Tag: seinen manga

Mushishi

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Yuki Urushibara’s ten-volume manga series Mushishi is a gentle but eerie collection of short stories about the uneasy relationship between humans and the natural world. Originally serialized between 1999 and 2008, Mushishi is now available in a series of hardcover Collector’s Editions from Kodansha, which has done a marvelous job with the release.

Mushishi is set in Japan during an unspecified time around the late nineteenth century. Some people wear Western clothing and smoke cigarettes, but traditional ways of life still persist in isolated rural areas, which seem untouched by time.

Ginko is a mushishi (“mushi scholar”) who travels to remote villages to study and document “mushi,” a collective term for a variety of lifeforms that exist partially in our world and partially in the realm of the supernatural. Like germs or bacteria, mushi are tiny and exist unseen by the vast majority of people. Problems arise when mushi form large colonies, especially within human bodies. Even as he studies and admires mushi, Ginko is often compelled to eliminate them in order to restore health to their human hosts.

As is the case with non-supernatural illnesses, people severely impacted by mushi often find themselves unable to return to normal life. In the manga’s second story, “The Tender Horns,” people living in a village deep in the mountains find that they go deaf in one ear when the snow falls. Ginko tells the village chief that this is the result of a mushi called “Un,” which lives in human ear canals and eats sound. This is a temporary inconvenience for most people, but one woman was so deeply impacted that she died. Now her son seems to bear the same affliction, which has manifested as a set of small horns on his forehead.

The tone of Mushishi occupies a liminal space somewhere between nostalgia and horror. Many of the stories have happy endings, but they’re nevertheless pervaded with the uneasiness of living at the edge of an unseen world that has little regard for human life. Mushi, which are something in between plants and animals and spirits, act in keeping with their nature, which is simply to grow and replicate. To most mushi, humans are little more than substrate.

Some species of mushi seem to possess something akin to sapience, however, and their relationship with humans is complicated. One of my favorite stories in the opening volume of Mushishi is “The Traveling Swamp,” in which a marshland appears and disappears seemingly at will. When Ginko studies the pattern of the manifestations on a map, he realizes that the colony of mushi is traveling through underground waterways. The young woman who appears and vanishes with the mysterious swamp has become saturated with the mushi, which have welcomed her as a companion on their journey to the sea.

What Ginko sees of mushi growth and behavior is akin to many written records of Japanese folklore, such as The Legends of Tono and Tales of Times Now Past, in which inexplicable things happen to people seemingly at random. In a time before modern science and infrastructure, the natural world was just as dangerous as it was awe-inspiring. As much as people in rural areas were dependent on nature for their livelihood, they were also at its mercy.

Yuki Urushibara’s artwork delights in wild spaces, from mountain roads to deep forests to ocean vistas to overgrown villages, and her depictions of premodern architecture and clothing are equally impressive. Urushibara is especially skilled with the use of etching and screentone to convey a sense of dim lighting while still using enough contrast to creatively highlight the focal points of each composition. The inkwork is truly impressive, as are the watercolor inserts, and Kodansha’s release of the manga allows Urushibara’s art to shine.

If you’d like to bask in the twilit atmosphere of a deep mountain forest, I might also recommend watching an episode or two of the Mushishi anime (available on Crunchyroll in the U.S.), which is extraordinarily well-produced. The anime is slow and quiet and isn’t for everyone, perhaps, but there’s really nothing else like it.  

The Shadow Over Innsmouth Manga

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The Shadow Over Innsmouth is a gothic horror story in four acts. A college student on a self-guided architectural tour of New England takes an inexpensive bus that stops over in the isolated port town of Innsmouth. The student explores the town, and an elderly resident tells him about a wealthy sea captain who made an unholy bargain with ocean-dwelling fishpeople generations ago. The student is forced to stay in the town overnight, and the town’s hidden half-human residents chase him from his hotel. After successfully escaping Innsmouth, the student begins to question his own family lineage.

