Monthly Archives: December 2010

Yotsuba&! Volume 9

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By Kiyohiko Azuma. Released in Japan by ASCII Media Works, serialization ongoing in the magazine Dengeki Daioh. Released in North America by Yen Press.

It’s always harder for me to review slice-of-life mangas, as there’s less obvious things to draw on for discussion. I can’t really talk about the latest plot developments – Yotsuba getting a teddy bear is the closest we get to forward movement. Likewise, the characters are exactly the same as they’ve been, because that’s what the audience wants. No one wants to see the trauma of the Ayases being trapped in a fire, or seeing Yotsuba’s dad get shot in a botched armed robbery. Instead, we want yakiniku and balloons.

There are several awesome things about this volume, though, and not just in a ‘wow, this is cute’ way. Some of the characters have developed, Yanda being among the most obvious. Having been introduced as the jerkass who fights with Yotsuba, he’s now allowed to keep those traits while letting them be toned down so that he can interact better with the others. He fits in well with everyone at the yakiniku dinner, and we no longer wonder why on Earth Koiwai and Jumbo let him hang out with them. He’s the vaguely annoying friend who’s still a good friend – we all have those.

Azuma is also very good at subtleties. Fuuka doesn’t get much to do this volume, as she’s meant to be studying for midterms. This means that she can’t go with everyone else to look at the hot air balloons. However, we don’t see her getting upset about it – that would be out of character. Instead, we have a delightfully quiet bit of passive-agressiveness, as she notes blandly that they’re only hot-air balloons, and that they just float in the air. This is done in the background while the other characters are getting excited about the trip, and just made me laugh. Poor Fuuka, once again the unloved one of Yotsuba.

The highlights of the volume are definitely the teddy bear buying and the Balloon Fair, though. Yotsuba’s search for a teddy bear is adorable, and I loved how the bear she eventually chooses is posed with one arm up – we can immediately see why she picked him out of the other identical bears, he’s waving to her! Also, he talks! Though Yotsuba hasn’t yet quite worked out how to MAKE him talk… As for the balloon fair, not only do we get to see the teddy bear be even more awesome, but we get two beautiful Asagi moments – Koiwai trying to swing her around like he did Yotsuba, and failing as Asagi is quite a bit bigger; and Koiwai’s attempts to impress everyone with the bamboo dragonfly, quickly undermined by Torako being so much better at it. The panel showing an angry, frustrated Koiwai bent over while Asagi towers above him, noting Torako’s flies much farther, is not only funny but marvelously laid out – you really get the sense of Asagi’s brutal teasing.

In short, there’s a lot more to offer here than just Yotsuba being cute, although she certainly is. Come for the adorable, but stay for the sight of a manga author in terrific command of all his artistic powers, showing us what he can do to move and amuse us.

Toriko Volume 3

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By Mitsutoshi Shimabukuro. Released in Japan by Shueisha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Weekly Shonen Jump. Released in North America by Viz.

In re-reading my review of the 2nd volume of Toriko, I seemed to be rather grumpy about it, feeling that it had lost a lot of the qualities I liked in the first one. This 3rd volume seems to correct that balance a bit – Toriko still seems to be a hammy jerk, but we see more of the sharp mind behind it, and his defense of a mother wolf and her newborn shows his kinder side.

One thing I liked a great deal is how this manga deals with Komatsu, its normal character. Like a lot of Jump manga, it sometimes seems like he’s there to stand at the side of every battle and shout obvious commentary (see Beauty from Bobobo for the prime example). But this book reminds you that while Komatsu may be a complete weakling when it comes to capturing insanely dangerous food, he’s not called a master chef for no reason – put carving knives in his hands, and he’s a genius. He, rather than Toriko or Coco, is the one who saves the day and gets them their dish of puffer whale. More to the point, he *is* getting braver, if not stronger – when an entire arena flees from danger, Komatsu is asked why he’s not running, and he notes that after traveling with Toriko this just seems normal to him now.

