Archives for January 2011

Shojo Beat Quick Takes – Butterflies and Boys

January 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Butterflies, Flowers Volume 5 by Yuki Yoshihara

I tend to think of this series as “stealth josei” because while it is issues under the Shojo Beat imprint, the sexual content and mature readers rating puts it in the josei category for me. Yoshihara continues with her winning blend of workplace sex comedy and romance as Choko and her former servant/current boss/boyfriend Masayuki contemplate moving in together. His apartment is barren, so they go to a furniture store and try to pick out a few pieces. Even though Choko is now a working girl, she instinctively has upper-class tastes when it comes to furniture. Masayuki is crestfallen when the saleswoman doesn’t immediately treat them like a lovey dovey couple. Unfortunately when they are alone, Masayuki promptly becomes impotent because he’s unable to make the psychological switch to thinking of Choko as his girlfriend. Choko demands that he gets over his problem so they can have an ordinary relationship and refuses to respond when he calls her “milady”. Masayuki is unable to give up the master-servant relationship and decides to make love to her with the inexplicably otaku pronouncement “Even a Gundam is able to stand tall from willpower alone.” Butterflies, Flowers continues to be a little raunchy while simultaneously showing heart-warming stories about a developing relationship. It is a very unique combination that I think only Yoshihara could pull off.

Seiho Boys’ High School! Volume 4 by Kaneyoshi Izumi

This was a series I avoided when it came out for a couple reasons. I thought the premise of a shoujo series taking place in an all-boys high school had a very high potential for cheeziness. I also had read several volumes of Izumi’s other series Doubt! and gave up on it before finishing because I thought that the heroine was remarkably spineless. But I’d read several positive reviews of Seiho Boys’ High School! so I was curious to see if it really was good after all. The episodic nature of the manga and the handy character guide at the beginning made it easy for me to enjoy reading the manga even though I hadn’t read the previous volumes.

For an all-boys high school, there certainly seem to be plenty of girls hanging around. The romantic foibles of various characters are detailed in each chapter. Maki has a hard time moving forward with his current relationship due to his long-lost crush. Erika takes out her rage over his hesitation by mercilessly teaching him how to surf. The second story in the volume involves silent hunk Genda, who is utterly incapable of communicating his feeling to the girl that he’s dating, to the point of silently accepting without protest when she dumps him. When he sees her going out with a new totally unsuitable boy, he’s able to express himself with his fists and finally tell her how he feels. Izumi does a good job at showing Genda’s total and involuntary paralysis when it comes to talking to girls, which makes his breakthrough moment when he tells the object of his affections that she is “super cute” in a tiny voice. I liked the final story in the collection the most. Handsome Kamiki has a bit of a stalker in Fuyuka, who hangs around the school and is happy when he calls her by name. When Hanai confronts her, she says she realizes that she’s delusional but “My only choice is to embrace my delusions! I need to be a girl who lives in her dreams!” Hanai ends up serving as Henry Higgins to Fuyuka’s Eliza Doolittle, coaching her on how to change her personality to appeal more to boys. The interaction between Fuyuka was funny, with plenty of over-the-top pronouncements like “Master! I’ll work hard to perfect my womanly weapons!” Kamiki sees what’s going on and comments that he isn’t in favor of her sweetness and light act, and what if “people only like the plastic doll they’re seeing?” Fuyuka tries going out with a different guy and soon finds out that the strain of maintaining her new personality for someone she’s not even interested in isn’t worth it. I liked the short story format of this manga. I think Izumi’s character design and humor have improved a lot since Doubt!, and I enjoyed this volume much more than I was expecting.


Review copies provided by the publisher.

Kamisama Kiss Volume 2

January 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Kamisama Kiss Volume 2 by Julietta Suzuki

One of the things I liked about the first volume of this series was the way Nanami still continued to be a normal teenage girl even after achieving accidental godhood and taking up residence at a shrine. I liked the way Nanami journeyed back to the real world briefly, so I was happy to see that she makes the attempt to return to high school. What prompts her to return is a combination of boredom and a typical teen girl crush, when it is announced that the popular goth rock idol Kurama has just enrolled at her high school. He’s known as “a fallen angel with black wings” but he’s actually another yokai after Nanami’s power. Suzuki continues to have witty character designs for her yokai characters. Kurama is drawn almost as a parody of visual kei artists with heavy eyeliner, pointed fingernails, and black feathers floating in the air around him. While Tomoe sends Nanami to school wearing a goofy cat-head scarf in order to hide her mark of godhood, Kurama soon finds her out. He finds Nanami fascinating because after her initial meeting, she doesn’t immediately fawn over him like the other girls. She’s able to quickly perceive that Kurama has a stuck-up personality and her crush promptly fades. It seems like Kurama is going to stick around for awhile so it looks like Kamisama Kiss is going to be more conventionally shoujo than Karakuri Odette, with the normal girl being the crush object of two cute non-human guys.