The writing in Lovecraft’s original 1931 novella can be difficult to parse, and the xenophobia of the narrative isn’t attractive to contemporary eyes. Regardless, this is an extremely influential story in the field of speculative fiction, with adaptations ranging from Alan Moore’s strikingly upsetting graphic novella Neonomicon to the ruined Fishing Hamlet of Bloodborne, not to mention countless stage plays, radio dramas, television episodes, indie films, video games, tabletop games, and even delightfully bizarre Christmas songs. Many of these adaptations, though excellent, assume a familiarity with the original that may not exist in an audience that isn’t already embedded in the speculative fiction fandoms of the twentieth century.

If you’re curious about Lovecraft’s work but put off by his prose, Dark Horse’s release of Gou Tanabe’s manga adaptation is an artistic marvel presented with an excellent translation in a handsomely published single volume.

Tanabe’s adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth brings the story to life with the distinctive visual language of horror manga while maintaining as much accuracy to the original as possible. Just like the story’s protagonist, Tanabe is fascinated by the architecture of the rotting Massachusetts town. The immaculately detailed cityscapes that sprawl across the pages encourage immersion into the horror of social and moral decay. Moreover, whereas Lovecraft only hints at what lies underwater, Tanabe is gleefully explicit in his depictions of throngs of fishpeople so horrific they’d make even Guillermo del Toro uncomfortable.

Tanabe’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth succeeds not only as a faithful retelling but also as a standalone work of gothic horror. By pairing Lovecraft’s oppressive atmosphere with his own meticulous draftsmanship, Tanabe bridges the gap between early twentieth-century weird fiction and contemporary horror manga. The manga adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth preserves the unsettling allure of the original while offering both longtime fans and newcomers an invitation to experience Innsmouth’s decayed splendor in disturbingly compelling detail.

Shimeji Simulation

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Shimeji Simulation (シメジ シミュレーション) is a gentle but deeply surreal slice-of-life manga about two teenage girls living through the end of the world – or perhaps not “the” world, necessarily; but rather, an artificial world that they happen to inhabit. The focus of the manga isn’t on the apocalypse, which passes mostly unremarked and unexplained. Instead, the core of the story is the friendship (and understated romance) between the two girls, Shijima and Majime. 

Shijima Tsukishima has spent the past two years of middle school quietly living inside a closet, and the manga opens when she decides to begin attending high school at the beginning of the school year. Why Shijima became a hikikomori is something of a mystery, but her primary personality trait is that she dislikes being bothered. She plans to spend her time in high school silently reading books at her desk.

This plan is interrupted by a classmate named Majime, who aggressively demands that Shijima become her friend. Since a pair of shimeji mushrooms sprouted from the side of Shijima’s head during her period of isolation, Majime immediately gives her the nickname “Shimeji,” an appellation that quickly becomes as pervasive and persistent as Majime herself.

Majime bluntly inserts herself into Shijima’s life and persuades her to join the school’s Hole Digging Club, which is managed by an art teacher named Mogawa. Majime assumes that the club is little more than an excuse to hang out after school, but Mogawa is oddly committed to the endeavor, especially when encouraged by the quiet presence of a second-year student named Sumida who only communicates through abstract drawings. Meanwhile, Shijima’s older sister has dropped out of college to devote herself to the ongoing construction of a bizarre machine with an inexplicable function.

For the most part, the girls engage in mundane slice-of-life adventures. They chat in the classroom, visit one another’s houses, and attempt a study session at a family restaurant. Mogawa teaches her art lessons. Majime catches a cold. A group of girls in their homeroom start a rock band. Shijima meets a super-senior named Yomigawa who’s decided to stay in high school just to hang out in the library and read philosophy books.

What makes this manga interesting are the strange glitches in the world surrounding the characters. The mushrooms sprouting from Shijima’s head are a good example, but there’s also the fact that Shijima and her sister occupy one of the only two tenanted apartments in a giant danchi housing building that’s falling apart yet still somehow livable. 

As the story progresses, more glitches begin to manifest. Everyone wakes up to a snowstorm in the middle of summer, for example. One day, the school building is flipped vertically and becomes a pocket dimension with a separate axis of gravity. Another day, water loses its mass and floats in the air. Suburban streets twist into optical illusions, and fish swim through the sky.

