Review: SATURN APARTMENTS

 Of course, not every sci-fi work is so old, so storied, so action-packed.  Sometimes it's more about just trying to live your life while living in the future.

SATURN APARTMENTS (Dosei Mansion), by Hisae Iwaoka.  First published in 2005 and first published in North America in 2010.

PLOT:

At some point in the future, humanity abandoned Earth so it could become a planet-wide wildlife refuge.  Now humans are confined to a massive space station drifting through the upper atmosphere and the lower on the socio-economic scale you are, the less sunlight you get to see.  Those precious windows are expensive to wash, and it's done by people like Mitsu.

Mitsu is an apprentice window-washer straight out of school.  His father was also a window-washer, but he died mysteriously on the job.  It's up to cranky old man Jin to teach him, as Mitsu learns to appreciate all the details of his work and the people he meets.

STORY:

This is a sci-fi story by way of slice-of-life.  Saturn Apartments is as slow and methodical as the window-washers themselves, inviting you the reader to get nice and cozy with Mitsu and Jin.  It's not unpleasant to read, but I found it hard to get invested in it and Mitsu was the big reason for that.  There's just not that much to the kid.  He's very passive and he learns more through observation than action.  In fairness, this is true for much of the cast.  Jin is about as dynamic as we get, and his deal is that he's a crank on the job and a doting husband at home.  It wasn't enough to keep most of the details of this story from slipping out of my head shortly after finishing the first volume.

ART:

Iwaoke's style will be a deal-breaker for a lot of people.  They draw these tiny-eyed potato people against these vast, cold structures, something that doesn't really fit with most readers' ideas of manga art.  I can't say that I cared for it myself, as it's a style that makes it hard to distinguish characters and even harder for them to emote.  I will say that I liked her backgrounds.  They capture not just the scale of the space station but also the economic divides within it.  You get a real sense of history, character, and size in the spacious, sealed-off apartments of the rich, the breezy middle layers, and the dark and crowded slums of the poor.  The panels tend to be big, all the better to show off the views from both the outside and inside of the station.  I just wish I cared for it more.

RATING:

Saturn Apartments has some good-looking elements and and a peaceful, ruminative tone that some people will enjoy.  That said, it was a hard sale for manga readers a decade ago and it's not much different now.

This series was published by Viz.  This series is complete in Japan with 7 volumes available.  All 7 volumes were published and are currently out of print.