Ave Mujica has ended, but life has continued. Here are some things that have been keeping me alive recently.
My First Love’s Kiss
I’ll admit, I decided to start this series of blog posts entirely to talk about this series. My First Love’s Kiss, written by Adachi and Shimamura author Hitoma Iruma and illustrated by Fly, sounds like a fairly standard yuri love triangle story on paper. I might never have even picked it up if not for the recognizable names and utter lack of English-translated yuri light novels. Nearly instantly, my mundane expectations were shattered. The story begins with Umi Mizuike, daughter of a single mother providing for her via prostitution, moving in with Hoshi Takasora, a fairly unremarkable girl leading an unglamorous lower class life. Umi is depicted as a shell of a child, a girl whose life has been completely devoid of anything but the utter necessities. Her constantly shifting home life has resulted in a severe lack of education, evident in her clumsy manner of speaking and near-total illiteracy. Having never experienced a touch of warmth, love, or luxury, Umi is quickly swept into being paid for sex by a smooth-talking, wealthy woman under the alias Chiki. Takasora, driven by a developing crush, secretly follows Umi to one of her nighttime meetings with Chiki, and a cyclone of madness ensues.
This isn’t a story about good people falling in love and living happily ever after. If you can’t handle fictional characters doing terrible things to each other, don’t read this. The dramatic moral failings and character flaws of the three heroines aren’t there for shock value. Each of them has a personality and motivations befitting of their circumstances, their actions frighteningly realistic as you grow to understand their backgrounds. Chiki, for example, is a despicable, narcissistic woman who uses her wealth to take advantage of the unloved and poor, but she has an unmistakable charm thanks to her sophisticated upbringing. The lack of love she holds for those she seduces is obvious, yet her silver tongue and powerful aura are impossible to escape. She’s a violent whirlwind that sweeps up everything around her, including the reader. Her actions each volume left me reeling, my brain swirling for hours trying to comprehend everything that had just unfolded.
My First Love’s Kiss is equal parts utterly insane lesbian romance and devastating exploration of the cyclical effects of abuse. Iruma doesn’t glamorize abuse, prostitution, and poverty, but he doesn’t demonize them either. They are simply presented as the realities the characters deal with, an inextricable part of their lives that they have grown accustomed to and shapes the world around them. The depictions feel much more realistic and frank than many of those I’ve seen in anime and manga, never straying into the grounds of misery porn, and despite the heavy subject matter, the novels never felt like a slog to read. Instead, the experience is somewhere in between Shakespearean tragedy and psychological horror. It’s an absolutely gripping read layered deeply with irony and comedy.
Iruma’s penchant for writing such complex characters is complimented by a strong translation by Kiki Piatkowska. If not for a rather annoying way of translating honorifics (I’m sorry, you should not translate “chan” as “Little Miss”), it’s easy to forget that English isn’t the source language of the work. Clocking in at just three volumes, My First Love’s Kiss is both an excellent introduction to Iruma’s work and the powerful storytelling light novels are capable of. The “light” adjective doesn’t signify diminished value in the work. If you’re skeptical of the medium, approach this like any other piece of literature, and you won’t be disappointed.
Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You
Having fallen off a manga series about smoking before, I was a bit skeptical of reading Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You. Even as a subscriber to the Smoking Absolutely Does Look Cool camp, a hot lady smoking can only carry a story for a short time. Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You, fortunately, has both a hot lady smoking and an engaging narrative. Following a young supermarket cashier named Yamada and middle-aged salaryman Sasaki, smoking is used as an apparatus to bring two unlikely companions together. The series is primarily a slow burn romcom, but it also reflects on topics like workplace anxiety, the importance of selfishness in an uncaring world, and the devaluing of happiness in a capitalistic, promotion-driven society. This level of thoughtfulness helps elevate the manga beyond a standard romcom (though I am far from immune to those). I read through volumes 2 through 4 in a day, only to switch over to the digital version and catch up on another two volumes’ worth of chapters the next.
A Ninja and An Assassin Under One Roof
If you can believe it, A Ninja and An Assassin Under One Roof (Ninkoro for short) chronicles the lives of a ninja and an assassin living together. An absent-minded, underperforming ninja girl named Satoko abandons her village and enters a contract with assassin-for-hire Konoha, trading her ability to turn anything, including bodies, into leaves in exchange for Konoha’s protection from the ninja village’s assassins. Based on this premise, I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but Ninkoro ends up being a delightful mix of slice of life, yuri, and dark comedy. Personally, I find dark comedies can quickly stray into “I am no longer having fun thinking about the implications of this” territory, but Ninkoro keeps it light enough while still making me want to scream at times. SHAFT’s production really ties the elements of the show together. Every animation and pacing choice emphasizes the humor, with particular SHAFT-isms hiding to knock you over the head haflway through the series. Add in a punchy opening sung by Kana Hanazawa and produced by Taku Inoue, an over-designed cast of side characters, and extreme dedication to style and Ninkoro ends up feeling like much more than a sum of its parts. It’s become my unexpected favorite of this anime season.
Moimi Kashii
Spurred on by Project Sekai’s recent addition of a commissioned Moimi Kashii song, I’ve been listening to more and more of her catalog of vocaloid songs. I got really into the Niigo cover of Cat Loving last year, but for some reason I never checked out her other songs until now. Her lyrics about love and neglect meld beautifully with the slight emptiness and metallic glint of vocaloid melodies and despair-inducing combo of acoustic and electric instruments. In particular, I’ve had Insanity Blue (embedded above) and Henshoku on repeat for the last couple of weeks.