Although small glitches seem to be innate to the world, they’re exacerbated by Shijima’s sister, who’s been building and experimenting with various devices that alter the fabric of reality. Each of the first three volumes of the manga concludes with a longer narrative segment that shows the consequences of these experiments for Shijima and Majime, who are briefly thrown into the gaps between the cracks of reality.

The cumulative damage caused by Shijima’s sister is countered by a godlike entity who presents as a young girl and calls herself “the Gardener.” The Gardener’s role is to ensure that the reality experienced by the characters doesn’t mutate too wildly from one day to the next, but her power is curbed by the features of the universe’s code intended to keep its residents safe. She might be able to repair gaps in reality, but she has no means of forcing her will onto humans, even if it’s for their own good.  

Like Tsukumizu’s previously serialized manga, Girls’ Last Tour, it’s difficult to say that Shimeji Simulation is “about” anything. There’s no plot to speak of, and the only real conflict is between the characters and the entropy eating away at the edges of their slowly decaying world. In addition, it’s never explained how this constructed universe and the characters who inhabit it came to exist. Instead, I think it’s probably fair to say that the manga’s primary concern is existential ontology. In other words, what does it mean to be human, and why do we exist?

I recently read an interesting essay (here) whose author argues that Shimeji Simulation is about the barriers between people, why we need them, and what happens when they disappear. If everyone were able to get exactly what they want, what happens when the desires of separate individuals come into conflict? If there were a world perfectly tailored for one person alone, could anyone else live there? And, if you retreat into complete solipsism, what’s the point of being alive?

Toward the end of the manga, Shijima finds herself in a situation very much like her self-imposed hikikomori isolation in the beginning, when she lived entirely in the darkness of her closet. In the simulated world she comes to occupy through her sister’s rewriting of the universe’s code, Shijima doesn’t bother anyone, and she never has to deal with any external input that she doesn’t choose for herself. Still, can we really say that such pristine loneliness is preferable to the messiness of human relationships?

I read Shimeji Simulation as a story about the various ways that people communicate and connect with one another. Shijima never becomes a “normal” or friendly person, but she still manages to find joy and meaning in her interactions with other people, even if most of these interactions are nothing special. This is why, in the fifth and final volume of the manga, Shijima breaks the boundaries of her personal universe to find Majime, wherever her friend might exist in the fractured constellation of simulations.

“The meaning of life is to understand love” may seem cliché; but, given how strange and surreal her story becomes, Shijima’s realization feels significant and well-earned. Life is a constant shifting and melding of interpersonal boundaries, and communication and companionship are worth the pain and trouble of being human.

Shimeji Simulation is a remarkable work of science fiction. The manga may seem to have an unassuming beginning, but its narrative structure gradually builds, loops back in on itself, and continually starts over from a weirder and more nuanced position. Likewise, Tsukumizu’s art may initially feel sketchy, but this style is perfectly suited to express the uncanny glitches and fluid malleability of the setting. Shimeji Simulation is gentle and quiet, but also immensely intelligent and creative, and it’s a manga to contemplate and enjoy slowly while allowing yourself to be transformed alongside the characters and their strange but fascinating world.

Shimeji Simulation hasn’t received an officially licensed English translation, but a fan translation is currently available to read on Dynasty Scans (here). If you’re interested in a small taste of the manga’s tone, I’d also like to recommend the short fan anime adaptation of the opening chapter on YouTube (here).

Kanda Gokurachō Shokunin Banashi

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The first volume of Akihito Sakaue’s manga Kanda Gokurachō Shokunin Banashi, which won the Tezuka Osamu New Creator Prize in 2024, collects five stand-alone short stories about the everyday lives of artisans during the Edo Period. As might be expected from a manga about craftsmanship, Sakaue devotes meticulous care and attention to creating an accurate visual depiction of the tools and techniques used in these traditional arts. 

Shokunin Banashi opens with a twelve-page account of a day in the life of a carpenter who creates and repairs wooden buckets. Although the work may seem unglamorous, the skill involved is readily apparent. An additional layer of accuracy lies in the fact that this story’s star craftsperson is female, as were many of the artisans who kept Edo period society functioning.

