Tag: Manga

Posted on in Manga, The Manga Shelf

The Manga Shelf: Paperback Love in MARIA KODAMA LITERARY CORPUS

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. These articles contain spoilers.

There are numerous ways to start a work of fiction. You have your classics; “once upon a time”, “it was a dark and stormy night” and such that are true arch-clichés. Then, far, far on the other end of the spectrum, you have real head-scratchers. Unique opening lines that make you spit out a mental “huh?” before you even know what kind of thing you’re reading. The Maria Kodama Literary Corpus starts with one of those.

“These leaves are like Jupiter, aren’t they?” Asks the title character. Before you go flipping this particular simile over in your mind, trying to untangle it, know that that’s not really the sort of story Kodama Literary Corpus is. Corpus revolves around both Kodama herself and her male companion, our ostensible main character, Fueda. Together they make up the sole members of the school’s Literary Club, and their conversations comprise the bulk of the series. Fueda is something of a dazed everyman (although it eventually becomes clear that he’s stranger than might first be obvious), awestruck by the evident brilliance (and perhaps more obvious to us than him, the mercuriality) of Kodama. They have a fun dynamic that shines through even their more convoluted interactions. It’s cute, which is a good beating heart for any romantic comedy to have.

Of course descriptors like “romantic comedy” and “school life comedy” only loosely apply to Kodama Literary Corpus. It is perhaps more accurate to say that it uses their structure to examine topics that ordinary entries in those genres would not. In this way, it is somewhat reminiscent of Imitation Crystal’s work in the school life genre, though it’s far less emotionally dire than something like Game Club. (More distantly, it has a cousin in the more downtempo, conversational parts of Bakemonogatari.) Much of those topics consist of the structure of literature and storytelling itself, something that Kodama is keenly interested in, and is what gives the manga its name. She’s fond of blithely quipping “it’s literature.” when laying another lesson in the subject on Fueda. This is the core “storytelling loop” of Corpus, although there are other aspects to the manga as well.

The series’ somewhat flippant attitude towards fairly serious subjects (such as teenage drinking, here) in the non-Kodama/Fueda sections also pushes it further toward the IC camp of subversive pseudo-school life manga which use the format to accomplish non-traditional things.

Corpus even comes with its own dedicated “recommended reading” list, in the form of the books namechecked underneath each after-chapter doodle. This is perhaps the rare school life manga it is possible to be under-read for. (And lest it sound like I’m trying to make myself seem smart; I may well fall in that category myself. I have read just one of the books the manga mentions, and some of them I’ve never even heard of.)

The series sometimes likes to poke at its own format’s tropes as well. For example; at one point Fueda’s sister is introduced, and he takes a thoughtful lean against the fourth wall to ponder whether or not he even had a sister until a few days prior. There are also occasional shorter segments that offer looser, more surreal ideas. These are fun, although not the norm for the manga. It also picks at its romantic comedy side on occasion. One chapter establishes that Fueda can’t see very well and probably should be wearing glasses. It’s his perspective that the manga is filtered through, so the person we see as “Maria Kodama”, the long-haired school beauty, is in part his own wishful thinking, and isn’t how she actually looks in reality. Despite this, Kodama claims at one point that Fueda’s delusions “protect her”, giving away that she cares for him more than she might outwardly admit. To really nail home the point that Fueda is not purely in love with his idea of Kodama rather than the girl herself, we eventually learn that he does know what she actually looks like, and even has a picture of her reading at her desk.

Of what currently exists in English of Kodama Literary Corpus, the eleventh chapter is perhaps both its best and most representative. This chapter features a storyline wherein Fueda is asked to improve his schoolday diary. Kodama suggests he do this by thinking of the many mundane tasks he and his classmates do through a mythological, literary lens. In other words; Literary Corpus takes a chapter to analyze itself, taking a critical scalpel to its own worldbuilding and by extension those aforementioned genres. (You may notice this also means it’s basically doing my job for me, but hey, I’ve never been above an easy mark.) Fueda’s writing is greatly improved by doing this, but more importantly Kodama brings the entire thing back around to her and his relationship. She ends the chapter with another quip of “that’s literature”, and in a very real way, she’s right.

