Category: The Manga Shelf

Posted on in Manga, The Manga Shelf

The Manga Shelf: Something is Wrong in COCOON ENTWINED

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. 

It’s something of a minor media blogger faux pas to admit that you picked something up because it was recommended to you. Nonetheless, without a friend showing me this list of yuri manga recommendations, I doubt I ever would’ve even heard of Cocoon Entwined, much less so quickly become enraptured with it.

Cocoon Entwined is a hard thing to even describe. On the surface, it’s a fairly straightforward schoolgirl love triangle manga with a bizarre wrinkle in its setting (more on that in a moment). There are dozens of those, good and bad, up and down some fifty years of history in the medium. But just beneath that, it’s darker, stranger, and with more on its mind than one may initially assume. The blogger in the list I linked above describes it with the word “eerie”, and I can think of no better one. Cocoon Entwined‘s all-girl high school setting has the preserved delicacy of a butterfly pinned to a board under glass. Almost from its opening pages, there is the palpable sense that something about this entire setup is off.

On a more concrete level; the story is set in Hoshimiya Girls’ Academy, which is fairly typical for this genre with one very odd exception. Each student is expected to grow her hair out from the time she enters the school until she graduates. When she does, her hair is cut, and becomes material for the Academy’s uniforms. This central detail of the setting is going to be everyone’s first indicator that something is strange about this entire thing, and it comes up constantly.

Hair, in general, is a visual motif to the point of fixation throughout the manga. Mangaka Hara Yuriko excels at finely detailed linework, and puts it to use throughout in the depiction of long, lustrous locks. What might in other contexts come across as longing or romantic is often here tinged with unease, and at times even an implied lust.

The manga’s other signature trick is its unusual structure. Rather than linearly following a single story it cuts repeatedly backward and forward in time. Often, a character will be introduced as an upperclassman and the next chapter will be about her experiences as a first-year. It’s disorienting and occasionally even downright confusing, but this all feels very intentional. Cocoon Entwined seems to want to tell a story as much about the systems that shape women as it does about those women themselves.

Even before the manga begins to tip its hand a bit, everything about Cocoon Entwined just feels wrong. In the two volumes that are currently available in English, I would not define a single event that happens as being concretely “bad” in the usual sense. Nonetheless, reading Cocoon one cannot help but get the impression that they’re watching something that is on some level messed up, like seeing the inner workings of a cult. I made the mistake of initially reading it in the middle of the night and found myself legitimately creeped out. This unease–which has a heaviness to it that sharply contrasts with the delicate look of the manga itself–is in fact Cocoon‘s biggest point of interest. Which makes it a touch frustrating that it’s so hard to articulate. There are not many manga whose greatest strength is their ambiguity, but Cocoon may just be one.

In fact, reading the series I initially wondered if my assessment was off, and that perhaps this fairly straightforward girls’ love series was just being colored by my preexisting perceptions combining with the somewhat gothic art. It was only when the manga began to, in fleeting glimpses, offer a look at the dark heart of the academy that I was assured that no, this is all intentional.

I point to a few things here. One of the leads expresses her idea that the uniforms are suffocating. Indeed; there is a running tension between the uniforms, and hair in general, as a signifier of pretense, of airs put on, and so on, and kisses, only shown rarely, at distance, or fleetingly, as a symbol of something real, immediate, and honest. Something you take care of and cultivate vs. something you really can’t plan for at all. This tension between affectation and honesty bleeds into the literal plot by way of the already-complicated love “triangle”. (I count four people involved in one case and a separate, currently unrelated, one-sided affection. What shape this makes is left as an exercise to the reader.) Some characters seem to be lovestruck because they see a side to the objects of their affection that others don’t. Others are in love with the masks.

Furthermore, what is currently the most recent chapter ends on this bombshell of a cliffhanger, making the desire to “remove the uniform” extremely literal. It’s a gripping and intense expression of desire for emotional honesty, a demand to see behind that mask. One can only guess how it will turn out for our protagonists.

But even before this, one need only compare the scenes that take place within the Academy to those few that take place outside it. The Academy is always bathed in a soft glow, and the girls within it are delicate. The city, on the outside, bursts with chiaroscuro and full figures. That Yuriko manages to convey this drastic contrast so subtly is nothing short of remarkable.