The next two stories feature a blacksmith who specializes in swords and an indigo dyer who dreams of creating her own fabric pattern designs. My favorite of these opening stories is the fourth, which follows a young but talented seamster who sews and binds the edges of tatami mats. Along with the rest of his team, he’s been hired to replace the tatami in a high-end establishment in the Yoshiwara red light district. The courtesans are impressed by the craftsman’s skill with his hands, but he remains focused on his craft and maintains an appropriate professional distance. Once he’s finished the job, however, he allows himself to be a little flattered. This is a cute story that’s also very sympathetic to the craft of the women who work in Yoshiwara.

The three-chapter story in the second half of the volume is a workplace drama about a company of contractors who specialize in laying plaster walls. This is intense physical labor that requires a good eye, a steady hand, and careful group coordination. The leader of the team, Chōshichi, is an undisputed master of her craft, but a new recruit, Jinsaburō, soon learns that there’s trouble among the ranks of her subordinates. A master craftsman himself, Jinsaburō supports Chōshichi during the construction of a townhouse. For the reader, this is a marvelous opportunity to get an inside look at each stage of how these houses were built.

I’d recommend Shokunin Banashi to anyone who enjoyed Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ōoku series, especially for the high quality of its historical representation and the subtlety of its human drama. I might also recommend Shokunin Banashi to any illustrator who’s interested in studying hands depicted in a variety of positions while manipulating all sorts of specific tools. The art in Shokunin Banashi is something special, as is the physical book itself, which was designed to be a beautiful object.

Edited to add: This manga has been licensed by Yen Press as Neighborhood Craftsmen: Stories from Kanda’s Gokura-chou. Excellent!

Kamimachi

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Machiko Kyō’s Kamimachi (かみまち) was serialized from June 2019 to December 2022 and published as a two-volume graphic novel in August 2023. The story follows four homeless teenage girls who find themselves at a privately run youth shelter called Kami No Ie (“Family of God”) in the Tokyo suburbs.

Although he initially seems kind and welcoming, the middle-aged man who runs this shelter is a sexual predator, and he has assaulted and murdered one of his young charges prior to the beginning of the story. The ghost of this young woman, in the form of a Christian angel, helps the girls find the courage to escape the Kami No Ie shelter.

Each of the four main characters in Kamimachi has become homeless after escaping a toxic home environment.

Uka is the only child of a single mother who projects her loneliness and frustrated ambitions onto her daughter. The story begins as Uka leaves home and seeks shelter by means of a roomshare app. After a number of awkward situations, Uka comes to the attention of a group of men who use the app to recruit sex workers. These men force Uka into a situation in which she’s expected to trade a night at a short-term rental space for sex. She breaks out of the apartment and wanders the streets of Tokyo before finding herself at the Kami No Ie shelter.

Uka’s closest friend at the shelter, Nagisa, has been sexually abused by her stepfather for years. She finally flees from home after her mother witnesses one of these assaults and turns away in disgust.

Arisa was raised as a television idol by a single mother. After her mother’s sudden death in an accident, Arisa is given to the care of a talent manager who steals her inheritance and financial assets, leaving her destitute.

Yō is one of five siblings. She’s so neglected by her family and bullied by her brothers that she finds it preferable to sleep in subway stations. Eventually she stops returning home altogether.  

For each of these young women, Tokyo becomes a wilderness whose anonymous open spaces serve as a refuge from the enclosed interiors where they’re coerced into enduring abuse. Kyō draws indoor scenes using small panels with blank backgrounds, and these scenes often feature close-ups of the characters’ faces in moments of distress. Meanwhile, Kyō depicts outdoor scenes with large panels that frame the characters with trees and buildings. The expansive outdoor settings often serve as the stage for small moments of kindness and emotional clarity.

In Chapter Three, for example, Uka flees into the night after an attempted sexual assault at a roomshare apartment. After her escape, she wanders through the rain with nothing but the clothes on her back. Out of context, the rainy cityscape may seem bleak, but the large panels filled are a visual relief after the oppressively small and claustrophobic panels that depict the apartment.