I also like the way the manga handles the animals we see. They’re all super-special gene-crossed animal hybrids, but we have yet to find any cute talking rabbits or ferrets here. These are psychotically dangerous beasts, and they know it. And Shimabukuro’s art shows us this, as without any need for dialogue he shows us the animals’ smug ego, and their terror when meeting a fiercer predator. The shot of the newborn wolf on the 2nd to last page here is heartbreaking, and it’s great how well that comes across.

That said, I wasn’t especially pleased at seeing a fighting tournament when we’ve only got to Volume 3. Even if it was just animals fighting each other. It’s become such a cliche of Shonen Jump series that I had hoped that the series could have avoided it and gone on another couple of epic quests – especially as we even get one set up here, with the GT Robot’s devastation, but it’s handled rather obliquely. And, of course, much as I admired Komatsu’s development, this is at heart a bunch of muscular guys standing around going ‘grah!’. Toriko is about the fights and the insane animals, but lacks a true heart as of yet.

Still, it has intrigued me enough to get me to pick up the next volume. It even introduced a female character! …who’s a total cliche. Sigh. Well, if you license a Jump series, you have to be prepared to get what is basically a Jump series. Toriko will not be breaking any rules or setting new boundaries. But it’s pretty fun, especially for young teenage boys. And it’s a huge hit in Japan, being one of the two series in 2008 to really take off (Bakuman being the other). It’s even getting an anime this April. So definitely see if it’s your cup of tea.

License Request (sort of) Day: Soap Girl Moko, Vols. 1 & 2

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By Naruo Kusugawa. Released originally in Japan by Akita Shoten, serialized in the magazine Young Champion. Rights now owned by (and reprint put out by) Enterbrain. Not available in North America.

Content warning: this review will be discussing explicit sex, which appears throughout these two volumes. If you aren’t of age to read about it, don’t.

It has to be said, there are certain things that are very popular in Japan that, with the odd exception, just haven’t sold here, for all sorts of reasons. Sports manga is one of the most obvious, as is the huge amount of series involving ‘delinquents’ or youth gangs. And then there’s sex comedies. No, not the sort you get in typical shonen magazines (though those also don’t seem to sell well lately, unless there’s a supernatural element. Strange as Ranma, Love Hina, and Oh My Goddess were the big thing in the mid-late 1990s.). No, I’m talking actual comedies, written for adult guys, with lots of actual sex. We’ve only really seen this attempted here with Tokyopop’s aborted attempt to release Futari Ecchi (aka Manga Sutra), which bombed partly due to the economy but more due to the dullness of its leads.

It may come as a surprise to hear that there are a lot of these. They aren’t quite as common as they were back in the late 80s-early 90s (the era of the title I will eventually be talking about), But they’re still definitely there, in the pages of Big Comic Spirits, or Manga Action, or virtually anything with the word ‘Young’ in its name. A lot of them are essentially the same shonen harem comedies only written for grownups, with the heroines all now being a lot more successful in their efforts to get into the heroes’ pants. I have a certain fondness for seeking out these titles… not for the sex itself, necessarily, but simply as they tend to be very, very STRANGE. Titles like Kobayashi Makoto’s Chichonmanchi, with its virgin’s hell of flying penises and various grotesqueries. And even current fare like Ecce S, a Spirits title by Taku Kitazaki about a man who has a hypnotic magical tattoo on his ass that makes any woman who sees it want to have sex with him. Titles that make you stare for a bit and then say “Oh, Japan. (sigh)”

Luckily, Soap Girl Moko is far more of a normal, typical sex comedy. For those unaware, a ‘soap girl’ is a prostitute. Officially, the places where the girls work offer public baths to men who may want to relax after a long day. In reality, the girls offer varieties of sexual acts, though do also give baths, mostly as prostitution is technically illegal in Japan. There’s tons of Soapland places, though. Our heroine, Moko, starts the first volume as a neophyte soap girl, still learning on the job. We learn she started after rescuing a man from committing suicide (several times), and leading him to a Soapland, where his morale (among other things) is raised by the head girl there. Moko is inspired by this, and decides to become a soap girl so that she can help people.

