Have you ever wondered if life, the cosmos, or whatever you believe in, has a plan for you? If you're conscious and over, say, 16, I'd say you probably have.
The central idea behind the Livingstone manga is that, yes, every soul has a plan. This differs significantly from a "life" plan, as a soul plan can span across several lifetimes. When you deviate from your soul's plan, your psycholithe, basically a stone that contains your soul, can shatter and leave behind wicked, evil feelings that can taint an area and affect the soul plans of others nearby. The story's protagonists, Sakurai and Amano, exist to save psycholithes whenever possible, and if not, then to clean up the fragments of the psycholithes to prevent further damage.
This isn't really a new concept for supernatural/paranormal manga. The idea that areas carry negative energy, and that things like murder, suicide, or sudden accidental death can compound that negative energy, is really common. I haven't seen a lot of "clean-up crews" for this kind of energy, so that's why I picked this one up.
The characters of Sakurai and Amano are complete opposites of one another. Sakurai is a straight-laced, professional whose job is to basically convince people not to go against their soul's plan. Amano is a bit childish and impulsive, and he frequently pushes people in the opposite direction of Sakurai since it doesn't matter to him whether souls get to reincarnate or not. This might be because Amano isn't even of human origin, whereas Sakurai is (though it's not really explained in the first volume). I didn't really find their "odd couple" dynamic to be endearing, but their out-of-syncness was different and unusual. I did not get the feeling that Sakurai and Amano were ever going to come to a grudging understanding/respect for one another in the next two volumes.
The art for this manga wasn't very good. The artist, Kouji Seo, is known for hit series such as Suzuka and Fuuka, so I suspect that this three-volume manga was just a filler-project for him. It wasn't bad art, just not especially good. It could also be that, because the story itself is about things that aren't visually or psychologically appealing, neither is the art.
The stories were hard to read, too. Sometimes they were funny, or the author tried to inject a little humor into the scenes to lighten them up, but more often than not, they were emotionally uncomfortable. The things that cause a psycholithe to shatter are traumatic, horrible events, and part of the clean-up process involves Sakurai reading (and viewing) these events. If you are even slightly the squeamish type, I strongly recommend avoiding this manga.
Overall, I can't really say that this was a great manga or one that I would recommend to a lot of people. Clearly I wasn't the right audience for it, but I couldn't really get a sense of what the ideal audience would be. This was only the first volume, too, so it's possible that the author hadn't really formed a clear idea of what the story was going to be when it was published, but it didn't show enough potential for me to want to continue the remaining two.
Showing posts with label manga. Show all posts
Showing posts with label manga. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
Thursday, December 15, 2016
Onion-cutting ninjas
Stories have a lot of unique abilities. They have the power to transport people from where they are to entirely different time periods, points of view, and even worlds. They have the ability to both inform and entertain. They can distract us from our worries or help us feel like we're not alone in them. They can make us laugh, quake in terror, sympathize, hate, and cry.
But, man, I hate when a story makes me cry. It just sneaks up on you and ambushes you in the feelings. Today's post is devoted to some of those stories.
Books
There actually aren't very many books that have made me cry when I read them. Now, to clarify, when I say "books", I mean actual text on a page (or electronic...field thingy). I will cover manga in another section. I don't know what it is about books, but, although they can make me feel a whole bunch of other emotions: angry, joy, relief, etc... there's something too distant about text on a page to make me cry. There are always exceptions, and I'll go over two of them here.
The first book that made me cry was Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene. For those of you who didn't have this book assigned to you in middle school, it's about a 12-year-old Jewish girl, Patty, who falls in love with a German prisoner being held captive in her hometown in Arkansas. When the prisoner, Anton, breaks out of prison, she hides him in the storage room above the garage. Without going into too much detail, things do not go well with this plan. The part that made me cry, however, wasn't the inevitable "death of a loved one", but the aftermath of Patty's choices. In the end, she loses her freedom and her tentative place in her own family. The only person who comes to see her in prison (aiding and abetting the enemy) is her family's African American maid, Ruth. Everyone else has pretty much disowned her without trying to understand her motivations or feelings. Although you can understand her family's reluctance to associate with her, it's still a huge punch to the gut.
Another book that made me cry was Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. Kitchen was Yoshimoto's Western debut, and if you haven't read it, you really ought to because it's amazing. The story follows a grieving young woman coming to terms with the loss of her beloved grandmother. She reaches out to her grandmother's friends for support, and together they become a new family to weather the storms of loss in their lives. I read this shortly after having lost a family member myself, and Yoshimoto's description of grief hit right on the mark for me. Seriously, though, if you can get your hands on this one, do so.
