jiu jiu – Manga Report

Jiu Jiu Volume 2

I’ve been meaning to write about the second volume of Jiu Jiu and decided to finally sit down and do a post this week because it is during the Vampire Manga Moveable Feast and there is a new vampire character in this manga! Here’s my review of the first volume. I found the art in the first volume a little bit hard to decode, but for whatever reason I thought the second volume was much clearer. Either I was more used to the drawing style, or the layouts got a bit easier to follow. In any case, I had a much easier time reading this volume. For those people who enjoyed the first volume of the series, the second is much the same as Takamichi and her Jiu Jiu Snow and Night spend a fair amount of time exploring their feelings for each other in between episodes of demon-hunting shenanigans.

Things get shaken up a bit with the sudden arrival of an imperious vampire pig bat, who initially looks like an elementary school student when he switches to humanoid form. Takamachi thinks that it is adorable but Snow and Night are sensibly suspicious of any new addition to the menagerie. Meru has fixated on Takamichi for a ritual involving his first time taking blood from a human. He reveals that he’s actually 17, but can only reach maturity with the addition of blood. The contrast between Meru’s various forms was quite amusing, with the ungainly pig-bat being quite the caricature. Jiu Jiu flashes back and forth from scenes exploring emotional abandonment to more typical shojo manga staples like trips to the beach. Themes of maturity and growing up are explored, as the contrast between Snow and Night’s actual ages and their appearance sometimes gets the quasi-family group into trouble. Meru serves as a contrast to this dynamic since he switches between younger and older forms.

Jiu Jiu is still very episodic in nature. While the two volumes released so far explore the same themes, it doesn’t have the narrative urgency that would come from a more involved storyline. Still, I found myself enjoying Tobina’s unique art style more in the second volume just because it was more comprehensible, and there are elements in Jiu Jiu that are really quite odd, with all the cages and the characters’ tendencies to sleep together like a pile of puppies. I’d likely recommend this series to any fan of supernatural shojo who was looking for something a little offbeat.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Jiu Jiu Volume 1 by Touya Tobina

Jiu Jiu Volume 1 by Touya Tobina

I’m always curious when a new title is added to the Shojo Beat imprint, since Shojo Beat titles make up a majority of my reading list. I’m also happy to see that in Jiu Jiu we have a title with a quirky heroine, a general trend I am happy to see reflected in many of the recently translated manga series. Jiu Jiu looks like a promising shoujo twist on the monster hunting manga genre.

Takamichi is born into a family of Dark Hunters. When her twin brother is killed, she’s the sole heir. For companionship, she’s given a pair of Jiu Jiu – familiars who can switch form from wolf to human. In human form, Snow and Night are handsome teenage boys, but they’re really only three years old. Takamichi’s life becomes even more complicated when Snow and Night decide that they are going to start attending school with their mistress. As a heroine, Takamichi is harsh and guilt-ridden. She’s haunted by her brother’s death and often deals harshly with Snow and Night because she doesn’t want to get close to anybody. Takamichi also has a strong sense of duty, fulfuling her duties as a monster hunter while not wanting her Jiu Jiu to come along with her because she doesn’t want them to get hurt. This is the source of the main tension in the book, because Snow and Night want to be with their mistress at all times. Their names reflect their appearance and personalities, with Snow being pale with a bright and playful personality, while Night has a darker complexion and is more reserved and intuitive.

Visually, Jiu Jiu is dense with sometimes little transitions between scenes. It required more of my concentration to read than usual, and might have benefited from being a tad more sparse. The art style made me wonder if Tobina was somehow a Frankenstein mangaka created from mashing together Arina Tanemura and Hakase Mizuki. It was an interesting contrast reading Kaze Hikaru right after Jiu Jiu, because the two manga couldn’t be more different in terms of the art. One of the things I always appreciate in manga is an artist with an individualistic style, and Tobina’s thin line and the stylized spindly limbs of her characters emphasizes the animalistic nature of the Jiu Jiu. She switches back and forth between kawaii howling wolf pups and the demons that Takamichi faces. The first volume of Tobina’s other manga, Clean Freak Fully-Equipped had a similar focus on a protagonist with psychological issues. The combination of haunted heroine, stylized art, and a potentially interesting twist on monster hunting manga has me looking forward to the next volume.

Review copy provided by the publisher.