Short Takes: Library Wars, Ooku: The Inner Chambers, and Your & My Secret

A unseasonably cold, rainy weekend proved just what I needed to catch up on my reading; not only did I tackle a big part of my review pile, I also had a chance to flip through several recent purchases: bilingual editions of Doraemon and The Tale of Genji, Helen McCarthy’s The Art of Osamu Tezuka, and the long-anticipated Korea as Viewed by 12 Creators. I’ll post reviews of all these titles in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, I’m dedicating this week’s column to three continuing series: Library Wars, Ooku: The Inner Chamber, and Your & My Secret.

LIBRARY WARS: LOVE & WAR, VOL. 2

STORY & ART BY KIIRO YUMI • ORIGINAL CONCEPT BY KIRO ARIKAWA • VIZ • 200 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

I’m happy to report that the second volume of Library Wars is more compelling than the first. More happens, for one thing; the Media Betterment Committee stages a raid on the Kanto Library in an effort to confiscate books found in the possession of a teenage murderer. The raid raises a host of interesting ethical questions — can literature corrupt suggestible minds? should readers’ privacy be protected at all costs? does one’s reading habits reveal anything about one’s propensity for violence? — and creates a strange alliance between the Library Defense Forces and one of its avowed enemies, the Department of Education. Iku has more opportunities to opportunity to strut her stuff, for another: she rappels down the side of a building to prevent MBC thugs from capturing the “degenerate” titles in question, absolving the scornful Tezuka from performing the one task that unnerves him.

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Short Takes: Manga Hall of Shame Edition

I have a special fascination with bad manga. And when I say “bad manga,” I’m not talking about stories that are merely cliche or derivative of other, better series — for better or worse, manga is a popular medium, and popular media survive, in part, by giving audiences what they want, even if that means more of the same — I’m talking about stories so ineptly drawn, so spectacularly dumb, or so offensive that they make Happy Cafe look like Phoenix by comparison. To judge from the coverage of this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, I’m not alone in my connoisseurship of wretched books; among the most widely reported panels was The Best and Worst Manga of 2010, in which a group of seasoned reviewers singled out titles for praise and punishment. To kick off my Bad Manga Week, therefore, I thought it would be a fun exercise to look at three of the titles that made the worst-of list to see if they were truly suited for inclusion in The Manga Hall of Shame. The candidates: Orange Planet (Del Rey), a shojo farce starring one clueless girl and three hot guys; Red Hot Chili Samurai (Tokyopop), a comedy about a hero who favors spicy peppers over PowerBars whenever he needs an energy boost; and Togainu no Chi (Tokyopop), an action-thriller that proudly boasts its origins as a “ground-breaking bishonen game.”

ORANGE PLANET, VOL. 1

BY HARUKA FUKUSHIMA • DEL REY • 200 pp. • TEEN (13+)

Haruka Fukushima specializes in what I call “chastely dirty” manga for tween girls — that is, manga that places the heroine in compromising situations, teasing the audience with the prospect of a kiss or a grope that never quite materializes because the heroine is a good girl, thank you very much. In Orange Planet, Fukushima’s sex-phobic lead is Rui, a junior high student who lives by herself — she’s been an orphan since childhood — and pays for her apartment with a paper route. (That must be some paper route, considering she lives in a modern high-rise apartment and not, say, a cardboard box.) Rui is one corner of a highly contrived love square; the other three points are all standard shojo types, from the boy next door and the hot young teacher to the mystery man from the heroine’s past.

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Short Takes: Sarasah, Seiho Boys’ High School, and Time and Again

This week’s Short Takes column looks at three recent arrivals. The first, Sarasah (Yen Press), is a time-traveling adventure in which a lovelorn teen has a chance to repair her romantic karma; the second, Seiho Boys’ High School (VIZ), is a comedy about an all-boys’ school located on a remote island (feel free to make your own Alcatraz jokes); and the third, Time and Again (Yen Press), is a collection of ghosts stories set in ancient Korea. None were slam dunks, though two showed considerable improvement over their debut volumes. Read on for the scoop.

SARASAH, VOLS. 1-4

BY RYU RYANG • YEN PRESS • RATING: TEEN (13+)

The opening chapters of Sarasah reminded me of the pilot for Star Trek or Life on Mars — not because it has anything in common with either series plot-wise, but because both shows underwent dramatic transformations between their try-out episodes and their actual runs, with casting changes, tempo changes, and, in the case of Mars, a new setting. Sarasah‘s first chapter suggests an ill-conceived rom-com about a girl who’s so obsessed with the boy she likes that she stalks him, gives him unwanted gifts, and pays him embarrassing compliments. When JiHae orchestrates a birthday surprise for Seung-Hyu, he snaps, pushing her down a flight of stairs and killing her. Only JiHae doesn’t die; heaven’s gatekeepers offer her a chance to fix her romantic karma by going back to seventh-century Korea and figuring out how she alienated Seung-Hyu in a previous life. Once back in the Three Kingdoms period, Sarasah morphs from high school romance to historical drama, depositing JiHae in the middle of a plot to unseat Silla’s queen.

