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rainsometimesB is a Big Letter for me, with two titles I put very high up on my list of Seriously Good Stuff. But also two other titles I've found consistently impressive manga, plus one quite enjoyable collection of short stories.
Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa
The first volume of Barefoot Gen was the first manga I ever read, in a Swedish translation that came out back in the 1980s. (In fact, it may well have been the first piece of fiction centred on Japanese characters I'd ever encountered.) It made a huge impression on me, not just because the bomb but also the way Gen's family was made to suffer through their father's anti-war views even before the bomb fell. There was a strong leftist tenet throughout, as Nakazawa pointed out Imperial Japan's invasions and occupations of other countries, the discrimination against Koreans in Japan, the terrifying peer pressure that led soldiers to volunteer for kamizake missions; the propaganda that painted Americans as demons which made mothers jump to their deaths with their children as the US soldiers came, and more. And then the bomb came, transforming an ordinary city into a complete apocalyptic nightmare. (SPOILERS - though who doesn't know this?) taking half of Gen's family along with it leaving only his mother and newborn sister alive in Hiroshima. (There were also two older brothers who were out of the city, but they would take a while to be reunited - and there's always a bit of a distance between Gen and those two.)
In the 90s I read volume 2-4 in English translation, then much later found out there were 6 more volumes which I didn't get to read until long into the 00s. I find them all compelling. (Expectations spoiler for the last volumes)Maybe not as much volume 9 and 10 as the rest of it, though: it felt like Nakazawa was starting to run out of energy there.
Now, Barefoot Gen is one of those titles where it feels like I must add caveats despite my rating it so highly. It is a very didactic work: a Story With A Message, and intended for a young generation too - Barefoot Gen is shonen. The baddies are very bad, and while some mostly-good characters have less appealing traits too and get caught up in some stupid, illegal things, most of the time it's easy to tell one from the other. In fact, it feels like it represents the black-and-white view of children quite well. Gen himself is full of energy and inspiring words like a classic shonen hero, not always believable under the circs (though I don't really mind). The artwork is functional rather than stunning, and while it works for me I know from some reviews not everyone finds it congenial. Finally, even disregarding the nightmare horrors right after the bomb hits and the following days, there is a lot of poverty and injustice in the rest of the books too; read too much at one time, it can feel a bit much.
But.
There is, in my opinion, a strong sense of energy in these books that is practically primal. Yes, Gen isn't always plausible, but he still feels like a small force of nature in his attitude, even though things don't always turn out fine. Nakazawa is an accomplished storyteller in the technical sense as well as having an enormous amount of passion. And more than that... I just like to find out what happens to Gen and the people around him: there's a sense of community in adversity in it. Many reviewers convey the feeling that reading Gen is a painful civic duty, but to me it's also a pleasure because the story is well-told about characters that are appealing. Even when it makes me cry - and it does. (I actually welled up just from seeing a preview of the cover of the 10th volume above, believe it or not. Sniff.) After I've read one or more volumes of this manga, I disregard all the reservations and realise again it's moved me like few other titles have done.
Blade of the Immortal by Hiroaki Samura
I'm usually not much for titles with a lot of blood and gore - limbs flying, heads being crushed, etc - but this is one of the few exceptions. Taking place in 18th-century Edo-era Japan, this book has a multitude of characters from high-up in the government to miserable outlaw, but at its core it's about two protagonists and one antagonist: Rin Asano, Manji, and Anotsu Kagehisa. Rin is a teenaged daughter of a samurai whose parents were killed on the order of Anotsu Kagehisa by his ragtag band of a rookie dojo; now she's on a mission to avenge them. Anotsu is an interesting antagonist with several noble traits (for instance, a huge egalitarian streak), who sincerely believes what he strives to do is for the best of the whole of Japan. (I'm honestly not sure if the author is as skeptical of his worship of strength and winning above all as I am, but at least there are quite a few characters in the story besides Rin who don't buy what he's saying.) In any case, he remains intriguing pretty much throughout. (spoilers for vol 24)Except for volume 24. That whole onslaught on the shogun's stronghold was just boring; I felt for the poor soldiers being slaughtered and didn't have any sympathy at all for Anotsu & crew, no matter how despicably the government had acted previously.Feh.
