Club 9, Vols. 1-3

By Makoto Kobayashi
Published by Dark Horse

How much do I love Club 9? So much! How bummed out am I that the last few chapters were never collected into a graphic novel? So bummed!

This is kind of my own version of Shaenon’s Overlooked Manga Festival (which you should totally read). Club 9 might be a title that time forgot. A coworker of mine was reading this on the subway once and I was shocked that it was a Dark Horse title I had never heard of. It turns out Club 9 was brought to our shores long ago by Studio Proteus, and published in the now-defunct anthology Super Manga Blast. I feel bad for Super Manga Blast in the same way I feel bad for Viz’s Pulp magazine – both were just slightly ahead of their time.

Club 9 is the unlikely story of Haruo Hattori, a hottie idiot virgin hick of Li’l Abner proportions. Most importantly, Haruo is “pure hearted” – a strange Japanese concept that I am only now beginning to understand. Nothing is more valuable in Japan – even a 1980’s bubble economy Japan – than a pure-hearted virgin, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Haruo graduates from high school somewhere in the backwaters of the Akita prefecture and heads off to college in Tokyo to fill her head with book learnin’. Her high school boyfriend Kingoro lead the school baseball team to a miraculous victory at Koshien, (the World Series of high school baseball). Kingoro has been passed over for the baseball draft as the story opens, crushing his hopes of being in the big leagues and moving to Tokyo. Haruo moves to Tokyo by herself, vowing to remain a virgin for Kingoro.

Unfortunately Haruo’s dorm room is haunted by a disgusting masturbating ghost (a nerd ghost who died a virgin). In order to afford to live in Tokyo on her own, Haruo gets a job at the same bar where a college friend works. Haruo is too innocent and too “country” to know anything about hostess clubs, and thus, she unwittingly becomes a hostess.

Club 9 is hysterically funny and charming, but it’s a bit of a hard sell. First of all, the dialog is written in hardcore dialect – the type that people reading old-timey strips from the ’40’s (the Comics Journal crowd?) might be used to. This is basically how Haruo talks through most of volume one:

“Ah’ll call yuh iffen ah have a speck o’ trouble! Heba!!”

“Heba” as explained in a translation note on the first page, is provinicial dialect for “Hello,” “Good-bye,” “Howdy,” and “Aloha” all rolled into one. Haruo says it a lot. The Japanese title of this book is “Heba! Hello-chan,” since Haruo’s working name is “Miss Hello”.

Here’s another example of dialog from volume one:

Ken: Whoa nelly!! Lookit thet!! A Fah-rari-testa-roh-sa!! Ain’t Tokyo somethin’…? Yer’d never see one o’ them in Akita!
Haruo: Ehh…?! That thang? Don’t y’ try t’ tell me thet’s s’pose t’be cool! It’s pig-bitin’ ugly!

Yes, pig-biting. There are enough apostrophes in volume one to stretch back and forth the moon several times. My spell checker is exploding as I type this. I can only imagine what the original Japanese must have been like to inspire such colorful dialog! By volumes two and three the regional dialect is toned down, unless Haruo is talking to someone from her hometown.

“Ah ain’t got th’ tahm nor the inclination raht now for mixin’ with menfolk!”

The other barrier to reading Club 9 is a lack of cultural notes. Much of the story takes place in Ginza, in the 1980’s, in a hostess club. If you know anything about the Japanese economic bubble and have some idea of what Ginza is like and what hostesses do, it’s no problem. I suppose if you didn’t know anything about hostesses – well, neither does Haruo, and Club 9 explains it well enough, but you won’t get all of the jokes.

The finally stumbling block to enjoying Club 9 is the weird art. Backgrounds are rendered fabulously, and characters’ bodies are well-drawn, but their mouths are freakishly large and stylized. Check out Kingoro:

I don’t think that Club 9 would survive a flip-through in a bookstore by today’s typical manga fan. The fashion and hairstyles in the series are also 1980’s spectacular. I have to invent a word to describe that, like: Eightiestacular!

The story is strong enough that I think almost anyone could enjoy it – even if you don’t know anything about sports cars or baseball or Gucci or Li’l Abner. I hesitate to say this but I “laughed out loud” many times and attempted to relay the best jokes to my boyfriend. I avoided cleaning the apartment to read the volumes back to back.

Haruo is wonderfully star-struck by the manga artist she meets in the club and the guy from “the funny toilet commercials”. By volume two her sweet-hearted innocent charm has captured several men, including a national morning news anchor and a big-shot businessman who owns a baseball team or two. Things are building up for a major conflict in volume four…

…but wait, there is no volume four! The remaining chapters exist in English, in the pages of the out-of-print Super Manga Blast magazine. I haven’t read they ending yet! Crap!!! I wrote to Michael Gombos at Dark Horse, who had this to say:

“The editor of the serialized Club 9 English-language episodes in Super Manga Blast! has a great affection for that series. Although it is on hiatus now, he hopes to present the series to Dark Horse in a different format when some time has passed and the market may be open to revisiting Club 9, possibly collecting the whole story in an omnibus edition with those uncollected chapters. In the meantime — the whole story does exist in English. Please look for the later issues of Super Manga Blast! for those last episodes…”

Let’s generate some interest! The wikipedia page about Club 9 is blank! The Anime News Network encyclopedia page has no information about the plot. I think there might be a live-action drama of Club 9, but my internet surfing skills are not great when it comes to Japanese searches. Rightstuf has a page on a volume that never existed.

Here are some of my favorite scenes from the manga:

Haruo’s regular “work clothes” remind me of my own, back on the farm. She’ll learn the ropes soon enough:

And eventually, Haruo is totally made over:

Towards the end of volume 3 Haruo makes a surprise visit to favorite manga author/client:

It’s worth noting that Makoto Kobayashi is also the author What’s Michael?, which has been made into an animated series. I have never read What’s Michael?, but it was also in Super Manga Blast! and was made into an animated series.