Monthly Archives: July 2018

The Voynich Hotel, Vol. 1

Leave a reply

By Douman Seiman. Released in Japan by Akita Shoten, serialized in the magazine Young Champion Retsu. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Alethea & Athena Nibley. Adapted by David Lumsdon.

I had heard buzz about The Voynich Hotel before it was licensed, mostly that it was dark and funny. Weird probably also came up, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I probably should have been. Before it is dark or funny (though it is both of those things), The Voynich Hotel is STRANGE. A lot of the time it’s content to be a mild gag comic about the staff and residents of a hotel in the South Pacific, but then people start getting killed, or selling drugs, or investigating the secret legend of the three sisters from this island’s past (one of whom seems very familiar). And in amongst this we manage to have the start of a vaguely sweet romance between a guest who’s hiding from… something, and one of the maids, who is cute and innocent and one of those is a lie. I’m not even sure where this series is going, save the fact that I suspect there will be more deaths soon.

Our hero is Taizou, a Japanese man who arrives at the hotel hiding from his old way of life. He ends up passing out, but is taken care of by the two maids who run the day-to-day affairs of the hotel: Helena is cute and spunky and excitable and also Maria from Zetsubou-sensei, and Berna is stoic and deadpan also also a Rei Ayanami clone. The cook is trying to kill herself and anyone else she can get to go with her, the owner wears a Mexican wrestling mask, and the residents are equally eccentric – you might say the manga artist was normal, except he’s trying to write a manga and make deadlines while living on this island. There’s also an assassin, and three more arrive during the course of the first book. The assassins are mostly what drive what there is of a plot, but for the most part you’re here to see weird people be funny.

Fortunately, I found it very funny, though you’ll need to set your sense of humor dial to ‘sick’. Leaving aside all the deaths, I have to say that Berna’s ringtone grossed me out but also had me in hysterics – let’s leave it at that. There are also a lot of “shout out” references in this volume, most of them blatant. Helena takes Taizou’s temperature with her head, which he says is so cliched even Mitsuru Adachi wouldn’t do that anymore… wait, no, he would. The police officers who parody Isaac Azimov’s Bailey and Olivaw are also a hoot, though they remind me that Seven Seas has once again rated this series T when it clearly isn’t – there’s no nudity, but reader beware. Possibly the strangest thing in the book, though, is that Taizou and Helena’s growing relationship is rather sweet – well, once she puts on a different shirt, that is.

The Voynich Hotel was very popular scanlated, so I worry that it will suffer the fate of other popular scanlated series licensed over here (I’m looking at you, Franken Fran). It requires a strong stomach at times, but the skewed tone of this series tickled me, and at only three volumes, I’m quite willing to read more.

The Unwanted Undead Adventurer, Vol. 2

1 Reply

By Yu Okano and Jaian. Released in Japan as “Nozomanu Fushi no Boukensha” by Overlap, Inc. Released in North America digitally by J-Novel Club. Translated by Shirley Yeung.

Last time I mentioned that I found Rentt fairly dull, but the story being told around him fascinating. Unfortunately, this second book sticks with Rentt the entire time, and suffers from it. It’s divided fairly evenly into fourths, each of which sees Rentt telling us about what’s going on very matter of factly. And speaking in that “I… am a zombie… sort of tone…” to boot. The stronger part of the book is at the start, as I really enjoyed the Bronze Adventurer test he took with the young adventurer couple. And the chat he had with Sheila was also good, though signposted something that I was hoping this book would avoid. (It’s a light novel series, guess what? It’s not avoided.) Unfortunately, the last two stories aren’t as interesting, and by the end of the book I found myself skimming, never a good sign when the ending features a fight to the death against a giant dragon creature.

