All My Darling Daughters
By Fumi Yoshinaga
Rated T+, for Older Teen
Viz, $12.99

The centerpiece of All My Darling Daughters is a two-part story about Sayako, a woman who decides to have an arranged marriage. We look over her shoulder as she goes to dinner with a businessman who denounces those who don’t pull their own weight, a doctor who thinks women should be “natural and feminine,” not aggressive and short-haired, and a sweaty salaryman who immediately propositions her. Finally, she meets a man who is physically damaged but beautiful inside, and you think, ah, here we go.

But this is not a Harlequin romance. Instead of following the standard script, Sayako takes things into her own hands, and the resulting twist is both surprising and satisfying.

All My Darling Daughters is a self-contained set of five short stories about families and relationships, and each one takes a dip into unexpected territory. The framing tale is that of Mari, a working single mom, and her daughter Yukiko. The book begins with Mari’s abrupt announcement, following a bout of cancer at age fifty, that she has gotten married and her new husband, Ken, will be moving in with them. Yukiko is unnerved to learn that her new stepfather is younger than her, and at first their relationship follows a predictable, spiky curve. What makes this story so great is that Yoshinaga shows, rather than tells, what is going on; watching Mari and Ken prepare dinner together, Yukiko realizes that everything has changed. She moves in with her boyfriend, but she visits frequently, and much of the rest of the book unfolds as the family sits around at dinner, telling stories and arguing, as families do.

Like all real families, Yukiko’s family is messy and ambiguous. There are nice people and people who are not so nice, one heroically good character but no clear-cut villains. One of the threads that runs through the story is Mari’s insecurity about her looks, which she blames on the way her mother used to speak to her as a child. But in the final story, we see her mother’s point of view, and we learn that her negative comments were well intentioned. Another story, about a mediocre college professor and his sexually aggressive student, flips the usual norms of manga romance on their head.

Although the characters sleep on futons and eat with chopsticks, the situations and conversations in this book are universal. In fact, I felt like Yoshinaga was channeling me in the very first scene, when Mari returns home from work and scolds Yukiko (a teenager at the time) for not cleaning up or at least making tea. If she had added “Couldn’t you at least empty the dishwasher?” I would have started looking for hidden cameras. The story does get a bit more baroque after that, but Yoshinaga always allows her characters to find happiness in a number of ways, conventional or not, and somehow it all works out. It’s very refreshing.

This is the difference between truly mature manga and genre-bound shoujo or shonen. So much manga reflects our worst stereotype of Japan, the rigidly dictated roles, the all-or-nothing society in which anyone who doesn’t conform is bullied into suicide or seclusion. The bad suitors in the arranged-marriage story exemplify those stereotypes, but the woman, Sayako, rejects them all and makes her own path. While Japanese life often seems sterile in fiction, here it is rich with humor, anecdote, and ambiguity.

Yoshinaga’s art has grown in precision and complexity since her earlier works, such as Antique Bakery. There, she had a trick of placing a single head in a large panel with only blank space surrounding it. What could be a cheat in a lesser artist’s hands seemed monumental when she did it, but it could get monotonous after a while. In All My Darling Daughters she crowds the pages with more panels and more detail, which may be less pure but is also more interesting. She still uses the big, empty panels, but she saves them for major announcements, and they punctuate the flow of the story rather than dominate it. Yoshinaga’s clean linework is easy to read, and the pages never look cluttered. Her women are precisely drawn, and each one has a personality that shines through from their first appearance on the page. They all have a familiar look, too as if they were someone you knew once.

In terms of production quality, Viz has put together a beautiful package, with a gorgeous cover and cream-colored paper that really shows off the art without fatiguing the eye. Even more than most of the titles in the Signature line, this book feels deluxe, like a graphic novel for adults; it’s as far as you can get from Naruto.

Not that All My Darling Daughters would ever pass for anything other than manga. The storytelling style and the stories themselves all echo familiar manga tropes, but in Yoshinaga’s hands they have grown up and become something rich and strange—and highly entertaining.

Yokaiden, vol. 2
By Nina Matsumoto
Rated T, ages 13+
Del Rey, $10.99

The second volume of Nina Matsumoto’s is as imaginative as the first, but it lacks a bit of the sparkle.