Nanami’s high school classmates are almost uniformly obnoxious. The annoying boy from the first volume shows up again, and everyone makes fun of Nanami for being poor, until Tomoe makes a dramatic appearance to defend her. The other main storyline in this volume had many of the yokai of the week qualities of the first volume, but it ended up being in service of Nanami and Tomoe’s relationship developing further. A bright and powerful goddess with a shrine in the sky is dismayed to find out that Tomoe is in service to a human, so she announces that she’s taking over Nanami’s shrine, striking Tomoe with a cartoonish hammer to regress him into a child-like body. Nanami is soon placed in the role of Tomoe’s caretaker even though she’s lost her mystical powers. Nanami is determined to stick with Tomoe because she thinks he’s her only family. Seeing the power dynamic between Nanami completely reverse was interesting. Now Tomoe is helpless without his powers and unable to be intimidating because he looks like a three-year-old. He becomes dependent on Nanami to help him survive in the human world.

Overall, while Kamisama Kiss doesn’t quite have the quirky qualities I enjoy so much about Karakuri Odette, it is still a better than average shoujo series. There are fewer funny moments, but Kurama’s parodic goth appearance shows that Suzuki’s sense of humor is still intact.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

V.B. Rose Volume #11

January 25, 2011 by 1 Comment

V.B. Rose Volume 11 Banri Hidaka

My first impulse is to steer clear of long running series, just because I’ve long since entered double-stacking territory on the bookshelves that house my manga collection. But VB Rose #11 reminded me of some of the rewards for the reader that come with sticking it out for a multi-volume series. This volume shows the middle school adventures of Yukari and Mitsuya, and if I hadn’t read the previous volumes to see the ways they banter back and forth as adults I probably wouldn’t have appreciated this manga origin story so much.

Ageha asks the friends how long they’ve known each other and Mitsuya enthusiastically announces that it has been 10 years since they first met, “We’ve almost made it to our diamond anniversary!” What follows is an extended flashback as Mitsuya describes the beginning of their friendship to an enthusiastic Ageha. Mitsuya uses his charm to always be the center of attention at school. One day he notices Yukari sitting alone, and assumes that he hasn’t notices Yukari before because he is so unremarkable. When Mitsuya takes a closer look at Yukari he realizes that “He’s criminally cute!” Mitsuya promptly develops a strong man-crush but all of his attempts to get to know Yukari are mercilessly rebuffed until he finds a fashion pattern book that Yukari left at school. Mitsuya spends the evening reading the book and goes to V.B. Rose to return it because Yukari’s been out of school due to an illness. It turns out that the sickness was helping his father with an important order for the wedding dress business. Yukari’s sewing at a professional level, but his pattern making still needs a lot of work. It turns out that Mitsuya’s drawing abilities give him the talent to be a great pattern maker. Yukari and Mitsuya develop a friendship, and Mitsuya is brought into the V.B. Rose family.

There’s always been a slightly manic quality to Mitsuya’s flirting and joking personality. It turns out that this is a carefully crafted facade, as he was horribly disappointed in love many years before and has deliberately shut off his feelings. Being needed at the shop and developing a deeper friendship with Yukari allows him to come out of his shell a little bit, but the revelation about the true object of Mitsuya’s affections sets up a storyline that I’m very eager to see resolved in the next volume. Hidaka’s middle school versions of Mitsuya and Yukari are extra adorable, and the emotional arc of this volume will make fans of the series fall in love with it all over again.

Kamisama Kiss Winner

January 24, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The winner of the giveaway according to random.org, is commenter #4, JRB. I hope you enjoy this cute manga!

I asked How would you force your hot fox-spirit familiar to bend to your will? in my Kamisama Kiss Giveaway and got many entertaining responses:

From Celeste:

I would find out what its weakness is (food, drink, comics…) and dangle it in front of them. If that doesn’t work then I’ll use blackmail, seems to work in some manga.

