More stories of how manga can change your life. Or is it?
Creative Staff
Story: Seimu Yoshizaki
Art: Seimu Yoshizaki
Translation/Adaptation: Takami Nieda
What They Say
In this volume: A manga collection featuring beautifully frightening horror stories piques the interest of a cowardly pick-up artist. Reading about an attractive soldier battling evil inspires a young woman to upgrade her wardrobe. A manga about the wandering travels of lone ninja and swordsmen raises the question, “What is fate?” A practical home-style cooking manga provides eating suggestions for a woman looking to expand her nightly menu. A man sets out to find a specific globe-trotting adventure manga.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The latest volume of Kingyo Used Books continues with the episodic nature set by by the previous volumes. However this time, the structure and feel of the chapters are a little different.
The first chapter features a Kazuo Umezu fan club and how a stranger, easily terrified by Horror Manga, gets involved with the club and the inner politics of the club. The next story is about a struggling Graphic Designer who forever lives in the shadows of her boyfriend, a classmate who is known as sort of a protege, but finds a volume of Sailor Moon and fantasizes about playing dress-up and doing great things she feels she can’t in real life. Then a group of men sit at the zoo everyday waiting for the wolf to show itself in public.
These are the types of stories in this volume. Stories about people doing their routine through life and finding strength, or the will, to push through their hangups. But, the manga isn’t prominent in pushing them in that direction this time. In these stories the featured manga is just there. The manga serves as an initiator for the events to take fold, not as the purpose and meaning behind the events.
The two part story Nekotama-do is my favorite story in here and that is because it goes back to manga as the catalyst and focus. This story is about a man travelling the world in search of his ‘calling’. Along the way he meets another travelling Japanese man with whom he swaps manga with. He continues his journey trading manga with every Japanese traveller he comes across. Years after his travels, the man returns to Japan and marries. This man is Nomoto, the gentleman who took over the failing Nekotama-do manga lending library. The rest of the story is about Nomoto travelling the world seeking manga that has been borrowed but never returned. I really enjoyed this story because Nomoto does these actions not out of a sense of business but out of love, respect, and debt to both manga and the Nekotama-do.
This is the sort of story I have come to love in Kingyo Used Books and a type of story that is the minority in this book. Don’t get me wrong the other stories in this book are quite good and enjoyable in their own right. They just aren’t what I’ve come to love and look forward to with the series.
In Summary
While reading this volume I really liked each story and the way they were told and drawn (Kingyo still has great artwork!). But it felt more like I was just reading them. My curiosity in the featured manga wasn’t peaked, my involvement with each storyline wasn’t there, and my excitement to read the next chapter was just gone. In my review of Vol. 2 I said that Kingyo was a great series for non-manga fans to get into because of the pure love of manga and how it can affect someone’s life, as opposed to just being simple comics. This volume has totally taken the wind out of those sails! No non-manga reader could possible get into these stories and want to read more manga as a result. They would be good stories to read and they might enjoy them but that extension into the fandom isn’t there. At least now my expectations won’t be so high for the next volume so that I can just sit back a enjoy the tales being told and not be totally riveted. Although…there is supposed to be a chapter with Devilman as the featured manga next time!! I’m looking forward to that one!
Content Grade:C+
Art Grade: A-
Packaging Grade: A-
Text/Translation Grade: A-
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Viz Media
Release Date: April 19th, 2011
MSRP: $12.99