Volume 1 introduced Hamachi, a nine-year-old boy who is obsessed with yokai, spirits and monsters of Japanese folklore. When his grandmother, his sole caretaker, is killed by a yokai, Hamachi ventures into the yokai realm to seek revenge.

It’s a pretty classic setup that is enlivened by Matsumoto’s colorful renderings of a huge variety of yokai. However, in the first volume, as she notes in her afterword, she focuses on the more grotesque creatures, while in this one she brings in more human-like yokai, and she also sends Hamachi on a very classic fairy-tale quest. Honestly, I think the yokai in the first volume were more interesting.

Still, she puts some pretty good spins on the traditional tales. In order to find the lizard-like kappa who murdered his grandmother, Hamachi visits the nine-tailed fox spirit, one of the most powerful yokai. Matsumoto imagines her as a massively obese, three-eyed, rather feline fox who is obsessed with human culture: She lives in a mockup of a human home, eats human food, and even has her servants wear human masks. The fox takes a liking to Hamachi and wants to keep him as a pet, but when he insists on staying on mission, she reluctantly agrees to tell him where the kappa is. But first, he must retrieve three treasures that have been stolen from her.

The treasures aren’t stolen, of course; they are simply things the fox wants, and it’s Hamachi who will be doing the stealing. Accompanied by his yokai helpers, a lantern and an umbrella that have come to life after lying around for 100 years, he heads out to perform what should be impossible tasks: stealing a sword from a tengu, a mirror from a slit-mouthed woman, and a necklace from the gods. Each quest brings its own danger, but thanks to his friends’ intervention and a bit of dumb luck, Hamachi manages to get the elusive objects and come out alive. Meanwhile, a human yokai hunter is tracking him, but the hunter is slowed down when the yokai trick him out of his sword and he has to win it back by gambling with them.

Once Hamachi completes his three tasks, the fox yokai reneges on her promise and announces that she is going to keep Hamachi after all. The story ends on a cliff-hanger as the mysterious yokai-hunter bursts in, sword in hand.

Almost all of the interest in this book comes from the varied array of yokai and other creatures that Matsumoto brings to life. She doesn’t just stick with the classical definitions but gives them personalities of their own. Despite their outlandishness, the yokai are convincing as characters, and that makes the story tick. Hamachi usually plays straight man to their quirks, although he does have a sense of humor and a reckless quality all his own. If there is a problem in this book, it is his lack of emotional depth. He was not terribly broken up by the death of his grandmother (who admittedly is portrayed as a mean old woman), and he doesn’t seem to be terribly driven in his quest to avenge her death. It’s more like an excuse for a lark in yokai-land than a burning desire that cannot be quenched. In one chapter, he tells his yokai friends about his parents and how they died, and while the story is charming, it is played a bit too much for laughs. This would have been a good time to show Hamachi’s serious side, but instead he not only shows no sadness, he comes off as a bit dumb when his parents return as ghosts and a villager passes off their unusual appearance as tuberculosis.

I have to admit that I rolled my eyes a bit when the fox spirit announced her three quests—that’s a motif that was done to death by the Middle Ages—but Matsumoto mixes things up a bit and gets Hamachi through each one of them fairly quickly. In fact, the story is quite episodic—one adventure per chapter—which makes it easy to put down and pick up again.

Matsumoto’s art is worth a special mention here, as she does something quite difficult and makes it look easy. Rendering supernatural creatures is tough, because you don’t have real-life models, yet she manages to make an umbrella, a one-legged lizard, and an angel-like tengu all come to life in convincing ways. Not only that, she keeps all the art at the same level. Often Japanese manga artists will put a very cartoony character next to a realistic one, a juxtaposition that I find jarring. Matsumoto’s characters are all consistent—human or yokai, they all look like they belong in the same world. She seamlessly blends disparate parts together, too, giving a woman a convincing bird’s foot, for instance. And she avoids the temptation to make them look too close to classical Japanese representations—they are not overly complicated, nor do they appear to be frozen on the page. Instead they are loosely drawn and very animated, so much so that they look like they could hop off the page.

By the end of this volume, Hamachi is no closer to his goal (in fact, he barely mentions it), but we have been introduced to and entertained by a wide array of yokai, and that is the true charm of this series.

