Manga the Week of 11/2

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Oh dearie me. (deep breath)

Bandai is shipping the 4th volume of Code Geass: Knight, the doujinshi anthology series that focuses on the male characters for female fans of the series. Expect lots of BL tease with no actual BL.

If you want actual BL, then DMP is the place for you. We get new volumes of the awkwardly titled Great Place High School Student Council, the deluxe edition of Kizuna, Seven Days, and The Tyrant Falls in Love. And there are three new series debuting: Mr. Tiger and Mr. Wolf (no, it’s not a Tiger and Bunny spinoff), Only Serious About You, and Private Teacher. I think this giant pile of BL will satisfy even the most hungry enthusiasts.

Remember when I said we’d get the rest of Kodansha’a October this week? I was indeed correct! New Air Gear, which has hit 20 volumes of rollerblading frenzy. Vol. 2 of Bloody Monday’s intrigue and Cage of Eden’s potboiler antics. And two new thick omnibuses: Love Hina 1-3 (which I reviewed here a couple of weeks ago), and Tokyo Mew Mew 1-2 (for those who can’t get enough magical girl shoujo and can’t wait for Sailor Moon/V).

Speaking of omnibuses, Seven Seas is releasing Vols. 7 & 8 of Gunslinger Girl, which I believe means we’re now caught up with ADV and getting new material. Yes, it’s about killer loli assassins and their kindly adult male guardians, but it actually manages to deal with the serious issues surrounding such a plot and not be too skeezy. Mostly. Well, a lot. OK, over 60% not skeezy. Seven Seas also has the third volume of Toradora, which does star a tsundere, but it actually manages to deal with the serious issues surrounding such a girl and not have her be too tsun. Mostly. OK, maybe 40% dere? Perhaps an actual math degree would help.

Vertical is debuting its new Furuya title, a modern updating of the famous Japanese novel No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. I’ve also reviewed this, and it maintains Vertical’s reputation for cutting edge manga that makes you think.

And Viz has its first-week madness. From the Jump and Jump Square file, we have new volumes of Claymore, D.Gray-Man, the Death Note “Black Edition”, and Tegami Bachi. On the shoujo side, we have new Ai Ore! and Black Bird, some Dengeki Daisy (which I warn you has another nasty cliffhanger), Haruka: Beyond the Stream of Time (earlier BL manga, I’m sorry I called you unwieldy after reading this), The 11th volume of Kimi ni Todoke (wait, you mean it keeps going after they get together?!?!), and new Oresama Teacher and Story of Saiunkoku. It is a very Viz week.

So, in among that deluge, what do you want to buy?

Higurashi: When They Cry, Vol. 15

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Story by Ryukishi07; Art by Karin Suzuragi. Released in Japan as “Higurashi no Naku Koro ni: Tsumihoroboshi-hen” by Square Enix, serialized in the magazine Gangan Powered. Released in North America by Yen Press.

It’s Halloween, and time for all good bloggers to discuss horror. And so I will talk about Higurashi, which may be a mystery series, and may also be a harem series, but is first and foremost known for its graphic horror. This volume starts a new arc, with events once again reset to the middle of June. There’s a basic horror in the premise: the cast are dying in horrible ways over and over, each time with someone falling into a spiral of paranoia and insanity. Worst of all, the young priestess Rika seems to be aware of the previous iterations. Will this arc, focusing on the cute redhead Rena, be any more optimistic?

Well, probably, but not in this first volume. This is the start of the “Atonement” arc, which is the mirror of the first arc of the entire series, the ‘Abducted by Demons’ arc. Unlike the previous Shion arc, however, which told the same events but from a new perspective, this is showing an entirely different plot, focusing on Rena. We do start off bright and happy as always, with Rena and the rest of the club playing a penalty game with water guns in gym class. As the story goes on, though, we realize that the chapter title “Happy Rena” is misleading, and that she uses a smile to mask her inner pain and sadness. And what’s more, it’s getting obvious.

Rena is an interesting case. Most of the previous arcs have shown the protagonist (Keiichi at first, then Shion) start off relatively well-adjusted, then slowly the paranoia and madness seeps into them as they start imagining things that aren’t really happening. Rena’s backstory shows us that she’s already been committed for a long period after her parent’s divorce, and has attempted suicide as well as assault. And while moving back to Hinamizawa helped briefly, now that a new woman is cozying up to her father, the old feelings are starting up again.