To help avenge her parents, Rin engages the rough outlaw swordfighter Manji as a bodyguard. He's got a bloody past (and present, and future...) and now a mysterious old woman has given his body a kind of quasi-immortality, with strange worms in his flesh being able to heal every wound except decapitation. She told him that to make up for the hundred "good" men he slew in his past, he has to kill 1000 "evil" men before he can turn mortal again. (The question of who can reliably judge if someone's "evil" enough to count is not ignored.) Manji figures Rin can help him with that, besides paying for his food and stuff.
That's the story's core, then there are plots, fights, deaths, intrigue, trachery, mor eplots, more fights and deaths, pure slaughter of innocents, more plots, more treachery, more fights, etc. I feel like I have to warn any prospective reader that there's not just a lot of detailed gore in the story (including medical experiments in one long nightmarish arc), but also rape, mutilation and deaths of female characters that can sometimes be downright sexualised. (Eww.) ON THE OTHER HAND, there are many interesting female characters of different personalities, with several of them being strong fighters; the most skilled warrior in the whole series is a woman; Rin continuously grows in confidence, courage, insights and strength of will. I don't know if I'll be fine with everything that happens in the story until the end, and maybe I'll even have to eat all my recs later; but so far this remains a challenging, engaging, thoughtful and exciting work.
...When it isn't upsetting to the point of squickiness, that is. (Always caveating, with this one.)
Un bouquet de fleurs rouges by Rumiko Takahashi (French translation, lt: "A Bouquet of Red Flowers")
This is a collection of short stories in much the same vein as the older collection Rumic Theater by the same creator; low-key slice-of-life stories of everyday people - mostly housewives and officeworker breadwinner husbands - going through troubles and crises of various kinds to a more-happy-than-not resolution, often with a fair bit of poignancy to them. I think they were originally published in a josei magazine, but I'm not sure.EDIT: Actually, I now find out I was wrong about that and they're all seinen instead./edit
This particular collection has a notable gender imbalance for some reason, with all stories but one having a male protagonist (and they're all bespectacled harried officeworkers with thinning hairlines, to boot! ^_^). Some of them are besotted with dreams of romantic affairs to relieve them from the doldrum; the one female character has problems with her mother-in-law; one is troubled with a spoiled brat in the neighbourhood just as he can't connect to his own teenaged son; one is a ghost outraged by his family not mourning him enough for his taste, until he remembers he hasn't behaved like a very good person... The story that stood out the most for me was about a man taking care of his elderly, bedridden father, finding the situation tough and still feeling old resentment underneath his trying hard to be the dutiful son. Things turn better, and the final panel made me teary-eyed.
A Bride's Story by Kaoru Mori
This has been published in three volumes in English so far, beautifully presented, which is all I have read of it. This original and fascinating story is focused on a large family in a small village somewhere in Central Asia in the early 19th century. The bride Amir Halgal, 20 years old (and considered rather old to marry), comes from a nomadic clan of the same ethnic group to be married by arrangement to Karluk Eihon, only 12 years old and the youngest son (and heir) of the family. Amir and her new family discover each other, and the readers get to know all of them in turn. Mostly slowly paced and slice-of-life, some times the plot explodes into wild action. There is often a great sense of space and expanse when the action takes place on the plains outside the village; a large part of the third volume is set in a different place but in the same milieu where a supporting character makes new connections. (This is the one European character, a nice Englishman studying the life of these people and who, I must say, comes across as being from quite a later time period than he's supposed to be.) This is a patriarchal society for sure, but the female characters are just as strong and interesting as the male ones. Moreover, the views they hold feel organic to the time it's set in.
