Tag: recommendations

Famous Women: Rumiko Takahashi

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For Women’s History Month, I’m going to give a blanket recommendation to the work of a remarkable female manga artist (Japanese comic artist), one whose work was paramount in starting the manga/anime movement in the west. Her name is Rumiko Takahashi, and for those in the community, she needs no real introduction. I first started reading her first published work “Urusei Yatsura” (Those Obnoxious Aliens) at the age of three, and since then has followed her through “Maison Ikkoku”, “Ranma 1/2”, “Inuyasha”, and her various short stories in “Rumic World”. I haven’t been following her latest work “Rin-ne”, but the aim of this post is to chart her influence on me as a manga artist.

 


 

Rumiko is somewhat unique in the manga publishing world. She’s a best-selling female manga artist who draws mostly for a male audience (though she has female fans too), and she draws in a gender-neutral style that nonetheless is skilled, expressive and interesting. Above all that, she started off in the genre of comedy, which is never easy to do. She’s since branched out into horror, dramady, action-adventure and small-scale domestic drama, but she’s flexible and malleable enough that I don’t doubt she’ll go on to tackle other genres. Overall, her work is highly-recognisable and has a very strong sense of personality – you’ll always be able to pick a Rumiko Takahashi story at a glance.

 


 

I also have to mention her female characters. As a manga artist who started in the 70s in a magazine aimed at teenage boys, I imagine she must have gotten her fair share of pressure from the editors to make her female characters sexually-appealing. There’s no doubt Rumiko’s women are that, but they’re also slyly subversive in their personalities and the way they’re depicted. For a country that is known for its shy, submissive women (at least in manga and anime), Takahashi’s women are frequently loud, violent and filled with character flaws. All of them are as interesting as her male characters, and while everyone’s character defects are played for laughs, it’s wonderful to see such gender parity – and they’ve been depicted that way right from the start.

 


 

All in all, Rumiko Takahashi has a unique voice, one that has remained unique and recognisable for the past thirty years (and counting). If you haven’t read her work, you really should. If being the world’s best-selling female comic book artist doesn’t convince you, then being a wonderful comic book artist certainly should.

 


 

I have a list of her work here, many of which have been translated into English. My #1 pick for the uninitiated would be “Maison Ikkoku”, since it’s a more down-to-earth story about a poor ronin (failed university student) who is trying to win the heart of a young widow. Conversely, you may try her more zany comedies, like the slapstick earthling-meets-alien “Urusei Yatsura,” or the gender-bending martial arts comedy “Ranma 1/2.” Those who prefer action-adventure and medieval Japan can read “Inuyasha”, or “Mermaid Forest if you like horror. Her short stories in “Rumic World” is also one of my favourites.

 


Recommendation: Skip Beat!

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I’ve been plowing through the inks for “Small Shen”, seeing that this is the last leg of the book. I hope to get at least all 60 pages done by the end of June, which is a bit of a stretch, but I think I can do it!! Such is the life of rushing deadlines.

I realise I haven’t recommended something for a while, so this week I’ll be writing a recommendation for a popular shoujo manga: Skip Beat!

 
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Skip Beat!
(28+ volumes)

I haven’t read Skip Beat! for a while, but I can still remember the totally fun reading experience I had with this series. I only had one afternoon to read it, and I literally speed-read through my friend’s collection. I think I only got up to volume 20, but I would have read more, if more was available at the time.

 

Plot
Skip Beat! follows the story of 16 year-old Kyoko Mogami, who has always been in love with her childhood friend Shotaro Fuwa. While they were growing up, Kyoko acted as Sho’s doormat and gopher, though Shotaro felt no feelings for her, and only thought of her as his slave. Eventually, Sho has Kyoko move to Tokyo so she can slave away as his housekeeper assistant while he pursues a career in showbiz. Sho has some success, though he soon grows arrogant, and Kyoko one day overhears him telling his manager what a boring and plain girl Kyoko is… thus sparking a falling out between Sho and Kyoko that can only be described as “epic”.

Kyoko realises that Sho never cared for her to begin with, and the confrontation between the two causes Sho to throw her out of his house. In retaliation, Kyoko decides to take revenge on Sho, by getting a make-over and climbing the showbiz ladder herself. Her ultimate goal being revenge, she eventually meets another movie star called Tsuruga Ren, who eventually falls in love with her. As their relationship progresses, Kyoko starts to learn more about herself, and to develop a sense of purpose and self outside her initial goals of revenge.

 

Why I recommend this story
I think I’ve made Skip Beat! sound darker than it really is. This actually is a comedy series with streaks of drama and romance, and instead of the usual earnest angst that characterises such stories, this goes for laughs instead if dark moments. In the demographics stake, Skip Beat! falls firmly into the “shoujo romance” category, but with one glaring difference – this one takes the usual shoujo tropes of doormat heroine and distant love interest, and subverts them in a wicked way.

