I am on a reading BINGE.  Picture a bull dozer just loading up mountains of books and then dumping them into my eyeballs.  It’s all manga of course because something is wrong with my brain and I can’t seem to pay attention to novels these days.  I need pictures!  Which is ridiculous given that I AM A NOVELIST.  What is wrong with me?  I start reading a novel and I glaze out after half a page.  Wait, actually I have read several novels in the past couple of weeks, stories written for critique exchanges with writers I know.  So it IS possible, it’s just kind of…painful.  In contrast, I have to set timers to keep myself from reading manga too long, and I’ve been regularly staying up way too late reading while everyone else has dropped off.  I wonder what my deal is?

Anyway, ready for a rundown of some of the best of my recent binging?  Remember, I don’t review the shite, only the goodies, and believe me, you can figure a half-dozen, a dozen, maybe more, titles have been read and enjoyed somewhat, or read for a bit but ultimately discarded, for every one title I mention here on the blog.  Oh and it’s mostly relationship stuff lately.  No mecha-robots or apocalypse zombies or multi-generational fairy wars this time.  Sorry!  Next time.

And don’t forget the great titles on the previous couple of blog posts!  Because apparently, this blog is all about the manga this week.

So.  Today I offer you three high-school girl shojo stories because (1) they are ubiquitous, and if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, plus (2) they are funny romantic-comedy stories, which I love on rainy days, while eating chocolate, which is what today is all about.  I also have, for another post, three great yaoi stories, and a couple of weird what-is-this stories…I always love to find those.  But this post is going to be long enough as it is!  More reviews will have to wait until later.

Okay!

My Little Monster rises above the masses because it has hilarious, interesting, well-written characters, something I always fall for.  Shizuku, a super straight-laced study-bug gets entangled with Haru, a crazy, super-smart but severely ADD (or something like that?) guy with a rich family that he is avoiding and a tendency to beat people up when he doesn’t understand the social dynamics in a given interaction.  Which is all the time.

If this doesn’t sound funny, trust me, it is.  Missed signals, impulse control, exasperation, test-score competitiveness (one-sided on Shizuku’s side, Haru could care less that he gets the highest scores), plus a cast of funny, sweet characters.  Rom-com at it’s best.  Seriously, I just love watching these characters get so befuddled about each other and about their own feelings for one another.  Really fun.

My Little Monster is on-going, so I can’t comment on the whole story, bummer.  I HATE WAITING.  And yet, I must.

Next!

Missions of Love, has, I think, a terrible title obscurring a very enjoyable story. I’m almost too embarrassed to put the cover up here with that stupid title.  Oh, you know what?  I’m going to put the Japanese version here to obscure my shame. Okay.  This one is about a Yukina, a writer, actually a high-school girl who is a secret (but very dedicated) writer, who uses the people and interactions around her as a base for her stories.  When she realizes she knows nothing about romance, she decides to do some research.  Classic romantic comedy set-up!  She sets her sights on Shugire, a popular guy who dates everyone—and finds out some dirt on him which she then uses to blackmail him into doing her “research” with her.  Thus begins a strange adversarial relationship where they each keep trying to manipulate the other one, all while doing her “missions” that start with “holding hands” and work up from there in a pretty steady arc.

I’ve got to say, I’ve seen and read full-frontal sex scenes that don’t have nearly the juice that Missions gets out of hand holding.  I am dead serious about this.  The missions are simultaneously chaste and hot.  They haven’t even kissed yet but it’s all about lust and who one is willing to feel it with and why.  It’s pretty great.  Yukina has a child-hood friend who is in love with her and would gladly do her “research” with her, but she doesn’t feel it with him.  High concept rom-com love triangles for the win!  A great, fun read with great characters, which is all I usually ask for, really.  Once again, this title is on-going, so I don’t know the ending GAH.  Waiting is THE WORST part about reading manga.