The age difference between Amir and Karluk has the potential to be depicted in a manner that could feel squicky; I don't think it quite has, so far, but who knows what future volumes may bring. (They've been quite platonic up until now, but that may change as Karluk slowly grows older in body and mind.)
I can never talk about this comic without using the word 'gorgeous' somewhere, it's embarrassing. But Mori's art really and truly is a joy to behold here, even more so than in the earlier Emma series. One chapter is dedicated to a character learning about the tradition of weaving in her family, and the attention paid to the patterns is insane. But lovely! Sometimes there's female nudity or near-nudity (it is a seinen comic, after all), but it always comes across as sensuous rather than exploitative.
Buddha by Osamu Tezuka
Buddha is, as the name implies, Tezuka telling the story of Siddhārtha Gautama a.k.a Buddha and Śākyamuni, the founder of Buddhism, in eight thick volumes. However, he does so in a highly fictionalised way - I don't know enough about the traditional lore myself, but from what I heard about half the characters in Tezuka's work are made up by him entirely, including some very prominent ones. In addition, the first volume is all about letting us know the world the main character will be born into, introducing themes and also some characters that will return throughout the work, before finally showing us the birth about little Siddhārtha at the volume's end. The injustices of the highly stratified Indian societies of the day are plain to see; the themes of equality vs hierarchy/prejudice is one of the most prevalent ones in the work, with the other being about the interconnectedness of man, animals and the whole of nature.
As in many of Tezuka's more adult stories, there are many characters not completely good or bad, and he retains particularly adept at making originally appealing characters commit some horrible acts while still making it hard to now hate them completely; some turn to redemption, others not. The free-spirited Untouchable Tatta, one of the most memorable people in the story, is one of those gray characters. And even the Evil Treacherous Disciple Devadatta is shown to have had a cruel childhood where it's impossible not to feel for the poor tyke; it's one of those narratives where I kept reading the story of his formative years and went "if only someone had been a little nicer to him; if only he'd made that choice instead of that one when he had the opportunity...!"
The art is absolutely fantastic, with some advanced cutting and pacing techniques, wonderfully evocative landscape backgrounds, and that superb Tezuka flow.
I'd say that of all Tezuka's work I've read, this is the one that impressed and moved me the most; it is very, very solid, with fewer wild flights of fancy that sometimes tumble the narrative over in other stories. I remember once reading a review where it was said that if Phoenix is Tezuka's life work, then Buddha should be regarded as his masterpiece. The best of Phoenix is also completely amazing, but in large I agree. It's up there with the very best manga I've read.
Any additional B recs?
Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa
The first volume of Barefoot Gen was the first manga I ever read, in a Swedish translation that came out back in the 1980s. (In fact, it may well have been the first piece of fiction centred on Japanese characters I'd ever encountered.) It made a huge impression on me, not just because the bomb but also the way Gen's family was made to suffer through their father's anti-war views even before the bomb fell. There was a strong leftist tenet throughout, as Nakazawa pointed out Imperial Japan's invasions and occupations of other countries, the discrimination against Koreans in Japan, the terrifying peer pressure that led soldiers to volunteer for kamizake missions; the propaganda that painted Americans as demons which made mothers jump to their deaths with their children as the US soldiers came, and more. And then the bomb came, transforming an ordinary city into a complete apocalyptic nightmare. (SPOILERS - though who doesn't know this?) taking half of Gen's family along with it leaving only his mother and newborn sister alive in Hiroshima. (There were also two older brothers who were out of the city, but they would take a while to be reunited - and there's always a bit of a distance between Gen and those two.)
In the 90s I read volume 2-4 in English translation, then much later found out there were 6 more volumes which I didn't get to read until long into the 00s. I find them all compelling. (Expectations spoiler for the last volumes)Maybe not as much volume 9 and 10 as the rest of it, though: it felt like Nakazawa was starting to run out of energy there.