One of the anonymous figures passing in the rain, whom the reader later learns is Yō, stops beside Uka to give her an umbrella. Page 71 opens with a close-up of Yō’s extended hand before spreading into an open panel in which Uka and Yō stand at the center of a composition framed by misty buildings and puddles on the concrete. The two small figures reaching out to one another are enclosed in a soft curtain of rain, and the sense of relief at being a part of a larger world is palpable.  

Chapter Seven contains a similar scene in which the open sky and background cityscape suggest freedom from the violence that occurs behind closed doors. Nagisa, who’d encountered Uka in a roomshare arrangement, takes Uka’s discarded uniform and attends school in her place. One of Uka’s former classmates approaches Nagisa, offers to share her lunch, and asks that Nagisa talk with her on the roof. Nagisa initially tries to be normal, showing the girl photos of her mother and stepfather’s new infant daughter.

During this scene, the panels become progressively smaller until Nagisa finally admits the truth about having left her family. The shift to a full-page panel depicting the city’s jumble of buildings spreading under the open sky signals Nagisa’s admission that something has to change. This moment also serves as the catalyst for Uka’s classmate to begin searching for her missing friend, a decision that ultimately results in Uka’s rescue from the Kami No Ie shelter.

The openness of Tokyo cityscapes in these scenes suggests that the sort of hidden abuse endured by these young women needs to be brought into the open and exposed to the light of public scrutiny. Along those lines, I can’t help but feel that Kyō’s depictions of outdoor spaces in Kamimachi also reflect the artist’s emotional response to the Covid pandemic. For people in precarious situations, being physically stuck inside often exacerbated the experience of feeling trapped within oppressive social systems.

As an artist who documented the pandemic years through evocative illustrations posted to Instagram, Kyō’s project is not simply to depict the beauty of architecture and greenery within the city, but also to comment on the importance of open outdoor “third places” for young people suffering from social pressure and economic strain. Kamimachi doesn’t provide easy solutions, but it’s cathartic to see the issue of youth precarity brought out into the open air. 

Machiko Kyō is a prolific and award-winning artist whose illustration collections have been celebrated by The Comics Journal (here). If you’re interested in reading more about the artist’s work, I published a short essay on her 2013 graphic novel Cocoon – whose animated adaptation is scheduled to premiere on NHK in Summer 2025 – on Women Write About Comics (here). Here’s hoping that English-language readers will be able to experience Kyō’s compelling and thought-provoking work in the near future.

Hoshikuzu Kazoku

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Hoshikuzu Kazoku (星屑家族) is a two-volume graphic novel set in an alternate universe where parents are required to obtain a license to raise children. To qualify for a license, a prospective family is asked to undergo an audition with a homestay student. This auditor, who is often an orphan raised in a government-run facility, evaluates the family’s fitness by deliberately behaving badly and provoking difficult situations. 

An auditor who goes by Hikari is assigned to Daiki and Chisa Hirokawa, a young couple who live on the grounds of a Shinto shrine. During their initial interview, Daiki surprises Hikari by openly requesting that their family be denied a childrearing license. Daiki claims to be happy living with his wife as a couple, and he shares his suspicions that Chisa doesn’t actually want children. With that out of the way, Daiki says, the three of them can enjoy the homestay visit without any pressure or expectations.             

Chisa and Daiki genuinely seem to be happy together, but Hikari soon notices that Chisa is the target of a longstanding prejudice held by people in the neighborhood. Chisa’s mother killed her father when she was a child, and she’s been ostracized ever since. Along with her foster father, who once managed the shrine, Daiki was the only person who was kind to her. Now that she and Daiki have married and set up a household at the shrine, Chisa feels trapped within a community she can’t escape. Why, then, does she want a child so badly? And is it Hikari’s place to get involved?

Hoshikuzu Kazoku is a high-stakes family drama that presents a moral conundrum with no easy solutions. If the government creates regulations to ensure a well-ordered society, what happens to the people whose lives are more complicated than the provisions allowed by the legal code? If there’s room for flexibility in the bureaucratic system that enforces the law, who should have the right to grant exceptions? And more specifically, in a country witnessing its birth rate decline in response to the disintegration of community support structures, what are the limits of government intervention?

