Category Archives: reviews

Durarara!!, Vol. 7

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By Ryohgo Narita and Suzuhito Yasuda. Released in Japan by ASCII Mediaworks. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Stephen Paul.

Sooner or later in the life of every light novels, you get the volume that consists of short stories, usually because the author is still figuring out where to take the series next. And so it is with DRRR!!, which gives us 4 stories here surrounded by Izaya recuperating from his stab wound he got last time in the hospital, where he runs into a girl that literally everyone has forgotten, including him (and the creators of the anime, who were unhappy to see this, I imagine). The ‘theme’ of these stories seems to be Ikebukuro on holiday, and indeed, Narita has discussed the idea of the city as a character in the volume before. And of course there’s also some setup and moving of chess pieces for future books, most obviously in the story with Shizuo and Tom, which gives them a new co-worker.

First, though, we have to deal with the story nobody wanted. I think if you were to ask Western fans in particular which DRRR!! characters they never want to see or hear from again, the insane triangle of Namie, Seiji and Mika would likely top the list. And what’s worse, Narita has them in your face here, never letting you forget how much Namie wants to screw her little brother, or that Mika is seriously looking to EAT CELTY’S HEAD so that she can get closer to Seiji, or that Seiji… well, no, Seiji continues to be a nonentity. He gets some depth here, of a sort, but his main theme still seems to be “what do these two see in him?”. It’s not the most pointless story in the book, but it is the most disturbing. We then get a look at the backstory and current life of Akabayashi, the yakuza with a sweet cane and missing an eye we’ve seen in the previous book. He deals with the fallout from Akane’s kidnapping, stops some drug dealing on his turf, and escapes an attempt on his life with ease. He’s here to be incredibly cool, and succeeds. He also has a surprising tie to Anri, which is good as the “main” trio of teenagers otherwise make very minor to no appearances in this volume.

The best story in the collection, even if you don’t love her (which I do) is the third one, in which Vorona is cooling her heels at Russian Sushi and wondering what to do with her life now that she’s been beaten and humiliated. The answer? Join Shizuo and Tom in shaking down local deadbeats who rent porn and then never pay for it or other such offenses. Tom is rather startled at how good Vorona is at beating others up, and impressed at her wikipedia brain. Shizuo (who does not recognize her as the woman who kidnapped Akane, as she was wearing her motorcycle helmet) is just happy to be able to mentor someone. And Vorona is watching Shizuo closely, seeing how he manages to be stronger than everything else, and deciding that he’s her “prey”… much to the displeasure of Akane, who has decided that she needs to take out Shizuo as well, despite the fact that she really likes him. (It is implied that getting kidnapped on top of the family revelations kind of broke Akane, but that’s Narita for you.) This story is filled with humor and unnecessary violence, and the book is worth getting for just this one.

We end with a cute, if completely pointless, date between Shinra and Celty, who have gone off to the mountains to get closer but keep getting interrupted by the rest of the cast calling Shinra for one reason or another. This mostly serves to remind us that, eccentric as they are, these two are the least screwed up couple in the series. The book overall is marking time, but it’s still worth reading, provided you don’t mind the author occasionally reminding you that he loves to read horrible people being horrible at each other.

H. P. Lovecraft’s The Hound and Other Stories

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By Gou Tanabe. Released in Japan by Enterbrain, serialized in the magazine Comic Beam. Released in North America by Dark Horse Comics. Translated by Zack Davisson.

This is the first in a series of Lovecraft adaptations that are still being done in the pages of Enterbrain’s oddball magazine Comic Beam, home of Emma, Thermae Romae, and other hard-to-classify series. The mangaka, Tanabe Gou, has specialized in adapting horror titles to the comics page, and just reading a few pages into this volume will show you that he knows his stuff. This volume collects three of Lovecraft’s more well-known short stories and turns them into fairly gripping horror manga, with plenty of the author’s tortured, overdone prose, but not so much that you want to stop reading (as I frequently do with Lovecraft). Thankfully, the nameless horrors in these particular stories also don’t feature Lovecraft’s awful brand of racism that has led fans to back away from him a bit in modern times. You can enjoy them for what they are: scary stuff with no reasonable explanation.