Next!  Hana to Akuma (Flower and the Devil) got off on a weird foot with me because the premise just sounds so wrong, and yet I found I kept reading.  A dashing, top-hat wearing demon named Vivi comes to Earth for some reason (we find out later) and sets up an English-style mansion in Japan where he lives, bored, until he happes upon a baby girl, left outside his front gate.  He takes in the baby, on a lark, and, with the help of his demonic butler, raises her.  The story starts when she is fifteen and a romance is starting to bud between the two.

Now doesn’t that sound weird?  Wait, isn’t he her guardian father-type?  What’s up with this?  I don’t know, I can’t explain why it worked for me because usually anything that smacks of kid/parent incest is a deal-breaker for me.  I’m not interested.  But this…the girl is named Hana, which means flower.  Demons can’t touch flowers without them withering at once, and yet Hana gives Vivi a flower every day because they are pretty and she wants to make him smile.  He can’t understand it.  The whole story, really, is about him coming to understand this one thing.  It’s so….sweet.

The relationship develops very, very slowly.  Hana is ridiculously sheltered and talks about herself in the third person like a little child, which weirded me out even more, but her innocence is part of the whole deal.  And here is the thing:

THE ENDING IS ONE OF THE BEST PAY-OFFS THAT WASN’T THE PAY-OFF YOU THOUGHT YOU WANTED BUT WAS WAY BETTER, EVAR.  I’m serious.  I was weeping, I mean, ugly crying, and it isn’t a sad ending, because you know I hate those.

Seriously, I usually go for dark, complicated, fucked-up relationships and this one is so…not that.  I can’t even type out words like “pure” with a straight face and yet this book wants me to.

Just goes to show that I really will read anything. 

Hana is complete, at least, so no waiting for the pay off I promise is coming.  Hang in there until the end!

Anyway.  So there you have it, today’s offerings, three sweet, funny romances about teen-aged girls.  Maybe I’ll do guys in love next, or cross-dressing fashion lines, that one is awesome. Or the one about apprenticing with a space-time witch? Or maybe I’ll read something terrific tonight!  Did you know you can buy emanga for cheap and read it on a kindle or an ipad right then, one click instant gratification????  This is probably not a good thing.

And really, what IS with this binging?  I’m not avoiding my own novel—which, it would seem I can still work on, thank goodness.  I’m about 70% through the revisions and it’s going well, whew.

Dunno.  Phase of the moon maybe.  But I say, LET THE BINGING CONTINUE!

After reading the terrific Saezuru Tori wa Habatakanai, reviewed in my last post, I started sucking down yaoi manga like the crazy person that I am and I’ve got to say, it’s kind of eye-opening and here’s why.

Where are all the complex, troubled, intense, sexual, interesting relationship manga involving straight couples?  Am I missing something here?  Why can’t I find them?  And why are all the straight-couple romance stories so predictable?

Don’t get me wrong, yaoi is, as far as I can tell, chock full of sweet, romantic, predictable fluff/smut fests (your choice), just like manga written about straight couples.  But there IS a whole subset of stories I’m finding now about actual adults having actual adult relationships (vs. the idealized romance arcs typically found in shojo and even josei—written for adult women—manga).  Salarymen (Japanese “business men”) struggling in their gay relationships are not super common, but they can be found, it is a subset of the genre, for example, No Touching At All, a terrific story by the same author as Saezuru, or The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese and it’s wonderful sequel The Carp On the Jumping Block Jumps Twice.  Those were all really well done, chewy, interesting stories about complicated people.  Highly recommended.

So where are the analogous thirty-year old women stories?  Because I’m having trouble finding them.

Realistic, complex stories, about realistic, complex characters.  That’s all I’m looking for.  Is that too much to ask?

Tramps Like Us, remains the go-to working-woman-in-relationship rec, as far as I can tell, and it is tres delightful, to be sure, but it can’t be the only one.  Say, “I love you” has the sensibility I’m looking for although it is about high school, but it feels real, if that makes sense.  There are a couple of others (although nothing is leaping to my mind at this moment).  But on the whole, straight-relationship-manga seems to be, for the most part, about high school girls being wooed by older dudes in a blushing, oh don’t touch me there, kind of way.  If you want strong, complex, older characters dealing with realistic relationships in manga, it seems like you have to go to BL.