ETA: Almost forgot, I reviewed vol. 1 for Graphic Novel Reporter.

(This review is based on a review copy supplied by the publisher.)

Deka Kyoshi, vol. 1
By Tamio Baba
Rated T+, Teen Plus
CMX, $9.99

Detective Toyama is a big, bumbling, good-hearted guy, so when his superiors suspect a schoolteacher has been murdered, they send him undercover as the new teacher for her class. It sort of works, because he obviously loves kids, but Toyama tends to lead with his heart, not his head.

Well, actually, he does lead with his head on the first day of school—hearing a child being bullied, he rushes into the classroom and hits his head on the top of the door frame, leaving a visible head-shaped dent. That’s the only bit of slapstick in the story, though. Although the cover suggests a comedy, Deka Kyoshi is more of a series of moral tales, with a central mystery knitting them loosely together.

The mystery has to do with the first teacher’s death—she fell from a roof, so her students assume she committed suicide, and several of them blame themselves or each other. It’s not clear what Toyama is looking for, but he gets an assistant early in the book: Makoto, one of his fifth-graders, who can see people’s emotions as physical forms. To Makoto, a bully appears as a spiky monster, a girl who doesn’t want to grow up looks like a giant stuffed doll. It’s all pretty basic, although the alternate personalities, called synthes, are well conceived and well drawn.

Makoto’s abilities make him shrink from others, and that in turn makes him a target for bullies—he was the child Toyama heard being bullied in the beginning of the book. After Toyama rescues him, the two hit it off, and Makoto starts helping Toyama. But not with the case of the falling teacher—that case is forgotten as the book turns episodic and Toyama and Makoto start solving the other students’ problems.

In addition to Makoto, Toyama has another ally—Narita-sensei, the school doctor, who is also something of a psychologist. She is cool and logical, proposing sensible solutions and countering Toyama’s hotheadedness. If anything she is too cool, often offering advice that is so laid-back as to be useless. When Toyama gets frustrated that his class is all reading manga instead of paying attention, Narita advises him not to confiscate the offending books. “Being a hardnose about it will have the opposite effect,” she says. “The best thing to do is take time to persuade them that their time here is better spent paying attention.” Like that’s going to work with a classroom full of fifth-graders.

And indeed, the solutions proposed to the students’ problems are too simplistic. In the manga story, a student has been shoplifting manga so he can share it with the class and thus become popular. Narita catches him and makes him promise not to do it any more. Of course the kid backslides, and Toyama yells at him to be a man and stop stealing. The student’s synth disappears and he gives up shoplifting for good. With similar ease, Toyama, Narita, and Makoto manage to cure a girl who cuts herself and another girl who is uncomfortable with her changing body. The stories are nice little self-contained dramas, but they never veer far from the predictable. There does seem to be a dark figure lurking in the shadows who may be causing bad thigs to happen—and by implication may have something to do with the teacher’s death—but that possibility goes unexplored in this volume.

The art in Deka Kyoshi is clean-lined and clear, with a fair amount of exaggeration. People more knowledgeable than me have described it as old-style shonen, ad that does seem to fit, but it’s an accessible style that either girls or boys can enjoy. The synthes are nicely drawn, and creator Tamio Baba does a nice job of using physical forms to describe emotional states.

At about 160 pages, this volume feels a little skimpy, but there are a few extras—a color page in front, a two-page bonus comic in the back. The cover is bright and appealing, although it implies a wackiness that isn’t really present in the book. With its simple stories and clear art, Deka Kyoshi does feel like it is pitched more toward the middle grades than adults, and it will probably have the most appeal for that age group.

This review is based on a review copy supplied by the publisher.

Yotsuba&!, vol. 6
By Kiyohiko Azuma
Rated All Ages
Yen Press, $10.99

Yotsuba&! has become such a phenomenon in the manga world that it is impossible to write a truly objective review. Everybody loves the little green-haired kid!

The phenomenon might be a little harder for those new to manga to understand. The basic premise of the comic—cute kid misunderstands things in a humorous way—is so simple as to be universal. It’s the underpinning of countless newspaper comic strips and children’s books, and Yotsuba&! never strays too far from that premise. What makes it special is that it is done so well, with solid writing and beautiful, clear artwork.

