A Bride’s Story, Vol. 7

2 Replies

By Kaoru Mori. Released in Japan as “Otoyomegatari” by Enterbrain, serialization ongoing in the magazine fellows!. Released in North America by Yen Press.

I have reached the point in this series where I genuinely do enjoy the adventures of Amir, Karluk, and their family, and I’m pleased to see we’ll be headed back there for Vol. 8. But I will admit that my top 3 volumes of this series have all been the ones that venture away from the ‘main’ characters and focus on English researcher Mr. Smith… or rather, focus on where he ends up in his travels, as he also barely figures in this volume. Instead, we get a different kind of wedding, as two already married wives with young children find each other and we are introduced to a marriage ceremony between two women who vow to be Avowed Sisters, a concept that reminds me of Anne Shirley’s bosom friends.

bride7

Our heroine this volume is Anis, a young merchant’s wife who is married to a caring husband and has a young child, but still feels there’s something lacking in her life – she *is* happy, but knows she could be happier. After talking with her maidservant, she decides to start going to the public baths, and there meets up with the shy Sherine, who is also married, and bonds with her immediate.y And by ‘bonds’, I mean ‘falls in love with’, as we see immediately that Anis is physically and emotionally attracted to the reserved Sherine. They bond really fast – something remarked on by everyone – and eventually agree to become Avowed Sisters, with a ceremony led by one of the female elders. Of course, this being a dramatic story rather than a history, the moment the ceremony is over, Sherine’s husband drops dead.

I’ve talked before about how most of Kaoru Mori’s titles deal with repressed emotions, and that’s true here as well, even though by comparison Anis is open and obvious. Sherine’s husband was poor, and with him now gone it’s clear that she may be reduced to begging. This leads to Anis asking her husband to take Sherine as a second wife – something acceptable in these times and places – and his stunned reaction. Her husband’s been presented as a good guy throughout, who has trouble reading his wife but clearly loves her. He never took another wife as he was worried Anis wouldn’t like it, and Anis agrees that is absolutely true – except for Sherine. And so the volume ends with the two Avowed Sisters living together as co-wives, planning a trip, and feeding the birds by an ornamental pond.

The mood throughout is beautiful – after the last volume’s battles and deaths, Mori wanted to have a more peaceful story, though she jokes this just led to a lot of nudity. Indeed, the bath scenes take up a large part of the book, and there’s a fold-out color illustration with even more. For all that fashion is her first drawing love, Mori adores drawing the naked female form. But overall this is about Anis and Sherine, and another example of nontraditional brides in what is thought to be a very traditional period in time. It’s well worth your time.

Accel World: The Floating Starlight Bridge

Leave a reply

By Reki Kawahara and Hima. Released in Japan by ASCII Mediaworks. Released in North America by Yen Press.

My last review mentioned that I was more interested in the worldbuilding than the characters with this series, and it’s possible the author heard me, as this fifth novel, the first to not yet be animated, is filled with character development. Haruyuki’s personal issues still exist, but we are reminded that he’s not the only one having a bad time, and Kuroyukihime and Fuko are both dealing with devastating traumas, both involving Brain Burst and the real world, though we get minimal information on the latter. Luckily, this book isn’t simply piling up the angst – there’s a lot of fights going on here, and a race to the top of a brand new level which has a lot to offer everyone.

aw5

And there’s also that cover, as you are reminded yet again that this is a series filled with very young teens. That said, it fits well with the plot, as the overly dramatic ‘everything is terrible’ mood swings that kids get when they’re between 11 and 15 allows for dramatic speeches and loud screaming without feeling like you’ve stepped onto the cover of Shonen Jump too much. We get more development of the ‘Incarnate’ powerups, and they’re public now, so that’s a new worry. But the biggest worry is with our hero, who (as was becoming obvious) is not quite free of the killer possessive armor from Book 2, and one way that you can tell this is going to be a long-running series is that the volume is content to leave most everything up in the air.