We begin with “The Temple”, which takes place in WWII – something which may puzzle readers, as the story was written in the 1920s. The ‘about the author’ at the end mentions that Tanabe moved the action up a few decades, and honestly it works even better that way – the original U-Boat Captain was so villainous he may as well have been a Nazi. they find the head of an old Grecian statue on a dead British soldier, and its presence gradually makes the crew of the U-Boat lose its sanity – not helped by the captain shooting “traitors”. Soon he ends up discovering Atlantis underwater, and where that statue really came from. In “The Hound”, two men who enjoy grave robbing for kicks find a jade amulet and take it back to England, where they are soon haunted by the ghastly beast that they may have killed at the gravesite. Finally, in “The Nameless City”, there’s only our narrator, exploring a city in Arabia that no one dares go near, and finding (all together now) eldritch horrors beyond his comprehension.

Honestly, the plot is pretty much irrelevant. What matters most here is mood, and Tanabe nails it, particularly in The Hound, which I found the best of the three stories. The sense of an encroaching doom that will engulf our characters (all male – women rarely if ever appear in a Lovecraft story) grows more and more with every turn of the page, and the few actual shots of violence are striking. Lovecraft stories are about the unseen, the imagined, and the unimaginable. Therefore a lot of adaptations risk becoming silly by showing said unshowable evil and having it not measure up. Tanabe has just the right amount of balance, as The Temple relies on its narrator’s own villainous depths, and The Hound is glimpsed mostly in shadow and corners. The Nameless City does draw a few monsters in detail, but its viewpoint is still firmly on the narrator (and the amazing vistas that he’s passing through).

Lovecraft is not for everyone, and I would not blame people from passing simply based on the name. But if you like horror and want to read something really creepy and offputting, this is an excellent adaptation. He’s done more of these – I think The Colour Out of Space was also adapted – and I hope it does well enough that we see more.

Kagerou Daze VII: From the Darkness

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By Jin (Shinzen no Teki-P) and Sidu. Released in Japan by Enterbrain. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Kevin Gifford.

Each volume in the series has competed to see who in the Mekakushi Dan has the worst childhood, and we may have a new winner with Kido, who gets the focus here. The book is divided into two parts that it goes back and forth between, like previous volumes in the series. The main story continues, with Shintaro, the Mekakushi-Dan and a newly revived Takane trying to find a way to stop Tateyama – or rather, whatever is behind Tateyama – and figure out how to stop this whole mess. This is interspersed with Kido’s childhood, being a child of an affair whose mother then dies several years later, causing her to be taken in by her rich father. Kido is an introverted self-hating mess, which honestly fits pretty well with what we’ve seen of present-day Kido, so the flashbacks work pretty well. Luckily, she also has a big stepsister looking out for her. Unluckily, this book is called “From the Darkness”.

Kido’s sections are the strongest in the book, doing a good job (despite the author’s self-deprecation in the afterword) of a realistic young girl resented by most people in the mansion, ignored by her father, and waiting to be abused by a sister that she’s sure hates her. But Rin does not, in fact, hate her, and after a series of painful to read but oh so accurate scenes of Kido wondering when the next blow is going to fall, she gradually begins to open up to the other girl and speak. Unfortunately, her dad is not merely cold and withdrawn, he’s rather unhinged, something which I wish was written in a slightly less abrupt way – the shortness of these books means that sometimes motivations get either left out or reduced to a villain monologue, and in this case it’s the later, as Kido’s father insanely expounds on why he went mad. After tragedy strikes, Kido finds herself in Azami’s realm, where Azami – rather startled to be meeting someone – realizes that Kido has one of her Eyes, and tries to explain as best she can. This section works much better.

Things don’t get much better in the main storyline, where we learn that you rarely gain a cool cyborg body without its creator having the ability to take the body over and turn it evil. Balanced against this is the reunion of Shintaro and Takane, who has to explain why she did what she did as Ene – which is fairly heartwarming – and why she ACTED like she did as Ene – which is the funniest part of the book. Unfortunately, while Shintaro’s plan to take out Tateyama is a good one, as I said, it reckons without one of the group being possessed. And so how we end the book with Shintaro dead, Kido dead, everyone else presumably about to die, and the realization that Book 8 not only may be the last but also isn’t out in Japan yet. This will have to satisfy Kagerou Daze fans for now, but I think it will do a fine job.

Also, will Seto ever get developed?