Tell me I’m wrong.  Point me to some titles. Why are woman characters so wimpy in manga?  Am I reading the wrong books?

Okay, I was trying to think of novels, too, and it’s been awhile since I read novels heavily but examples that come to mind are, say, White Palace (and the terrific Susan Sarandan movie that was based on it), or Endless Love (and the terrible Brooke Shields movie that was based on it).  I know there must be tons of others.  Recs?

Anyway.  I love me some manga—and all kinds of stories, not just romantic ones—as anyone who has read my blog recently can attest. And I DO have a soft spot for high school girls falling in love that can enjoy well done shojo, no problem.  But sometimes I crave something else.  A something else that I’ve been finding this week within BL, which surprised me.  So.  What’s up with that?   Why is it that in order to tell a juicy, complicated, sexual, relationship story, we have to make both the characters men?

I welcome recs!  Basically I’m in the mood for any complex, interesting, relationship stuff, straight or gay, I don’t care, anything as long as it is interesting.  This stuff must be out there.  I can’t be the only one who wants it.  Why is it so hard to find?

I’ve just been blown away by an amazing story about a Yakuza boss who is one of the most interesting and complex characters I have come across in a long time.  Seriously.  You know what?  I’m even going to say this guy is in the top five, maybe top three, most complicated, fascinating characters I’ve ever read.  His name is Yashiro and he is powerful, tough, smart, wryly funny, deeply feeling, cruel, a sexual masochist, elegant, manipulative, kind, brutal, self-centered, generous, harsh…how can one character be all of these things?  Rarely am I so impressed by a writer’s characterization as I am by Yoneda Kou’s depiction of Yashiro.  I do not say this stuff lightly.

[Please note that I am writing this review based on the first 8 chapters, all that are currently available.  I can't comment on what comes after that because I haven't read it yet.]

I think Yoneda Kou must be similarly interested in Yashiro because she has written and drawn him for three stories.  I stumbled upon her work with the most recent, Saezuru Tori wa Habatakanai (pictured left), a longer work, on-going, currently at a cliffhanger, have I mentioned how much I hate WAITING.  Yakuza political maneuverings.  Violence (“damn, I got blood on my shoe again”).  But mostly this is a character piece on Yashiro, as revealed by his burgeoning relationship (what is it, friendship? lovers? boss/subordinate? it’s not really any of these) with his new, silent, impotent, ex-cop bodyguard, Doumeki.

Both men have terrible pasts.  Both have been damaged by what has happened to them.  But both are also extremely strong and ask for no pity.  The whole thing is just so unlike anything I’ve read or seen before.  It’s fascinating.

The art is great, too, spare and cool, like Yashiro.  The artist does great facial expressions, terrific body language—so much is conveyed without dialogue here, many panels of characters not speaking.  Really, characters like this come around so infrequently.

Oh!  Yashiro reminds me a little of Holly Hunter’s portrayal of Grace Hanadarko from the television show “Saving Grace,” another childhood rape-victim turned complicated, powerful, sexually voracious, self-destructive, open-hearted, violent adult.  That’s a great show (except for the terrible, terrible last three episodes that were written when they just found out the show had been canceled, do not watch those episodes!! But the rest of the show is some of the best written stuff out there, if you ask me).  Streaming on Netflix, go watch.

Anyway.  Yaoi, sometimes called Boys Love, is a genre of manga about homosexual relationships between men, but written for women. Technically, Saezuru falls within this category, but from what I’ve read of the genre (which is admittedly, not much), putting it in the same category is sort of like saying Sweet Valley High books are the same as something complicated and painful like, oh, say, Anna Karenina…just because they both have love-relationships at their heart.  BL seems to largely focus on idealized romantic stories between guys, lovey dovey sparkle fests, which is fine.  But, man, that is not Sazeuru with its realism and psychological depth.

Listen, while I wouldn’t recommend BL as a genre to that all that many people (it’s a very specific taste), I would totally recommend Sazeuru to anyone who wants interesting, complex, complicated, painful, masterfully told stories.  In the same way that I would recommend Brokeback Mountain (the film or the terrific short story it’s based on) to anyone who values powerful storytelling.  The gay part is sort of secondary to the power of the storytelling itself.

