Blue Spring

By Taiyo Matsumoto
Viz, 216 pp.
Rating: Mature

As depicted in most shojo and shonen series, the Japanese high school is the epitome of order, with students in neat, military-style uniforms diligently studying for exams, tidying up classrooms, staging plays, publishing stories, and participating in cultural festivals. Students who do not fit into the school’s established pecking order—social, athletic, and/or academic—quickly find themselves ostracized by their peers for lack of purpose. Taiyo Matsumoto, however, offers a very different image of the Japanese high school in his anthology Blue Spring. His subjects are the kids with “front teeth rotten from huffing thinner,” who “answer to reason with their fists and never question their excessive passions”—in short, the delinquents. Kitano High School, the milieu these kids inhabit, is a crumbling eyesore with graffiti-covered walls, trash-filled stairwells, and indifferent faculty. Students gather on the rooftop to play chicken during school hours and fill their after-school hours with girlie magazines, petty crime, and trash-talking at the local diner, marking time until they join the world of adult responsibility.

Blue Spring is not an easy read. Matsumoto eschews linear narrative in favor of digressions, interruptions, and fragments. As a result, many pages look like cinematic montages with three or four different story lines unfolding simultaneously. For those who don’t read Japanese or know much about Japanese popular culture, many of the book’s smaller details—graffiti on a bathroom wall, signage in the red light district—register as visual noise rather than symbolism, despite the editorial team’s heroic efforts to provide translations and footnotes. The artwork, too, may prove a stumbling block for some, as Matsumoto adopts a cartoonishly ugly style that makes his youthful protagonists look as weathered as Keith Richards.

Yet there are tangible rewards for the patient reader. Matsumoto’s almost hallucinatory style suits the material perfectly, capturing the intensity, the emotion, and the aimlessness of his characters’ lives. He offers no easy answers for his characters’ behavior, nor any false hope that they will escape the lives of violence and despair that seem to be their destiny. Rather, he offers a frank, funny and often disturbing look at the years in which most of us were unformed lumps of clay—or, in Matsumoto’s memorable formulation, a time when most of us were blue: “No matter how passionate you were, no matter how much your blood boiled, I believe youth is a blue time. Blue—that indistinct blue that paints the town before the sun rises.”

This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher. Taiyo Matsumoto’s series Tekkon Kinkreet (Black and White) will be released by Viz in September.

E’S, Vol. 2

By Satol Yuiga
Broccoli Books, 224 pp.
Rating: 16+

I thoroughly enjoyed the first volume of E’S. With its eighties-retro look, angsty telepaths, and post-apocalyptic setting, E’S seemed to be the perfect manga for a CLAMP fan still mourning the premature cancellation of X/1999. Alas, the shortcomings of Satol Yuiga’s series came into much sharper relief in volume two. The biggest problem is that the story just doesn’t make much sense. Yuiga hasn’t bothered to explain his premise very carefully, and in the absence of compelling characters, the future-dominated-by-an-evil-corporation theme doesn’t feel very fresh. The action sequences are frantic, fill-every-square-inch-of-the-page affairs that left me with a headache. And the characters… ugh. Kai dithers and vacillates, but we never sense the personality behind those choices. Nor do we really understand his relationship with Hikaru. There’s some intimation that his sister may, in fact, be dangerous, but the idea is abandoned as quickly as it’s introduced. But the biggest problem with the E’S cast is the lack of memorable female characters. The series desperately needs a heroine whose primary interests do not revolve around baking or tending cute, helpless animals. Perhaps such a creature materializes in the next volume, but I don’t think I’ll be around to witness her arrival.

Volume 3 of E’S will be released in July. To read a review of volume one, click here.

Yakitate!! Japan, Vol. 5

By Takahashi Hashiguchi
Viz, 208 pp.
Rating: Older Teen

Reading a volume of Yakitate!! Japan is a bit like ordering the same dish every time you visit a favorite restaurant. You know exactly what you’re going to get—in this case, tournament competition, outrageous puns, and even more outrageous feats of bread-baking—but it’s still as delicious as the first time you tried it. Volume 5 of this pan-tastic series chronicles yet another round of the Pantasia Rookie Tournament. This time, the fearless (and none-too-bright) Kazuma Azuma is called upon to top his amazing Technicolor achievement from volume 4 with bread made from specialty yeast. My only gripe with this volume: no recipes! Volume two’s omake included instructions for making steamed bread in a rice cooker. Why no directions for making, say, green turtle bread? Or growing your own brown rice yeast? Perhaps Viz could invite American readers to submit their own Ja-pan recipes. My mouth is watering at the prospect.

If you haven’t yet sampled Yakitate!! Japan, I encourage you to do so. Though the characters are two-dimensional, the puns dreadful, and the plot structures as formulaic as a Law & Order episode, Yakitate!! Japan is never less than entertaining, and manages to make something as mundane as bread-baking into a spectacle of Super Bowl proportions.

Volume 5 of Yakitate!! Japan will be released in May. To read a review of volume 4, click here.