Movies
There is no medium better suited to inducing a tear-fest than movies. The combination of elements - actors' emoting, musical scores, lighting, framing, color - manage to hit all of your "cry buttons" at once. Children's movies are especially devastating because you let your guard down about them. You go there thinking "there's no way a story about a bunch of stuffed animals is going to make me cry" and before you know it, the toys are on a conveyor belt heading toward an incinerator and you're bawling into your popcorn. And let's not get started on the first twenty minutes of Up.
If you're looking for a good weepy movie, look no further than Still Life. This slow-paced dramatic story chronicles the life of a councilman whose job is to look for the family members of unclaimed corpses. In this era, where anyone can connect with millions of strangers with the click of a mouse or the tap of a key, it's hard to believe that anyone could be so isolated as to have no one to come to their funeral, say a few words, or even mourn for their loss. However, even in this interconnected age, there are still people who have very few connections in the real world. John May does his best to try to find the next-of-kin of these kinds of people, and if there is no one, or no one wants to come for them, he tries to give the deceased a decent funeral based on what he does learn about their lives in the course of his research. This is the kind of movie that really makes you think about those people who might be on the periphery of your life, and it might even inspire you to reach out to those people.
Manga
When you think of manga, you probably think of action, adventure, romance, magic, and The Power of Friendship. You see those big, child-like faces and those colorful splash pages and you think it'll be a nice, light, entertaining read.
And then you read Twin Spica by Kou Yaginuma. Twin Spica is a science fiction story set "five minutes into the future" in a Japan that has tried, and failed, to send a manned mission into space. And when I say failed, I mean failed in the most firey and spectacular manner possible - the maiden launch of the shuttle The Lion crashes onto a busy market street, killing the crew and many civilians. Among those killed is Asumi Kamogawa's mother, but despite this tragedy, Asumi has dreamt of nothing but becoming an astronaut her entire life. However, the cards are stacked against Asumi - she's short, she's weak, she's poor, and her father - an engineer who worked on the ill-fated space project - bore the brunt of the blame for The Lion's failure and lost his job and any credibility he might have had. Yet still she dreams and works hard to get into the extremely competitive and exclusive high school program newly introduced into Japan with the hopes of rebooting its space program.
The story doesn't seem all that sad. I mean, sure, it has sad beginnings, but Asumi doesn't seem to be too hampered by this. However, echos of The Lion play pretty heavily throughout, and almost everyone involved in the program has some sort of tragedy or hardship going on in the background of their lives. Plus, not everyone is going to make it into space, and when someone fails, it's hard to watch them see their hopes and hard work go to waste.
That said, I still highly recommend Twin Spica. It didn't do very well in the Western market, but you can still get it as an ebook.
So, those are my Onion-Cutting Ninja stories. If you have any to share, please leave me a comment!
Books
There actually aren't very many books that have made me cry when I read them. Now, to clarify, when I say "books", I mean actual text on a page (or electronic...field thingy). I will cover manga in another section. I don't know what it is about books, but, although they can make me feel a whole bunch of other emotions: angry, joy, relief, etc... there's something too distant about text on a page to make me cry. There are always exceptions, and I'll go over two of them here.
The first book that made me cry was Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene. For those of you who didn't have this book assigned to you in middle school, it's about a 12-year-old Jewish girl, Patty, who falls in love with a German prisoner being held captive in her hometown in Arkansas. When the prisoner, Anton, breaks out of prison, she hides him in the storage room above the garage. Without going into too much detail, things do not go well with this plan. The part that made me cry, however, wasn't the inevitable "death of a loved one", but the aftermath of Patty's choices. In the end, she loses her freedom and her tentative place in her own family. The only person who comes to see her in prison (aiding and abetting the enemy) is her family's African American maid, Ruth. Everyone else has pretty much disowned her without trying to understand her motivations or feelings. Although you can understand her family's reluctance to associate with her, it's still a huge punch to the gut.
Another book that made me cry was Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. Kitchen was Yoshimoto's Western debut, and if you haven't read it, you really ought to because it's amazing. The story follows a grieving young woman coming to terms with the loss of her beloved grandmother. She reaches out to her grandmother's friends for support, and together they become a new family to weather the storms of loss in their lives. I read this shortly after having lost a family member myself, and Yoshimoto's description of grief hit right on the mark for me. Seriously, though, if you can get your hands on this one, do so.
Movies
There is no medium better suited to inducing a tear-fest than movies. The combination of elements - actors' emoting, musical scores, lighting, framing, color - manage to hit all of your "cry buttons" at once. Children's movies are especially devastating because you let your guard down about them. You go there thinking "there's no way a story about a bunch of stuffed animals is going to make me cry" and before you know it, the toys are on a conveyor belt heading toward an incinerator and you're bawling into your popcorn. And let's not get started on the first twenty minutes of Up.