JRB:

Puppy dog eyes. Very shoujo.

#
Sesame:

I’d probably just get it drunk on sake or whatever its preferred drink is. I feel like I see depictions of Japanese spirits drinking all the time so I wouldn’t feel too bad about it.

PhoenixTerran:

Delicious food! (It works on me, anyway.) Of course, while I like my cooking the feeling isn’t universal. So, I would probably have to convince my housemates to make something for me first, ’cause they’re awesome when it comes to good food.

Tungwene:

I would threaten to make him eat my cooking for a week because I happen to be a terrible cook.

From Manga Critic:

Flossies: no self-respecting canid can do without them! My dog looks positively stoned when she chews one, I doubt that a fox spirit could resist them, either. (It’s like catnip for dogs.) As an added bonus, the fox spirit would have greatly improved breath as well.

From Jacob:

Cold iron. Fair folk can’t stand that ol’ col’ iron.

Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy

January 24, 2011 by 1 Comment

Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy by Fumi Yoshinaga

I’m willing to try any manga by Fumi Yoshinaga, and I was curious about Not Love But Delicious Foods, because it is obvious from her other manga that Yoshinaga is an unapologetic foodie. This volume detailing the restaurant visits of Yoshinaga and her friends and co-workers feels a little more like omake (the extra author notes or side stories included in a manga) than a full-fledged volume, but if I had to read a volume of nothing but food omake, I’d expect Yoshinaga’s to be very entertaining. I wasn’t disappointed by the love of food on display here, but I was more interested in the ways Yoshinaga portrayed herself as she ate.

More than anything else, Not Love But Delicious Foods functions as a food diary from a restaurant enthusiast. Yoshinaga goes to eat with her assistants and friends, visiting different restaurants and including detailed descriptions of the meals eaten at each one. There isn’t the historical background or information about preparation included that you’d see in a series like Oshinbo, instead you get recitations of what’s great about a particular dish, with a map to the restaurants visited after each chapter. The food descriptions sometimes seemed to blur together a little bit, but I read the book in one sitting. It might be better sampled a chapter or two at a time. I did put down the book feeling a wave of nostalgia for Japanese bakeries (they put so many different things inside bread) and Yoshinaga changed my dismissive attitude towards eel.

Yoshinaga portrays herself as a middle aged man, unsightly hag, and dolled-up drag queen. She introduces her character as “F-mi Y-naga, a thirty-one year old female who makes her living by drawing men engaged in anal sex.” She has a wide circle of friends she goes out to eat with, but her mainstay is her hopeless assistant S-hara. She lives with S-hara, and he works on her manga but he’s not very good. She keeps trying to lend him out to other manga artists in the futile hope that he’ll come back with better skills. Yoshinaga portrays her attitude towards food as very proprietorial. She’s delighted to talk about food, take people out to eat, and if someone likes a dish that she recommends she is as proud as if she made it herself. She frightens away potential dates, but thrills inside when she sees a well-fed man. One of the stories that I thought was interesting coming from a yaoi author is when Y-naga discovers that one of her acquaintances is gay. She takes him out to eat and apologizes to him, saying “I’ve been paying my rent drawing manga with gay themes, but none of them are real gay themes!”

Y-naga’s capacity for food is almost endless, as shown when the staff of an all you can eat restaurant gathers and bows to Y-naga and her friend when they finally place their last order. The lecturing tone is fairly consistent throughout the whole manga, but it is something Yoshinaga is very aware of, making comments like “Imparting boring trivia to young female meal companions is one of Y-naga’s old-man like traits.” Yoshinaga is obviously exaggerating her quirks for comedic effect, but if was fun reading about her adventures in restaurants and seeing the way she enjoys sharing food with her friends. I think this manga is probably best suited to someone who is already a Yoshinaga fan, and who has already read several of her series. While Not Love But Delicious Foods is funny and entertaining I imagine it would be less captivating for someone who isn’t very familiar with her previous works. As a companion piece to Yoshinaga’s other series providing an exaggerated look at the life of a talented manga creator, Not Love But Delicious Foods functions very well. It does make me dearly wish that someone would pick up and translate her series “What Did You Eat Yesterday” about the culinary adventures of a gay couple.

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