Hmmmm… I’m having difficulty mustering enthusiasm for this week’s crop of manga, light novels, and commemorative editions. The real standouts—and the books most likely to find their way into my shopping basket—are two long-running titles from CMX: Kaoru Mori’s Emma, a mangafied mash-up of Upstairs, Downstairs and The Forsyte Saga, and Yasuko Aoike’s From Eroica With Love, a spy thriller whose leads look like members of a Led Zeppelin tribute band. I might also pick up a copy of Demon Flowers (Tokyopop), a new series from the creator of The Demon Ororon. Though I’m not always sold on Mizuki Hakase’s storytelling, I love her sharply stylized character designs; her bad boys look like Carnaby Street regulars with their skinny black pants, shoestring ties, and artfully disheveled hair. And for a butt-kicking chaser to all that girly goodness, I’ll probably buy the latest issue of Blade of the Immortal (Dark Horse).

REVIEWED THIS WEEK:

• Brave Story (Viz)
• The Cute Book (Vertical, Inc.)
• Kanna, Vol. 1 (Go! Comi)
• Narration of Love at 17, Vol. 4 (NETCOMICS)

SHIPPING THIS WEEK

• The Bad Book (Vertical, Inc.)
• Blade of the Immortal, #129 (Dark Horse)
• Cherry Juice, Vol. 1 (Tokyopop)
• Chibi Vampire Novel, Vol. 3 (Tokyopop)
• The Cute Book (Vertical, Inc.)
• Dark Moon Diary, Vol. 1 (Tokyopop)
• Demon Flowers, Vol. 1 (Tokyopop)
• Emma, Vol. 5 (CMX)
• Eureka Seven, Vol. 6 (Bandai)
• Fantamir, Vol. 1 (Tokyopop)
• From Eroica With Love, Vol. 10 (CMX)
• Full Metal Panic Novel, Vol. 1 (Tokyopop)
• Hibiki’s Magic, Vol. 2 (Tokyopop)
• I Luv Halloween, Vol. 3 (Tokyopop)
• I.N.V.U., Vol. 4 (Tokyopop)
• Kamen Tantei, Vol. 4 (Tokyopop)
• Karma Club Novel, Vol. 1 (Tokyopop)
• Kilala Princess, Vol. 3 (Tokyopop)
• Ordinary Crush, Vol. 1 (DMP)
• Path of the Assassin HC, Vol. 1 (Dark Horse)
• Path of the Assassin, Vol. 7 (Dark Horse)
• Pearl Pink, Vol. 3 (Tokyopop)
• Phantom, Vol. 3 (Tokyopop)
• Poison Candy, Vol. 1 (Tokyopop)
• Samurai Deeper Kyo, Vol. 24 (Tokyopop)
• Star Trek, Vol. 2 (Tokyopop)
• Takumi-Kun, Vol. 1 (Tokyopop)
• Welcome to NHK, Vol. 4 (Tokyopop)

Brave Story (novel)

By Miyuki Miyabe
Viz Media, 824 pp.

Brave Story begins in present-day Tokyo, where eleven-year-old Wataru Mitani lives with his parents. Though they appear to be an ideal family, Wataru’s father is deeply unhappy and abandons his wife and son for a mistress. Wataru is left to cope both with his own feelings and with his unstable mother, who vacillates between rage and suicidal depression. Just as he’s about to succumb to despair himself, Wataru is transported to the magical realm of Vision. There, Wataru learns that he can change his fate by finding the Tower of Destiny and pleading his case before Vision’s creator, a.k.a. the Goddess. Determined to salvage his broken family, Wataru embarks on a punishing journey through Vision, acquiring, in the process, a powerful sword and fiercely devoted posse of fanciful creatures.

Miyabe may shamelessly pilfer scenes from other sources, but she populates her tale with sympathetic characters, putting them in situations that reflect the complexities of adult life. Her heroes and villains alike are motivated by selfish desires; even Wataru, whose rationale for seeking the Goddess is to reunite his parents, comes to see that his dearest wish is really a fearful, self-interested one. The artlessness of the prose, however, undermines the subtlety of Miyabe’s observations. In chapter sixteen, for example, Wataru arrives in the city-state of Lyris to discover that its non-human members are confined to shantytowns and subjected to harassment. Just in case we didn’t see parallels between Lyris and, say, 1980s Johannesburg (or 1960s Birmingham, for that matter), Miyabe includes this helpful exchange:

It sounded like South Africa during apartheid. “Are there other kinds of discrimination in daily life here? Like separate facilities for different races?” Wataru asked.
Toni’s eyes opened wide. “There sure is. How did you know?”
“I know of a similar situation in another place,” Wataru replied. I saw it in a movie once.

Long as it may be, passages like this one give ample evidence that Brave Story won’t be confused with War and Peace any time soon. (For the record, the English edition of Tolstoy’s book clocks in at 1,472 pages, nearly 450 more than Brave Story.) Miyabe’s dark fantasy is best described as a Frankenbook, stitched together from pieces of EverQuest, The Guin Saga, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and The Wizard of Oz to create an entertaining, surprisingly adult adventure story whose seams sometime show.

Brave Story is available now.

The Cute Book

By Aranzi Aronzo
Vertical, Inc., 48 pp.

OK, OK… technically speaking, The Cute Book, Vertical’s first Aranzi Aronzo release, made its bookstore debut in February. But this is the first time it’s shown up on the Midtown shipping list, so I’m including The Cute Book in this week’s column for those of you who missed it the first time around.