Now, Barefoot Gen is one of those titles where it feels like I must add caveats despite my rating it so highly. It is a very didactic work: a Story With A Message, and intended for a young generation too - Barefoot Gen is shonen. The baddies are very bad, and while some mostly-good characters have less appealing traits too and get caught up in some stupid, illegal things, most of the time it's easy to tell one from the other. In fact, it feels like it represents the black-and-white view of children quite well. Gen himself is full of energy and inspiring words like a classic shonen hero, not always believable under the circs (though I don't really mind). The artwork is functional rather than stunning, and while it works for me I know from some reviews not everyone finds it congenial. Finally, even disregarding the nightmare horrors right after the bomb hits and the following days, there is a lot of poverty and injustice in the rest of the books too; read too much at one time, it can feel a bit much.
But.
There is, in my opinion, a strong sense of energy in these books that is practically primal. Yes, Gen isn't always plausible, but he still feels like a small force of nature in his attitude, even though things don't always turn out fine. Nakazawa is an accomplished storyteller in the technical sense as well as having an enormous amount of passion. And more than that... I just like to find out what happens to Gen and the people around him: there's a sense of community in adversity in it. Many reviewers convey the feeling that reading Gen is a painful civic duty, but to me it's also a pleasure because the story is well-told about characters that are appealing. Even when it makes me cry - and it does. (I actually welled up just from seeing a preview of the cover of the 10th volume above, believe it or not. Sniff.) After I've read one or more volumes of this manga, I disregard all the reservations and realise again it's moved me like few other titles have done.
Blade of the Immortal by Hiroaki Samura
I'm usually not much for titles with a lot of blood and gore - limbs flying, heads being crushed, etc - but this is one of the few exceptions. Taking place in 18th-century Edo-era Japan, this book has a multitude of characters from high-up in the government to miserable outlaw, but at its core it's about two protagonists and one antagonist: Rin Asano, Manji, and Anotsu Kagehisa. Rin is a teenaged daughter of a samurai whose parents were killed on the order of Anotsu Kagehisa by his ragtag band of a rookie dojo; now she's on a mission to avenge them. Anotsu is an interesting antagonist with several noble traits (for instance, a huge egalitarian streak), who sincerely believes what he strives to do is for the best of the whole of Japan. (I'm honestly not sure if the author is as skeptical of his worship of strength and winning above all as I am, but at least there are quite a few characters in the story besides Rin who don't buy what he's saying.) In any case, he remains intriguing pretty much throughout. (spoilers for vol 24)Except for volume 24. That whole onslaught on the shogun's stronghold was just boring; I felt for the poor soldiers being slaughtered and didn't have any sympathy at all for Anotsu & crew, no matter how despicably the government had acted previously.Feh.
To help avenge her parents, Rin engages the rough outlaw swordfighter Manji as a bodyguard. He's got a bloody past (and present, and future...) and now a mysterious old woman has given his body a kind of quasi-immortality, with strange worms in his flesh being able to heal every wound except decapitation. She told him that to make up for the hundred "good" men he slew in his past, he has to kill 1000 "evil" men before he can turn mortal again. (The question of who can reliably judge if someone's "evil" enough to count is not ignored.) Manji figures Rin can help him with that, besides paying for his food and stuff.
That's the story's core, then there are plots, fights, deaths, intrigue, trachery, mor eplots, more fights and deaths, pure slaughter of innocents, more plots, more treachery, more fights, etc. I feel like I have to warn any prospective reader that there's not just a lot of detailed gore in the story (including medical experiments in one long nightmarish arc), but also rape, mutilation and deaths of female characters that can sometimes be downright sexualised. (Eww.) ON THE OTHER HAND, there are many interesting female characters of different personalities, with several of them being strong fighters; the most skilled warrior in the whole series is a woman; Rin continuously grows in confidence, courage, insights and strength of will. I don't know if I'll be fine with everything that happens in the story until the end, and maybe I'll even have to eat all my recs later; but so far this remains a challenging, engaging, thoughtful and exciting work.
...When it isn't upsetting to the point of squickiness, that is. (Always caveating, with this one.)