Elsewhere, Norse Mythology makes an appearance as another thematic thread, but when The Norns–the three sisters who weave the Past, Present, and Future–are mentioned, the youngest of them is missing. The school, this seems to imply, is being kept in an eternal present that honors an endless past. The future is cut off and inaccessible to preserve a “perfect” now. It’s hard to say how literal any of this is, but when we’re introduced to thread catacombs full of spools of human hair, and mention is made that the most beautiful girl from every graduating class becomes “a part of the school forever”, it starts to feel pretty damn foreboding regardless.

It’s hard to know where any of this will ultimately end. Cocoon Entwined‘s mysterious nature makes it hard to predict much about its future direction with any certainty. But ultimately, that’s fine. Darkness this hauntingly heavy doesn’t come around very often.

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Manga, The Manga Shelf

The Manga Shelf: The Morbid Optimism of SUICIDE GIRL

Content Warning: This article contains art that depicts, and frank discussion of, suicide and self-harm. Reader discretion is advised.

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. 

“Monsters of the dark mind–Disappear!”

One of my original goals in starting the “Manga Shelf” sub-column was to shine a spotlight on stuff where my opinion may not’ve been totally settled, but I did definitely think it was at least interesting enough to be paying attention to. And today, we have something that fits the bill perfectly, and with one hell of a high concept. Suicide Girl, to not bury the lede, is a manga about a depressed magical girl who is conscripted by the owner of a mysterious café to combat and hopefully rid the world of “suicide demons” called Phobias, which cause people to kill themselves.

As far as elevator pitches go, it’s both wild and initially quite offputting. I’ve never been shy about being a skeptic of the whole “dark magical girl” movement. Even if in recent months (and hell, days) I’ve come around somewhat. Add to that the understandably extremely touchy issue of suicide and the manga’s irreverent, sometimes jokey tone, and Suicide Girl really feels like it should be a complete disaster.

However, while it’s too early to definitively say that Suicide Girl is a total success or anything like that (only five chapters are available in English at the time of this writing), it does feel, strangely enough, like it actually does have its heart in the right place.

To explain, first some brief recapping: our lead is Kirari Aokigahara (named after the suicide forest, yes). She meets the aforementioned mysterious café-owner while attempting to kill herself. The man foils her attempt (it’s complicated), and senses within her the power to fight the Phobia. She has a vision of, and is sent to, the site of a suicide-to-be. There, she seemingly talks the would-be victim out of her mistake, only for her to suddenly fling herself onto the tracks anyway. So far, so edgy.

It’s in the second chapter, where we get a bit of Kirari’s backstory, that Suicide Girl started to pick at the heavy coat of skepticism I’d built up from reading too many seinen manga in my day. And where, I suspect, it’ll do the same for others. The gist is simple: Kirari had a fiancé once. She doesn’t anymore. Adding to the weight of her retelling is the art; Suicide Girl‘s panel composition is something to behold.

The image of the looming silhouette of a building physically shunting Kirari’s flashbacks off to the side of the page, as though dominating her memories of the event, struck me. My initial (admittedly unfair) assumption had been that Suicide Girl was essentially a deliberately way-over-the-line gag manga. And while there is an element of that, this was the page that convinced me that it was trying to tell a meaningful story, too.

I don’t mean to sidetrack into my personal history too much. But while I’ve (thankfully) not struggled with physical self-harm in many years, suicidal thoughts have never entirely been gone from my mind. And I struggle with my self-worth every day. The externalization of suicidal ideation present in Suicide Girl–that is to say, the Phobias–initially struck me as crass. I generally hate it when stories try to pin real problems on supernatural causes. But ruminating on it, I had a different thought.

The chemical imbalances and societal factors that cause depression do have real scientific or sociological explanations. However, to those suffering from them, suicidal thoughts can certainly feel as arbitrary and loathsome as being possessed by a demon. It’s a thought I myself have had before, if not in so many words. In that light, what followed in that first story arc struck me as less frivolous and more, perhaps, as cathartic.

First: Kirari learns that she has not actually failed her mission quite yet. The death of a Phobia victim comes with a timer. If the Phobia itself can be defeated in time, time resets, and their victim returns to life unscathed.

So off she goes. In fighting the monster, she transforms for the first time. Again the art plays a big role in bolstering the manga on the whole. Her henshin sequence is striking, morbid, horrifying, and incredible.

Yes, she hangs herself to transform. What I might’ve otherwise considered to be a gross parody of a traditional transformation sequence strikes me as a lot more nuanced in the broader context of Suicide Girl. Kirari, finally understanding that her boyfriend’s suicide was not her fault (nor, indeed, his) rejects literal death as an escape and substitutes it with a metaphorical and transformative death of the old self.

It is also partly a parody of traditional magical girl-isms, of course. A nod to the famous “Precure leap” gag occurs just pages later.

It is worth noting that Kirari does not immediately and instantly turn her entire life outlook around. She still misses her departed boyfriend, and when she tries to go out and act like everything’s fine, she can’t. What a later chapter proposes is that if one can’t find happiness within the self, they can find it by helping others. An idea that is, for something as ostensibly edgy as Suicide Girl, an emotional thesis that is perhaps surprisingly mature, even optimistic. Add this to the catharsis mentioned earlier that just comes from seeing Kirari beat the living daylights out of physical manifestations of the worst parts of the human mind, and Suicide Girl seems less like it’s making fun of those with Brain Issues, or using us for storytelling fodder, and more like it’s actively rooting for us.

There’s another, even simpler, layer to all of this. Which is that Kirari also has another of my favorite traits in a magical girl; she’s kind of a huge badass. An almost dorkily-grimdark one? Yes, but tell me you don’t think dialogue like this is cool on at least some level.

The manga’s wild facial expressions could honestly fill an article of their own.

In general, Suicide Girl manages to pull-off an impressive tight-rope-walk between being grim almost but not quite to the point of corniness, genuinely pretty cool, and surprisingly sincere when and where it really counts.

Now, Kirari and the café owner’s stated goal of eliminating suicide from the world may be a little ambitious. (The café owner himself points out that Kirari was not possessed by a Phobia when they first met.) So time will tell how the manga handles that plot point. There are other wrinkles on the page, too. A second Suicide Girl (a burned-out idol named Manten) debuted in the current arc, and her philosophy is almost perfectly counter to Kirari’s, adding an interesting twist to things.

It’s hard to say if Suicide Girl will prove if it’s “earned” the right to its doubtlessly controversial subject matter or not. It is, of course, entirely possible I’m simply wildly misreading the whole thing and it actually just is supposed to take the piss, but there’s worse sins one can commit as a commentator than giving something too much credit.

And, of course, as much as I’ve found watching Kirari pummel literal emotional demons to be cathartic and even oddly liberating, not everyone is going to take it that way. It must be emphasized that that’s perfectly fine; people deal with things in different ways.

But for me at least, many of my favorite magical girl stories are, ultimately, feminine power fantasies. Stories where empathy, love, and hope do always win out over evil in the end. Time will tell if Suicide Girl follows suit, but at the moment, it certainly seems to be headed down that road. It’s just taking a darker side-path than most.

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Manga, The Manga Shelf

The Manga Shelf: A Goodbye To THE NIGHT-OWL WITCH

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. 

The Night-Owl Witch (Maya-san no Yofukashi in its native Japanese. Its only official title, as it was never brought over here to the Anglosphere in any legal capacity) is a story with very few moving parts. Our lead is Maya, a nerdy shut-in who spends most of her nights on her computer talking to the manga’s sole other major character, her best (and quite possibly only) friend Mameyama. Maya is a witch, a fact that matters to the story only occasionally. The real heart and soul of The Night-Owl Witch is in the first, not the second, part of its title. Maya is a withdrawn otaku with terrible sleeping habits who spends most of her life on her computer. As a career anime blogger, I cannot help but relate.

More than that, though, there is something surprisingly honest about the depiction of Maya and Mameyama’s friendship. Mameyama, to put it bluntly, has her shit together much more than Maya does. Maya essentially relies on Mameyama for much of her emotional well-being. Not deliberately of course, but it’s the sort of not-entirely-even friendship that anyone who’s grown up online will be all too familiar with. Mameyama also ends up serving as Maya’s conscience of reason a fair bit of the time, and not always successfully.

But whether it’s succumbing to the engineered gambling of a gacha game or the common nerd lament of clothes being, just, like, way too expensive, Maya’s real resonance comes from her general experience.

That of someone who has friends, but no friends around. The bittersweet plea of many the world over who certainly have people who understand them, just not in person. In as much as a fairly light character comedy can be said to have one, The Night-Owl Witch‘s core conflict is this; the gap between Maya’s very real friendship with Mameyama and the loneliness she feels in spite of that.

The series, as is common for slice of life manga, is set in this kind of experiential loop, where each chapter starts from essentially the same premise. A loop sometimes formally termed “the endless everyday”, and the subject of much examination both within critical spaces and within the medium itself. (A brilliant triumph over this cycle is the primary reason that A Place Further Than The Universe is among the best anime of its era.) The Night-Owl Witch is not that ambitious, and as such never formally resolves the character arc Maya’s circumstances create. If a half-complete character arc can even be said to be one in the first place.

What it does do, though, is explore the many shades of emotion present in Maya’s circumstance. From the comedic to the melancholic to everything in between. Over its 39 chapters we get a surprisingly thorough feel for Maya as a person, as someone who is coping with her situation as best she can despite the burdens of societal pressure to be “normal”. (It’s not a stretch to call Maya spectrum-coded, intentionally or not, but many such NEET characters are.)

Maya’s discomfort with society at large is rendered in many ways, both stark and completely silly. Sometimes within the same chapter.

If there’s a main complaint to be levied against The Night-Owl Witch, it has to do with that last word in its title. We see rather little of Maya The Witch over the course of its run. There’s not much insight into what witches do, what their society is like, why Maya lives in a cheap Tokyo apartment instead of among them, if there even is an “among them” to live in, and so on.

But those are setting and lore questions, more valid a concern is how little we get to see of Maya as a proactive character. She uses her magic in tangible, productive ways only a handful of times over the run of the series. Each one is, without fail, a highlight. In one instance, she a cherry blossom all the way to Mameyama’s home, several prefectures away. (Well, she messes up and blows a plum blossom instead, but the sentiment is the same.) In another, she hovers nearby to monitor an argument between a couple that looks like it might turn ugly, and giving the girl involved in said argument a scarf to keep her warm.

In the penultimate chapter, she causes it to rain to aid for her search for a kappa. In each of these cases, the art style subtly shifts, “de-chibifying” Maya and making her look more like what is presumably her actual appearance; her insecurities stripped away in these brief moments of mystic self-actualization.

….even if they’re often somewhat immediately undercut by the practical consequences of Maya’s sorcery. (It’s established fairly early on that trying to do too much with magic too quickly causes digestion issues, and if you don’t think that’s milked for comedy here you don’t read many manga of this sort.)

Thus, The Night-Owl Witch is perhaps a good manga held back somewhat by the limitations assumed of its genre. Yet, for the criticisms I have and could further make of it, it’s been a companion in my life for the nine or so months that one-man operation Shurin’s 3am Scanlations has been translating the title. The manga has in fact been complete in its home country for several years, but Shurin’s scanlations only concluded earlier today, thus bringing the manga’s unofficial English run to its end.

Mangaka Hotani Shin has since moved on to their new title Maku Musubi. But, I suspect I’m not the only person with some fondness for The Night-Owl Witch‘s title character, since an unrelated character in that series looks an awful lot like Maya herself, if clearly quite different in personality.

Earlier, I mentioned the “endless everyday”. I am wary of framing the device (or even the term) as a negative. The good thing about a series of this sort ending is that one is free to, if one wishes, to imagine the late nights Maya and Mameyama stretching on into infinity. Perhaps one day we’ll meet them again. In our hearts, if nowhere else.

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, The Manga Shelf

The Manga Shelf: Relentless Ribbing and Queer Longing in SCHOOL ZONE

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. Each column ends with a Final Verdict, telling you the reader whether or not I recommend the series and why.

In my brain, there is an elitist impulse telling me that calling School Zone a “yuri manga” doesn’t quite feel right. The term is generally taken to imply actual romance, which isn’t really what’s going on here. But as the genre’s anglosphere definition has broadened somewhat over the years (and swallowed the older westernism “shoujo ai”), we can appreciate that it does include stuff that’s a little harder to fit in just a single box. School Zone, primarily, is a character comedy, centered around our two leads; a pair of quirky schoolgirls named Sugiura (“Kei”) and Yokoe. And later, some other characters who are mostly paired up in similar fashion. Kei is fairly serious, snarky, and is short with a blond crop cut. Yokoe is a screwball, is on the taller side, and has long greyish-black hair. As far as your basic pairups for this kind of thing go, they’re a match made in heaven.

