By Hiroki Endo
Dark Horse, 230 pp.

I wish that short story collections enjoyed more popularity among American otaku. Some of my favorite manga—Real Lies, The Rumic World Trilogy, Snow Goddess Tales—fall into this category. These anthologies offer readers certain pleasures not found in a long-running series: economy of form, varied subject-matter, and closure. Moreover, the short-story format encourages manga-ka to experiment with styles and genres not always represented in their serialized work. In Snow Goddess Tales, for example, CLAMP embraced an aesthetic reminiscent of the 18th century shijo school, while the short stories anthologized in Rumic World demonstrated Rumiko Takahashi’s chops in a variety of genres, from horror and sci-fi to shojo-esque high school comedy.

Tanpenshu features three stories by Hiroki Endo, best known to American readers as the author of the dystopian sci-fi saga Eden: It’s An Endless World. Like Eden, the stories in Tanpenshu examine the darker side of the human psyche, exploring the root causes of sudden, extreme acts of violence. The first story, “The Crows, the Girl, and the Yakuza,” focuses on the relationship between Aoki, a mobster with brutal enemies, and a homeless girl who tends a mob of crows. The second, “Because You’re Definitely a Cute Girl,” explores the disturbing inner world of Makino, a high school student traumatized by the recent death of her mother and older sister. The final story in the anthology, “For Those of Us Who Don’t Believe in God,” introduces us to a college theater troupe that is staging a play about prolific American serial killer Henry Lee Lucas.

By far the strongest of the three stories is “The Crows, the Girl, and the Yakuza.” The plot sounds like vintage John Woo: a disfigured homeless girl rescues a badly wounded yakuza, nursing him back to health (physical and emotional) just as she has nurtured dozens of injured birds. Yet Endo never succumbs to the hyperbole characteristic of so many Hong Kong gangster films. Yes, his heroine is an orphan with a scarred face and a checkered past. And yes, we can guess what will happen when Aoki’s enemies trace him to the warehouse where he has been recovering. Yet Endo never invites us to pity his nameless heroine; instead he shows us her resiliance, her intelligence, her warmth, and her unsentimental view of the birds she protects. As a result, the climax of the story leaves us with a palpable sense of loss and horror, rather than the more comfortable feeling of sadness that mere melodrama might induce.

The second and third stories in the anthology are more uneven. The initial pages of “Because You’re Definitely a Cute Girl” are a convincing portrayal of a damaged teenager. Makino’s slightly odd demeanor—her morbid interest in sex, her peculiar reading habits, her awkward social interactions with peers—seems like the plausible result of loss and parental neglect. As the story progresses, however, Makino begins to act out her disturbing thoughts in an almost comically Freudian way. She devolves into a textbook hysteric, driven to violence by a pathological dread of becoming a mature, sexual person. Though this type of character enjoyed a certain vogue in fin-de-siecle Vienna (think Elektra or Salome), it’s a lot harder for a contemporary reader to find the hysteric a convincing dramatic type.

“For Those of Us Who Don’t Believe in God” suffers from a similar inability to translate psychological insights into convincing drama. In the characters’ self-conscious dialogue, Endo captures the posturing, the insecurity, and the self-aggrandizement of a certain type of college student. Where he flounders is in showing us the connection between the students’ off-stage behavior and the experimental play they’re performing. The play depicts a disturbed subject who callousness towards others is sometimes mirrored in the students’ off-stage actions. But the play isn’t particularly daring or penetrating in its insights; it feels like an amateurish meditation on that perennial question, why would God create people as fundamentally wicked as Lucas? Perhaps Endo intended the play to be banal, but given how much of the story is devoted to the play itself (as opposed to the off-stage drama) it’s hard to know if Endo is mocking or endorsing the students’ enterprise or why the students would have such difficulty disentangling themselves from the not-very-tricky moral dilemmas the play poses.

Though I sometimes felt Endo’s writing was forced, I found the naturalism of his artwork beautiful. Endo draws memorable faces and settings, creating a seedy milieu for his yakuza tale that couldn’t have been more evocative if it had been rendered in Odorama. He also demonstrates a special flair for paneling; he varies the layout and density of the images in perfect synchronization with the plot, punctuating his violent stories with moments of lyricism and calm. Some of his finest sequences are completely wordless, relying solely on facial expressions and body language for their expressive effect.

The bottom line: in spite of some narrative weaknesses, I’d recommend Tanpenshu to manga lovers in search of a thought-provoking read or commitment phobes who dread the prospect of another thirty volume series.

This review was based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher. Volume two of Tanpenshu will be released on May 23rd.