Un bouquet de fleurs rouges by Rumiko Takahashi (French translation, lt: "A Bouquet of Red Flowers")
This is a collection of short stories in much the same vein as the older collection Rumic Theater by the same creator; low-key slice-of-life stories of everyday people - mostly housewives and officeworker breadwinner husbands - going through troubles and crises of various kinds to a more-happy-than-not resolution, often with a fair bit of poignancy to them. I think they were originally published in a josei magazine, but I'm not sure.EDIT: Actually, I now find out I was wrong about that and they're all seinen instead./edit
This particular collection has a notable gender imbalance for some reason, with all stories but one having a male protagonist (and they're all bespectacled harried officeworkers with thinning hairlines, to boot! ^_^). Some of them are besotted with dreams of romantic affairs to relieve them from the doldrum; the one female character has problems with her mother-in-law; one is troubled with a spoiled brat in the neighbourhood just as he can't connect to his own teenaged son; one is a ghost outraged by his family not mourning him enough for his taste, until he remembers he hasn't behaved like a very good person... The story that stood out the most for me was about a man taking care of his elderly, bedridden father, finding the situation tough and still feeling old resentment underneath his trying hard to be the dutiful son. Things turn better, and the final panel made me teary-eyed.
A Bride's Story by Kaoru Mori
This has been published in three volumes in English so far, beautifully presented, which is all I have read of it. This original and fascinating story is focused on a large family in a small village somewhere in Central Asia in the early 19th century. The bride Amir Halgal, 20 years old (and considered rather old to marry), comes from a nomadic clan of the same ethnic group to be married by arrangement to Karluk Eihon, only 12 years old and the youngest son (and heir) of the family. Amir and her new family discover each other, and the readers get to know all of them in turn. Mostly slowly paced and slice-of-life, some times the plot explodes into wild action. There is often a great sense of space and expanse when the action takes place on the plains outside the village; a large part of the third volume is set in a different place but in the same milieu where a supporting character makes new connections. (This is the one European character, a nice Englishman studying the life of these people and who, I must say, comes across as being from quite a later time period than he's supposed to be.) This is a patriarchal society for sure, but the female characters are just as strong and interesting as the male ones. Moreover, the views they hold feel organic to the time it's set in.
The age difference between Amir and Karluk has the potential to be depicted in a manner that could feel squicky; I don't think it quite has, so far, but who knows what future volumes may bring. (They've been quite platonic up until now, but that may change as Karluk slowly grows older in body and mind.)
I can never talk about this comic without using the word 'gorgeous' somewhere, it's embarrassing. But Mori's art really and truly is a joy to behold here, even more so than in the earlier Emma series. One chapter is dedicated to a character learning about the tradition of weaving in her family, and the attention paid to the patterns is insane. But lovely! Sometimes there's female nudity or near-nudity (it is a seinen comic, after all), but it always comes across as sensuous rather than exploitative.
Buddha by Osamu Tezuka
Buddha is, as the name implies, Tezuka telling the story of Siddhārtha Gautama a.k.a Buddha and Śākyamuni, the founder of Buddhism, in eight thick volumes. However, he does so in a highly fictionalised way - I don't know enough about the traditional lore myself, but from what I heard about half the characters in Tezuka's work are made up by him entirely, including some very prominent ones. In addition, the first volume is all about letting us know the world the main character will be born into, introducing themes and also some characters that will return throughout the work, before finally showing us the birth about little Siddhārtha at the volume's end. The injustices of the highly stratified Indian societies of the day are plain to see; the themes of equality vs hierarchy/prejudice is one of the most prevalent ones in the work, with the other being about the interconnectedness of man, animals and the whole of nature.
As in many of Tezuka's more adult stories, there are many characters not completely good or bad, and he retains particularly adept at making originally appealing characters commit some horrible acts while still making it hard to now hate them completely; some turn to redemption, others not. The free-spirited Untouchable Tatta, one of the most memorable people in the story, is one of those gray characters. And even the Evil Treacherous Disciple Devadatta is shown to have had a cruel childhood where it's impossible not to feel for the poor tyke; it's one of those narratives where I kept reading the story of his formative years and went "if only someone had been a little nicer to him; if only he'd made that choice instead of that one when he had the opportunity...!"