In the first volume, Yotsuba was puzzled by ordinary things like air conditioners. She would see an object, wonder what it is, and then apply her own logic to the problem, always winding up with a crazy misunderstanding that was gently corrected, with many amused looks, by the others around her.

By volume 6, Azuma seems to have run that well dry, and the stories are more ordinary kid-and-family stories. Yotsuba does a recycling project, taping discarded objects to an old T-shirt. Yotsuba gets a bike. Yotsuba rides all over creation to deliver a bottle of milk to a friend. She just seems like a sweet kid who lives with her father and likes to go hang out with the older kids next door.

There are a few qualities that set Yotsuba&! apart from, say, Dennis the Menace or Rose is Rose. For one thing, the setting is very noticeably Japanese. Yotsuba&! is a slice-of-life manga in a pedestrian setting, so we get to see a lot of images of ordinary people at home, which is somewhat unusual in manga. While many artists keep the backgrounds vague, Azuma treats us to detailed interiors and sweeping urban landscapes, complete with carefully delineated buildings and crisscrossing wires. My favorite part of this volume was the story in which Yotsuba rides her bike cross-country to bring a bottle of milk to a friend, along paths and through fields and neighborhoods, the landscape spreading around her on either side.

Yotsuba herself always seem to be on full power, unlike the people around her. It’s not that she is hyperactive so much as earnest and eager, always straining to head out on the next adventure. One difference between Yen Press’s editions and those produced previously by ADV is that in the Yen book, Yotsuba’s words appear larger in the text balloons, so she seems to be yelling a lot of the time.

One of the interesting things about this series is that Yotsuba is drawn in a noticeably more cartoony, less realistic style than everyone else. Her head is big (bigger than her father’s) and perfectly circular, her body is smaller in proportion to her head than those of other characters, and her eyes are often reduced to circles. Everyone gets the circle-eyed look once in a while, but Yotsuba has it most of the time. It’s as if the iconic smile face grew pigtails and a body. If you apply Scott McCloud’s theory, that means that the reader is supposed to identify with Yotsuba herself. That opens up a range of interesting speculation, given that the series runs in a comics magazine for young men in Japan, that I’m choosing not to pursue.

Here in the U.S., though, Yotsuba takes on a different context. Its all-ages rating makes it a natural for kids, and the clear linework and simple situations also make it easy to grasp the story visually. Azuma describes his characters with great economy, giving each one a distinct look and personality without distracting the eye with a lot of details.

As many readers know, Yotsuba&! was originally published by ADV, which started their manga program with a flood of releases and then slowed their output to a trickle. They published the first five volumes of the series, with decreasing frequency, and then, despite louder and louder clamoring from readers, never published any more. This will remain one of the great mysteries of manga publishing—why, with people practically climbing the walls for these books, they didn’t just go ahead and publish them.

Anyway, Yen rescued the license and has started it fresh, with new translations and redesigned editions of the first five volumes. The translations definitely are different, although which one is better will be a matter of individual taste. The ADV editions have translators’ notes at the end, the Yen editions do not. On the other hand, Yen retains the original sound effects and Japanese script in the art (translated in the margins between the panels), as well as honorifics, which will doubtless please purists. Yen also wins on production values, with high-quality paper and glossy covers making for a very handsome set of books.

Yotsuba&! is one of those atmospheric manga, like Aria, that you can read for relaxation. Each chapter is a self-contained story, so you don’t have to work too hard, and the biggest conflict in the book is Yotsuba taking off on her bike and getting grounded. It’s a great choice for escapist reading for kids or kids-at-heart.

(This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.)

CSI: Intern at Your Own Risk
Story by Sekou Hamilton
Art by Steven Cummings
Rated T, for Teen, 13+
Tokyopop, $12.99

I’m going to confess up front that I have only watched the CSI TV show a few times, and I didn’t really care for it; the close-up shots of innards always struck me as a bit cheesy. My tastes lean more toward Law and Order, Bones and NCIS, which go a bit lighter on the bodily fluids.

Fortunately, Tokyopop’s CSI manga doesn’t lean much on the TV show. Instead, it’s geared for teen readers with a group of high-school students who get the awesome experience of being interns at the Las Vegas CSI labs, with the characters from the show playing the part of their kindly but distant instructors.

