By Inio Asano
Viz, 209 pp.
Rating: Older Teen

Well, I’ll give it this: What a Wonderful World! is, to me, a very unique manga. This comes with a follow-up statement: something unique is not always completely excellent.

Asano’s manga is a collection of short stories that are oh-so-loosely intertwined. Sometimes, the only connection between tales is the transition page in between them. Other times, a main character from an earlier story may play a smaller side role in the story of yet another character.

I love the idea of short stories, the way an author can take a big concept, boil it down into something bite-sized, and give you a small taste of an entire world over the course of a few pages. With manga, however, the concept is much harder to pull off. A short chapter of manga (one of them is only seven pages) gives an incredibly limited amount of time to create a character who the reader can either identify or, at the very least, find memorable. The main issue with What a Wonderful World! is that half of the chapters aren’t memorable at all.

Every story is, in one way or another, about what people amount to in life. For the most part, this manga is all about life’s losers, the ones whose dreams are abandoned or diminished or stolen. The theme is unifying, but it does grow old after a while.

It opens with Toga, a college dropout who is interested in music and winds up completely alone. Her friend, Horita, embodies the stereotypical musician, with ridiculous hair and talk of going pro with his music. When she leaves college, she also quits the band, and hasn’t talked to any of them, including Horita, since. A chance reunion with Horita allows her to learn he has given up on music and has entered the business world, trading in his mohawk for a modest cut and a shirt and tie. She strengthens her resolve to become a successful musician and that’s the end of the story.

Toga benefits from being the character with the most recurring scenes in the manga, which makes her one of the best developed characters in this first volume. Her later appearances reveal that she has become a middle school teacher who also plays in a band on the side. The band, DAT3, is semi-successful, having released two singles. This makes Toga the only character who comes close to living her dream, with the consolation of only being able to do it part-time. In a way, she’s still settling for second best.

Another story I’d like to mention involves one of Toga’s students, Hozumi, who is the president of the student body. He is an exemplary student while in school and a bully outside of it. He runs with a gang of losers who prey on other students. The nicest touch in this story is how Hozumi smokes cigarettes outside of school and no one ever calls attention to it. Too often, manga-ka seem to throw in exposition to point out little details, ruining good touches of subtlety along the way. Such is not the case here.

When Toga asks Hozumi to check on another kid who has been absent for a few days, she is completely unaware that Hozumi is the one who has been beating up this kid and making him want to stay home. (Side note: what happened to teachers or administration calling home? Is this how the Japanese school system works?) The bullied student has a mirror on the outside of his door, so as Hozumi talks to the kid (who has locked himself in), he is forced to look at himself and realize what he has done. The story ends with Hozumi trying to kill himself and failing.

Those stories are the best of the bunch. Others are far more forgettable. Here’s a brief synopsis of a few more, so you can see if any of these might interest you: a high-school girl is kidnapped by a nice-guy criminal in a bear suit, an unsuccessful 35-year-old manga artist sees his daughter fall and get back up which convinces him to attend a middle school reunion, and one girl looks out at fresh snow and thinks about getting a fresh start in life.

What a Wonderful World! is a commentary on how people can be so full of fire at a young age, only to burn out and take a less fulfilling path in life. In some cases, the characters have never had any real passion, so technically they’re just lame, lost sheep wandering blindly through life. Either way, there is a constant sense of defeat pouring out from every character. No one really achieves any sort of long-term happiness in the end, which adds a lot of predictability that blunts an otherwise solid read.

Volume one of What a Wonderful World! is available now.

Review copy provided by the publisher.