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Honey So Sweet, Vol. 1

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By Amu Meguro. Released in Japan as “Honey” by Shueisha, serialized in the magazine Bessatsu Margaret. Released in North America by Viz.

In general I try to avoid reading back cover copy when I get a book, as it frequently tends to spoil the entire volume, particularly with manga titles. That said, I wouldn’t have to worry about that with Honey So Sweet, which wastes absolutely no time telling us what our premise is. Bad boy delinquent is secretly a big sweetie pie. We’ve seen this before, and not just in shoujo, and if that’s all there was to this title I’d likely be saving it fro a Brief review and moving on. But it also has the heroine, Nao, who is shy in all the worst ways – life has left her with an intense desire to avoid conflict, and so when Taiga confesses to her the initial reaction is “if I say no, he’ll kill me’.

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I’ve talked before about how difficult it can be to keep readers from abandoning a series when you write someone with major character flaws. To be fair, it is easier to do so when your heroine is of the wallflower variety than if she’s a selfish ball of temper. But Nao is the early parts of this volume is someone that is seemingly making all the wrong choices in an effort to just slide by in life – and she knows it, as she keeps repeating it to herself. Her parents have passed away at an early age, and much of her narrative monologue is done as communication with their souls in heaven. Her She’s living with her mother’s younger sister, who she has a massive complex for since he took her in and has sacrificed quite a bit for her. And she (not surprisingly) always seems depressed.

So it’s great seeing Taiga slowly manage to get Nao to have fun, and show actual effort, and elicit feelings from her that aren’t “go along with him because SCARED!”. We learn less about him in this volume, except that he tries a bit too hard to help out everyone, particularly Nao, but that’s the point – he’s the nice guy at heart, and you have to look past his face. By the end of the volume, Nao’s uncle is remarking on the fact that she’s smiling a lot more these days, and it’s a great thing to see, as now we can see her moving forward in life and doing things she’s good at.

In many ways this is very typical shoujo romance – we’ve seen Taiga’s sort in hundreds of other titles. We have two others who form a core group with our hero and heroine, and one is the tsundere hothead guy who speaks before he thinks, which again we’ve seen before. The other is Kayo, who’s grumpy, stoic, and seemingly written as a gift to me – I really want to see more from her in future volumes. Together they don’t make this title unmissable, but they make it enjoyable, and by the end Nao has developed enough so that you’re rooting for her as well.

Of the Red, the Light, and the Ayakashi, Vol. 1

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By nanao and HaccaWorks*. Released in Japan by Media Factory, serialization ongoing in the magazine Comic Gene. Released in North America by Yen Press.

I’ve spoken before about how it can sometimes be difficult to review a new volume of a shoujo romance whose basic premise is ‘girl in high school likes guy, feelings ensue’, as there’s just so many of those out in North America. I am very happy to say that I’m starting to feel that way about the influx of yokai manga over here as well. We have all different types of yokai titles over here, including those for kids, for young adults, for men, for women. After a year that saw the loss of Shigeru Mizuki, it’s heartwarming to see his legacy, and that of Japan’s folklore, carry on. And so we have this new series, which is actually based off of a visual novel, and brings together the yokai genre with mystery, horror, and a bit of not-quite-BL – exactly what a shoujo reader would enjoy.

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Our hero is Yue, a name that longtime readers of manga will know always seems to be connected to the supernatural in some way. (I believe in Chinese it means moon.) He’s a yokai, and seems to be very important, but is unfamiliar with much of the world beyond the temple area in which he lives. So he and his friend/familiar descend the mountain to attend a festival, and run into two contrasting humans, one quiet and serious, the other angry and a bit over the top. As the series goes on, and he gets permission to visit his new wannabe friends, though, we discover the village where this is taking place is slightly off to begin with, and that there’s more going on here than meets the eye.

This series is an excellent example of what you want in a first volume. It gives you enough backstory and characterization to satisfy while making you want to read more to see what happens. Yue is sweet and naive without seeming foolish, and Tsubaki is reserved but shows a genuine love of family. As for Akiyoshi, he provides some of the series’ few laughs with his stalker-ish ways, but also gets to carry the bulk of the exposition, as he knows about the yokai without being part of them. Honestly, the three leads make a good team.

As for the horror and mystery, well, it would appear the danger is not just of having your life taken, as if a typical vampire manga, but having your very existence removed from the world. An old kindly elementary school principal vanishes one day, and those connected to the school deny he was ever there – or that they even had a principal. It gives an extra frisson of creepy to the whole deal. For more old-fashioned horror, there’s also the standard scary black ghosts that try to eat you, which also pop up a lot in these sorts of manga. Basically, AkaAka (its fan nickname) may not tread all that much original ground, but it hits all the right notes and really makes you want to read on. A definite good read, despite a double bad sign of both a name all in lowercase *and* a name with a special character in the authors.

Emma, Vol. 3

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By Kaoru Mori. Released in Japan in two separate volumes by Enterbrain, serialized in the magazine Comic Beam. Released in North America by Yen Press.

The entire first half of this omnibus gives the reader the opportunity to watch a giant other shoe dropping, and the back half then shows the shoe’s impact, with horrible consequences for many people, but mostly for Emma. Last time I talked about how well the repressed yet burgeoning love between William and Emma is, and it flowers here, with Emma visibly getting happier and less repressed. William too is different now that he accepts his feelings and is determined to do something about them. Sadly, that determination runs up against absolutely everyone – his own family, who are determined that he not make the same mistakes they made, and more importantly his fiancee’s family, who may cross over the line into actually being evil, or at least willing to commit slow murder.

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The author is very fond of big, dramatic moments – you see it in her Bride’s Story series as well – and you can see why, as she’s fantastic at handling them. The arrival of William at the Molders estate, and Emma running out to embrace him (the the surprise and amusement of the ENTIRE household) is fantastic, and reminds you again that it’s nicely coincidental that Emma ended up in the one household in Britain that wouldn’t be appalled at this. That said, that’s why William came up to meet her – the rest of society is not going to be quite as forgiving. The volume starts off with a flashback showing us how William’s parents, Richard and Aurelia, met and married. Aurelia is not of a lower class like Emma is, but she’s still “eccentric”, and that’s deadly for the time. More to the point, she’s introverted, and the pressures of society exhaust her to a damaging degree. Which is why they now live apart. It’s very bittersweet.

As for Eleanor’s father, wooooow. It’s rare we meet someone in a manga like this who gets to be pure evil. He’s really well handled, too, being extremely polite to William’s father, then throwing away his gloves in disgust afterwards, as he had touched someone of a merchant class – horrors! When William breaks off his impetuous and foolish engagement to Eleanor, to her horror, the Viscount calmly sees what needs to be done – Emma needs to disappear. Luckily, he knows some thugs who can fairly easily trick and abduct her (though the cliffhanger seems to hint she may be rescued soon). This sequence may be the weakest in the book – it’s a bit overmelodramatic, to be honest – but it’s earned, at least, and the true high point of the last half of the book is Williams’ screaming match with his father in any case.

I expect things to be resolved soon, even though we have two full omnibuses to go – the last three volumes of Emma were side stories and sequels, so these two wacky kids should get their happy ending soon. Which is good, as this volume could get pretty depressing at times – as Mori herself notes in the afterword. No worries, the journey is still very much worth the effort.