it would at the end of volume 2… I was picturing an Ash and Eiji on the road type of thing but it went in more of a direct action route including sequences with Ash running around with a machine gun, and pretty much an extended slow escalation of the war with Dino on a basically evenish playing field. I’m not sure that I can say that I wouldn’ta enjoyed the comic I had in my head better, but hey. I would also say that mystery angle doesn’t end up nearly as much of a thing as I thought it would be to start with – Banana Fish being a psychoactive drug that controls people is kind of… the only thing it could ever have been? And it just is that, and plans to use it never really end up much more developed than like, “they’ll be able to use it to do assassinations and stuff.” It goes to show though that it was always more about Banana Fish as the culmination of the control/domination/abuse themes moreso than it was about the machinations and mystery behind it.
In the later volumes I stopped taking notes and was reading the volumes very quickly, as something to do while away at the coast, but… moreso with a feeling of getting through it than a feeling of rapt attention though. I’d say the last handful of volumes can definitely be a bit of a grind to get through the end. What feels like lots and lots of iterations on the same kind of things Eiji worrying for Ash; Ash telling Eiji to leave; Dino getting control over Ash in someway; Ash breaking out while people in parallel try to break him out, etc. The series is very very caught up with surely the most famous character, Ash Lynx, and he’s a completely over the top personification of a lot of things the book is interested in and also pretty much fetishizes – abuse, troubled but genius youth, NY crime, vulnerability-based homoeroticism etc. and in the end I’m still not sure exactly how I feel about how it handles those things, and I kinda wish it had ended up a more grounded story about them instead of whole-heartedly being super duper extra about all of those elements. But I suppose that’s why it ended up a genre classic – it’s a total slamdunk touchstone to draw on if you want to explore those archetypes, because it is so focused on them.
I suppose the “Eiji and Ash don’t get together” ending was inevitable… at least at the time anyway. Maybe it’s because of absorbing more recent media expectations about that kind of thing, or maybe since I was kind of tired of reading Banana Fish by the end and wasn’t approaching their relationship as a teenage girl super duper overcome with the tragedy of the whole situation, but I found myself more leaning towards quietly saying “boo” and moving on than being moved. I thought the coda written some years later, Another Story, was quite good and interesting (I don’t remember if Another Story is the name of the important story in that volume too, or just the volume – it has a bunch of miscellaneous side story tidbits included as well).
An interesting character introduced early on in this chunk of volumes that I haven’t talked about is ユーシス, who dresses in female clothes but identifies as male and is cast as sort of like, a shadow version of Ash who suffered similar abuse but turns it to bitterness I guess, and anyway they’re interesting and worth mentioning but I don’t know what specifically to say.
It’s funny – I remember reading an amazon review from a Japanese reader complaining that the afterword at the back of a volume spoiled the ending of the series, and so I avoided them and only read them after finishing the whole thing, and boy yeah! They did not care about organizing those in a way where they wouldn’t talk about stuff to come. Even the one for the last numbered volume which I read right after I finished it, since I figured what else is there to spoil at that point?, discussed and quoted a scene that’s in the later story in the Another Story volume. Go figure! There’s a nice general one I think (if I remember right) in the first volume by Ryuichi Sakamoto (RIP) though I believe, which is neat.
YAWARA! （1-3）
I started reading this here and there as a breezy pleasant series to work through, since it happens to be next in the first queue in my backlog system (so it gets a bit of boosted cachet despite not yet being ordained by fate as the next thing).
It’s fun! It’s an 80s Naoki Urasawa series about a JK who is ridiculously good at judo but doesn’t wanna do judo. It’d be perfect for anyone around, say, level 43 of Wanikani, since the protagonist Yawara is a walking mnemonic for a particular kanji… (get it? She was raised to be amazing at 柔道 so her name is 柔).
The people in Yawara’s life (like her grandpa) can be pretty frustrating in their intense unwillingness to not take no for an answer on the whole judo thing, so if you’re sensitive to that I could for sure see it coming across as more annoying than fun. And it’s also a series that’s pretty into upskirts etc. of Yawara, a teenager (indeed the plot begins from one). But I think what really makes the series worthwhile for me is the art – Naoki Urasawa’s career obviously speaks for itself, but I’ve mainly read grimmer, later works from him. And something about his style (already ridiculously polished in 1986), + a lighthearted 80s pop sense of fun just screams endearing to me. Especially the sections with a little bit of color at the start of the volumes (I picked up a used set from mandarake at some point). It’s easy to buy into the drama and comedy centering around whether or not Yawara will get a chance to shine in judo when the art is very clearly up to the task of making that moment shine like the other characters know it will, when I assume it eventually does happen.
天冥の標 I メニー・メニー・シープ
This one ended up on a sci-fi-focused queue in my backlog system and randomized to the top and then randomized to be selected as the next book to read, despite my knowing absolutely nothing about it, and I think just ending up with it based on a mention in the extensive reading thread that I didn’t even read carefully since I just thought it looked interesting and that was enough (In retrospect, now doublechecking, I hadn’t even remembered that they were very positive comments that tipped me off to it, so I didn’t even know if Naphthalene had liked it or not going in).
