HINAMATSURI, by Masao Ohtake. First published in 2010 and first published in North America in 2018.
PLOT:
Yoshifumi Nitta is an up-and-coming Yazkua whose decadent life is turned upside down by a strange metal egg that appears in his apartment, which in turn contains a strange young girl named Hina. Hina has incredible telekinetic powers, but she also has expensive taste in food and her powers creates as many problems for Nitta as it does solve them. Together the two will have to find a way to forge something like a family despite neither of them quite knowing how that works.
STORY:
Deadpan comedy is a tricky thing. It takes a certain degree of farce to make it effective, but it's a formula that's not easy to get right. Play things too serious and the story becomes inert and unfunny; play things too broad and the deadpan stops being funny and just becomes bizarre. Hinamatsuri manages to strike this balance while scoring some legitimate feels.
It helps that Nitta and Hina themselves are fun characters. He may still be a criminal who enjoys some of the finer things (to say nothing of the parties) it can bring, but in his attempts to care for Hina he inadvertently demonstrates a more caring and egalitarian side to himself. As for Hina, we get only hints of her past (such as her skepticism towards adults asking things of her and her constant hunger) and her literal-mindedness , but her detachment allows her to defuse some situations and her powers allow her to help her guardian and keep Nitta's selfishness in line. Neither of them has any idea of what a normal guardian/child situation is like, but they manage in their own fashion and in its own weird way becomes the heart of the story.
Yet there is also room for good absurdity, even with the Yazuka angle. You have hostage situations at the school that become impromptu therapy sessions, a relaxing fishing trip with the boss that becomes chaotic when Hina's powers accidentally start a slow leak, and a gang war that starts when Hina's powers go off by accident. The more promising front for comedy, though, is through Hina's slowly growing group of school friends. The best part of the book is what happens when Hina's new friend Hitomi tries to help Hina figure out what Nitta's doing at night, only to end up getting roped in bartending for a drunk businessman and everyone - Hina, Nitta, the drunk, the actual bartender, and her - end up tagging along to a trip to the hostess club. It's a scenario that manages to snowball into ridiculousness while throwing in a few swerves for variety. It's moments like that this that make Hinamatsuri not only funny, but memorable.
ART:
Ohtaka's artstyle is pretty average for what you normally see in seinen. The guys are squarish and somewhat beady-eyed, while the girls (and young women) are wide-eyed and cute. The world around them is well-drawn (or at least well-rotoscoped), but is otherwise a fairly ordinary look at Tokyo. Even the composition is fairly conservative, lacking in a lot of the broad takes or stretches of long, awkward silence that tend to come with most comedy manga. This approach actually works with this story's style of comedy though, because it just gives further grounding to the strangeness and absurdity going on. It's just as deadpan as Hina herself, and that makes it funnier.
RATING:
Hinamatsuri actually managed to get some chuckles out of me by coming up with an original premise, getting silly with it in a very low-key way, and underselling it just enough to make it funny. It's a style of comedy that works well in manga and it's one well worth seeking out, even if you didn't watch the anime.
This series is published by One Peace Books. This series is ongoing in Japan with 14 volumes available. 1 volume has been published and is currently in print.
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