There it is, Plain as Daylight

Sugarholic, Vol. 1
By Gong GooGoo
Published by Yen Press

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After the house she lives in with her mother and grandmother is destroyed in a landslide, twenty-year-old slacker Jae-Gyu is sent away from her rural hometown to live with her older brother in Seoul. With little money and even less optimism, she gets off the bus in the big city, only to lose her money and make an enemy (a good-looking but arrogant guy whose shirt she accidentally tears) right off the bat. Things get no better once she finds her brother, who is obviously engaged in shady business and really doesn’t want her around. She does find some refuge in her best friend, Hyun-Ah, whose family moved to the city a few years back, but even that is marred by the re-emergence of Hee-do, a childhood playmate Jae-Gyu bullied repeatedly, who is now an up-and-coming pop star harboring a long-held crush on her. Then to top things off, she gets embroiled in the middle of some kind of dangerous family trouble involving the torn-shirt guy (a martial artist named Whie-Hwan) who insists they pretend they are in love with each other in order to save himself from being sent out of the country.

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So, I picked up volume four of Pluto earlier this evening, anxious to dig in to the latest volume of my favorite manga series this year. My plans were dashed less than a chapter in, however, when I became so emotional that I actually had to put it down. Since this volume is new, I’ll avoid any details. Suffice it to say this was a fairly small incident (relative to the scope of the work as a whole) that just happened to hit me unusually hard. This isn’t a fatal issue, of course. I’ll pick it up again once I feel I’ve recovered, perhaps in a less vulnerable moment. Nor is it a criticism of Pluto, by any means. I want to be moved deeply by fiction. That’s why I read it. It’s a powerful testament to the craft of both Tezuka and Urasawa that the series is able to affect me so strongly.

What this experience brings to mind now as I remain here uselessly in my chair, not quite ready to pick up anything else, is other moments in manga that have brought me to tears. Continue Reading »

Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit, Vol. 2
By Motoro Mase
Published by Viz Media

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Fujimoto is becoming accustomed to his job as the harbinger of people’s doom, but he’s not sure if that’s a good thing. The volume opens as his girlfriend tells him she’s leaving him because she feels crushed by the weight of his work. Meanwhile, the work goes on and this volume introduces two new victims of the government’s Social Welfare Act. Both stories are tragic, of course, perhaps even more so than those told in the first volume, though both victims also end up changing other people’s lives for the better, one through the work he’s able to during his short life, and the other, sadly, through her death.

Despite whatever “good” has been done by these individuals, however, there is still no evidence that the government’s systematic murder of its citizens is actually a positive thing at all. One emerges from this volume hoping against hope that Fujimoto might find the stomach to start a rebellion of some kind, not that he’s yet demonstrated anything approaching that kind of fortitude. His deepest conflict right now is whether to let himself grow colder still toward the unfortunate souls he must visit (on the way to one last-minute Ikigami delivery, he asks his driver to make a stop at the video store so that he can avoid paying a late fee) or whether he should try to discover some philosophy of life and death that he can use to help heal their pain. This is the extent of what he can manage emotionally at this point.

I found the individual stories in this volume even more compelling than those in the last, which is certainly something that will keep me reading. I do hope the story will find a new direction to explore before the manga’s current formula becomes tedious, as it undoubtedly will should it continue on like this much longer. For the moment, however, what is offered here is more than enough to keep readers engaged. Ikigami continues to be a fascinating and well-told story with fantastic art to match.

Volume two of Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit will be available on August 11th, 2009. Review copy provided by the publisher. Click here to read my review of volume one.

Unsophisticated and Rude
By Momoko Tenzen
Published by DMP

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When Hiroto’s best friend, Satoshi, confesses that he’s fallen for another guy (popular upperclassman, Nao) it’s a bit of a shock, but not for the reasons Satoshi might have expected. It’s not the fact that Satoshi is crushing on a boy that bothers Hiroto but rather which boy. Hiroto, too, has always harbored feelings for Nao and in fact still struggles to deal with the memory of a drunken night they once shared, something he’s sure Nao wants to forget. Torn between friendship and love, Hiroto mainly tries to avoid being around Satoshi as he watches him getting closer and closer to Nao, but it is Nao’s true feelings that are the real surprise.

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