Ayako is a story of post-war Japan, told from the perspective of the Tenge family. Made wonderfully rich by the vast amount of farmland they’ve owned, the American occupation of Japan has helped to establish new reforms that will now see the family’s chief source of wealth parceled out to their tenant farmers. Losing so much has the devastating side effect of airing the family’s very dirty laundry. Fueled by greed, incest, and murder, each member of the Tenge family is responsible for their downfall and no matter how hard they try to run from it, there’s no escaping such terrible sins.
Much like Tezuka’s other adult manga, Ayako weaves a dark and unnerving tale. The patriarch of the Tenge family is rotten to the core, drunk on power and status, and enjoys taking advantage of Ichiro, one of his more ambitious sons. As a means to secure his father’s fortune, Ichiro allows his father to have sex with his wife on a regular basis. The result of this incestuous union is Ayako, the family’s open secret. Ayako is born into a terrible environment, as she is doted on by her grandfather and led to believe her mother is actually her sister. The Tenges manage to live with the shame until the return of Jiro Tenge sets in motion a chain of events that lead to Ayako’s forced imprisonment for over twenty years.
During the war, Jiro is captured by the Allies and becomes a prisoner of war; to protect himself, he willingly becomes a spy for the American army. Upon Jiro’s return to Japan, his new allies force him to become involved in the murder of their political enemies, one of whom is the lover of his sister. When Ayako’s simpleton friend catches him disposing of his bloodied clothes, Jiro murders her. In doing so, he digs himself deeper and deeper into a hole, trapped in a spy game that has no winners. To avoid police attention and prevent the dishonor of any smear on their “great” name, the Tenges cast Jiro out and lock Ayako away in a cellar.
Ayako is mostly a story of two individuals: Jiro and the titular Ayako, after both have been forsaken by their family. Having left his old life behind, Jiro falls in with the yakuza and soon rises to a position of influence. To evade police investigations, he takes a new name and relies on massive social, economic, and political post-war changes to keep him hidden. Meanwhile, Ayako is trapped underneath a storage shed, forced to spend her days with very little human contact and no chance of escape. Ichiro would like nothing better than to have her killed, but because his father’s will stipulates that nothing will happen to the estate until she turns 15, he is forced to leave her alone. Ayako is a tragic victim, and when she grows into a beautiful woman, she has no idea how to interact with other people. She finds peace in her brother Shiro, but even he gets caught up in the family’s sewage.
This is what makes Ayako such a depressing story. The Tenge familyis so corrupt, so rotten to the core, that no one is redeemable. There’s not one innocent soul among them, and those who have the chance to do something for Ayako end up bowing to the pressure and dominance of the family name. This makes their eventual poetic comeuppance all the more sweet, especially because they remain true to their nature until the very bitter end.
Ayako is told against the backdrop of history, reflecting a period of time when the country of Japan experienced a major shake-up. Throughout the story, there are allusions to and dramatizations of real-life events caused by the Farm Land Reform Law and the massive layoff of over 90,000 Japan Government Railways employees after the company was made public. Jiro Tenge’s story arc sees him involved in a dry run for what would later be known as the Shimoyama Incident, in which the president of the newly-named Japan National Railway was found dead and dismembered on a railroad track.
Much like Tezuka’s other mature works, there are very few heroes and smiles to be found in Ayako. It feels a bit less adventurous than Swallowing the Earth, Apollo’s Song, or Barbara, only because of how strongly it relies on historical events. However, that’s not a bad thing. Although I felt the JNR and Shimoyama plot lines went on a little too long, retelling such events gives readers—especially Western readers—a chance to see how Japan changed after World War II through the eyes of a family that had so much to lose.
Ayako by Osamu Tezuka ISBN: 9781935654780 Vertical, Inc., 2013 Publisher Age Rating: 16+
Where the first part of Message to Adolf sets the stage for the story, in this second part, the stage is mostly ruined. Criticisms that were expressed in the review of the first part of the story (that the story is a bit loose and contains ephemeral connections that feel forced) persist and are stressed to the point where the entire narrative breaks and the reader is left wondering why. As in the first part the art remains excellent, and Osamu Tezuka tackles forests, faces, ice shelfs, and walruses with equal aplomb and joy.
The beginning of Part 2 finds us primarily with Adolf Kauffman in Germany as he rises through the ranks of the Hitler Youth, to eventually find himself working for the Führer himself. Then the narrative touches on Adolf Kamil as he is living with his mother in wartime Japan. Then it introduces a communist spying plot centered around one completely new character and one character that is the son of a previously introduced character. Next Sohei Toge is reintroduced. As expected these disparate threads became entangled and the characters are periodically drawn together.
Unfortunately the in-between parts suffer. For example, many pages are spent detailing exactly how Adolf Kauffman gets back from late wartime Germany to Japan. It involves U-Boats, the Arctic, guilt, and nervous breakdowns. It is largely irrelevant and ponderous to the overall plot. It is, however, an opportunity for Tezuka to stretch his fingers and create something that gets us into the mind of Kauffman and how he is handling the warcrimes and general brutality he was pushed into as a member of the Nazi party. Unfortunately at this point I really didn’t care about Kauffman. By this time in the story, the plot never sticks with any character long enough for the reader to care about him/her, instead the writing seems solely there to move the characters from one point to another. Everything feels forced.
Everything, that is, except for the art. Tezuka again shows why he is an artistic master. Echoing what was written in the review of Part 1, Tezuka deftly handles the multitude of old and new characters, giving them all distinct visual elements and making them easily identifiable. Once again, his output is nearly superhuman. It took a large number of pages rendered to tell this story and the art shows no inconsistency or quality changes throughout. It is a shame that the same cannot be said for the narrative arc.
Message to Adolf Part 2 by Osamu Tezuka ISBN: 9781935654445 Vertical, 2012
There is a thing that happens when you read enough Osamu Tezuka: you keep comparing each work that you read to his greater body of work. That’s not necessarily fair, but it happens, and in this case Message to Adolf, Part 1 (which won the 1986 Kodansha award) is comparable to, but does not quite reach the heights of, other Tezuka works, like Buddha, MW, or Ode to Kirihito. It is a strong work overall, however.
The first part of Message to Adolf sets the stage of the story. It begins during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, when all three Adolfs the story follows are still alive. Sohei Toge is covering the Olympics when he gets a mysterious phone call from his younger brother Isao who implores him to meet up at 8pm the next day. Sohei arrives late to the meeting to discover his brother murdered, hanging in the tree below his apartment. Sohei only has two clues, a piece of paper with the letters RW on it and the presence of a white powder, plaster, underneath Isao’s fingernails. This plaster sparks Sohei’s memory of a murder case back in Japan, a geisha who was found dead with a similar white powder under her nails. This becomes the setup for the first part of this volume, which deals with Sohei trying to discover why his brother was murdered.
Another part of the story deals with Adolf Kamil, a German Jewish boy living in Japan, and Adolf Kauffman, a half Japanese, half German boy whose father is a high ranking member of the Nazi Party. The two develop an unlikely friendship that is strained with the rise of the third Adolf (Hitler), the Nazi Party, and the start of WWII. Kauffman befriends Kamil as a youngster, before the onset of war, and this friendship persists even as Kauffman is shipped to a Hitler Youth school in Germany.
Message to Adolf’s story is a bit loose and many connections with characters are ephemeral and feel forced. Some of these characters feel like an attempt to inject a more literary feel to the story, which is largely unsuccessful and unnecessarily bloats the story. Fortunately, though, the cartooning is top notch and shows why Tezuka is hailed as a genius and a father of manga.
Tezuka deftly handles the multitude of characters, giving them all distinct visual elements and making them easily identifiable. He also is masterful at cartooning the emotions these characters go through; shock, nervousness, fear, and rage are all easily identifiable. In addition, he creates remarkable depth and range, and when you consider the number of pages he illustrates to tell this story it is truly an astounding and outstanding output.
While there is nothing to preclude it from being enjoyed by a younger audience, this story would likely be best suited for adults. It has an adult tone and the youthful characters are more symbols of youth than someone a younger reader might identify with. Libraries of all stripes would benefit from having this in their collection.
Message to Adolf, Part 1 by Osamu Tezuka ISBN: 9781935654438 Vertical, 2012
So I’ll admit that I’m not much of a wine drinker, being underage. But Drops of God has me eagerly awaiting my 21st birthday, which at the time of this writing is just a scant 12 hours away. I originally picked up this manga as a way to get my father, who is a wine aficionado, to see what I loved about the medium. But as he fell in love with the series so did I.
The basic structure of the plot is that noted wine critic, Yukata Kanzaki, has died. His estranged son, Shizuku, must battle with his father’s protégé, Issei Tomine, for the man’s house, money and, most importantly, his legendary wine cellar. They compete by seeking the “Tweleve Apostles,” twelve spectacular bottles of wine, described in Yukata’s will. The catch, of course is that the wines are not described by name, only by how they taste. Shizuku and Issei need to taste and identify wines to find each bottle in turn.
I should note that this series is marketed at adults. And while in Japan adults read manga, in the US they by and large do not. So this series has struggled to find a market. Because of that, the translation of the series has skipped several volumes. Normally the two contestants would go bottle by bottle, finding each “Apostle” in order. However, in an attempt to gain footing in the US, the manga has skipped ahead from the Second Apostle (found at the end of the previous volume) to the Seventh. This is because the Two Apostles shown (and presumably the 4 in between) were wines from Europe. Here the wines showcased are from the “New World” — Australia and the US.
The Seventh Apostle is described as being like the Sagrada Familia, a magnificent (and still unfinished) church in Spain designed by Gaudi. While the actual description is beautiful it’s also lengthier than this review. Shizuku travels to Australia and makes a tour of wineries there, eventually choosing the “2003 Glaetzer Amon-Ra Shiraz Barossa Valley.” Issei, on the other hand, travels to Nappa Valley and tries many American wines before deciding on the “2003 Sine Qua Non The Inaugural (Eleven Confessions) Syrah Central Coast AVA.” They then both travel back to Japan to have their wines tasted by the mediator. While both wines end up evoking religious imagery for the taster, Shizuku’s calls forth the image of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, while Issei’s choice brings forth the correct image of the Sagrada Familia, putting him ahead at Four Apostles to Shizuku’s three.
The art in this book is brilliant. The characters are richly detailed and look almost human. But even better than that, the scenes any given wine calls forth are truly works of art. They’re the best artwork you’ll see in any manga anywhere.
While this is likely to be the final volume of this series published in the US, it’s still worth reading. If you like wine, or even think that might like to like wine, this series is the one for you. I recommend that you start with the first volume to have a better idea of what’s going on and get a firmer grasp on the characters, but if you only have this one, read it. It’s a fantastic series and well worth getting all five volumes available in the US.
Drops of God, vol. 5: New World by Tadashi Agi Art by Shu Okimoto ISBN: 9781935654520 Vertical, 2012
While surfing the Internet for inspiration, manga-ka Furuya is drawn to the voice behind an enigmatic online diary titled No Longer Human. In it, a broken young man named Yozo Oba recounts in deeply personal, painful, and unsparing detail the depths of his fear — of his father, of other people, of himself — and the wreckage it has left in its wake.
This three-volume manga series by Usamaru Furuya is based on a quasi-autobiographical novel of the same name published in 1948 by celebrated Japanese author Osamu Dazai. Shortly before his 39th birthday, and after multiple failed attempts to end his life over the years, Dazai drowned in a double suicide with a female acquaintance. Furuya’s adaptation of Dazai’s last completed work presents an unpretentious, unsentimental, and devastating depiction of a gifted soul crushed by anxiety, guilt, and the weight of existence.
“Troubled” seems an inadequate description of pitiable protagonist Oba as he stumbles from one experience to another, imagining himself a marionette dangling from strings controlled by the hands of his cold, detached, un-pleasable father. On the surface, he has everything going for him: beauty, charm, intelligence, talent, and a good heart. But as much as these smooth his way in the world, they also feed his personal demons, enable his weaknesses, and leave him, and occasionally those around him, vulnerable to his failures and the cruel vicissitudes of fate.
Oba’s overwhelming fear and incomprehension of others (especially “ordinary” people who don’t seem to have to fake it) is countered by his desperate struggle for their acceptance even as he perceives himself to be inherently unworthy. What makes this particularly affecting for the reader is the fact that Oba knows that something’s wrong with him, that he’s falling apart, and that he’s hurting people who care about him. He wants to fix things, to get better; and yet he’s often helpless to save anyone, believing the most he can do is try to relieve them of the burden of himself.
Amid all the tension and drama, there are still moments of sweetness and humor, sincere and sarcastic, as Oba experiences the happiness of honest connections and creative pride. The reader is thankful for these emotional reprieves, as well as for the distancing frame of the fictional Furuya’s sympathetic yet safe perspective.
The art subtly adds to the power of the story’s blunt, irony-edged text (including select passages and echoing refrains from the original novel). When we see through Oba’s wary eyes, realistically detailed and clean-lined panels are exchanged for more textured, pencil-sketched images, where laughing classmates become leering, hollow-orificed faces swirling off into the air as though smeared by erasers and sucked up into a vortex. In contrast, as he slides further into the miasma of addiction and depression, Oba’s surreal hallucinations are deceptively clear and sharp. Other touches elsewhere, such as innocent blushes or too-wide eyes or harmlessly nondescript features, encourage the reader to form her own opinions about who can or can’t be trusted; opinions which Furuya uses to his advantage.
Unusually, the left-to-right art of this edition was prepared simultaneously with the original by Furuya, himself. Perhaps he felt the story was so important that he wanted as few barriers as possible between it and readers outside of Japan?
In his afterword, Furuya talks of his adolescent identification with Dazai, calling him his “depressive hero,” and of their shared belief in the need to portray the “ruin and negativity” of reality. His acknowledgement that he nevertheless finds himself unable to replicate Dazai’s unqualified hopelessness, in either life or art, is another tiny, but appreciated, comfort.
With its sobering focus on thwarted potential, No Longer Human isn’t for everyone. A tragic, haunting confessional made all the more heart-wrenching by Dazai’s fate, its pages document the protagonist’s self-destructive escape mechanisms as well as the imagined and real-world traumas from which he’s running. Sex, prostitution, rape, nudity, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, and strong language — some of which involve minors — all add their weight to a story from which adults and mature older teens should come away moved and thoughtful.
No Longer Human, vols. 1-3 by Usamaru Furuya Vol. 1 ISBN: 9781935654193 Vol. 2 ISBN: 9781935654223 Vol. 3 ISBN: 9781935654223 Vertical, 2011-2012 Publisher Age Rating: 16+
Antisocial high-schooler Hikaru just wants to be left alone. But when she skips out on a class-trip dinner for a solitary walk on the beach, she attracts the attention of what she at first believes to be a shooting star before it abruptly changes course, makes a beeline for the beach…and incinerates her.
Some days later, a slightly confused Hikaru is back in math class, trying to tune out the world and her own insecurities, as usual. But this time there’s a strange, new, and annoying voice no amount of volume adjustment on her headphones will make go away. And it’s coming from inside her own head.
The voice belongs to Horizon, which turns out to be not so much a shooting star as a cosmic hunter hot on the heels of its arch nemesis, the insatiable Maelstrom. Having fused with Hikaru’s blood cells in order to rebuild and sustain her after killing her (an act for which it politely semi-apologizes), Horizon now needs Hikaru’s help to discover the identity of Maelstrom’s local vessel before the villain jumps hosts, disappears into the global population, and destroys all life on the planet. This seems a tall order for an ill-adjusted teen with her own baggage, but with the fate of the world in the balance, and the threat of an incessant internal lecture, refusal isn’t an option.
Inspired by a classic 1950 sci-fi novel by Hal Clement called Needle, this four-volume science fiction thriller serves up more amusement and cheezy, thoughtful optimism than you might expect, given the main character’s violent demise on page nine of the first volume. The story still sports plenty of suspense and horror, as the energetic antagonist goes about its violent business while wearing another’s face. But beneath that surface conflict lies a greater focus on the nature of evolution, free will versus determinism, what it means to be human, and, for our begrudging protagonist, what it means to be Hikaru. At first survival takes precedence, but as the characters have more time to observe and learn, their thoughts turn to more philosophical matters, lending more than one interpretation to the series title as well as to the often-echoed theme of the first chapter, “You Are Not Alone.” The result is an odd yet enjoyable tale with some darkly gruesome scares, light-hearted humor, and – perhaps reflecting the seemingly simpler era of its inspirational material – a healthy dose of sentimental corniness.
Awkward, put-upon Hikaru (who thinks mumbling, “Um,” to a classmate’s back counts as an information-gathering conversation) sets a likeable example for the rest of the characters. For the humans, even when we don’t get to see much about their lives outside of their interactions with the principals, Tadano makes good use of their appearances to define their personalities and relationships with minimal dialogue and few panels. And the cosmic entities have apparently taken cues from the locals when it comes to behavior and speech, as even the most powerful and detached of them still says things like “Wow” and “Ew, gross.” They do have some surprises to them, if not greatly developed depths, and while Tadano probably could have played more with their fish-out-of-water status, they nonetheless fill their roles satisfactorily.
The art fits the story well, with photo-referenced street scenes and detailed backgrounds (particularly character-defining ones, like the tiny, cluttered apartment Hikaru shares with her aunt and uncle), suitably icky monstrousness when needed, and sturdy figures with determined jaws, blocky hands and feet, and untidy, scrappy airs that make them look relatable and ready for whatever the universe may throw at them next.
The series closes out with a short story, “Hikikomori Headphone Girl,” featuring the prototype for Hikaru, and a selection of bonus art from the original Japanese editions.
Interestingly, there’s really no fanservice here at all, despite the inclusion of an early bath scene and several extended instances of vaguely defined, non-sexualized male and female nudity in the latter volumes. Along with the mildly strong language and bloody yet not excessively graphic violence, it all serves a story that will probably most appeal to older teens and adults who like their sci-fi with an earnest, positive, if still occasionally yicky, spin.
Although Shizuku Kanzaki has been trained up by his father, a famous wine critic, to be a wine connoisseur, he has never tasted wine. His training involved tasting and smelling and building vocabulary. But he rebelliously turned away from the world of wine to work for a beer import company.
Now, his father has died. To inherit the estate, including a valuable wine collection, Shizuku has to identify twelve apostle wines described by his father, as well as a thirteenth perfect wine, called The Drops of God. To add tension to this task, Shizuku is competing for the estate with a young wine critic Issei Tomine, recently adopted by his father.
Shizuku may have the language and training to appreciate wine, but he has no experience with the actual beverage. He gets help from many people, including Miyabi Shinohara, an apprentice sommelier and later co-worker, a homeless man who later turns out to be a great retired wine critic, and his co-workers at the newly formed wine division of his beer company. Each aspect of wine that Shizuku learns about is presented as a mini-story within the larger story. He learns about “terroir” and helps reunite a couple, he learns about the different famous wine makers of France and helps an amnesiac regain her memories. All this through the power of wine.
The descriptions of the wine and the experience of drinking the wine are flowery and over the top and fabulously entertaining. When Shizuku first sips a wine, the reader sees only visuals, no words. Shizuku is transported to a rock concert, the noise blowing his hair and clothes back. You see a screaming crowd. Then an iconic image of the rock band Queen. Then he describes the moment: “It’s powerful but I also felt a melting sweetness and a sharp rush or sourness. Just as the soft, husky vocals of Queen are wrapped in deep guitar sounds and heavy drums. It seems somehow like classical music but it isn’t. It’s something modern. Yeah, its Queen alright.”
The book is filled with characters giving small lectures on the finer points of wine: what good regions are, who the great wine makers are, which years were good, how an adequate wine can become better with proper decanting or aerating or not. Agi does a great job making all this information fit into the narrative and it flows. You become genuinely interested in knowing about wine.
Okimoto’s drawing is clear and complements the text well. I often find manga to have so many lines that mean so many things (this one is for emotion, that one for movement, the other one is complicated clothing) that I can find the drawings hard to read. Not so here. Okimoto uses all the manga conventions, even chibis, and yet retains a clarity of picture easy enough for a more novice manga reader to understand. I think this is especially important in a book like this, one that is clearly targeting an older demographic. This would be a good series to give to an adult curious to try manga.
My main criticism of this book is that vol. 1 – 4 only covers Shizuku’s search for and discovery of the first two apostles. The rest of the series has not been released in English yet. So the reader is left hanging, wondering how it will end.
The Drops of God, vol. 1-4 by Tadashi Agi Art by Shu Okimoto Vol 1, ISBN: 978193565427 Vol 2, ISBN: 9781935654292 Vol 3, ISBN: 9781935654360 Vol 4, ISBN: 9781935654391 Vertical, 2011-2012 Publisher Age Rating: (Adult)
I spent several years working in an artisanal bakery. There were things to enjoy about the job, but the hours were awful and the work was messy and repetitive. There were certainly days that I resented our general cultural romanticization of food production. After the umpteenth stranger told me how “relaxing” and “zen” my job must be, I was primed for enjoyment of Kitchen Confidential, Tony Bourdain’s breakout book. He revealed the seedy underbelly of his life in kitchens, presenting it all with a preposterous, but enjoyable, swagger and snark. He followed that up with a series of television shows in which he travelled the world eating interesting food and mercilessly ragging on celebrity chefs and foodie poseurs. This was lots of fun, but as I left the bakery and got happier about life I appreciated that Bourdain’s snark and vitriol were gradually tempered by an open-minded culinary multiculturalism. So, while it wouldn’t have fazed me coming from old Tony, I was a bit surprised that new Tony started his comic book with a guy getting his head chopped off for daring to order a California roll.
Get Jiro! is set in a near-future dystopian Los Angeles utterly dominated by foodie culture. Restaurant reservations are matters of life and death and chefs are big societal powers. Two chefs are particularly important: Bob heads the haute cuisine Internationalists and Alice heads the militantly field-to-table Vertical Farm. (Side note: anyone else remember when Bourdain said some bad words about Alice Waters’ insistence on local produce? Makes me wonder who Bob’s named after!) The two factions are locked in a heavily-entrenched gang war, angling to control the best chefs, locations, and ingredients. On the outskirts of the city, Jiro quietly makes his superlative sushi, sticking doggedly to traditional ingredients and practices, culinary perfection his only ideology. When he comes to the attention of Bob and Alice they both try to seduce and then strong-arm him into their camps, but he turns his nose up at both of their operations and chooses a third path. Jiro, it turns out, is ex-Yakuza, as skilled a killer as he is a chef, and he chooses to burn the LA food scene to the ground rather than compromise his sushi.
In precis, the sushi samurai plot is totally unworkable but Bourdain, co-writer Joel Rose, and artist Langdon Foss commit to it so wholeheartedly that one simply accepts and enjoys it. Chefs already have lots of knives — why wouldn’t they turn them on each other? The tensions between differing culinary philosophies are easy to spot in the real world; they’re simply writ a little larger here. The characters are consistent and the dialogue is fairly believable, so it’s easy to come along for the ride when folks get ready to fight to the death over a menu. There were a few little things that could have been clarified; I wasn’t quite sure why Jiro spared a particular sous chef or what I was to make of the couple brief appearances of the Maoist soup vendor who rallies behind Jiro. However, on the whole, it’s a good execution of a fun premise.
Foss is a big part of keeping the book believable. His art is heavily derivative of Frank Quietly — doughy figures, copious blood, and panels bursting out of the grid every which way– but it’s good. He’s put some obvious effort into nailing the details of all the food (as well as the deadly culinary tools), which is hugely important, both because the food is the soul of the conflict and because Vertigo is surely trying to snag some of Tony’s food-savvy fans who are likely to notice if the sushi rice is packed too tightly or the pot au feu is made with the wrong cuts of meat.
In the end, my only complaint about the book was a philosophical one. Bob and Alice are villains because of how they treat other chefs, but Jiro’s the one who murders a customer for ordering poorly. In fact, Bourdain devotes quite a bit of page space to how food should be enjoyed and heaps scorn upon those who do so incorrectly. So, to be clear, chefs are artists who must be given free rein to follow their personal visions. But customers? Those philistines are the real enemies here. Glad to know where we stand, Tony.
Get Jiro! by Anthony Bourdain, Joel Rose Art by Langdon Foss ISBN: 978140122827 Vertigo, 2012
The high school’s pop music club is about to be disbanded due to a lack of members, but 10th grader Ritsu jumps at the chance to both be a club president and fulfill her dream of being a drummer in a band. She drags along her reluctant best friend Mio to play bass, but they still need two more members and an adviser to qualify as an official club. They snag Tsumugi to play keyboard when she mistakes the meeting for the choir club, recruit Yui for guitar, even though she’s never picked up an instrument, and blackmail the music teacher, an ex-rocker, to supervise the club. Will this band of misfits ever move on from taking beach vacations and using their meetings to indulge in snacks to actually learn some songs and perform?
K-On! by Kakifly — the title refers to to keiongaku, a Japanese term for pop music — was originally published as a four-panel comic in a young men’s manga magazine and is collected here in the first English volume from Yen Press. Since the short four-panel comics (read vertically) were intended to be read over the span of months, reading them as a continuous narrative in one volume gives the story a choppy feeling that takes some getting used to. Likewise, there’s not much room for deep, ongoing plots, so there are a lot of quick gags and simple storylines. That said, the story is fun to read and packs in a lot of humor. Each of the main characters has her own endearing quirks — Yui is incredibly earnest, but also extremely clueless, Ritsu is an overachiever, but also pretty lazy — that makes the character interactions entertaining. The club adviser is particularly amusing with her ostensibly demure exterior hiding a pop-music obsessed interior, helping the girls learn their parts and making them elaborate stage costumes. This volume also includes a few pages of translation notes and a music lesson at the end of the book to enrich the reading experience.
While this is mostly a girl-friendly series, there are several panels that make it clear that it was originally intended for a male audience, including gratuitous bikini scenes, panty shots, and maid costumes. It’s not pervasive, but it does stand out. This garners an Older Teen rating from Yen Press, indicating it may be inappropriate for readers under age 16.
Overall, while a bit superficial, K-On! is a lighthearted romp with likable characters and a fun premise. Yen Press is releasing all four volumes of the manga and the anime adaptation is also available in the US on DVD and Blu-Ray from Bandai.
K-On!, vol. 1 by Kakifly ISBN: 9780316119337 Yen Press, 2010 Publisher Age Rating: OT (16 )
The adage that the Japanese have a manga for everything is, for the most part, true. If you can think of it, there’s probably a comic about it out there somewhere. Yes, even curling. Lucky for us, some of these special interest manga are starting to be licensed and translated into English.
The first volume of one of the most eagerly anticipated titles has recently been released by Vertical. The Drops of God, by Tadashi Agi and Shu Okimoto, is about Shizuku Kanzaki, the son of a renowned wine critic, and his battle to identify the thirteen wines his father considered divine. Should he fail to do this, Shizuku’s inheritance will go to his father’s protege, a wine-obsessed, snobby, pill-of-a-guy who sets Shizuku’s teeth on edge.
In the race to identify these heavenly wines, Shizuku suffers from a terrible handicap. Fed up with the weird things his father made him do while growing up (drink weedy teas, lick knives, sniff pencils, etc.), Shizuku left home before he’d even tasted wine. He has no idea what he is supposed to be looking for when a bottle is opened. His only advantage is that, thanks to his father’s training, Shizuku has an incredible sense of taste and smell and can identify the subtle differences in vintages, vintners, and even terroir. What starts out as a fight to save his father’s collection of wines from an interloper turns into a desire to learn as much about wine as possible. And in order to do both, Shizuku must learn about wine quickly, which allows the reader to learn along with him.