The art is absolutely fantastic, with some advanced cutting and pacing techniques, wonderfully evocative landscape backgrounds, and that superb Tezuka flow.
I'd say that of all Tezuka's work I've read, this is the one that impressed and moved me the most; it is very, very solid, with fewer wild flights of fancy that sometimes tumble the narrative over in other stories. I remember once reading a review where it was said that if Phoenix is Tezuka's life work, then Buddha should be regarded as his masterpiece. The best of Phoenix is also completely amazing, but in large I agree. It's up there with the very best manga I've read.
Any additional B recs?
no subject
Date: 2012-09-13 07:58 pm (UTC)Most strongly, I recommend Yumi Tamura's award-winning shojo epic Basara (which I blather about a bit here: http://oishiitokoro.net/stage/411basara.htm).
"Basara is my absolute favorite non-yaoi manga. Though it's a cliche to say so, it really does have a sweeping plot and literally dozens of memorable characters, major and minor, both male and female … and among them, my favorite manga character ever: Ageha of the Blue Nobles. ~
Basara has so many interesting motifs – gender identity, doubling (many of the main characters have secret or double identities), the tension between being and becoming … There's drama, passion, angst, humor, a strong yet believable heroine (and a female pirate queen!), honorable enemies, not-so honorable friends, twists, and heartbreaking reveals."
The second one - which comes with the same caveat as your comments about the content of Blade of the Immortal - is Kentaro Mirua's Berserk. (I admit I only made it to about volume 20.) Berserk is the only seinen manga I've ever read. Normally I'd be entirely resistant to its bleak, violent content - but 10 years ago a friend sent me the first disc of the anime. I was hooked, and after reaching the devastating end of the anime (which portrayed material from vols 1 and 4-10) I turned to the [even darker) source material. Not for the soft-hearted, this manga will pierce you through with pure misery -- and perhaps that's what made it unforgettable to me.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-13 08:19 pm (UTC)I've heard a lot about Berserk - from what I can tell, it's in many ways a well-done story with a lot of thought in it, but I rather suspect it would be hard for me personally to take. It gets very stern warnings...
Oh yeah, Basara!! I should have added that one, really. I'm afraid it's one of those works that kinda fell between the cracks for me. I found it absorbing to read but when I couldn't find any more volumes in English (I think vol 8 was the last one I read), I kinda forgot about it, without any urgency to push me further. Not sure why because it really did feel like a cool story. Well, I guess it happens. But it certainly deserves a rec, so again, thanks!
no subject
Date: 2012-09-13 08:42 pm (UTC)(Actually, looking at my shelf - another good "b" is Banana Fish. :p)
And ... oh yes, the Berserk manga is ... well, it's a seinen manga. Gorgeously drawn, though explicit in both violence and sex. There's very, VERY little comic relief/humor. I admit that I'm still somewhat horrified that I ... well, liked it isn't really the right word. Somehow I got emotionally invested in Guts (Gattsu) - the bleakest of all anti-heroes- in the charismatic Griffith, and in the female warrior Caska.
(BTW, shall I pre-recommend two "C" titles? :p Amane Ayano's Crimson Spell, and Eiji Nonaka's Cromartie High School.)
no subject
Date: 2012-09-13 09:50 pm (UTC)*nods* I think I know what you mean when you find something that you're not sure if "liked" is the best word, but... it means something.
(Thanks for the pre-recommends! But as I've read none of those, I can't put them on the regular post for C, alas... Want me to repost your recs in a separate comment tomorrow, or maybe do so yourself?)
no subject
Date: 2012-09-13 10:06 pm (UTC)(Heh, hope you don't mind I'm using my old KinkBingo icons :p)
no subject
Date: 2012-09-14 06:32 pm (UTC)(And not at all!)