Even putting such questions aside, Hoshikuzu Kazoku is compelling by virtue of its problematic yet still sympathetic characters. Hikari, Daiki, and Chisa each bring loads of emotional baggage to the table, but they do their best to communicate to the limited extent of their abilities. Despite their many flaws and the odds against them, I wanted these characters to be happy.

Aki Poroyama’s writing, dialogue, and pacing are all excellent, and the visual language of the manga serves to set the mood and create dramatic impact. I wasn’t familiar with the work of this artist, and I was amazed by the polish of this graphic novel. I’d recommend Hoshikuzu Kazoku to mature readers looking for socially conscious speculative fiction driven by complicated human stories. 

Nickelodeon

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Nickelodeon Blue

Title: Nickelodeon
Japanese Title: ニッケルオデオン (Nikkeruodeon)
Artist: Dowman Sayman (道満 清明)
Publisher: Shōgakukan (小学館)
Publication Dates: 11/2010 – 10/2014
Volumes: 3 (赤・緑・青)

I sometimes feel as if I’ve spent the past ten years of my life trying to find another Azumanga Daioh: a set of girl-centric stories that are weird and funny and touching without being male gazey. I love Azumanga Daioh‘s cute artwork and bizarre situations and perfect ratio of dark to sweet humor. Having read my way across a large swath of its many, many imitators, I’ve come to the conclusion that Azumanga Daioh is one of a kind. But I’ve found something close, yet different – and just as enjoyable.

Dowman Sayman’s Nickelodeon series is, on the surface, nothing like Azumanga Daioh. Each of the manga’s stand-alone stories is exactly eight pages long; and, aside from a few inconsequential crossover references, they have nothing to do with each other. Whereas Azumanga Daioh was all about the daily lives of high school girls, the subject matter of the stories in Nickelodeon ranges from grotesque fantasy to sci-fi spoofs to sarcastic magical realism. Unlike Azumanga Daioh, which has few male characters of note, the cute girls of Nickelodeon are more than adequately balanced by cute boys. What Nickelodeon does have in common with Azumanga Daioh is the tone of its unique style offbeat humor, as well as the artist’s ability to imbue stock characters with unexpected depth and feeling.

At the core of each of the stories in the series is a relationship between people, with “people” being a relative term. These relationships can be friendly, or romantic, or antagonistic, or a mix of all three. Boys are paired with girls, boys are paired with other boys, girls are paired with girls, girls are paired with tigers, boys are paired with flesh-eating demons, high school students are paired with clueless angels, conjoined twins are paired with blind dates, and ghosts of all sexes are all over the place. There are robots, giants, mad scientists, wish-granting devils, zombie princesses, and seemingly normal people with all manner of strange hobbies. The artist is like Scheherazade, spinning a seemingly infinite number of stories out of contemporary pop culture tropes, but all of his stories are refreshingly original.

One of my favorites is the cover story of the “Green” volume (pictured below), “Hickey & Gackey” (Hikkī & Gakkī). The piece opens with a girl named Otowa delivering a set of handouts to her classmate Sengoku-san, who seems to have become a hikikomori some time ago. Sengoku-san lives alone in her house, which has become a gomi-yashiki (trash hoarder’s den). After speaking briefly with Sengoku-san, Otowa promises to come again next week, but Sengoku-san tells her that this is the last time they’ll meet, as the city is sending an enormous garbage disposal unit named “Duskin Hoffman” (Duskin is a Japanese company that makes Swiffer-like cleaning implements) to her house to dispose of her like the rubbish she is. Suddenly, the ground starts shaking, the blades start whirling, the trash starts flying, and Otowa reaches out to Sengoku-san, making a last desperate confession. It’s absurd and ridiculous but somehow manages to punch you right in the feels, and the ending is beautifully open to interpretation.

