***GOLDENBIRD***

Ever since my March visit to Japan, I nervously have been waiting for my manga shopping to arrive per fune, that is, ship mail. Today, the first package of two arrived! I made a list of the 6,5 kilogrammes of solid entertainment that arrived, with short reviews.

Anno Moyoco: Sakuran Vol. 1
- This manga kicks Memoirs of a Geisha’s butt. Sakuran is the story about an oiran, a high-class prostitute. The geisha were originally musicians accompanying the show; the oiran were the true stars of the floating world. The main character is no lotus blossom; she is a tough, determined, violent woman with a hard childhood behind her, and an insecure future. I like the intensely black pupils of Anno’s characters, they reflect raw emotion. Also, she draws really handsome yet realistic-looking men (and some pretty ugly ones!). The volume has a wraparound cover with images from Sakuran the Movie - much more saccharine-sweet than the original manga, but it would still kick Memoir butt, because Shiina Ringo is the music director!

Asami Yuko: Wild Half vol. 6, 8
- I already own a few volumes of this funny & cute furrylover manga. Okay okay, maybe not literally “furrylover”, but ya gotta keep the search engines running. But the main character is a teenage boy whose best friend and pet is a huge wolfdog that transforms to a tall, slightly werewolfish guy with ponytail and pointy ears. Also, the lower half of his body is completely covered in black fur. He’s wuffly, go see for yourself at this fansite! Ahem… anyway, they get into all kinds of pet-related predicaments due to Taketo the human’s kind heart and Salsa the dogman’s private investigator instincts. Among their friends is Kaoru the vet, Maria the animal lover (she has a rental pet shop and lives together with all the animals), other “WildHalfs” such as Mirei the catgirl (naturally), Taketo’s dog-phobic and overprotective policeman brother, a nutty parrot called Polynesia… as often in manga, the lively character interaction is enough to keep one reading, even if one doesn’t understand everything of the dialogue…

Ikeda Riyoko: Eroica Vol. 1
- The creator of Berubara loves classical music, no wonder she chose Beethoven’s “Eroica” as the title for her bio-manga about Napoleon Bonaparte. The artwork looks a bit sloppy and half-hearted at times, but as soon as Joséphine (and you can tell from page one that she’s a bad girl) steps into the picture, it’s good old Ikeda-sensei in full bloom again. Empire dresses, jewellery, glistening black curls, enchanté!

Kihara Toshie: A~ra wagadono!
- The pretty cover with sakura leaves over a boy and girl in obvious late Meiji-early Taisho costumes in a 1970’s shojo style made this book a must-buy. I do judge a book by its cover, and I’m usually rewarded! This is a slapstick romance, where girls and boys clash in a ‘modern’ co-ed high school. (I’m just guessing…) There is a lot of romantic intrigue, quite a bit of gender-bending and some teenage angst when adults Just Don’t Understand. But mostly the adults stay behind the scenes and the kids take care of the drama, much like Peanuts. Cliché checklist: Perky and bubbly heroine, check. Stubborn, yet deeply caring, kendo-training hero. Blond, blue-eyed, blatantly bisexual foreigner. Big sister character who falls in love with the tragic poet with TBC. Tiny, wide-eyed crybaby (male). Bitchy princess with blonde banana curls. Huge, incredibly hairy guy who is devoted to the bitchy princess. Did I miss someone…?

Kihara Toshie: Nue - Vol. 4
- Wha!! Not Kihara-sensei again… Oh yes, and this time it’s an erotic drama set in the Edo period. The nue is a mythical beast, a kind of chimera, which is a living bad omen. The main character, a pretty boy who often dresses like a girl to trick lecherous men out of their pocket money, resembles the nue in that he appears to be bad news for everyone whom he meets. His chivalrous manners attract women, too. The other main character is a strikingly handsome samurai who is unsure if he can trust the nue boy’s love. Is it just an act? Again, I’m only guessing the plot ^_^

Kihara Toshie: Oojisama ga ii no!
Same edition as the book above, this manga is a deliciously 1970’s shojo fantasy about pretty princes in Oriental lands (although they should be properly called Occidental, from the Japanese perspective). A Japanese medieval warrior is kidnapped by a Persian prince to the world of the Arabian Nights. Marvellous costumes and mysterious magical tricks abound (the nicest scene must be a rain of cherries above the domes and minarets of the Persian capital). There is so much going on in every page, and the Tezuka roots are still visible in the tight layouts and occasional yet heavy-handed slapstick. Call me old-fashioned, but I like it.