But as I said, Saezuru is ongoing.  I came to the end of the available chapters and did this Kahn scream of “NOOOOOO!” that could be heard across the galaxy, and then started hunting Yoneda across the internets like a bloodhound.  And, as I also mentioned, she has written two other times about Yashiro.  More, more, I want more!

Tadayoedo Shizumazu, Saredo Naki mo Sezu is a one-shot that shows some of Yashiro in high school.  Too short!  The story, about Yashiro’s first and only love for a fellow (straight) student, Kageyama, feels a little rough to me compared to Sazeuru, like Yoneda was, perhaps, finding her way into this complicated person.  But it was interesting to get this glimpse into his past.  Well worth a read.  Beautiful ending.

On the other hand, if I had started with this, I don’t know if I would have gone further (and what a loss that would have been!).  Yashiro’s darkness is on display here without the room (just 40 sparse pages) to get in his more complex kindnesses.  I might have been turned off by his extremes, judged him as damaged goods and moved on.  I’m glad I read this one after Sazeuru.

Don’t Stay Gold, is another one-shot, taking place a few years after Tadayoedo.   Yashiro has joined the Yakuza here but is still quietly in love with Kageyama, who has become a doctor.  Yashiro sets up Kageyama (without his knowledge) with another character, Kuga, a wild, beautiful thug, despite Yashiro’s ongoing feelings for the man.  Again, an interesting glimpse into his character, but not the storytelling of Sazeuru.  Read after.

Okay, having praised Saezuru so highly, here are a couple of warnings.

First, the first dozen pages or so of Sazeuru are really a tag ending for Don’t Say Gold…something I totally didn’t understand when I read them, having not read the other work yet.  They made much more sense to me later.  I recommend just buzzing by them.  The real story starts with Doumeki’s entrance.

Second, it took me the first chapter to get straight who everyone one was and to sort out how to tell who was saying what.  It’s worth the effort!  I  went back and re-read the first chapter  after I had gotten it figured out and it made a lot more sense.  So if you’re confused at first, hang in there and maybe go back.  Clues: Yashiro is generally wearing a vest and has that sly smile.  He’s always smoking.  Doumeki has that buzz cut and unchanging facial expression.

Finally, there is some explicit sex here.  Not porn explicit, but if two guys getting it on with power dynamics is going to offend you, go elsewhere.  There are also two (so far) brief flashbacks of rape.  Yashiro is completely accepting of his own strange preferences and has zero shame about it, but sex is a big deal to this guy, so it’s a central focus of the story.  It’s not really for turn on, the way most BL sex scenes are.  It’s all about the character.

For a great essay on yaoi in general and Yoneda Kou in particular, see Pank Literary Magazine’s take on it.

Really great stuff!  Highly recommended!

Today I have for you two high-concept romantic comedies that both manage to transcend their formula bones to become frothy, lovely, richly-charactered pieces well worth spending time with.  Romcom done well is such a delight!  Especially because it is so often done so badly.  And it is often done badly because when it IS done well it looks effortless, even silly—which is why romantic comedy can get so little respect.

Here’s why its hard (part of it).  In order for romcom to work it has to make you feel.  It is not a mystery, say, where the intellectual puzzle can carry a lot of the weight.  Romcom is all about the feelings, the laughter the romance, the building sexual tension… In order to feel anything you have to care.  And in order to care, you have to have great, well-written characters.  Because if the people in the story are boring, flat, or too stupid to live, you will not care.  You will look at these people in these ridiculous situations and it will just seem stupid.

But fear not!  Today’s manga selections manage to pull romantic comedy off beautifully.  Great characters, lots of caring, lots of feelz right where you want them—all wrapped up in a fun, silly, funny package that looks effortless.