All but explicitly stated here is the idea that stories are how we connect to each other; Kodama understands that more than most, so it’s not unreasonable (or even uncharitable) to read this entire endeavor she sets upon Fueda as simply a way to bring them closer together. After all, these are the final two pages of the chapter.

The after-chapter doodle also (half-jokingly?) claims a kinship with James Joyce’s Ulysses, drawing a line between two wildly different literary traditions in a way that only an oddball underground manga could. Given the presence of both a fixation on the goings-on of daily life, and a tendency to subvert or reanalyze those expectations present in both works, it’s not really an inaccurate comparison, either. (Whether Literary Corpus is anywhere near as good as Ulysses, or indeed, vice versa, is up to you, of course.)

Not that Kodama’s intentions are all good. A few chapters after this, she slyly destroys a burgeoning poet’s interest in the form, simultaneously using Fueda as a mouthpiece to do so and doing so specifically so he doesn’t take an interest in her. It’s hard to say, the work still incomplete, whether this mildly darker undertone will be explored in detail. One could also quite easily argue given what we see that Kodama is–by intention or by side effect–saving the girl from a fairly lonely life. After all, Kodama doesn’t entirely seem to think that her own being a “literature girl” is an admirable thing, as previously established in several chapters. (And either point of view assumes this will even stick. It’s hard to say if Inoue, as the girl’s named, will return as a character in any major capacity.)

Maria Kodama Literary Corpus, all told, is a unique little thing. And really, I have no reason for writing about it here beyond that fact. Strange little underground manga like this are perhaps my favorite thing in the medium, and if I can share them with my readerbase, all the better.

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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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) To The OTHERSIDE PICNIC and Back Again

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

What to make of Otherside Picnic? Named after a famous Russian novel to which it bears little resemblance, and drawing on a twenty year tradition of Japanese “net lore” for its inspiration, one might initially peg Otherside Picnic as a fairly heady, intellectual kind of horror story. But while it’s certainly creepy enough in its most unsettling moments to earn the genre tag, it’d be a mistake to box this one in as being solely for those with an SCP Foundation addiction.

A more proper indicator of where Otherside Picnic is coming from might actually be its opening theme. A rollicking, adventurous pop-rock tune with a romantic slant from accomplished anisongsters CHiCO with Honeyworks. Otherside isn’t not a horror series, but it’s important to consider what else it is; an adventure anime, and also a show with some pretty prolific lesbian subtext. It’s not at all dour, is what I’m getting at.

Instead, Otherside is a surprisingly breezy watch. It’s the story of Sorawo, a depressed college student who, through her vast knowledge of online urban legends, wanders through a gateway to another world; the titular otherside. When we meet her, she’s lying flat on her back in a puddle, pursued by a mind-invading monster known as a kunekune¹, and about to accept her imminent death. What, or rather who, saves her is a gun-toting Canadian-Japanese woman named Toriko, who she quite quickly develops a very obvious crush on.

Like, very obvious.

Otherside Picnic follows the two, as they grow closer, make trips to and from the Otherside, and contend with the many strange creatures that live there. Sorawo often gives a brief rundown of what these things are, which is helpful if you, like me, only have a pretty limited knowledge of Japanese creepypastas. The “net legend” angle is a big part of the setting’s appeal, so if the idea of even something as out there as the bizarre and disturbingly violent “monkey train dream” getting a nod appeals to you, the series is a must-watch.

Really, I was surprised at how much I liked Otherside Picnic in general. Horror isn’t really my genre, but Sorawo is just the right kind of relatable reserved nerd. (Although I will admit, the one thing the series is missing from the light novels is her delightfully gay inner monologues about how attractive she finds Toriko.) Her character arc over the course of the series is fairly simple, as she starts out as said reserved nerd and by the final episode, having along the way developed what are essentially magic powers, and having been through so much with Toriko is, well, decidedly no longer that.

On a less literal level, the series also hums a simple theme of the importance of finding people who you just vibe with. In the finale, this is all but stated outright, as Sorawo and Toriko both recount how the other saved them. It gives Otherside Picnic a point, adding some substance to its afternoon anime binge-friendly nature.