Kihara Toshie: Suishou to biroudo (Crystal & Velvet)
- The subtitle of this late 1990’s lady-comic is “French Romantic Mystery”. The main characters, Mademoiselle Belle and Monsieur Camille, look like the usual shojo clichés of perky and bubbly blonde getting into trouble (reader identification object anyone?) and tall, dark & dangerously handsome man who breaks all the rules but not her heart. Aww. (They get it on already on page 24, which is nice.) I bought it because I thought it was a period piece, but I can always file it under ethnic stereotypes (warning: this comic contains knife-fighting, flamenco-dancing gypsies). It’s interesting to see how Kihara’s style developed since the 1970’s.

Matsumoto Leiji: Space Pirate Captain Herlock Vol. 1-3
- Yeah, that’s his real name, get used to it. Haven’t opened the plastic yet; found these for the ridiculous price of 157 yen (about 9 SEK, or 1 Euro) each in a used-book store in central Nara. It’s a good thing for my bookshelves that I don’t live in Japan…

Matsumoto Leiji: Sennen joo (Millennium Queen) Vol. 1
- The German dub of Millennium Queen (Die Königin der tausend Jahre) was the first anime series I ever followed regularly, the first anime that I have clear memories of. In a hotel bedroom, during holiday travels with my family, I remember watching one episode on Sky Channel, where the main character’s father dies in a hospital. It was scary - Swedish cartoons didn’t show that kind of things! Hajime, the innocent boy hero who looks a lot like other boy heroes in Matsumoto’s works, finds himself entangled in a strange web of intergalactic intrigue before even leaving his home neighborhood in suburban Tokyo. The manga is very different from the anime - Hajime’s home explodes already on page 2!

Miyauchi Saya: Gottsu sukkiyanen <3
- The title means “I love it lots!” in Osaka dialect. And yes, a heart symbol is supposed to be there in the end of the phrase. It’s just a high school girl comedy with some local colour thrown in - the Osaka tower, takoyaki munching, dialect… I bought it because Osaka-ben sounds cool and fun, and I guess that part of Japan could be home for me in a way some day ^_^

Mizuki Shigeru: Biography of Hitler
- One of the grand old men of manga, and a WW2 veteran. I have to open this wrapping very soon… Mizuki-sensei is more famous for his ghost stories, as his homepage shows, but dealing with the horrors of the war has also been a recurring theme in his work. In a country where the war is often either ignored or whitewashed, Mizuki’s work is extremely important.

Murakami Motoka: Merodorama (Melodrame) Vol. I & II
- Paris, 1925. At a fancy ball, young Tsuzuki Shintarou is mistaken for a waiter by an arrogant upper-class Frenchman whose aspiring fashion designer daughter becomes smitten with the handsome Japanese student. Dancing, drinking, dueling and general romantic jazz age mayhem ensues. The comic includes guest appearances by Foujita, Picasso, Coco Chanel, Josephine Baker and more. I wasn’t 100% convinced by this story - Tsuzuki is very cute and dapper, but it gets a bit tedious when he constantly has to use his amazing judo skills against big, hairy racist Western men (come on, the French upper-class was racist in a cultured and verbal way, not bitterly violent like low-class American thugs during the Yellow Peril period… and the Japanese - like African-Americans - were actually popular ‘exotics’, unlike Arabs and Berbers, for example). Also stereotypical but much more fun was the depiction of European women lusting after attractive Japanese men, juxtaposing images of shunga and bullfighting… Still, the strange, cosmic end chapter where the main couple unites post-mortem gave me goose bumps.

Saito Chiho: Buronzu no tenshi (Bronze Angel) Vol. 3
I have already volume 1 (where is 2??) of this historical romance set in early 1800’s Russia. “The Bronze Angel” is of course national poet Alexander Pushkin himself, whose East African ancestry (his maternal grandfather was brought as a slave at Peter the Great’s court, was freed and eventually became a prominent official) is slightly exaggerated in order to depict him with dark skin (Saito-sensei seems to have a thing for dark skin, many of her famous works feature dark-hued persons in leading roles; Revolutionary Girl Utena doesn’t even have any exotic explanation for the skin colour of some of its characters, which is refreshing). Anyway, Pushkin is of course dangerously handsome, rebellious, artistic and is determined to catch the beautiful but poor noblewoman Natalia Goncharova. Their real-life love story was both happily fulfilled and ended in tragedy, a perfect set-up for a multivolume shojo manga. As Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet, Saito lets the readers know from the very beginning that the ending will be sad. Interesting cultural note: I wonder if this has been translated to Russian - if not, it should be, because Russians of all ages love their Pushkin to death.