Nickelodeon was serialized in Shōgakukan’s recently defunct IKKI monthly alternative seinen magazine, and its readers were thus expected to be genre-saavy and open to weirdness. The manga also contains moments of overt sexuality – it’s nothing that could even remotely be considered pornographic, but some of the characters are shown engaging in adult thoughts and behaviors, and there is occasional cartoonish nudity. The humor is for the most part good-natured, and the author emphasizes and plays on the silliness and personality quirks of his characters, not the sizes and shapes of their bodies. However, because male and female humans are portrayed as having nipples (the horror!), I don’t foresee Nickelodeon being licensed in North America. If you can speak a little Japanese, though, it’s fairly easy to read. In fact, I assigned a chapter to my fourth-year Japanese class this past fall, and the students seemed to really enjoy it.

Nickelodeon is almost perfectly bespoke to my own personal tastes, so it may be that I’m biased, but I think the three-volume series represents many of the great pleasures of manga written for an adult audience. Downman Sayman is wonderfully talented, and I’m expecting great things from him in the future. Hopefully one day his work will find its way into English!

The artist has two other two-volume seinen series, The Voynich Hotel (Voinicchi Hoteru) and Paraiso (Para☆Iso), available on Amazon.co.jp, and you can also find him on Twitter. Although he hasn’t updated it in some time, he has an account on Tumblr, which is cute and hilarious (but not entirely safe for work).

Nickelodeon Green

Marshmallow Bungaku Girl

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Marshmallow Bungaku Girl

Title: Marshmallow Bungaku Girl
Japanese Title: ましまろ文學ガール (Mashimaro bungaku gāru)
Alternate Title: Mädchen Marshmallow Literatur
Artist: Amano Taka (天乃 タカ)
Publisher: enterbrain (エンターブレイン)
Publication Dates: 6/27/2011 – 2/15/2013
Volumes: 2

In the late Meiji Period, as Japan undergoes the process of modernization, Hoshino Mone is a student at an all-girls private high school in Tokyo, where she lives with her male guardian, Sei. Although a young woman’s duty is to be beautiful and modest so as to become a suitable bride, Mone has a different dream – she wants to write literature! Literature (the bungaku of the manga’s title) is believed to corrupt women, so Mone cuts off her braids, dons schoolboy clothing, and joins an all-male literature club. Although she must face a bit of drama concerning her choices, the friends Mone makes help her hone her talents and offer her inspiration as they take her on adventures around town. The handsome young literary illustrator Nasuhito knows Mone’s secret but believes in her potential. Nasuhito’s respect for Mone as a fellow artist is not the only source of his warm feelings for her, however.

Although Bungaku Girl was published in the seinen magazine Fellows! – the former name of Kadokawa’s prestige-format monthly serial Harta (ハルタ) – it reads like a shōjo manga from the 1990s, when the influence of series such as Fushigi Yûgi and Cardcaptor Sakura injected elements of gender bending and bishōnen harems into even the most prosaic romance stories. All of the young men in the literature club are impossibly gorgeous, and everyone is decked out in immaculate period dress. There’s a hint of yuri provided by the radiant high school princess Sono, another literature fan who becomes enamored of Mone’s courage and independent spirit, but there are no elements of the male gaze to be found in the manga’s story or art. Instead, there are touches of Mori Kaoru in the close attention paid to historically accurate fabrics, interiors, street scenes, and city vistas.

Bungaku Girl is less about Mone’s cross-dressing and gender identity than it is about her commitment to doing whatever it takes to find a supportive community for what she loves. Many of the story’s most powerful moments occur when the characters are being creative – when Mone is writing, or when Nasuhito is drawing, for instance – and these moments are reinforced by being framed within the sense of belonging to a group of people all working together to share their ideas and produce something tangible. For us nerds who have studied modern Japanese literary history, there are pleasurable echoes of the student groups, coterie magazines, and research trips into pleasure districts associated with real-life literary figures.

This two-volume series is only available in Japanese, but it would be really cool if someone were to license it in North America. The story is simple and charming, the characters are adorable, and the art is clean and attractive. Bungaku Girl offers love, drama, and interesting imagery, not to mention encouragement to leave your comfort zone and live your dreams!

Bungaku Girl Volume 1 Page 23

I… want to join your literature club!