Okay.  First we have Gokusen by Kozueko Morimoto, a charming story although at first glance I’m hard pressed to say why—when it starts out it feels so slight.  I think the sum of its parts may exceed the charm of any of its individual components in some alchemical process I don’t quite understand—but am happy to enjoy. Gokusen is about Kumiko, a Yakuzu (Japanese mafia) heiress, the granddaughter of a Yakuza Boss, who follows her ideals to become a high school math teacher and homeroom teacher at a school mostly populated by delinquent, not-very-smart guys (with the exception of red-haired Shin who is in the school for…complicated reasons).  It’s a perfect job for her because she is (not surprising given her background) a total badass who is completely unperturbed by gangs of rough young men.  Although she has to keep her Yakuza background a secret in order to keep her job…. Highjinks ensue!

At first I thought the story suffered from too many lovable stupid mafia guy trope characters.  You know, those movies where the mafia killers are really sweet guys and the shooting and mayhem are all in good fun?  I mean, the real Yakuza is not a comedic element.  Look at this gal, Shoko Tendo, author of Yakuza Moon, a REAL daughter of a Yakuza boss.  Drugs, rape, beatings, forced marriage, it is not a pretty picture.  I wonder what Shoko Tendo would make of Gokusen?  Humor? Insult? Disgust?  For a while, as I read the first few volumes of Gokusen, this troubled me, this making light of something that is not light at all.

But the humor to be found in the contrast between badass killers who have, um, a different moral compass, and the gentler side of their personalities, well, it’s a rich vein.  Look at the Bruce Willis, Helen Mirrin, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman movie, RED, about ex-CIA agents and assassins who are all a lovable bunch of crazy-heads.  I love that movie.  “If you break his heart, I will kill you. And bury your body in the woods.”  I love Helen Mirrin!  Mary Louise Parker spins comic gold out of her every line.  For RED, I’m willing to turn off the part of my brain that knows in the real world, it ain’t funny.  Because RED is.  Very, very funny.

So, I got over my discomfort and just went with it, accepting the world of the story, and enjoying the funny.  It’s easy to do because Kumiko is such a great character, so pure of heart and yet so ready to give anyone who needs it an ass-kicking, so loyal to her students and her family, so quick to rush ahead without a plan.  She’s got a code of ethics that is hilariously atypcal, and she follows it with honor and great responsibility.  She trucks with no nonsense.  And the other characters are equally well drawn and likable, down to each goofy student in her class (thank god for weird hair cuts or I never would have kept them all straight).

I’ll warn you though, Gokusen is bit of a slow starter.  Some manga pull me from the get go, but this one I would drift away, then come back, then drift away…until I was a couple of volumes in and totally hooked.

One reason might be that the art put me off at first.  Morimoto’s art is homely, even sort of ugly at times, and I don’t mean badly drawn but rather drawn to look ugly.  This is not your typical big-eyed manga style.  But I have to say, the art really grew on me.  It fits these ugly-on-the-outside characters, these lumpy, insecure, tough-guy guys.  It’s kind of the point, that the appearance may be rough and unusual but the sweet insides are worth getting through the superficial.  That’s kinda cool.  But it took me a while to get it.

Another reason it started slow for me is that the romance component has got such a slow burn I probably read a hundred or two hundred pages before I even identified that there was a romantic lead and who the romantic lead was.  But that character, too, grows substantially through his adventures and his coming realization of his love for Kumiko and what that means for his life.  It was wonderful, really, to watch the relationship develop without the characters even knowing it for quite a while.  He’s a great character, so subtly done but a cornerstone of the plot—like the character himself, not flashy, just quietly getting the job done.

Anyway, once I was in, I was in, and I really enjoyed all the various subplots and mini-plots and the huge cast of crazy characters and mostly Kumiko.  Very fun.  Recommended.  Won’t change your life, but will totally entertain you in a sweet, funny way.  And it’s complete, too, which is always a blessing when it comes to manga.  I see there is a live-action version, as well, I wonder if You-tube has it?  I’m always a bit nervous when I have liked a manga so well, to go looking for the other iterations…and maybe have my inner manga iteration somehow sullied.  *shiver*

On the other hand, sometimes I come to the manga from the tv-version first, which is what happened, in the case of Kamisama Kiss or Kamisama Hajimemashita, by Julietta Suzuki. The kids and I caught Kamisama Kiss on Hulu and enjoyed it enough that I sought out the manga.  The anime covers the first five volumes of the manga which is now on its 14th volume and still going (cliffhanger! beware!).  It’s about a high school girl, Nanami, abandoned by her debt-ridden father (mother is dead) who inadvertently (she thinks!) becomes the human god of a local shrine populated by Tomoe, a kitsune (fox demon) and a couple of masked shrine spirits.  Talk about high concept. But it works and all the pieces are explained well enough to get the story in gear and moving.