Sato Daisuke & Itoh Yu: Koukoku no Shugousha Vol. 1
- Mindblowing. This manga is based on a novel, but the art is so strong that I couldn’t imagine reading it without these images. It’s a war story, but it is set in an alternative past with more than a touch of the fantastic: a small island country that is not Japan is fighting a winter war against a vast empire that is not Russia, armed with saber tigers and monks with necromantic abilities. Everybody is losing, the superiors are unworthy, the enemies are tall sexy blonde cuirassiers, “we” are 800 against 40,000 of “them”, and the main character is a total murderous psychopath with tiny, cold pupils in huge, gloomy eyes. If translated to Finnish, this would sell like hot cakes. Reminds me of Timo Rautiainen & Trio Niskalaukaus’ “Lumessakahlaajat” (”Wading in the Snow”). Watch the video at your own peril. It lacks saber tigers, badly.

Watanabe Taeko: Kaze Hikaru Vol. 1-3
- In the Bakumatsu period, the Shogun’s Kyoto could only depend on one force for its protection against rebels and insurgents: the Shinsengumi. This special police force is legendary in Japan, and countless manga versions of their collective and individual fates have been produced. Kaze Hikaru takes the classic plotline of a plucky girl heroine, dressed like a boy in order to avenge her murdered family, infiltrating the Shinsengumi and staying “under cover” in spite of the constant erotic attention that a fresh face attracts in an all-male environment - (at least in many women’s fantasies!). Watanabe’s art is really cute and I love the detailed chommage hairstyles on the more mature men (Saitou-sama!).

Yamato Waki: Haikara-san ga toru Vol. 6
- A very Taisho-romantic shojo title that starts out as a slapstick-romance in mid-70’s style. I have a tidbit of the earliest episodes in Italian, and it’s hilarious. Benio, the perky & bubbly heroine, breaks all the rules like a true mo-ga, getting drunk on sake, talking back to her teachers, fighting with her half-German ridiculously handsome military cadet would-be fiance, making friends with a huge hairy yakuza, chasing away lecherous ogresses from her widower dad etc. All very innocent and prettily drawn with lots of flowers, of course. This is the second-to-last volume, and Yamato’s style is already settling down, sadly (see below for a 1980’s take on it).

Yamato Waki: Yokohama Monogatari Vol. 1
- Yet another Meiji/Taisho romance about two girls from different social classes and their growing friendship. Of course, there’s also the chivalrous & handsome love interest (who may or may not be of foreign origin, at least he leaves on a ship in the end, symbolizing the girls’ dream of travels and adventure) that tests their loyalty to each other. It’s a nice manga but I just can’t seem to concentrate on it. Yamato’s art style is less interesting here. (But this Italian fansite is nice!)

Yasuhiko Yoshikazu: Nijiiro no Trotsky (Rainbow-coloured Trotsky) Vol. 2
- Volume 1 is still on its way somewhere on the ocean. This historical manga is set in Japanese-controlled Manchuria in the Taisho/Showa period, before WW2. At a boy’s military school, a boy is defiantly planning his own way in life. His earliest memories are violent and bloody; his family is murdered, and he sees Trotsky looming in the door of their hut - what has he seen, a hallucination? He hates the Japanese and their superior attitude towards his Mongol origins. There is military intrigue and romantic attraction in the shape of a pretty singer in a qipao. Yasuhiko-sensei’s brushwork is masterful, but I personally don’t like the faces of his youthful heroes. His “ugly” characters are much more interesting. I also like to spot famous actors in the “cast” of his comics - in Joan, a Jean Reno-lookalike played the heroine’s faithful Baldrick! Check out this website about his work.

Yukimura Makoto: Vinland Saga Vol. 1
- What Scandinavian school kid doesn’t know about Leifr Eiríksson “discovering” America (really just the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, and they were chased away by the Native Americans anyway) 500 years before Columbus? Yukimura provides a fresh look, I hope (I haven’t opened the plastic wrapping yet, fie on me!).

That’s it for this time. I’ll add some scans (if I have the time).

June 5th, 2007 | Category: art, nippon | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL