Black Bird Volume 8

I read the first couple volumes of Black Bird and decided that the romance between a young girl and a dominating demon just wasn’t for me. I wasn’t all that thrilled with all the wound licking going on, and for whatever reason in my tawdry manga I prefer the flat out trashiness of something like Ai Ore to the more romanticized Black Bird although both titles display the same type of troubling and stereotypical gender roles in their main couples. At least Ai Ore is more open in its commitment to crazy plot elements, with all the rape threats, etc. right there on the page. In contrast, Black Bird tends to coyly hide elements of sexual coercion with all the accidental wounds and subsequent licking going on, along with a heroine who would happily sacrifice her existence for her demon boyfriend. This volume of Black Bird marks a bit of a turning point, as Misao and Kyo may finally have to get it on. Not because they mutually decide to take their relationship to the next level as an expression of their love, but because Kyo is afflicted by a horrible curse (which manifests in the form of exhaustion and tribal tattoos) and only Misao’s becoming his demonic bride can heal his affliction. I enjoyed this volume more than I expected but for a large section of the book I was really hoping that bad guy Raiko would prevail with his demon hunting mission and actually kill Kyo. I have a feeling I’m not supposed to be rooting for the death of the romantic lead in this manga.

Stepping on Roses Volume 5

I originally felt a little resentful towards this title because I thought it was more superficial than Ueda’s other series Tail of the Moon, which is one of my favorite historical shoujo manga. After reading a couple volumes I think the Perils of Pauline troubles that beset Sumi are starting to be more amusing than annoying, just because Ueda manages to pack so many problems into a single volume of manga. In the fifth volume Sumi is still in her marriage of convenience with wealthy businessman Soichiro. The evil Natsuki has succeeded in driving away Soichiro’s faithful butler and inserting a spying maid into Sumi’s household. Soichiro’s best friend Nozomu is still in love with Sumi but that didn’t stop him from marrying a random rich girl, who is not pleased that her husband is in love with someone else. So! Sumi and Soichiro are growing closer, but when he asks her if she loves him she replies no. He conveniently has forgotten that when they married he instructed her not to fall in love with him and he walks out in the rain. Sumi goes after him and gets soaked. Nozomo has moved out of his house, leaving his wife alone after she caused a scene at a party by attacking Sumi with a bouquet of flowers. Nozomo spends his time alone creepily working on an epic naked painting of Sumi, and when he finds her outside his house he decides to finagle her into posing for him. In the meantime Sumi’s hapless brother with a gambling addiction is trying to go straight by working at Soichiro’s company, and Soichiro’s long lost butler has moved in with Sumi’s poverty stricken family. Whew! I do wish that Sumi had a bit more of a personality, as her main function seems to be making futile attempts to ward off the attentions of almost every man who stumbles across her.

Seiho Boys High School! Volume 5

This volume was my favorite in this mini-batch of manga. I enjoy the self-contained short stories in each volume, but since the series uses the same rotating cast of characters, the reader still gets plenty of character development. Having the stories written more from a male point of view also provides a nice contrast to more conventional shoujo titles. The first couple stories explore Maki’s situation as he remembers his dead girlfriend and struggles on a first date with his new girlfriend. A ghostly image starts appearing to many of the guys at the dorm, and Maki wonders if his girlfriend Erika is trying to signal something to him. The ghost ends up being a hermit-like male student, but Maki has an unexpectedly touching dream triggered by the episode that may be a signal that he’s truly ready to let go and move on with his life. Unfortunately moving on can be difficult, as he attempts to go on a date with his current love interest and starts tensing up and making the situation even more awkward. Stories about relationships are balanced out by more comedic episodes, as Hanai accidentally finds his photographic ambitions recognized when he starts getting besieged by girls from other schools who want pictures of his classmates. The ongoing storyline about ordinary girl Miyaji and extraordinary male specimen Kamiki gets a little bit of progression as well. This manga strikes me as a good series to have around to reread. The episodic nature of Seiho Boys High School makes it easy to pick up a random volume to read, and the short stories provide plenty of humor and emotion.

Review copies provided by the publisher.