Who are Aranzi Aronzo? Contrary to their website’s introductory page, they are not globetrotting, tambourine-playing salarymen of Norwegian and Vietnamese extraction, but two sisters from Osaka who have made careers of peddling cute-but-edgy products. Their empire includes retail stores in Tokyo and Taipei, a booming online business, and a series of craft books that are equal parts manga and DIY manifesto. The Cute Book, one of seven Aranzi titles that Vertical has licensed for the US market, features step-by-step instructions for fashioning critters out of materials easily obtained at your local art supply store. Sounds straightforward enough, but there’s an undercurrent of weirdness running through the text that’s almost impossible to describe. Imagine a Hello, Kitty! craft book penned by Junko Mizuno, and you have some idea of the tone.

The true measure of any how-to book is the ease of the instructions, and The Cute Book scores big points for its user-friendliness. Throughout the book, directions are supplemented with traceable patterns, photographs, and clear illustrations demonstrating a variety of useful knots and stitches. For those of us who find the typical Better Homes and Gardens craft project daunting (“Spruce up a picture frame with some old wrapping paper and a glue gun!”), the authors have included needle-less shortcuts. I’m not 100% certain what I’ll do with the flock of felt sheep I’ve begun making—at my age, festooning gloves and hats with googly-eyed animals is bound to raise a few eyebrows—but perhaps I can give them to my Australian shepherd. She needs a job, after all!

Portions of this review appeared in the July issue of Chopsticks. The Cute Book is available now. A tip: to post pictures of your handiwork or preview other books from the Aranzi Aronzo series, visit Vertical’s Aranzi homepage.

Kanna, Vol. 1

By Takeru Kirishima
Go! Comi, 180 pp.
Rating: OT (16+)

It’s a safe bet that Kagura, the slacker-protagonist of Kanna, won’t be adding a “World’s Greatest Dad” mug to his collection anytime soon. At the beginning of the story, Kagura can barely take care of himself as he works a part-time job and attends cram school. His life takes an unexpected detour into fatherhood, however, when he finds a seven-year-old girl asleep in his bed. Much to his frustration, the poor moppet doesn’t speak enough Japanese to explain who she is, how she arrived in Kagura’s apartment, or why she refers to him as “Daddy.” It doesn’t take long for Kagura to realize that Kanna (said moppet) is in imminent danger from powerful, supernatural forces. (The high body count at the diner where he busses tables provides an important clue.) With a demon hot on their trail, the two set out for Kagura’s hometown to seek assistance from his former girlfriend, now a priestess at the local shrine.

The most disturbing scenes in Kanna don’t involve monsters or flying body parts, as one might imagine, but some loli-flavored interactions between Kanna and one of Kagura’s acquaintances, who has an unhealthy interest in cute little girls. I’m with David Welsh on this one: I find these scenes just plain icky. Equally off-putting is volume one’s choppy execution. Takeru Kirishima makes little effort to connect his scenes with smooth transitions. Instead, the book reads like a series of hyperlinked web pages: Click here to learn who Kanna’s real parents are. Click here for a scene of gratuitous kiddie cosplay. And so forth. Minus the loli slapstick, Kanna might be guilty pleasure—think Yotsuba&! meets Kami-Kaze—but as written, this moppet vs. monster manga is about as much fun to read as a Linux manual.

Volume one of Kanna is available now.

Narration of Love at 17, Vol. 4

By Kyungok Kang
NETCOMICS, 184 pp.
Rating: Teen (13+)

Narration of Love at 17 is a refreshingly honest soong-juhn (shojo) story about one high schooler’s struggle to make friends and make sense of complicated feelings for a childhood playmate. Seyoung, the heroine, is a normal seventeen year old. She’s bright, but not exceptional; pretty, but not a head-turner; and talented, but not outstanding. For several years, Seyoung has been a member of the drama club, relegated to backstage roles while the beautiful Hyemi lands the plum parts. Seyoung views Hyemi as a threat to her friendship with Hyunwoo, Seyoung’s neighbor and confidante. As Hyunwoo and Hyemi grow closer, Seyoung is forced to make a choice: will she continue to rely on Hyunwoo, and hope that he will eventually reciprocate her romantic feelings, or will she forge new friendships and assert her independence?

Good shojo depends on the “truthiness” (to borrow a word from Stephen Colbert) of its characterizations, and on that front author Kyungok Kang succeeds beautifully. Her primary characters seem like flesh-and-blood teenagers with their quicksilver moods, intense passions, deep insecurities, and ever-changing social allegiances. On the strength of Kang’s storytelling, I’d give Narration of Love at 17 an A minus, but the dated artwork may hamper some readers’ enjoyment of the series. The characters’ eyes, hairstyles, and elongated bodies owe a debt to shojo pioneers Moto Hagio and Keiko Takemiya—not necessarily a bad thing, as both Hagio and Takemiya are accomplished draftsmen. But Kang’s character designs lack the elegant refinement of Hagio’s and Takemiya’s; the cast of Narration looks awkward and snouty, especially when viewed in profile, and have such androgynous faces that I found certain characters hard to distinguish from one another when viewed up close. If you’re willing to forgive some clumsy art, however, you may well find Narration of Love at 17 an engaging antidote to the numerous harem comedies and vampire love stories aimed at teenage manga fans.

The fourth and final volume of Narration of Love at 17 is available now. To read the first chapter online for free, click here.