There’s been other shoujo stories such as Kare Kano and Fruit Baskets that also subvert the typical shoujo heroine, but this one out-does in the other two in its gleeful depiction of Kyoko’s darker moments. In fact, this can be said of all the other characters that appear in the series – all of them have a lot more to them than initially meets the eye, especially when it comes to negative traits. That’s not to say they’re two-faced or unlikeable. Most of the characters are adorable, despite their selfishness and pettiness – this is one manga that actually celebrates the way the characters revel in their bad behaviour, whereas another manga would punish them for the same transgressions.

Is it right for a character to be driven entirely by revenge? The story is subtle in the way that Kyoko eventually comes to realise that she really does enjoy showbiz, and that she can have a career outside her single-minded pursuit of Sho’s demise. That’s not to say that this manga has a realistic take on Japanese show-biz – this is pure character dramady, with show-biz as a backdrop, and the creator even freely admits she barely knows anything about actualy show business.

Not that it matters much. Skip Beat! is funny, is charming, and never takes itself too seriously. If you’re looking for something light-hearted with a sweet and upbeat heroine who only has the one flaw of being hilariously nasty about the guy who betrayed her, then this is your book. It’s wonderful to see Kyoko’s negative traits in full-force, because you rarely see such things handled in such a well-balanced and funny way in shoujo.

Recommendation: Tuesdays With Morrie

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Hi folks. This week I managed to get an iPhone 4S, which was replete with battery problems, until it turned out that it wasn’t the fault of the iPhone. No sooner have I gotten it fixed, then I had problems with my new laptop overheating… I am just plagued with tech problems all this week! Somehow I managed to finish pencilling Chapter 3 of Small Shen, as well as some of Chapter 4, so it’s not all bad news. I hope to finish the Chapter 4 pencils by early March, so I can get started on the inks and onto the middle of the book.

Apart from that, this week I was also fully into… Linsanity!! Somehow, even with all the tech problems, I still managed to watch all the videos of Jeremy Lin’s game-winning streak on Youtube. I was tempted to recommend Linsanity for this week’s recommendation, but pulled back because I’m hardly an expert on the NBA – everything I learned about basketball I learned from Slam Dunk. I may not feel confident discussing basketball, but everyone is getting behind his inspirational story, and the flood of feel-good vibes is leading me to recommend a pretty famous self-help book: Tuesdays with Morrie.

 
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Tuesdays With Morrie
(2002, Mitch Albom)

You may already have heard of this book – it was a massive bestseller back in the day, and a friend of mine recommended it to me. It’s one of those books that isn’t hard to read, is accessible, and most of all, is such a quick and uplifting read that you absolutely cannot say no to it.

 

Plot
Tuesdays With Morrie is a non-fiction book written by Mitch Albom, a former sports journalist who has fond memories of one of his university professors, the titular Morrie. Mitch’s life and career was just coasting along when he heard that his former professor was in the grips of a terminal illness, and only had a few months to live. Morrie taught Mitch (and many other students) a lot about life when he was younger, so he decides to visit Morrie regularly in his last month, to document the man’s ideas, beliefs and teachings. What resulted from these trips was the best-selling, life-affirming, “self-help” book Tuesdays With Morrie.

 

 

Why I Recommend this Book
I hesitate to call this book a “self-help” book, because while I like self-help books, this one goes a little bit further than this. It hasn’t got any bullet-point checklists, any motivational mantras or any “life plans”. It is written in the simple manner of a story, where the writer (Mitch Albom) explains his brief-but-memorable history with Morrie, discovers years later that his professor dying of a terminal illness, and then goes off to chat with Morrie every Tuesday until his death. That’s it. It’s not written in a way that’s meant to be bombastic or emotional. It’s simply the words of a very wise man, who has lived a great life and inspired many people.

It’s also not a particularly long book, which can only be a good thing. These days, if you recommend a “great and inspiring” book to someone and it happens to be more than an inch thick, people will sigh and look like they’re on the verge of being hit on the head with the likes of War and Peace. It seems that people want inspiring things to read, but don’t want to work too hard to absorb those words of wisdom, even though 30 years ago they may have wanted to. It seems that a few things have changed since then, but what hasn’t changed is that everyone still wants to go to Heaven, but nobody wants to die. Well, reading Tuesdays With Morrie won’t kill you or even kill much of your time, but it may certainly offer a few pearls of wisdom, if not an inspirational story along the lines of Linsanity.

There’s not much more that I can say about this book, except for an anecdote from a few years back. An acquaintance of mine once asked me for a book recommendaton, saying that she wanted to read something “meaningful”. I asked her to be specific, and she said “no fiction”. I pressed her on her interests, and she said she didn’t want to read anything about history, religion, spirituality, sociology, psychology, science, philosophy, anthropology, or anything that ends with a -logy. But, she wanted to read something “meaningful”. Well, guess what I recommended? Tuesdays With Morrie is a book that manages to fill that tiny void beautifully.

Recommendation: Zashiki Onna

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I just got started on the pencils for chapters 3-4 of Small Shen, and this will probably take up a large chunk of my time for the next month or so. I also made some headway on my story for the Peter Pan anthology that the Bento creators are putting together – I wrote the whole story, which is 10 pages in total (including title page), and called We are the Pickwicks. You’ll get to read the story eventually, so I’ll keep mum on what it’s about.