If you're looking for a good weepy movie, look no further than Still Life. This slow-paced dramatic story chronicles the life of a councilman whose job is to look for the family members of unclaimed corpses. In this era, where anyone can connect with millions of strangers with the click of a mouse or the tap of a key, it's hard to believe that anyone could be so isolated as to have no one to come to their funeral, say a few words, or even mourn for their loss. However, even in this interconnected age, there are still people who have very few connections in the real world. John May does his best to try to find the next-of-kin of these kinds of people, and if there is no one, or no one wants to come for them, he tries to give the deceased a decent funeral based on what he does learn about their lives in the course of his research. This is the kind of movie that really makes you think about those people who might be on the periphery of your life, and it might even inspire you to reach out to those people.
Manga
When you think of manga, you probably think of action, adventure, romance, magic, and The Power of Friendship. You see those big, child-like faces and those colorful splash pages and you think it'll be a nice, light, entertaining read.
And then you read Twin Spica by Kou Yaginuma. Twin Spica is a science fiction story set "five minutes into the future" in a Japan that has tried, and failed, to send a manned mission into space. And when I say failed, I mean failed in the most firey and spectacular manner possible - the maiden launch of the shuttle The Lion crashes onto a busy market street, killing the crew and many civilians. Among those killed is Asumi Kamogawa's mother, but despite this tragedy, Asumi has dreamt of nothing but becoming an astronaut her entire life. However, the cards are stacked against Asumi - she's short, she's weak, she's poor, and her father - an engineer who worked on the ill-fated space project - bore the brunt of the blame for The Lion's failure and lost his job and any credibility he might have had. Yet still she dreams and works hard to get into the extremely competitive and exclusive high school program newly introduced into Japan with the hopes of rebooting its space program.
The story doesn't seem all that sad. I mean, sure, it has sad beginnings, but Asumi doesn't seem to be too hampered by this. However, echos of The Lion play pretty heavily throughout, and almost everyone involved in the program has some sort of tragedy or hardship going on in the background of their lives. Plus, not everyone is going to make it into space, and when someone fails, it's hard to watch them see their hopes and hard work go to waste.
That said, I still highly recommend Twin Spica. It didn't do very well in the Western market, but you can still get it as an ebook.
So, those are my Onion-Cutting Ninja stories. If you have any to share, please leave me a comment!
Thursday, December 8, 2016
Slayers: The Ruby Eye - Hajime Kanzaka
Light novels are beginning to get a bit more attention in the Western market these days thanks to successful series like Durarara!! and Sword Art Online, but these titles aren't the first to make the jump from East to West. Way back in the mid-90s, Tokyopop and a few other companies tried their hand at bringing light novels to the US, too. They didn't catch on right away, in part I think because people didn't know how to categorize them, and also because the marketing for anime and manga was still pretty underground.
One of the novel series that was brought over was Slayers, which was the basis for the popular anime series of the same name. The anime series did reasonably well in the U.S., and still has a pretty dedicated audience here as well. There was recently a revival with two 13 episode seasons, Revolution and Evolution-R, that featured new animation and characters with some nods to previous seasons' characters. If you are looking for some good old-fashioned sword-and-sorcery fun that maintains a fairly even balance of comedy and action, I highly recommend looking up the Slayers series.
But this post is about the books. I would like to review each individually, so today I'm going to start with the first one: The Ruby Eye. This book introduces the bombastic sorceress Lina Inverse and her loyal, but somewhat dopey, swordsman companion Gourry Gabriev. Lina Inverse is travelling the world seeking adventure, fame, and maybe a little stolen treasure (although in her defense, she only steals from bandits). After a certain item falls into her hands following a particularly successful raid on a bandit camp, she finds herself launched into an adventure whose repercussions would impact the rest of her life. You see, the item in question is the key to reviving a fearsome Demon Lord, and the forces of evil would very much like to get their hands, mitts, paws, tentacles, and any other extremity on it for themselves.
Of course, Lina is no shrinking violet when it comes to defending herself or her treasures. She's a powerful Black magic sorceress - she's even mastered one of the most powerful spells in the field: The Dragon Slave. And if magic won't work, her companion Gourry Gabriev will make short work of any enemy with his elite swordsmanship and, if necessary, the power of the legendary Sword of Light. Just don't ask him to do any heavy thinking - he's really more the brawn of the pair (though sometimes he surprises you with astute observations...).
If this book sounds a lot like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, that's because Kanzaka himself is a fan of tabletop RPGs and conceived Slayers as a means of exploring some of his ideas about them. In the author notes at the end of the book, it's mentioned that he's often asked himself questions about how different types of magic could be used in creative ways.