So it was an interesting edge case of the system to end up with this book as the next thing to read – and it being a clearly investment-demanding start of a sprawling sci-fi story – but not especially having a direct reason to push through it outside of that framework. It ended up being picked through occasionally in the background for a while while I cleaned up book club picks and things like that at the end of the last year, and then I only really got going with it more recently this year, and once I hit the 下 volume, I really turned the dial up and churned through a huge portion of it in a weekend, through to the end.
I’m glad I picked up the note-taking habit from mystery novels! Or I can’t imagine I would have made any progress in that initial slow period when it was in the background of other things. There sure are a lot of katakana terms to keep track of, and throughout I felt that the biggest strength of the book is that I don’t quite know anything like it (in contrast to say, Legend of Galactic Heroes, which is plenty complex in its own right but is certainly reminiscent of the setting of Gundam) – meaning it would be very difficult to feel grounded without those notes or making more of a real push from the start.
As an example of how little I knew going in and how surprising it was to get started, I had 100% assumed the title was meant to be “Many Many Ship” before the world-building made it clear I’d overlooked the ー and it’s Many Many SHEEP, referring to the (rather odd) name given to the setting of a struggling space colony and the livestock that form the backbone of the colonists’ livelihood, and it’s not in anyway the battle-heavy space opera I had assumed from the cover.
But I think that surprise is a good thing! And fun! The setting and world-building are definitely interesting, and again – I like a lot that I never could assume what the author would introduce next.
I did feel though that the biggest drawback on the other hand, is that I never quite was 100% on board for any one particular element. Like – there’s tons of stuff in here: mysterious plagues, immortal companion robots, rebellion against restrictive regime, various alien lifeforms, electric mermen, etc. and I admired the willingness to put a jumble of elements in there without feeling the need to make the point and thrust of it all obvious from the get-go… but no one thing sold the book for me completely. I was thinking about my nearest comparison point, and I think it’s A Fire Upon the Deep, because that’s a sci-fi novel in a similarish ballpark with a striking original setting and lots of elements thrown in, but there the hook about consciousness, and the space Usenet and all that jazz totally reeled me in. Here I felt more… intrigued, the whole way through. Which is a little bit of a not ideal place to be for a big beefy novel that requires so much investment to work through and starts a big long series of presumably similar novels. (Of big general plot threads the closest thing probably to fully hooking me was probably エランカ and the capital setting, but she ended up involved in the Lovers storyline which I was a bit lukewarm to while contrastly I feel like being kind of cold on イサリ is the biggest single reason I wasn’t fully hooked as things developed)
I think though it’s a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – taken on their own, some of the individual threads feel slightly underdeveloped or not hugely interesting to me, but by the very end of this first book… I gotta admit I did want to see where things would go. The feeling of all these pieces being in play on this weird, troubled colony out there in space is one I do feel endeared to, and although things certainly happened in the ending, it does feel like the mystery of that strange setting is only just getting started in certain ways.
… So the prospect of continuing it is… daunting. But positive! I think I probably will someday, and even put it in a backlog queue. I’d be curious if I ever really have endurance for the whole run though – I kinda picture the likeliest outcome being reading the second volume, and if I still feel the same way of only sorta being on board instead of all the way there, I imagine that may well be when I part. But hey who knows. I think (I hope?) I scrawled a brief summary of what all had happened in the ending in my notes (which I otherwise fell off of taking in the second half) for whenever I do continue with it, anyhow.
Definitely cool to experience something with so few preconceptions!
九国のジュウシ （2-3）
This is a belated Harta catch-up – belated both because the series long ago finished in the magazine (but it was running when I started reading the magazine so I still wanted to satisfy my curiosity) and belated because I read the first volume ages ago with intent to finish these last two soon.
Anyway, it’s pretty neat! I feel like this one suffers from the same thing one of my short-lived favorites, 希釈王, also did: it doesn’t feel very… marketable? Like the tone is more strange than appealing in any one specific way. It’s very violent, pretty comedic but mainly drama? Historical but over the top in certain ways… oddly earnest? But again very violent, in an oddly flippant way.
Anyway, it’s interesting! I suppose the approach to violence is in a way underlining the time period – the story is about Kyushu in the Sengoku period and culminates in the real life Siege of Iwaya Castle. Kind of like Vinland Saga, there’s a presumably fictional (slash heavily heavily exaggerated) boy who’s amazing at murdering people running around, but I feel like he makes oddly less impact than you think he might.
I dunno, I like it! I think if you’re interested in Sengoku-period Kyushu, it’d definitely be one to check out as a curiosity.
鋼の錬金術師 （2-4）
I’ve made slight in-roads into FullMetal Alchemist in both English and Japanese before, but now it’s come up as the next ordained manga in my backlog system and wouldn’t you know it but this time I feel a lot more ready to jump into it for some reason. Maybe now my reading skills are fully equipped for the comedy asides and stuff to land easily? Or maybe it’s just happenstance, I don’t know. But I think I’m going to try to read right through it and I think I’ll enjoy it a lot.