But as mentioned, School Zone is mostly a comedy. 51 of the series’ chapters are available in English, at the moment. (Only in scanlation form, although the series was announced for a pickup by Seven Seas as I was planning out this column. So there ya go.) Of those, the vast majority can broadly be termed “antics”. The two give each other a lot of guff in the same way lots of close friends do.

This sequence here is typical; Yokoe says or does something dumb or outrageous, Kei reacts. It’s a fairly simple setup, but it’s good fun, and carries much of the manga.

However; if one reads something like this for enough chapters to get attached to the characters, the question will inevitably come up. What kind of relationship, exactly, do Kei and Yokoe actually have? The series’ tagline sells it (somewhat asininely) as a “miserable yuri comedy”, so they’re clearly crushing on each other at least, right?

Well, the “miserable” in the manga’s admittedly-overwrought tagline might come from the fact that that doesn’t seem to be the case. Namely, the “each other” part. Yokoe definitely has it bad for Kei. As for the other way around? That’s a lot less clear. The two value each other a lot, and one gets the sense that neither quite wants to take their relationship to the next level because they’re afraid of losing what they have. That’s explicitly the case for Yokoe (as we’ll get to), and it wouldn’t be out of character for Kei either. There is plenty of evidence that the feeling is mutual, but neither character is willing to push it forward. Kei even takes steps to deliberately walk it back.

School Zone runs in what is ostensibly a shonen magazine, but while the situation of a possibly-mutual infatuation that both parties are scared to act on certainly transcends the boundaries of gender and sexuality, it hits especially hard for young queer women. A group for whom not knowing if another girl is hitting on you or just being friendly and you’re reading too far into it is even more common than it might otherwise be.

Even within School Zone itself, Yokoe and Kei’s closeness is occasionally called out as weird. And even if the characters doing that have the best of intentions or are simply curious, it’s not hard to make the connection that this is one reason that they may be unwilling to commit to being more than just friends.

Indeed, throughout other character pairings as well, this kind of longing that seems like it might work out but won’t definitely work out shoots an odd undercurrent of melancholy through what is otherwise a pretty upbeat and goofy series. It’s an interesting contrast, and puts School Zone a cut above those series that are content to be merely formulaic, if perhaps still very squarely in the area of the school life comedy.

Not all of these characters are equal, of course. School Zone‘s biggest demerit is its place next to YuruYuri on the shelf of manga that inexplicably find siscon characters funny.

Yeah, why?

Even then though, that character, Tsubaki, is also paired up with a hyperactive gyaru who seems hellbent on breaking her out of her shell via sheer overbearing girl power. So who’s to say where, exactly, that storyline is going to end up.

And in a twist that genuinely is kind of amusing, her sister, Hiiragi, is subjected to much the same thing, despite going to a different school in another part of town. (I have a suspicion, though I obviously can’t prove it, that the mangaka may have realized there’s really not any comedy to wring out of the siscon character archetype. Hiiragi and Tsubaki have barely interacted since then.)

Hiiragi’s partner-in-antics is also much more on the obnoxious side, but, hey, it seems to work for her.

But as fun as these other characters can be (or not be), it’s still Kei and Yokoe’s story. The manga’s strongest moment thusfar has been its 49th chapter. A flashback where we get a walk through Yokoe’s memory; an aborted half-confession framed by some surprisingly complex panel layouts and shadowing. Panels are slashed in half or inset to contrast the external reality and the internal monologue, or spaced far apart to denote time passing.

It is, above all, sad. A kind of dejected blueness you just generally don’t expect from something that bills itself the way School Zone does. The series seems to have an intuitive understanding that life is not just one thing. Thus, despite their quirky personalities, the two leads of School Zone feel like fully realized people, truly what sets the good slice of life manga apart from the simply decent.

School Zone is still serializing. So it is impossible to say if Yokoe and Kei’s peculiar relationship will ever become anything else. But it’s hard not to root for them. That School Zone makes you do that is, itself, its success as a story.

Final Verdict: Strongly Recommended, with some caveats. One must weigh the “ech”-inducing but thankfully only intermittent siscon characterization of Tsubaki against the otherwise fun comedy and, especially, the more serious explorations of pining the series gets into in its best moments, when deciding whether or not to pick up School Zone.

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.