If you haven’t already suspended disbelief, please do so now.

Having had the experience of watching real detectives work on cases (not murders, but robberies and a rape), I know that CSI isn’t very realistic, and this manga is an even worse offender. Standard procedures get violated all over the place, and the timeline is off. The plot here relies on the old “The murderer is one of us!!” routine, but it assumes a person can commit a crime of passion and then revert to everyday life as if nothing ever happened. Even for fiction, that’s a stretch.

As entertainment with a bit of science thrown in, the book doesn’t do too badly. It starts out with the murder itself, of course, and then we shift to the interns’ point of view. The lead character, Kiyomi, is the poor-but-happy daughter of a cab driver. She’s smart, too. The other four interns are the usual types: The geek, the jock, the creepy guy, and the cute guy. The creators do a nice job of introducing them by showing the entrance interviews, including their varying reactions to the question “Are you bothered by the smell of decomposing flesh?”

After passing a rigorous test (in which the instructors let Kiyomi through because she’s a girl, even though she scored lower than the guys) everyone gets to work. In my office, interns get coffee, shred paper, and take the blame when the copier breaks down, but the CSI interns get to attend a real autopsy and walk around the crime scene of an open case. Naturally, they start formulating their own theories of the crime. There are a few logical leaps (i.e., the fact that the criminal cleaned up the crime scene leads indisputably to the fact that he is one of the CSI interns), and the astute reader will have no trouble figuring out who the culprit is before the big reveal. But that’s part of the fun—it’s always nice to outsmart the detective.

Unfortunately, the story reads like a first draft. The characters and their dynamics are all in place, but their interactions are a bit too obvious. A worse flaw is the big chunks of expository dialogue that fill in pieces of the plot or information about crime scene techniques. It’s interesting material, but it could have been presented more gracefully.

As a parent, I question the 13+ rating, given that the opening scenes include shots (including one looking right up the crotch) of a bloody, staring corpse. On the one hand, a lot of 13-year-olds see worse on TV every day, on shows like CSI and Bones and NCIS. On the other hand, the natural audience for a 13+ book is 10- to 12-year-olds, and the content of this story backs that up—the dialogue and art are fairly simple. I would have toned down the corpse scene a bit, knowing that kids tend to read a little ahead of the age ratings.

The art is competent, if not outstanding, and it looks like a lot of Tokyopop’s other global manga titles. Cummings has a nice, clean line and doesn’t overuse toning. The biggest flaw is that the elements of the panel don’t always fit together properly: Sometimes two characters will seem to be out of scale with each other, and the backgrounds always look cavernous. The cover art is pretty nice, though.

The book seems a bit slim for $12.99, but the creators have plenty of room to tell their story—it doesn’t feel rushed. The format is bigger than standard manga, which I feel makes the book a bit easier to read. A few character sketches and a chapter from an upcoming CSI novel are the only extras.

Anyone over 16 will probably find CSI: Intern at Your Own Risk to be too elementary, but this is a decent read for younger teens, with the sort of crime-scene science that some people (myself included) find fascinating. While it could use a bit more polish, it also skips the cheesy camera work and graphic violence of the original, leaving a palatable, if rather earnest, little story.

(This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.)

Four-Eyed Prince, vol. 1
By Wataru Mizukami
Rated T, ages 13+
Del Rey, $10.99

Four-Eyed Prince is a cliché-ridden story of a girl who admires a classmate from afar, confesses her love, gets rejected, and goes home to find out that he is her stepbrother. Sachiko is yet another of those plucky orphans who is being dumped on a random family member, in this case, the mother who abandoned her as a baby. The prince, Akihiko, is your usual spectacles-wearing manga guy, cool and aloof, and he wants nothing to do with his klutzy, emotional new stepsister. (Note: Although they go to the same school, Sachiko had no idea this guy was her mother’s stepson until she walked in the door of their house. He, of course, knew it all along. Like life, manga isn’t fair.)

Warning: Spoilers and indignation after the cut

Akhiko disappears, Sachiko goes out after him, it rains, and she winds up, soaking wet, in a bar where the cute bartender, Akira, fixes her some hot milk with brandy, feels her up a bit, and takes her for a walk. On this walk, she unburdens herself of all her feelings about Akihiko, then passes out and wakes up naked in Akira’s bedroom….