Ai Ore Volume 1 by Mayu Shinjo

I don’t think I’ve ever blogged much about Mayu Shinjo’s series Sensual Phrase, mostly because I wrote about it for Library Journal’s Xpress Reviews online a long long time ago. If you scroll down this page you can see my review of the final volume. Sensual Phrase was pure trashy soapy fun, as you might expect from a series about a virginal (but not for long) girl who inexplicably becomes recruited to be the lyricist of a popular rock band. Shinju’s series fill a niche that isn’t often explored here for translated manga – more mature shoujo. We’ve got some other examples like Butterflies, Flowers (which I consider to be josei masquerading as shoujo) but not much else.

Ai Ore deals with superficially swapping traditional gender roles and romance in a teen rock band saga format. An androgynous band named Blaue Rosen is faced with the loss of their lead singer. All the pretty boys in the band are actually girls who attend the same all female high school. A cute girl named Akira asks to audition for the part, but the stoic lead guitarist Mizuki doesn’t want anyone else singing her songs. Of course Akira turns out to be a boy, and a romance between the tall and rangy Mizuki and the short and cute Akira begins. Mizuki’s handsomeness cause her to be treated as a major crush object by all the girls at her school, and Akira’s feminine charms have given him the title of his school’s “princess”. When Mizuki and Akira are together, misunderstandings abound as Mizuki’s classmates don’t understand why she is favoring a single girl with her attention and the boys at Akira’s school are disappointed that a handsome boy is monopolizing the attention of their princess. Shenanigans!

Unfortunately the switch in outward appearances doesn’t mean that Shinjo’s characters personalities are switched as well. For all his girlish features, Akira is a fairly typical alpha male, relentlessly pursuing his goal of dating Mizuki and joining her band despite her not very convincing protestations. While Mizuki professes to hate men, and is committed to maintaining her princely outward appearance, her inexplicable feelings for Akira turn her timorous. She doesn’t project the self-confidence and cool that she’s able to maintain as part of her stage performance. Shinjo’s romantic plot devices have a striking similarity to many of the tropes that pop up in old school romance novels. Threats of rape and sexual assault are common, and I was a little bummed out yet unsurprised that the end of this volume focused on several scenarios of this type. I am generally a big fan of cross dressing manga but Ai Ore didn’t totally win me over, despite plenty of over the top pronouncements like Akira saying “Instead of singing about love, drown yourself in me!” It was a little hard for me to believe that Akira is more physically dominating than Mizuki when he’s drawn to be around a foot shorter than her.

Existing Mayu Shinjo fans will find a lot to like about Ai Ore. It is an oversized edition of 300 pages, with color pages in the front and a character gallery in the back. Even though I’m not finding this manga as immediately addicting as Sensual Phrase, I’ll want to check out the second volume.

Review copy provided by the publisher

Oresama Teacher Volumes 1 and 2 by Izumi Tsubaki

Izumi Tsubaki is the author of the high school massage club manga Magic Touch, that didn’t generally get favorable reviews from most manga bloggers. I read one volume from Magic Touch that was from the middle of the series and didn’t think it was horrible, although it didn’t inspire me to pick up the rest of the series. Oresama Teacher seems so much better! There’s an element of subversive humor on display that many shoujo series
lack, and some of the unconventional interactions between the characters made me think that Oresama Teacher seemed a bit like a kinder and gentler version of an Ai Morinaga series. And I love Ai Morinaga.

One of the things that I liked right when I first picked up Oresama Teacher is the fact that the heroine is a semi-reformed juvenile delinquent being packed off to an alternative school. I wish we had more teacher-centric female juvenile delinquent manga released in English, and can only hope that one day we get Gokusen translated over here. Mafuyu is able to fight and lead a gang with great competence, but she is utterly incapable of living alone and cooking for herself. When she goes out to replace the instant ramen she destroyed, she happens upon a handsome older man who is getting beaten up. He acts mysterious and bizarre and steals her food. Of course, when Mafuyu shows up at school the next day she discovers that the man is her homeroom teacher Takaomi.