What I like most about this series is how much fun it is. The story is narrated from Lina's point of view, and she has a lot of smart-mouthed commentary to add to the situation that's sure to get a chuckle out of the readers. The illustrations sprinkled throughout the book also help to add to its charm.
Since this is the first book in the series, is does suffer a little from pacing issues. Some adventures are glossed over a little too much, either because the author ran out of time to devote to specific fights or because he wanted to just skip closer to the Big Battle at the end. Still, there's a lot of action squeezed into just about 200 pages, so I can't really complain too much about a few missing battles with hired goons.
It's also a little bit dated, but I don't think that this is a bad thing. Lina's voice is a product of the time that this book was written and translated in, so if you hear a little bit of a Valley Girl voice in your head sometimes, just consider that part of its charm.
The other drawback about this series is that it is really hard to find. It was put out by Tokyopop back in the 90s to early 00's, so it's long out of print. I keep holding out hope that someone will rescue the license from purgatory and release ebook versions of the books, and maybe even continue where Tokyopop left off. There are 8 volumes available in English, but the series ran on for 15 volumes in Japan, plus specials and manga. Still, if you can get a hold of these books, grab them while you can. They may not be worth much, but they're a fun read.
I'd recommend these books to anyone from teens to adults. They're good, light reads that you can use to escape for an hour or two. And, maybe if enough people read and demand more of them, we'll see that license rescue that I keep hoping for and we'll get the rest of the series (I can dream, can't I?).
One of the novel series that was brought over was Slayers, which was the basis for the popular anime series of the same name. The anime series did reasonably well in the U.S., and still has a pretty dedicated audience here as well. There was recently a revival with two 13 episode seasons, Revolution and Evolution-R, that featured new animation and characters with some nods to previous seasons' characters. If you are looking for some good old-fashioned sword-and-sorcery fun that maintains a fairly even balance of comedy and action, I highly recommend looking up the Slayers series.
But this post is about the books. I would like to review each individually, so today I'm going to start with the first one: The Ruby Eye. This book introduces the bombastic sorceress Lina Inverse and her loyal, but somewhat dopey, swordsman companion Gourry Gabriev. Lina Inverse is travelling the world seeking adventure, fame, and maybe a little stolen treasure (although in her defense, she only steals from bandits). After a certain item falls into her hands following a particularly successful raid on a bandit camp, she finds herself launched into an adventure whose repercussions would impact the rest of her life. You see, the item in question is the key to reviving a fearsome Demon Lord, and the forces of evil would very much like to get their hands, mitts, paws, tentacles, and any other extremity on it for themselves.
Of course, Lina is no shrinking violet when it comes to defending herself or her treasures. She's a powerful Black magic sorceress - she's even mastered one of the most powerful spells in the field: The Dragon Slave. And if magic won't work, her companion Gourry Gabriev will make short work of any enemy with his elite swordsmanship and, if necessary, the power of the legendary Sword of Light. Just don't ask him to do any heavy thinking - he's really more the brawn of the pair (though sometimes he surprises you with astute observations...).
If this book sounds a lot like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, that's because Kanzaka himself is a fan of tabletop RPGs and conceived Slayers as a means of exploring some of his ideas about them. In the author notes at the end of the book, it's mentioned that he's often asked himself questions about how different types of magic could be used in creative ways.
What I like most about this series is how much fun it is. The story is narrated from Lina's point of view, and she has a lot of smart-mouthed commentary to add to the situation that's sure to get a chuckle out of the readers. The illustrations sprinkled throughout the book also help to add to its charm.
Since this is the first book in the series, is does suffer a little from pacing issues. Some adventures are glossed over a little too much, either because the author ran out of time to devote to specific fights or because he wanted to just skip closer to the Big Battle at the end. Still, there's a lot of action squeezed into just about 200 pages, so I can't really complain too much about a few missing battles with hired goons.
It's also a little bit dated, but I don't think that this is a bad thing. Lina's voice is a product of the time that this book was written and translated in, so if you hear a little bit of a Valley Girl voice in your head sometimes, just consider that part of its charm.
The other drawback about this series is that it is really hard to find. It was put out by Tokyopop back in the 90s to early 00's, so it's long out of print. I keep holding out hope that someone will rescue the license from purgatory and release ebook versions of the books, and maybe even continue where Tokyopop left off. There are 8 volumes available in English, but the series ran on for 15 volumes in Japan, plus specials and manga. Still, if you can get a hold of these books, grab them while you can. They may not be worth much, but they're a fun read.
I'd recommend these books to anyone from teens to adults. They're good, light reads that you can use to escape for an hour or two. And, maybe if enough people read and demand more of them, we'll see that license rescue that I keep hoping for and we'll get the rest of the series (I can dream, can't I?).
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