A few months ago I stumbled across a word for what turns out to be one of my favorite anime genres, although I didn't realize it had a name: iyashikei. It's a term for anime and manga specifically created to have a "healing" or soothing effect, and often crosses over with another favorite of mine, "slice of life." I came across this series after learning about that word - I'm watching it on Blu-ray, but it's also streaming for free on Crunchyroll.

(Content warning for the series:

My Roommate is a Cat stars Subaru, a 23-year old introverted mystery writer who's dealing with both grief over his parents' death and social anxiety. Being around people and noise exhausts him, and all he wants to do is read books and be alone. However, he's also terrible at taking care of himself - he doesn't properly stock his kitchen, he forgets to eat when he's on a deadline, and his social anxiety is so great that even talking to store employees is hard for him.

While visiting his parents' grave, he encounters a stray cat, is struck with an idea for his next novel, and ends up taking the cat in, the first living being he has purposely allowed into his life since his parents' death. Each episode is generally structured to first show viewers Subaru's POV and then all or most of the same events from the cat's POV. There's often a mismatch between how they interpret events, but they gradually come to understand each other and form a little family, which also leads to Subaru allowing more people into his life.

I have about three episodes left, and I'll be sad when it's over. It's a sweet series with occasional sad moments - I recommend keeping tissues on hand for the flashback scenes. Haru, the cat, views Subaru like one of her siblings, someone who needs to be taken care of and watched over, but she also occasionally gets a little irked by him. And I can definitely relate to Subaru's introversion. Although he often finds that his interactions with others go better than he expected and open up his world in enjoyable ways, it still exhausts him all the same. The episode where his friend brought his younger siblings over was pretty much how things went when my sister brought all the kids to my apartment a few years back.

Why does Netflix make it so hard to keep track of their upcoming shows? I spend time on their "Latest" page, and yet this still managed to slip into their catalog without warning.

I've only read one volume of the manga, but I definitely plan on watching this. It's basically edu-tainment about cells and the functions of the human body. It's horrendously expensive to buy a physical copy of this series (Aniplex of America prices, ugh), so streaming is probably the only way I'll ever watch this.

This is my first Manga Classics read. I chose it specifically because I've read the work on which it's based, although it's been a few years. Also, while I didn't love the original Jane Eyre, I didn't hate it either, which is more than I can say for some of the other works adapted for the Manga Classics series.

This seemed to be a pretty faithful adaptation. It began with Jane's childhood - first her aunt's mistreatment of her, and then her life at a school for poor and orphaned children - and then continued on to her time as a governess at the Rochester household and everything that happened after that point.

I'll be blunt: I don't actually like Rochester. I didn't when I originally read the novel (I'd already long since learned his big secret via cultural osmosis), and I didn't when I read this adaptation. He and Jane had some nice moments, and Chan and Lee did a great job, but it didn't erase my fundamental dislike of the character. He's a selfish man who tried to maneuver a much younger woman, his employee, into a position he knew would horrify her if she knew the full truth. And he didn't plan on telling her one bit of what was actually going on until well after it was too late.

I remembered really enjoying the portion of the original novel set during Jane's childhood. That part seemed a little weaker in this adaptation, although I'm not sure why. Still, it was nice seeing Jane all small, angry, and cute.

All in all, this adaptation was well done. The story was easy to follow, and the use of certain manga visual conventions (such as the sweat drop when Rochester tried to explain away some of the strange things Jane witnessed and experienced) was very nice. The artwork was attractive, and if there were times when Jane seemed awfully young-looking compared to Rochester, well, she was quite a bit younger than him.

I'd like to take a look at more entries in the Manga Classics series, but at the moment the series looks like a good potential starting point for building a more purposeful library graphic novel collection (as opposed to my library's current method of relying mostly on random gifts) that would probably be considered acceptable by staff members who are more leery of graphic novels as a format. The one concern I've heard was from a coworker who worried that students would use them as a way to avoid reading the original novels. We don't collect Cliff's Notes for this reason. However, I'd argue that, if this was such a big concern, we wouldn't collect movie versions of the books either, and we certainly have those. This manga adaptation isn't going to tell a student anything about Brontë's style or use of language, or every little change Chan made to the story to adapt it to a new format - they'll still have to consult the original for that.

I own the Manga Classics version of The Scarlet Letter, so I might try that one next.

Extras:

• 2-page comic-style afterword by SunNeko Lee
• 4 pages of notes from Crystal S. Chan, discussing the work she did to adapt Jane Eyre to manga format, including some slight changes she made to improve the flow of the story in this format, the limitations of the novel's original first person narration, the advantages that manga gave her over other formats like film and TV, and info about some of the decisions she and SunNeko Lee made for the artwork.
• 2 pages of background notes written by Stacy King - info about Charlotte Brontë, the novel, and life as a governess.
• 2 pages of character design sketches

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

This is technically the first volume of a manga adaptation of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human. However, in reality it’s more like a work inspired by Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human. It has a lot of the same characters and a lot of the same events, but also enough important changes that the impact of certain familiar scenes and characters is completely different. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

The volume begins with Usamaru Furuya as a character in his own manga. He’s trying, and failing, to think up an idea for his next serial when he suddenly gets an anonymous email pointing him to an online “ouch diary.” The website contains three images: one of 6-year-old Yozo posing with his family while wearing a wide fake smile; one of Yozo at age 25, his expression lifeless and worn down; and one of Yozo at age 17, cool and handsome. Furuya proceeds to read the diary that goes with those images, to learn how Yozo fell so far so quickly.

