"Black Bird" di Kanoko Sakurakoji ❀

I asked for comic recommendations for my almost 9 year old daughter, which I am now reading through. This is one of those. 

So, this one forced me finally to sit my ass down and figure how to read a manga. When I was a kid, lo, those many years ago, I'd heard tell of manga, and my very coolest guy friends read it, but it wasn't readily accessible to a white girl in Minneapolis. Not cheaply, anyhow. I think with all the Japanese gaming platforms and stuff like Pokémon, manga is way more accessible now (and has been for 20 years, sigh). So I should probably catch up. 

It is way counterintuitive at first, reading right to left, but you catch on fast. And with this particular story, the sort.of dislocation caused by reading backwards worked well with the text. Wandering Son is about two 5th graders, a boy and a girl, who are transgendered, each longing to have the gender of the other. The events of Wandering Son are prosaic, just the usual problems of 5th graders -- friends, teachers, little sisters, parents -- but with this fearful edge of discovery. There's even a play within a play, complete with crossdressing. 

The art is, well, maybe not the best. It's serviceable for the most part -- real flat, no color -- but I had trouble differenciating characters other that the principles. I also spent a fair amount of time puzzling through Japanese honorifics, which is an important part of the kids' interactions. The translator wrote a very good essay about honorifics. He generally thinks they should never be translated, because the average plot doesn't hinge on a specifically Japanese sense of social placement and gender, at least in ways that will be meaningful to the average Westerner. Here, it is vital stuff, worth puzzling through, worth translating. 

I thought to myself, dang, this is pretty heady stuff for kiddie comics. Turns out shojo manga, which this is, has genderbending plots quite commonly. (Shojo manga are roughly manga written for schoolgirls -- ostensibly, but we all know who's likely eavesdropping). This sparked a memory for me of my cool friends reading Ranma 1/2 back in the day, about a boy who turns into a girl when splashed with cold water, and his attempts to rid himself of this curse. 

So, ok, no points for originality. But I did enjoy how Wandering Son really did seem to be written for children, not written sidelong for more prurient interests. This is about transgender children, and the long, hard process of coming out and finding allies. Not, har har, I get stuck as a girl icky cooties. My 12 year old son thought it was sweet, his words, and has moved on to later volumes. I'm not sure I'm going to continue, precisely because it is so age appropriate: that awkward world of an awkward age. Good job. 

Spring is here and I have officially run out of excuses for not cleaning.  I have gained all of my original weight back, and that means that I have entered DEFCON 3 and I now have to keep the sugar away through any means necessary.   Since I can't go to the gym three days out of the week (two days because I donate plasma for that sweet, sweet book money) I will need to turn days that I get milked for my blood water into cleaning days. 

Just... I can't possibly get those scorch marks out of the carpet where that cast iron got dropped from that fire.   Rugs?  Gah.

I got my record player set up in the bedroom, and listening to records while writing in bed is actually a pretty great joy.  Listening to that "Encounter with Monolith" song from 2001: A Space Odyssey on vinyl is an atmospheric, haunting experience.

I will have to start cleaning soon, but before I go about doing just that -

Kamisama Kiss, Vol. 1

Filled with a lot of that Shojo googly-eyed softened close-ups of character's faces as they come to realizations about other people's feelings, most of this is pretty uninteresting and has been done previously already,  HOWEVER - the manga managed to surprise me about, oh, four times or so, with a few laughs to be had, surprisingly enough.   You look at the cover, you know where this story is going to go.  The protagonist is all knees and elbows, literally and figuratively knocking into everything like a seven year old, the guy is all aloof towards her and has adorable fox ears.  The story is all Fruits Basket with its homeless pretty girl with no family and all of these mystical male characters telling her that she's actually super pretty *gasp* and super special somehow. 

HOWEVER - this story is apparently contingent on the protagonist becoming powerful as she learns her own powers and grows to Believe in Herself(tm) and I have a soft spot for this type of trope.   Also, I like how in spite of her weakness, she has some real balls and doesn't back down when she gets her mind to it.  

I will give this manga one more volume to prove its worth to me, for I do have a sometimes longing for Shojo as long as its lower on the trashy spectrum. 

Goddamn shojo,

Intense close-ups of the girl characters with their hair fluttering in the wind and a "I just saw a man naked for the first time" look on their faces for a good 1/5 of the manga - laziness, lack of artist ability or ART?  You decide!

NG Life, Volume 1 by Mizuho Kusanagi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Pretty fun and interesting to have the love of your life come back the same gender as you. And to have your male best buddy returning as a cute girl with a huge crush on you.

The best thing of all was that only you alone retained memories of your previous life. Ain't that frustrating like hell? Hehehehe




* Reviewed on July 23rd, 2014

*:--☆--:*:--☆:*:--☆--:*:--☆--:*:--☆--:*:--☆:*:--☆--:*:--☆--:*

View all my reviews

To be honest, I didn’t think I was going to like this manga. In fact, I was expecting to loathe it. To my surprise, I didn’t. But let me be clear in saying that I didn’t love this manga. I don’t know what it is about this manga but it’s a manga that I would love to bash but at the same time there’s this charm and likability to it that I just can’t hate it.

I don’t know why people label this a sci-fi manga. I mean, yeah, the characters came from the moon but the rest of the elements make this manga a fantasy.

So, now that I got that out of the way let’s take a look at the story. Sailor Moon is the shojo manga that basically started the magic girl story in manga. It’s very predictable and cheesy. I mean unbelievably cheesy. Like nacho cheese cheesy. Since it is also a romance, it tends to have those romantic clichés like the main couple being total opposites and not getting along.

But no matter how many flaws this manga has, I have to admit that there is this charm to it that just makes it kind of likable. Some of the characters are likable and the plot did move surprisingly fast. I’ll probably read the rest of the series, who knows? I might like it more.