It also resolves issues left over from the previous book about Fuko, who is at last doing something with the team, but really isn’t using her full potential due to her latent trauma over what she did to her legs in the game. I’d wanted more with her and Kuroyukihime, and I got it here, as it’s clear that both of them take the blame for the pain that each one suffered, and it’s up to Haruyuki to demonstrate that they are not a horrible person (Kuroyukihime) or to show off what her powers and avatar really is used for (Fuko). Haruyuki is very empathic, and (except of course for the increasing number of girls crushing on him, which he doesn’t get mostly for plot reasons) understands almost unconsciously what needs to be done to help people achieve their potential.

Brian Burst, for all its drama, twisted revenge antics, and continued suggestions of a dark evil villain side using it for bad things, is a game, and a fun one at that. The battles featured here are probably the best writing in the book, as they’re fast, exciting, dramatic, and uncertain. Yes, you could predict that our heroes would win, but how they won was certainly not expected, and I loved that it also required an assist from Blood Leopard and Ash Roller – breaking apart the boundaries of the ‘teams’. Given what happens near the end of this book, Haruyuki and company are going to need all the allies they can get. I’m eagerly looking forward to the next volume.

Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer, Vols. 9-10

Leave a reply

By Satoshi Mizukami. Released in Japan by Shonen Gahosha, serialized in the magazine Young King Ours. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

This final volume has a lot of fighting and backstory in it – in fact, a good 4/5 of the book could be described as fighting and backstory, even the epilogue with Akane. But it’s a credit to the author that the backstory always feels natural and not like an infodump, and the fights never wear out their welcome, even when they’re supposed to. We get the villain’s main motivation (delusions of godhood), the relationship between him and Anima, and why Samidare is so desperate to smash the world. And, spoiler, the world is not smashed, which means that we also find out what happens afterwards – we hear in an afterword that Mizukammi always wanted to find out what happened to characters after the final battle ends, and that’s what we see here. It’s heartwarming as heck.

lbh9-10

With the exception of Nagumo, our cast have for the most part been from middle-school to early college age, and their mindset and problems have stemmed from that – immaturity, frustration, pent-up emotions, and budding sexuality. We now see that Animus and Anima’s battle has remained what it is again due to a very childish reason – Animus has psychic powers, as does his sister, and when a doctor calls him a god, Animus gets one of the most creepy ‘insane grin’ faces I’ve seen in manga, and proceeds to prove his godhood by destroying first the space station they’re on, then the Earth. Anima, who was trying to convince him that powers or no he’s still a human, is desperate to stop him.

If this sounds vaguely familiar it’s because it’s mirrored in the relationship between Samidare and Yuuhi, who as I predicted is not really going to let her smash the world with her giant projected fist after all. That said, he does pretend he is for some time, which leads to a number of battles where he shows off how much he’s been holding back until now, and basically curbstomps all the other knights bar Mikazuki, who’s still down from the battle against Animus. Samidare goes on like a lovestruck girl (which she is) about how cool Yuuhi has become, and it’s true – his emotional growth in this series has been nothing short of stunning. And now with Samidare, who has discovered that she has something to live for after all, the emotional growth is a catharsis.

The 10 years in the future epilogue is a bit Harry Potter-esque, particularly the part where we find out that Shimaki and Yayoi got married despite very little interaction in the main series at all – Anima’s “Hmm?’ and blank stare reminds me of my own when I heard Luna was marrying some offscreen guy I’d never heard of. But as Yuuhi points out, that’s how life works, and is the nature of ‘where are they now?’ epilogues. More importantly, Samidare is healthy again, and everyone has been moving forward. Even Akane, in many respects the most emotionally broken of the group, gets a separate section to show off how much he’s changed – though the Hawaiian shirt is perhaps a bit much. (He also gets the best “love confession”.) The fighting is dine, our heroes are content, and so am I. This was a great ending to a terrific series, one of the more realistic takes on superhero battles out there. Get someone all of it for Christmas.