At first we focus on Nanami coming to grips with this change in circumstance, still trying to go to high school but also fulfill her new duties as god.  Then her relationship with the hilariously grumpy Tomoe, who becomes her familiar, or servant, and gradually, slowly, her love interest, starts to take over and Nanami is swept up in the strange and whacky world of youkai (spirits, demons, monsters) politics and complicated situations, and, you know…Hijenks ensue!

Nanami is a great character, another pure of heart girl who is quick to love and refuses to give up even when the odds, and the youkai, are seriously stacked against her.  Tomoe, too, is wonderful, and more complex, a powerful badass who is tremendously bored and usually pissed at his whole situation in this delightful way.  Why are grumpy badasses attending to the needs of big-hearted, determined girls so funny?  You know what?  Tomoe reminds me of Elliot Spencer from Leverage, taking care of Parker, except that Elliot is all American hetero-sexual masculine and Tomoe somehow manages to come off as super masculine, badass, and sexy…despite wearing a dress (kimono), long nails, and carrying a fan.  How DOES he do it?  And that’s the tamed Tomoe.  Don’t even get me started on long-haired, wild fox Tomoe of his past.  You see, he’s over 600 years old and used to be a rape-and-pillage kind of demon, until he fell in love with a human girl and got himself cursed, and then Mikage, god of the aforementioned shrine, made him forget all that and tamed him by making him Mikage’s familiar. It’s complicated.  But those wild roots run deep….

A wild fox pondering his options.

Okay, I totally have a crush on an animated character who has fox ears and a tail.  I don’t care!  No regrets!

But seriously.  Kamisama Kiss is sweet and fun with loosely connected stories gradually building an over-arching plot, a nice device by the way in a serialized story and not easy to pull off well.  Various sub-characters and sub-plots get side-stories and back-stories and all are funny and full of Nanami saving the day through sheer determination and belief in love, and often Tomoe saving her.  And then her doing something surprising that saves him…. you know how it goes.  Nanami never gives up, and it’s fun to see her, the only human in the cast sometimes and with few powers, surrounded by mystified youkai who don’t understand her.  All the while she is gradually winning a place in jaded Tomoe’s foxy heart….

I did drift a bit in a couple of the longer stories, Kurama’s Tengu mountain plot, Himemiko’s swamp youkai princess in love with a human boy plot, the dragon king under the sea…whenever it got too far from Nanami and Tomoe, I did find myself skimming a little.  But it always came around again quickly enough, and the sub-stories are interesting in their own right…it’s just that I’ve gotten so attached to Nanami.

And THEN.  Things get serious in volume 14!  Time travel.  Threat of death.  Dark pasts come to light.  Bascially everything that has been hinted at and glossed over comes to a head and the shit gets real, people, as real as drawn kitsunes can get. Stakes, I’m talking stakes!  And I’m not telling you a thing about it except that it is a great example of taking characters that start out as light and funny and pushing them deeper by asking why would they be that way?  And then coming up with really interesting answers….

Honestly, even though the whole thing starts from a very formulaic place,  at this point I totally don’t care.  Great characters, fun and frothy at times, sweet, funny, but with a healthy dose of Tomoe’s dark past.  I’m in hook line and sinker.

And we have to waaaaait for the next one!  NOOOOOOO!!!

I HATE WAITING.

Great reading, fun, recommended. Again, not a life-changing rip your guts out story.  But sometimes, that is not what one wants.  Sometimes we want romcom done well.  Either of these titles will take you there.