The other piece of news is… I finally got the Store section up! It’s an Amazon Store at the moment, mostly for American/Canadian buyers; but for the International people, I’m also setting up a Book Depository Store, since that online store has Free International Shipping! The setup process is more complex than Amazon’s, so hopefully I’ll get that store up in the next few weeks.

 
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Zashiki Onna (manga)
(1993, Mochizuki Minetaro)

This week I’m recommending a one-shot manga called Zashiki Onna, which is a horror manga that is light on gore but heavy on the creepiness. Against all that is holy, I am linking to a pirated manga site, because sadly it’s the only way to read this manga in english (for now anyway).

This short, 1-volume horror manga is created by Mochizuki Minetaro, the same guy who created Dragon Head. Those reading manga in the early days of TOKYOPOP may remember this dark story about people trapped in a long dark tunnel, victims of what appears to have been an earthquake. This is an earlier work from him, written in a time where hardly anyone has heard of “stalking”. Perhaps that’s why it’s rather obscure – apart from the short length, it’s also a fairly old manga. But it’s a good one.

 

Plot
Hiroshi Mori is a typical young man in college – living in a cheap rental apartment and fantasising about a girl he likes. All was fine, until one night when he hears a persistent banging on his neighbour’s door. He pokes his head outside to see what’s going on, which was a very bad move – it was a tall, creepy woman with long black hair, wearing a trenchcoat and carrying old shopping bags. She insists that she was looking for his neighbour, but he claims to know nothing and leaves. The next night she is back again, and it slowly becomes clear that she has shifted her attention from his neighbour… to him.

 

Why I Recommend this Manga
It’s short, and it’s creepy. If you like your horror weird and spooky, as opposed to gross and gore-splattered, this is the manga for you. It depends on what you find creepy, and in my case, gore doesn’t scare me at all – and sadly (for me), gore is the more common approach to horror in Japanese manga. Just look at my attitude to typical (and prolific) Japanese horror masters: Junji Ito of Uzumaki fame, and Kazuo Umezu of Drifting Classroom. These two manga artists are horror staples who have been around for decades, but their style largely relies on spilling blood, and distorted people doing black-shadows-on-typical-“horror”-face, something I can’t stand. Modern horror stories tend to use a cutesy artstyle, which doesn’t sit well with me either. Which is why Zashiki Onna is such a “pleasant” surprise – it’s style is ugly-realistic, but with dramatic lighting that’s entirely suited to the storyline. I feel safe recommending this to any kind of horror fan, as opposed to just manga-reading horror fans. That says a LOT about this story.

 
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Okay, stalking stories have been around for yoinks, but because of the art style and the straight-forward story-teling, this manga retains a lot of its power. Not that readers understood that this was a “stalker” story when this story first came out. Most readers back in 1993 probably knew nothing about stalkers, and so were probably quite freaked out by what they might have originally thought was just some over-zealous admirer. Even the title, Zashiki Onna, reflects what the true form of the female stalker might have been. You see, this manga marries two of the most enduring horror-supernatural tropes of Japanese culture – a creature called the Zashiki-Warashi, and a famous Japanese ghost story written in 1825 called Yotsuya Kaidan. Without understanding these two cultural references, most readers these days may just think that this is just a “typical stalker story”, and that the stalker was a human. Not so.

In Japanese mythology, a Zashiki-Warashi is a creature who appears in the form of a young child, who often lives in big houses with a long history. These creatures typically bring great wealth to the household, which makes it seem benign… but not really. If a Zashiki-Warashi should leave your house (and they can leave on a whim), then disaster will strike and your household wil lose all the wealth it’s acculmulated. So it’s a creature that is more like a double-edged sword – and the reference to Zashiki in the title of the story may hint that the stalker is a modern, twisted form of the Zashiki-Warashi.

The other reference – that of 19th-Century ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan – is a much more famous reference, due to it having influenced the storyline of famed J-Horror movie The Ring. When The Ring first came out, people waxed lyrical about the story… except people who are already familiar with Yotsuya Kaidan. Even though Yotsuya Kaidan is about a vengeful female ghost called Oiwa who comes back to relentlessly haunt her evil Samurai ex-husband, it’s really about how the re-telling of a story can give it great power. Most people miss the true story of Yotsuya Kaidan, which is about it’s author researching the history of Oiwa legends, and discovering all the various versions of it is giving form to this demonic creaure called Oiwa. Which sounds like the storyline of the movie Candyman, but variations of this idea has been around for centuries. The Ring simply represents a modernised re-telling of it.

 
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All-in-all, if you’re armed with knowledge of these two cultural facts, it may make Zashiki Onna a more interesting read. It’ll certainly help explain the ending, which may confuse some people who don’t realise that the title alone explains that the stalker isn’t human to begin with. Which then makes it not a “stalker story”, but a “ghost story”. And guess what? It’s more successful that way.