It’s sure one to go for a quick but effective heartstrings-pull so far (I’m always surprised to remember how early on the famous dog thing is, and there’s already been the brothers making up and that guy who wouldn’t shut up about how much he loved his family getting killed) and the action and gags are crisp and effective. And I gotta appreciate a mangaka who puts in a prodigious amount of bonus pages (and assistant thankings).
プ女と野獣 （1-2)
I bought these aaaaaaaaages pretty much purely because it involves pro wrestling – I think I could barely read the title much less the summary at that point.
These are very easy to read and sort of pleasant but the elephant in the room is that the plot is about an underage girl getting involved with a professional wrestler. And uhhhh let’s just say that that is too fraught subject matter for me to really at all enjoy.
The character archetype of the プ女子 is an interesting phenomenon to observe from afar as an English-speaking pro wrestling fan, since I get the impression it’s like, well, 腐女子and BL adjacent, and presented (and even promoted by wrestling promotions) as a sort of harmless, mundane thing of women wanting to watch attractive men be emotionally and physically intimate with each other. And that does feel a lot more positive than English-speaking pro wrestling spheres where the only stock character archetype for a female fan (I’m thinking of “ring rat”) is incredibly and directly misogynistic. But it’s definitely hard to imagine that there isn’t or couldn’t be at least a little bit of misogynistic crossover there with the two concepts, and at the very least applying the same kind of trope and fandom targeted at fictional BL characters to (semi-)real performers in pro wrestling seems like it could be a wresipe for disaster. So I don’t know what exactly to feel about it, but it’s interesting.
And so anyway – in some ways this series (clearly written by a female pro wrestling fan – she talks about Misawa and EVIL in the author notes) is interesting as that kind of cultural artifact, like it’s interesting and notable that this could in the first place be presented as a generally innocuous fantasy for a girl to have (and to be clear I 100% do not put the same standards to romantic fantasy stories that I would to a real relationship and so I’m absolutely not saying the book itself is inherently unethical in the way that the power dynamic portrayed probably would be in real life).
But oof, just too many wrestlers in real life ousted from the industry for sex scandals. Too many 80s (and 90s and 00s) anecdotes way too casually recounted. Even the tamest sweetest relationship ever that the book tries to get across is just too close to extremely sensitive ground.
It looks like there’s just one more volume [small]published right before Speaking Out made a big splash… hmmmmm I wonder if it’s a coincidence there weren’t more…[/small] so slightly morbid curiosity might take the better of me at some point (it really is extremely easy and quick to read language-wise, and I do feel bad that these review notes are so dark when the tone of the book itself is earnest and sweet) but…
Interestingly, this is the third manga I’ve come across that’s a romance with an otherwise uncomfortably large age gap between a very young girl and a much older man told from the female POV by a (I think) woman author. I guess I’m not familiar enough with romance tropes in either English or Japanese to know if that’s like, a super established thing. But I guess this line is just me mentioning that it seems like it’s more of a thing than I would have assumed it would be. I’ve probably been unduly skeeved out by them because of that - I suppose on reflection “it would be cool to have a romance with a mature older guy - but like, in a foundationally benign way” is a pretty normal fantasy to have or want to depict all things considered, it’s just not one that had occurred to me, so I found it very confusing to know what to do with these series.
ハルタ １０３号
I fell a month behind! I finished this (April’s), a little after the May issue had already come out.
ナッちゃんはテンションで水深が変わる by 中原ふみ ended this issue, with a tankoban release said to be announced at a later date.
I liked this series! It’s a chill slice of life about a JK who psychically manifests marine life around her that reflect her emotions, for no particular reason. I wouldn’t have minded it being a relaxing interlude between more dramatic series for a much longer time.
It’s definitely because I was so busy but uhhh to be honest my memory of the 新連載 this issue is there was one I don’t remember at all, and “that Van Gogh one” started up again after previously ending.
I honestly might go back and try to reread that 新連載 I forgot since looking at the pages isn’t sparking memories…
An interesting announcement is that they launched a “Harta Alternative” website:
It looks like it’s (so far) three free series started to publish for the first time on the website, with 1 chapter of one of them releasing every Monday or so (so a pretty slow rate overall, but individually roughly approximating the rate they would get new chapters in the magazine).
I read the 4 chapters released so far, and I liked them a lot actually!
J ⇔ M is by 大武政夫, most famous for ヒナまつり (which I still haven’t read), and it’s about a hard-boiled hitman and an elementary school girl getting freaky friday’d, and I feel like I wouldn’t like it from that description but it’s strangely charming - there isn’t very much gender based comedy really at all, and they both take it more or less in stride, with the comedy coming instead from the little girl being better at hard-boiled patter than the hitman ever was, and the hitman having to deal with the physical challenges of murdering people in a different way.
Some interesting pop culture references too like this dango song.
The other two only have one chapter out so it’s a little harder to judge them, but
梅花の想ひ人 日本昔噺選集 by おく seems like it will be a lush telling of some interesting folk tales, and the stories being standalone seems like it’ll suit this format real well.
And 贋 by 黒川裕美 seems to be about a horror illustrator turning to forgery as a path to commercial success.
Can’t knock free manga!