Tsubaki comes up with something I didn’t think was possible – an interesting twist on the old “I have met my beloved childhood friend again as a teenager” plot device that is used so often in shoujo manga. Takaomi is Mafuyu’s long lost neighbor, but he carefully trained her to be a delinquent from a young age. Mafuyu at first remembers her old friend tenderly, but when her real memories start to come back she realizes that due to Saeki, her childhood was filled with brutal training sessions and savage beatdowns. While she starts school determined to act like a normal girl, join clubs, and fall in love, Mafuyu soon finds herself confronting her former ways. She sits next to young delinquent Hasakaya who is able to detect her innate bloodlust. Hasakaya is so eager to fight that he takes on large groups alone, and Mafuyu decides to rescue him while disguising her actions. Hayasaka is just dim enough to believe that she had no involvement when he wakes up with bodies piled around him. Saeki appears to be sociopathic and manipulative, getting Mafuyu and Hayasaka to join his “Public Morals Club” and indulging in the occasional bit of sexual harassment.

Many of the characters in Oresama Teacher are hilariously dimwitted, the better to set up Tsubaki’s jokes. This is the type of thing that gets a little tiring after multiple volumes of a comedy manga series, but Tsubaki’s characters have a bit more depth than usual, because she’s careful to develop everyone’s individual motivations. Hasakaya’s weird code of honor ensures that he’s always going to get into trouble by challenging multiple people to fight him at once, and Mafuyu’s impressive fighting skills and desire to save her friend ensure that she’s always going to come to his rescue. Her new found friendship is important to her and she doesn’t want Hasakaya to think that she’s odd, so she makes a rather pathetic attempt to hide her identity by wearing a bunny mask. Mafuyu’s penpal by way of carrier pigeon, the macho guys in the crafts club, her growing friendship with Hasakaya and the inexplicable relationship between her and Takaomi have me looking forward to the next volume. Oresama Teacher is a great manga to pick up if you’re looking for something light and funny that also serves as an antidote to more typical shoujo.

Review copies provided by the publisher

Sakura Hime: The Legend of Princess Sakura Volume 1 by Arina Tanemura

Arina Tanemura can be a somewhat polarizing manga creator. Some people love her detailed art and others might find overly cluttered. Some people may enjoy her plotting and characters which are girly to an extreme. Others might find her manga a bit hard to relate to. The main series of Tanemura’s that I’ve read in its entirety is Kamekaze Kaito Jeanne, about an art thief named Maron who is the reincarnation of Joan of Arc. I have a lot of lingering affection for Tanemura due to Kamekaze Kaito Jeanne sheer craziness (Maron goes to talk to God in the final volume), and I’ve been slowly collecting volumes of her other series Full Moon and Gentlemen’s Alliance Cross. So to people who say “Artwork too busy!” I say “Galaxy Eyes!” If somebody says “Too many shoujo cliches!” I say “Look at the ribbons! LOOK AT ALL THE BILLOWING RIBBONS!”

Sakura Hime is set in the Heian period, which gives plenty of room for Tanemura to display her love of detail with all the flowing costumes the nobles wear. Sakura is a princess who has grown up in isolation, promised in marriage at a young age to Prince Oura. The introduction page of the manga encapsulates the whole story, as it has a picture of our cheerful heroine and a potentially tortured young man with the text “Always I watch you. I hate you. I hate you. Always I’ve hated you. Always….I watch you.” This might be getting a little dark, despite all the magical girl trappings of Tanemura’s story. Sakura is visited by an arrogant emissary named Aoba who claims to be a representative of the prince. Sakura wants to make her own decisions and isn’t happy about being sold into marriage. Aoba (who is of course the prince in disguise) and Sakura naturally fall in to the type of bickering relationship that usually signals a romance drawn out over at least four volumes. But there are complications, as it turns out that Sakura is a descendant of one of the legendary Moon Princesses and thus her fate is to transform into a fighting sailor outfit and armed with a sword that she can’t exactly control, fight demons!

The rest of the volume shows Sakura gradually starting to stand up for herself. Romance isn’t working out for her, and she has to flee, accompanied only by her tiny sidekick. She soon makes new friends but dealing with Aoba and her own mystical nature ensure that she’s still going to experience rough times ahead. If you have a low tolerance for silly magical girl manga, Sakura Hime isn’t for you. If you have a tendency to be distracted by billowing ribbons and always appreciate it when characters yell things like “Sakura Descends! There is no escaping the moon’s divine retribution!” Sakura Hime seems like an amusing way to pass the time while you’re waiting for the new Kodansha editions of Sailor Moon. Tanemura’s billowing ribbons really are the best.

Review copy provided by the publisher.