Review: TSUKIYOMI MOON PHASE

 Sadly I've mostly come to dread vampire manga.  That's not because they are frightening, but because more often than not they are just bad like today's example.

TSUKIYOMI MOON PHASE (Tsukiyomi), by Keitaro Arima.  First published in 2000 and first published in North America in 2005.

PLOT:

Kouhei Mido is spiritually deficient.  He had spiritually sensitive parents, he can photograph ghosts by accident, but he is completely unable to sense the supernatural.  That probably explains why he wasn't disturbed when he stumbled upon a mysterious young girl in a castle while accompanying a group of ghost hunters.  The girl, named Hazuki, charms Kouhei into letting her kiss him...which really means biting him because she's a vampire who wants to turn him into her minion.  Her bite has no effect, but she still insists on following Kouhei back to Japan to find out about her past and to continue lording over him.

STORY:

Moon Phase takes two things that I hate (loli and tsunderes) and combines them to make them worse!  I suspect that readers are meant to find this all funny but the whole thing just left me cold.  

I want to find the people who decided that nothing is funnier than "haughty little girl fights with boring dude because she's crushing on him" and punch them in the face.  This trend was inescapable in the 2000s because of early adopters like this series making it a trend in the first place.  It is such an painfully unfunny character dynamic and it doesn't get better with repetition.  It also takes forever for this series to get around to the actual premise.  It takes half of the volume for Hazuki to bite Kouhei, escape the castle and start her search.  

So much of the blame lies with Hazuki.  All her pretense at sweetness ends with that first bite; afterwards, she does nothing but yell, throw fits, and manipulates others with her cuteness.  I was almost prepared to praise the manga for not sexualizing her in the ways that the anime version did, but then it felt the need to show Hazuki lounging around naked in a hot spring in a supremely uncomfortable way.  Kouhei is no better.  He's completely nondescript, nothing but a living sounding board for Hazuki's tantrums. Arima tries to bring some pathos to him by giving him a missing mother just like Hazuki, but it's far too little effort and far too late into the manga to be effective.  All that's left is just obnoxiousness.

ART:

Unlike the anime, this manga can't coast on Akiyuki Shinbo's visual style.  It's actually quite plain-looking.  The craziest it gets visually is Hazuki's little squashed head and a running visual gag where she gets cat ears.  There's a lot of spiritual shenanigans, but most of it is represented with nothing more than blobs of screentone.  Even the backgrounds are plain.  Clearly what little effort Arima put into this series visually was Hazuki's lolita dresses and nothing else.

RATING:

Moon Phase might be the worst vampire manga I've ever read, and very little of it has to do with the vampire content.  Mostly it's just obnoxious, boring, and visually dead.

This series was published by Tokyopop.  This series is complete in Japan with 16 volumes available.  12 volumes were published and are currently out of print.