Don’t panic if you aren’t quite sure what vintage, vintner and terroir mean. The book handily defines all these terms and more within the context of the story. Even better, Agi and Okimoto use senses and emotions to describe how the wine tastes. I may not automatically know what a wine critic means when he says something about “fruity bouquet” or “earthiness,” but I know what it’s like to stand in a strawberry field on a spring day under a peach tree. Using images I’m familiar with to describe a topic like fine wines makes for more ah-ha! connections as Shizuku and I learn about wine together.
On Twitter, I commented that The Drops of God is one of the best sports manga I’ve read and I think the comparison is fair. What Cross Game does for baseball and Hikaru no Go does for a board game, The Drops of God does for wine: it takes a subject a select group of people know a lot about and makes it accessible to the lay-person through clever narration, solid art, and healthy competition between two characters who both want to win.
The Drops of God, vol. 1 by Tadashi Agi Art by Shu Okimoto ISBN: 9781935654278 Vertical, Inc, 2011
Ayako is a story of post-war Japan, told from the perspective of the Tenge family. Made wonderfully rich by the vast amount of farmland they’ve owned, the American occupation of Japan has helped to establish new reforms that will now see the family’s chief source of wealth parceled out to their tenant farmers. Losing so much has the devastating side effect of airing the family’s very dirty laundry. Fueled by greed, incest, and murder, each member of the Tenge family is responsible for their downfall and no matter how hard they try to run from it, there’s no escaping such terrible sins.
Where the first part of Message to Adolf sets the stage for the story, in this second part, the stage is mostly ruined. Criticisms that were expressed in the review of the first part of the story (that the story is a bit loose and contains ephemeral connections that feel forced) persist and are stressed to the point where the entire narrative breaks and the reader is left wondering why. As in the first part the art remains excellent, and Osamu Tezuka tackles forests, faces, ice shelfs, and walruses with equal aplomb and joy.
There is a thing that happens when you read enough Osamu Tezuka: you keep comparing each work that you read to his greater body of work. That’s not necessarily fair, but it happens, and in this case Message to Adolf, Part 1 (which won the 1986 Kodansha award) is comparable to, but does not quite reach the heights of, other Tezuka works, like Buddha, MW, or Ode to Kirihito. It is a strong work overall, however.
So I’ll admit that I’m not much of a wine drinker, being underage. But Drops of God has me eagerly awaiting my 21st birthday, which at the time of this writing is just a scant 12 hours away. I originally picked up this manga as a way to get my father, who is a wine aficionado, to see what I loved about the medium. But as he fell in love with the series so did I.
“I’ve lived a life full of shame.”
Antisocial high-schooler Hikaru just wants to be left alone. But when she skips out on a class-trip dinner for a solitary walk on the beach, she attracts the attention of what she at first believes to be a shooting star before it abruptly changes course, makes a beeline for the beach…and incinerates her.
Although Shizuku Kanzaki has been trained up by his father, a famous wine critic, to be a wine connoisseur, he has never tasted wine. His training involved tasting and smelling and building vocabulary. But he rebelliously turned away from the world of wine to work for a beer import company.
The high school’s pop music club is about to be disbanded due to a lack of members, but 10th grader Ritsu jumps at the chance to both be a club president and fulfill her dream of being a drummer in a band. She drags along her reluctant best friend Mio to play bass, but they still need two more members and an adviser to qualify as an official club. They snag Tsumugi to play keyboard when she mistakes the meeting for the choir club, recruit Yui for guitar, even though she’s never picked up an instrument, and blackmail the music teacher, an ex-rocker, to supervise the club. Will this band of misfits ever move on from taking beach vacations and using their meetings to indulge in snacks to actually learn some songs and perform?
The adage that the Japanese have a manga for everything is, for the most part, true. If you can think of it, there’s probably a comic about it out there somewhere. Yes, even 