Much of the rest of the fun of the series comes from setting details or technical aspects. The monster design is quite strong, and combined with the often surprisingly good animation², this carries the series’ weaker episodes. There’s also quite a few running sub-plots tucked in to the show’s single cour. These range from fairly serious (a lost group of US Marines who the pair eventually rescue), to clear set-up for seasons yet to come (Sorawo’s apparent and only briefly touched-on ability to not-quite mind control people, the late-game introduction of minor character Akari), to the just plain odd (there’s an episode about cats who are ninjas) or funny (the pair accidentally buy a multi-purpose miniature harvester on a drunken spending binge at one point).

It’s hard to imagine that Otherside Picnic will exactly change anyone’s life, but like last year’s Dorohedoro, it’s strong genre fare in a genre that is under-represented in mainstream TV anime. That it is perhaps only the second-best anime of the Spring 2021 season to revolve around a heterochromiac who travels to an otherworld that also has a lot of queer subtext speaks more to the strength of the competition than it does any problems with Otherside. This is a series I could see getting sequel seasons for years, frankly, as there is a lot of unadapted material and a lot of mysteries left unexplored. Perhaps if we’re lucky, that will be the anime’s eventual fate. Either way, there’s a lot to love about a brief trip to the Otherside.

1: The subtitles somewhat astoundingly refer to these things as “wiggle-waggles”, which is pretty damn funny.

2: Surprising because this is a LIDENFILMS production. I’m not an expert on the company by any means, but what I’ve seen from them has traditionally had outright bad animation. While the CGI used for some distance shots won’t impress anyone anytime soon, I was pleasantly surprised by how good it looked at other times.

If you like my work, consider following me here on WordPress or on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work 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 Manga, The Manga Shelf

The Manga Shelf: Cardboard Romance in DESTROY ALL OF HUMANITY, IT CAN’T BE REGENERATED

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. These articles contain spoilers.

Destroy all creatures. They can’t be regenerated.
–Rules text of “Wrath of God“, and namesake of the manga.

What we have here today is, without beating around the bush, a simple boy-meets-girl romance. There are hundreds of manga like this, probably thousands, so it’s difficult for one to stand out without some kind of twist. Something that grabs the audience’s attention. That twist here is simple, but surprisingly important to the general flow of the story. As its lengthy title hints at, Destroy All of Humanity, It Can’t Be Regenerated is deeply entwined with, and is basically about, seminal trading card game Magic: The Gathering. It is, in fact, licensed, which is why the manga can get away with showing you all of its period-accurate power combos faithfully reproduced from the actual card art without having to censor them. It is frankly sensationally geeky, and it’s less a flaw and more just a fact that if you don’t have some level of MtG knowledge, the manga will be a touch hard to follow.

And yes, period-accurate. Because Destroy‘s other big deviation from the norm is that it is something of a period piece, though it’s closer to present day than the term normally implies.

The year is 1998. The global mood shifts from optimism to wariness about the impending year 2000. In Japan, Obuchi Keizō becomes Prime Minister and the Nozomi Mars probe launches. In the world of anime; Cardcaptor Sakura, Cowboy Bebop, Serial Experiments Lain and, perhaps most pertinently, Yu-Gi-Oh! all premiere. In other words; it’s not the worst time to be a nerd living in suburban Japan. Perhaps less specifically associated with Japan is the growing global popularity of Magic: The Gathering. At this point in time, Magic–and the entire medium of TCGs–was just five years old, younger than contemporary competitor Hearthstone is now in 2021. The game is about to enter one of the most infamous phases of its first decade. And it is in this environment that we meet our protagonists, and, indeed, they meet each other.

Left: Hajime. Right: Emi.

Hajime and Emi are ordinary middle schoolers*. They compete for the top spot in their grade but don’t otherwise really know each other, until one day Hajime discovers that Emi–shock of shocks–plays Magic: The Gathering, just like he does. What initially seems like it might be the setup for a very stupid “what? Girls have hobbies?!” kind of comedy eventually proves itself to be a surprisingly thorough look at both young love and the transience of youth in general. That’s a lot to put on a manga about a card game, but it’s not exactly unique in this regard, as we’ll get to.