… which is in her new apartment….

… because Akira is Akihiko’s secret identity. Like Superman, he changes so profoundly when he puts on glasses that even the woman who has been obsessing over him for months doesn’t recognize him.

And of course he doesn’t “take advantage” of her, because Akihiko may be a jerk, but he’s not a cad. Being a jerk, he calls her “easy” and says all girls are sluts. And Sachiko, well, she’s left to make the best of it.

So, at this point in the story, I was wondering whether the life of a manga-ka is so hard that none of them ever get to be in a real relationship. The setup is so lacking in any kind of emotional authenticity that it’s hard to understand why anyone thought it would be a good idea to write it down in the first place. Yes, it mixes up a lot of shoujo-manga tropes, but most of them aren’t very good tropes to begin with. What’s worse, the only character who expresses genuine emotion, Sachiko, is mocked and put down for it.

Then the clouds part a bit. Akihiko confesses that he is deliberately putting on different personalities to hide his real self. Abandoned by his father, Akihiko was taken in by Sachiko’s mother, his stepmother, who is working hard to pay off the gambler’s debts. Akihiko took on the bartender job so he could become financially independent. It’s still as full of holes as a fishing net, but having been a teenager once, I know that “you don’t know the real me” thing is gonna resonate.

Sachiko decides she wants to get to know her new stepsibling better, and what better way than to enter the two of them in the “Coolest in School” contest, dressed as a pirate and a kidnapped princess? Sachiko wanted Akira to play the part, but Akihiko shows up, glasses and all, and they announce to the entire student body that they are stepsiblings. Everyone starts laughing and jeering, but when Akihiko whips off his glasses and sweeps Sachiko into his arms, the audience turns to jelly and they win the contest handily.

Ah, the power of spectacles.

On the way to the hot springs, Akihiko accuses Sachiko of flirting because she talks to another guy. Then he mocks her looks and takes off with the other guy’s girlfriend. When Sachiko gets frustrated and pushes the girlfriend, Akihiko slaps her in the face. It’s all OK, though, because it turns out the other girl was dissatisfied with her boyfriend because he was too kind and considerate, and she asked Akihiko to come on to her to make him jealous. When the cuckolded boyfriend tries to punch out Akihiko (and gets tossed ignominiously into the pool), well, then, his girlfriend is all hot for him again. In case we don’t get it, Akihiko spells out the moral of the story for Sachiko: “When you consider the lengths that girl went to, it must mean that she really cares about him, right?”

Yup, and if a guy hits you, it’s probably your fault for being too demanding. Sheesh!

There are people who argue that books like this are bad for teenage girls because the girls are such terrible role models. (“His words are usually harsh,” Sachiko says as Akihiko yells at her for dropping a dish, “but underneath it all, my Four-Eyed Prince really is kind to me.”) I actually think this is a good story for teenage girls, because they will react with such indignation to Akihiko’s jerkiness that it will be even harder for the next guy to push them around. (In case you don’t have any teenage girls around, let me tell you that indignation is pretty much their default emotion.) In fact, I have nothing but pity for the poor spectacles-wearing guy who tries to hit up a girl right after she reads this. His earth will be scorched.

Furthermore, Akihiko is actually a good depiction of an abusive boyfriend; he’s charming one minute, cold and controlling the next, and just when Sachiko is totally frustrated, he lets a bit of his real, vulnerable self slip through. It’s a textbook case, especially the business at the hot spring.

The volume ends with a “bonus” story that’s basically more of the same—emotionally aloof rich guy, spunky part-time housekeeper, you know the drill. Let’s just say, it’s no Emma.

While it’s safe to say this book is not for everyone, it’s also safe to say that no one outside the target audience is going to read it anyway. Mizukami’s style is best described as extreme shoujo: The eyes are enormous, the main character goes chibi about every third panel, and flowers and sparkles are everywhere. It’s vaguely reminiscent of Arina Tanemura—less crowded but just as energetic. Tanemura’s heroines usually have more backbone, though.

Although I think it’s intended as a romantic comedy, Four-Eyed Prince reads like cautionary tale to me; while Sachiko will probably get her man in the end, it’s unlikely that American readers are going to think it was worth it.

(This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher, who probably bitterly regrets that decision right now.)