The start, though, is very good. The test that Rentt and the adventurers he’s paired with take is quite vicious, which is fair given what adventurers of this level have to go through. More monsters than expected, ambushes from guild members, and also ambushes by other adventurers trying to take them out, given that only the one team who gets there first passes. This allows Rentt to show off his knowledge and experience. The adventurer couple are cliched (they reminded me a bit of the brother/sister team from Log Horizon) but cute. After this, we see that, as expected, Rentt’s attempt to hide himself by taking on a different last name and putting on a cloak and mask are not QUITE as effective as he’d imagined. Unfortunately, this then leads to the thing I thought we’d avoided. Sheila is clearly in love with Rentt, and when brought back to the house to meet Lorraine, Lorraine immediately knows it. I don’t really need undead harem adventures.

The third story has Rentt going to a village whose ritual sacrifice festival has gotten a bit too literal about its ritual sacrifices, and she steps in to save the day and figure out what’s going on is not as supernatural as people would think. The final story is the one ending in a cliffhanger, as Rentt takes on the task of finding a rare plant to help heal the head of an orphanage (the orphans are the ones hiring him). The most interesting part of this is when Rentt tries to kill a giant rat creature and instead finds himself getting a familiar, and a rather snarky one at that. Unfortunately, this is almost entirely Rentt by himself and Rentt without other people to bounce off of is far, far too dull. Things aren’t helped by the fact that, due to a rumor of adventurers disappearing, he has to stay out of the dungeons to avoid being suspicious. As a result, he’s stagnated a bit.

So now that we’ve had that dreaded second album syndrome, can things pick up? I believe they can, but I suspect it relies on how large the cast is for the third book. Too much Rentt can be deadly.

Kakafukaka, Vol. 1

Leave a reply

By Takumi Ishida. Released in Japan by Kodansha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Kiss. Released in North America digitally by Kodansha Comics. Translated by Erin Proctor & Molly Rabbitt.

I’ve talked before about the fine balance that some titles need to walk with character development. It’s good to have characters with notable flaws, so that you can show them growing, learning, and changing. On the other hand, particularly in manga where a casual reader can drop a series after the first volume (when most stories have only just laid out the basics), if a character is too unlikable they risk annoying the reader too much. Kakafukaka is a josei series with two people who, at separate points and together, may grate on the reader’s nerves. The supporting cast also has its own issues, and there isn’t really a character that I can hang my hat on here and say “well, at least they’re sympathetic”. On the other hand, this sort of cast and plot is the reasonIe’ve been wanting more josei in the first place, and seeing these broken twenty-somethings blunder through life is why I’m here.

Aki is a young woman who feels it’s been a bit of a downhill slide since middle school. She’s drifting through life, can’t find a steady job, and has a self-loathing complex a mile wide. Oh, and she walked in on her boyfriend screwing another woman. Which means she’s now looking for a new place to live as well. Fortunately, one of her friends is getting married (which comes as a surprise, as she hadn’t told Aki yet) and is looking for someone to take her room in a share house she’s living in with three other boarders. To her surprise, she knows someone else who lives there: Tomoya was her classmate in middle school… and also the boy she lost her virginity to. That said, everything got awkward after that and they drifted apart. Now we’re ready to pick up where we left off? Not quite. Tomoya, it turns out, has erectile dysfunction… something that seems to be cured when he’s around Aki, much to his surprise and Aki’s discomfort. As a result, they reach a very uncomfortable agreement.

Kakafukaka’s issues are front and center, and also the point. Tomoya asks Aki to sleep in the same bed with him, both so that he can get a good night’s sleep (he’s been dwelling on this) and also so that he can see about curing himself. He promises not to “do anything dirty”, but as Aki herself notes, the entire premise kind of revolves around his getting hard when in contact with her. In addition, Tomoya is not all that happy with Aki’s super-low opinion of herself, one of the other flatmates has a crush on Tomoya to a disturbing degree, and Tomoya himself is simply hard to read – one of those “mild-mannered” mellow but stoic types that you see a lot of in titles like this, so Aki can’t help but receive mixed signals.

And so you have a series that shows a lot of promise, but has working against it the personalities of the two leads and the basic premise of their needing to be together. I’m optimistic that the series is going in a positive direction, but the reader might want to wait till a couple more volumes are out and read them in one big gulp.