No, really, she does. There is no question at all, throughout any of this series, that it is written solely for adult guys as a typical guy fantasy. This isn’t reality, nor do you want it to be. The girls are all varying degrees of nice, though most of them have more of a realistic bent than Moko, who’s your standard fluffhead with a heart of gold. The owner of the Soapland is your typical frustrated young manager who get aggravated by Moko’s clumsiness and slipups. Her regular clients we see more than once tend to all be nice guys. It is, for a manga that usually features an explicit sex scene every 3-4 pages, very clean. But you have to wrap your head around the basic plot of the manga, which is that sex can help solve most of life’s problems.

There’s a tiny bit of character development as the series goes on. Moko starts off as a complete ditz, and towards the start of the series I actually Tweeted “Worst. Hooker. Ever.” She’s clumsy, she’s awkward, she accidentally bites her clients right where you never want to be bitten… it’s sad. Luckily the author knows that this sort of characterization would not be feasible for a long running series, and has Moko learn from experience fairly quickly. Her girl next door looks and sweet personality make her one of the place’s more popular girls (in fact, there’s a story discussing how her rocket in popularity is completely exhausting her), along with her seemingly genuine desire to get to know most of her clients. She also really comes to like sex, which lends itself very well to using her body to help her clients, her neighbors, her friends, guys who accidentally hit her with her car…

The plots for these sound like they were taken from “Bob’s Big Book of 70s Porn”, they’re so cliched. There’s guys dealing with impotence, cheating guys who Moko reunites with their estranged spouse, bitter old vice-presidents who quickly soften (well… really the opposite) after getting to know Moko, kids trying to lose their virginity who fake being 18 so they can get in, clients who get so enamored of the girl they like that they try to propose… you name it, it’s in here. That said, it’s rather refreshing what isn’t in here. Because the plot is about a certain whitewashed form of prostitution, all the sex here is completely consensual. Rape is mostly absent (one attempt leads to Moko successfully fighting the guy off), and the one bit of disturbing sadism (Moko’s overenthusiastic client gives her welts on her back from whipping her) has the other soap girls uniting to teach him a bit of his own medicine. No women here are meek little wallflowers – not even Moko.

I’ve been describing this as explicit, which it is – we see lots of sex, and Moko is nude a great deal of the time. That said, this still ran in a mainstream Japanese magazine from 1990-1994, so there is some self-censorship. There are no bodily fluids on display. Moko has visible nipples, but her nether regions are just suggested. The men’s privates are either whited out or shown in sillhouette – even the intersex women, who comes to Moko to help with her self-identity crisis. This, by the way, leads to Moko dressing up in a Western suit and hat with a little mustache, possibly the funniest panel in the entire book (and she still looks really sexy, too.) The art style of the characters themselves is very mid-late 80s, and seems influenced by both Hojo’s City Hunter and Takahashi’s Ranma. We see giant heads when characters are mad, for example, and sweatdrops are abundant.

The Western World is likely more familiar with this than they think. In 1994, after the manga was winding down, an anime was made of the series, also called Soap Girl Moko. This was then bought by Kitty Media in North America, who put it out on VHS (and later DVD) as My Fair Masseuse. It was a popular adult title for people who avoided adult titles, likely for the same reasons I liked this manga – it was refreshing to see a hentai anime that didn’t feature rape and showed sex actually being enjoyable to men and women. That said, don’t get this expecting anything other than what it is – sanitized porn for young college guys. It’s just well-told, fun sanitized porn for young college guys.

I said this was a license request, more due to habit when discussing a Japanese title not out in English than anything else. (It’s not even scanlated! Gasp!) But honestly, in this market? I can’t see this selling. As has been mentioned before, women buy while men download, and this is very much a title for men. It’s likely too explicit for the mainstream publishers, but at the same time it’s not hardcore enough for Icarus, I suspect. So if you’re interested, you might want to track down the original Japanese. Enterbrain bought the rights to the series about 2 years ago, and re-released it in 4 ‘bunkoban’ volumes of about 325 pages each, which sell for about 830 yen. Do it for Moko, won’t you?