Destroy All of Humanity‘s real ace in the hole here is an ability to transmute pop-culture ephemera into actual, meaningful pathos. Obviously, the connection to Magic: The Gathering is what runs deepest. There is an ongoing thread wherein the release of various sets–especially those in the Urza block–is directly and deliberately correlated with the basic inevitability of time moving forward. “Growing up” is a big theme here. Another occasional reference point, Revolutionary Girl Utena, is tied explicitly to the arc of a specific character, Yakumo.

It’s good to know the shadow girls are still getting work.

Elsewhere, everything from the Boogiepop series that spawned the Light Novel format to Final Fantasy VII, to Eurodance hit “What Is Love?” come up. Sometimes, as with the many anime referenced, these appear to just be namechecks, but they tie into the wider narrative often enough that the interpolations feel meaningful rather than simply clever.

So why this, why all of these allusions? Well, they’re merely the methodology. Destroy All of Humanity runs on the same internal logic as a sports movie. Personal growth is tied, directly or not, to persistence, determination, and skill at a game of choice. In that way it’s very classic, maybe even old-fashioned. What prevents it from feeling maudlin or corny is a shock of wistful melancholia that shoots through much of the series. There is a palpable sense that with the end of the 20th century comes a kind of end of innocence. Everyone, Hajime most of all, is keenly aware that teenage years don’t last forever.

Running alongside the many references to pop culture media is a lone nod to one of the phenomena of the day. A fixation on the idea that the year 2000 would bring about the end of the world–in recent memory this has largely been supplanted by the later 2012 debacle, but it was definitely a presence at the time. Here, it serves as the simplest of the manga’s many metaphors for the waning of youth. But in that would-be apocalypse, it sees a kind of romance, and it is for that reason that it’s so easy to root for Hajime and Emi. Even if the world were to burn, they’d have each other.

Tip for all the straight boys in the audience: if she asks you to “be with her when the world ends”, that means she dreams of kissing you under the moonlight.

Visually, Destroy All of Humanity‘s default mode is a sort of nostalgic charm. The character designs aren’t throwbacks exactly but they don’t quite feel contemporary either, aiming for a sort of timeless middleground that works more often than it doesn’t. The backgrounds similarly hit an ageless “suburban Japan nostalgia” feel that is so ingrained in the medium it’s practically invisible if you don’t take the time to notice it.

The main thing that departs from all this is the actual Magic duels themselves. There’s a certain type of person who will want to pick this manga up just for the wonderfully nerdy sight of things like a mill combo (specifically, the “Turbo Genius” deck, and yes, they do use that very name in-fiction here) getting the full Yu-Gi-Oh! treatment.

Destroy All of Humanity is also good at capturing how control players see themselves.

And about that whole “rival in love” thing. The main pairing remains pretty uncontested throughout, but Destroy does manage to shake things up a few times, and the duels also being the emotional centerpieces of the story is a big part of how. The aforementioned Turbo Genius duel is actually surprisingly intense. (Making a Blue artifact deck the one the “bad guy” of the match uses may be a little obvious, admittedly.) It’s not the only one of its ilk in Destroy All of Humanity, either, mangaka YOKO really seems to have a knack for this kind of thing.

In general, Destroy All of Humanity has few notable flaws. It is noticeable how often the skeevier side of 90s otakudom is simply brushed off. One minor character’s bouts of misogyny are even played as an obvious joke–no one takes him seriously–which frankly just kind of seems like wishful thinking. But this is a minor complaint and I find it hard to hold against the series.

It is also worth noting that Destroy All of Humanity isn’t finished. The series releases fairly slowly, though scanlators The Fallen Angels are diligent about translating it when new chapters do release. So there is of course, time for all of this to go south, but it seems unlikely that it will. Things aren’t this well-written by mistake.

The most recent chapter ends with the delightfully sitcom-y revelation that–oh my!–our lovebirds are in the same class after years of being assigned different classrooms within their grade.

It’s the kind of slightly-cheesy twist that suits this sort of thing well. Where is it going to take it? Who knows. But when Destroy All of Humanity finally ends, I think I do know where Hajime and Emi will be; right beside each other.

*I think. They’re called “middle-schoolers” in the scanlation but act more like high schoolers and I can’t tell if that’s artistic license or due to that thing where Japanese and American high school years don’t line up exactly right. I suppose it ultimately doesn’t matter.

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.