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Short Takes: Flower in a Storm and Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture

For those of you who’ve been following this weekly-ish feature, I have a programming note: I’ll be posting Short Takes on Monday from now on, and bumping The Shipping News to Tuesday. Regular reviews and features will follow throughout the week, with a linkblogging post on Fridays. Thanks for bearing with me while I experimented with various formats and schedules — I think I’ve finally found a formula that works.

On deck this week are the second installments of Flower in a Storm (VIZ), a shojo drama about a high school girl with superpowers and the billionaire who loves her, and Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture (Del Rey), a comedy about a college student with the ability to see bacteria, here rendered as cute, roly-poly critters with a hint of ‘tude. How do the latest installments stack up against their debut volumes? Read on for the scoop.

FLOWER IN A STORM, VOL. 2

BY SHIEYOSHI TAKAGI • VIZ • 196 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

The premise: Rika wants nothing more than to be a normal teenager with a normal dating life, but her super-strength and super-speed make blending in with her peers more difficult than she imagined. Only Ran, the heir to a multibillion-dollar corporation, seems up to the task: he’s adventurous, bold, and confident, and determined to make Rika his wife. If only Rika didn’t find him obnoxious and overbearing!

What I said about volume one: “What would a superhero comic for teen girls look like? Flower in a Storm offers one possible template, liberally mixing car chases, kidnappings, and assassination attempts with romantic drama. Rika has numerous opportunities to strut her stuff — leaping from a speeding convertible, subduing a gunman — but, in a nice touch, is reluctant to reveal her powers for fear of standing out in a crowd. Though Ran is a pure wish-fulfillment character — he’s handsome, rich, and brilliant — he’s an appealing one; like Tony Stark, Ran thinks big, plays hard, and travels in style, entering or exiting the story with an outrageous gesture or snappy line. At times, Flower cleaves too hard to shojo convention, with some tired, paint-by-number scenes… Shigeyoshi Takagi does better when she’s staging a fight or poking fun at her characters, as those scenes have genuine comic zest. Flower isn’t perfect by any means — stronger, more distinctive visuals would help — but it’s a nice bit of escapism for female readers who like the idea of superhero comics in principle, but prefer heroines whose everyday struggles more closely resemble their own.”

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A Drunken Dream and Other Stories

The 1970s marked a turning point in the development of shojo manga, as the first time in the medium’s history that a significant number of women were working in the field. These “founding mothers” weren’t the first female manga artists; Machiko Hasegawa was an early pioneer with Sazae-san,^[1] a comic strip that first appeared in her hometown newspaper in 1946, followed in the 1950s by such artists as Masako Watanabe, who debuted in 1952 with Suama-chan, Hideko Mizuno, who debuted in 1956 with Akakke Pony (Red-Haired Pony),^[2] and Miyako Maki, who debuted in 1957 with Hahakoi Waltz (Mother’s Love Waltz). Beginning in the mid-1960s and continuing throughout the 1970s, more female creators entered the profession, thus beginning the quiet transformation of shojo manga from sentimental stories for very young readers to a vibrant medium that spoke directly to the concerns and desires of teenage girls.

Several figures played an important role in affecting this transformation. One was Osamu Tezuka, whose Princess Knight (1954)^[3] is often erroneously described as “the first shojo manga.” (Shojo manga, in fact, dates to the beginning of the twentieth century, when magazines such as Shojo Sekai, or Girls’ World, featured comics alongside stories, articles, and illustrations.) An affectionate pastiche of Walt Disney, Zorro, and Takarazuka plays, Tezuka’s gender-bending story focused on a princess with two hearts — one female, one male — who becomes a masked crusader to save her kingdom from falling into the hands of a wicked nobleman. However conventional the ending seems now — Princess Sapphire eventually marries the prince of her dreams and hangs up her sword — the story was a rare example of a long-form adventure for girls; well into the 1950s, most shojo manga featured plotlines reminiscent of Victorian children’s literature, filled with young, imperiled heroines buffeted by fate until happily reunited with their families.

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The Name of the Flower, Vols. 1-4

Given the sheer number of nineteenth-century Brit-lit tropes that appear in The Name of the Flower — neglected gardens, orphans struck dumb by tragedy, brooding male guardians — one might reasonably conclude that Ken Saito was paying homage to Charlotte Brontë and Frances Hodgson Burnett with her story about a fragile young woman who falls in love with an older novelist. And while that manga would undoubtedly be awesome — think of the costumes! — The Name of the Flower is, in fact, far more nuanced and restrained than its surface details might suggest.

The story starts from an old-as-the-hills premise: the orphan who grows up to marry — or, in this case, pine for — her guardian. In The Name of the Flower, the orphan role is fulfilled by Chouko, who, at the age of sixteen, lost her parents in a car accident. Overwhelmed by grief, Chouko stopped speaking or showing emotion until a distant relative took her into his home, admonished her for being silent, and suggested that she revive the house’s lifeless garden. Flash forward two years, and Chouko has emerged from her shell, still quiet but full of calm purpose and warm feelings for Kei, her guardian. Kei, however, is a troubled soul, a successful novelist who achieved notoriety for a string of nihilistic books written while he was in his early twenties. His eccentric garb (he wears a yukata just about everywhere) and brusque demeanor suggest a man in full flight from the outside world — or at least some painful memories.

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