In addition to Rena not really needing much impetus to get her started into killing other people, the people she’s dealing with are those that we’re not really going to miss. It turns out that her father’s new love is a gold digger who leeches onto men and gradually strips them of their money… something she casually brags about in a cafe while on the arm of Satoko’s uncle. Remember him? Back in the Curse Killing arc, we saw his physical and mental abuse of the fragile Satoko. Combined with his new love, they’re a couple that Rena is allowed to kill while still retaining the audience’s sympathy… or are they? Does anything justify murder?

As for the horror elements in this volume, for those who were creeped out by the fingernail torture in the Eye Opening Arc, well, we may have found a way to top it. Rena’s repressed rage and despair apparently comes into her head in the form of imaginary maggots that are inside her skin. Note they don’t feel imaginary to her – or to us, as we see them a few times, most notably bursting from her neck as she tries to kill herself in a flashback. Karin Suzuragi’s art is generally considered the “cutest” and most “moe” of the group of artists adapting the series, so this is particularly grotesque. There’s also Rena’s murder of Rina, the aforementioned gold-digger. The anime keeps things vague and silhouetted, but the manga has no trouble being graphic, showing Rina being beaten to death with a pipe (after trying to strangle Rena, to be fair) and begging for her life once she realizes what Rena will do. Oh yes, and eyeballs bulging from sockets, a Higurashi classic.

Higurashi makes for an excellent horror series, but it’s the mystery and characters that keep me coming back after so many deaths and resets. This isn’t the final arc, so I know things will turn south – they already have. But I want to know if the heroes can get any closer to redeeming Rena, and if she can find the “atonement” the arc title implies. I also want to know why this reset keeps happening. There’s got to be more to it than just torturing teenagers over and over again. Gripping, unnerving, and with a jarring contrast between art and events. Welcome to Hinamizawa.

No Longer Human, Vol. 1

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By Usamaru Furuya, based on the novel by Osamu Dazai. Released in Japan by Shinchosha, serialized in the magazine Weekly Comic Bunch. Released in North America by Vertical.

Vertical released 3 new series in quick succession this past month, and this may be the least talked about of the three. However, it should be talked about more, as it’s excellent, with Furuya creating a disturbing mood of suffocation and pretense as he adapts a classic Japanese novel about despair into modern times.

The original novel by Dazai was released in 1948, and is still beloved in Japan. We’ve seen its influence here already; the first Book Girl novel used it as a focal point, and Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei has many similarities between its protagonist and the narrator of No Longer Human. Furuya uses a bit of a distancing device to bookend the manga, showing himself looking at a website that supposedly describes the life of Yozo Oba, a young man who seems dissolute and bored with life.

The back cover notes that he takes refuge in clowning, but honestly we only see that for the first chapter of the book. In reality, Yozo has a different face for each situation he’s in, and seems to throw on personalities at random. This is not all that uncommon, of course, but he’s also a teenager, and seems to regard his attitude as unique and everyone else as being happy and content. In other words, Yozo thinks too much. As the manga goes on, various bad things start happening to him, but he deals with it by either reacting on the fly or drifting aimlessly. Yozo lacks a purpose.

This isn’t a horror manga (more on that later in the week), but there are certainly several images within that could be right at home in a horror anthology. Furuya loves to draw surrealistic mindscapes showing his characters’ fractured psyches, and so we see swirling faces, blank puppet eyes, and dolls breaking apart in the sea. What Yozo goes through is no picnic, either – he may start out as a rich dilettante, but his family curtails his allowance, then cuts him off completely. And the political group he joins turns out to be a terrorist organization. Is it any wonder he ends Volume 1 where he does?

As with Genkaku Picasso, the emphasis here is on imagery. Furuya is served well by a pre-existing plot, however, even if he’s adapting it to modern times, and so things hold together better than they did in Picasso. This is also for a far older audience than Picasso; there are several scenes with Yozo having sex, and there’s also some violence and graphic situations, particularly at the end of the first volume. No one is going to have their psyche magically fixed by a pen here.

As with most of Furuya’s works, No Longer Human isn’t for everyone. But I definitely regarded it as a step up from Picasso, and it lacks (so far) the sexual violence and gore of Lychee Light Club. Intriguingly, the flipped format we see here *isn’t* flipped – Furuya redrew his entire manga left-to-right for the French market, and Vertical is using that version. It works very well. For those looking for a psychological thriller with intellectual overtones, give this a try.