Then readers get the story of Yozo’s life, starting with a few pages showing him as a child and middle school student, behaving like a class clown in order to get people to like him. The story quickly progresses into Yozo’s high school years, when he is befriended by Horiki, who Yozo believes is truly what he has spent his life pretending to be, a friendly and shiftless clown. Although Yozo starts off with everything in life handed to him on a silver platter, things rapidly fall apart, and the volume ends with Yozo’s first suicide attempt (I’m assuming the manga will include the next one).

When I reviewed Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human, I said that the beginning of the book, which dealt with Yozo’s childhood, worked best for me. Furuya opted to either skip most of that or include it as vague flashbacks. I thought, at first, that I’d be okay with this, until I realized that it really changed the overall tone. In the book, Yozo started off as a child who couldn’t empathize with others, had trouble figuring out what other people were thinking and why they acted the way they acted the way they did, and was terrified that people would see through his desperate attempts to fit in. The manga wasn’t as successful at setting the stage, and so high school Yozo was even more insufferable. Readers basically only saw Yozo at his absolute worst, looking down on everyone around him, drinking, skipping class, and paying for sex and doing his very best to not get to know the women he had sex with as actual people.

A few things I should add, at this point. First, Furuya aged Yozo down a bit. I don’t think Yozo met Horiki until college in the book, whereas in the manga they became friends during high school (with Yozo, the word "friend" can be assumed to mean nothing more than "acquaintance with whom he spends time"). Also, unlike the book, which alluded to sex but never mentioned anything in detail, there is quite a bit of on-page sex in the manga. One scene in particular did a good job of getting across the kind of guy Yozo was: he found himself distracted by thoughts of something a friend from school told him while he was having sex with a girl who’d just told him she wanted him to be her boyfriend. Then he couldn’t understand why she was so upset with him. I don’t know that the other sex scenes (four, total) were strictly necessary, though.

Now, back to the story/character changes. Another thing Furuya did was add a bit more to the plot. In the book, Yozo hung out with Marxists and took part in meaningless (to him) meetings and activities. The work annoyed him, but he stayed with the group because he couldn’t quite figure out how to leave and because others expected him to do things. In the manga, Yozo actually kind of liked being involved with the Japan United Labor Association, although he looked down on its members. He gradually realized that they were

Furuya also ascribed emotions to Yozo that I’m not really sure he actually felt in the original book. For example, in the manga Yozo indicated that he actually cared about Ageha (I can’t remember if that was her name in the novel, too). I don’t know that the Yozo of the original novel truly cared about a single person, especially enough to admit it to himself. He cared about how people made him see himself, and that was pretty much it.

This was a funhouse mirror sort of adaptation, although the end result was still largely “miserable people doing self-destructive things." I’ll read the next volume because I already have it on hand, but I doubt I’ll be putting in an ILL request for the third and final volume.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

The Caterpillar [Imo-Mushi][芋虫] by Suehiro Maruo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The tale might be visually grotesque and psychologically twisted but it also showcase highly creative poetic expressionism from its intricate artwork. Thus I became a moth to a flame yet I regret nothing.

After experiencing Suehiro Maruo sensei's work here, I am keen on exploring his other works as well. His artistic style complements really well with Rampo Edogawa sensei's daring work of fiction. Both of their works often focus on the darker side of human nature.

Now that I have read this manga adaptation of the novel, 芋虫 Imomushi aka Caterpillar (キャタピラー / Kyatapirā) by Rampo Edogawa sensei, I shall be moving onto the book next. I am saving the movie adaptation of the novel for last. Actually I have skimmed through the video a little and it wasn’t as morbid as this manga and I find the actor for the ‘torso man’ looks rather pleasing. He is nothing like the poor lump of flesh depicted in this manga.

Of all things twisted that had happened in the story oddly enough my mind chose to fixate on that unique way of marinating bananas illustrated in the manga. Does that sort of bizarre food preparation really happen in real life? Or is it only in the mind of a hyper creative cum erotic writer?




*Sighs longingly* Damn! All this is giving me a cliterection.




BOOK DETAILS:
Title: The Caterpillar Imo-Mushi 芋虫
Illustrator/Artist: Suehiro Maruo
Author: Rampo Edogawa
Publication Date: 2009 (First published in January 1st, 2006)
Publisher: Enterbrain
Type: Manga / Graphic Novel
Genre: Adult, Historical, Horror, Seinen, Tragedy, Ero-guro, Psychosexual Horror Erotica, Manga Adaptation of a Novel

Description:
The Caterpillar is an adaptation of the 1929 Edogawa Rampo short story of the same name. The Caterpillar is a haunting psycho-sexual tale of Lt. Sunaga, a disfigured and limbless veteran of WWI who returns home to his young and beautiful wife. Sunaga initially is given a hero's welcome, but is quickly forgotten and shunned because of his injuries. Unable to speak or care for himself, he is completely at the mercy of his wife as she grows to loathe and toy with him.
-From Same Hat! blog




* Reviewed on January 2nd, 2015
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PREVIOUS COMMENT:
Just found out that this manga is adapted from Rampo Edogawa Sensei's famous psychosexual horror short story, 芋虫 Imomushi (The Caterpillar). I have sort of skimmed through the movie adaptation of the novel and I must say that this story is so not for the faint-hearted. I would expect the no less from this manga adaptation. Therefore do consider yourself warned.

* 31st December 2014



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