Merry Month of Manga: SHORT-TEMPERED MELANCHOLIC AND OTHER STORIES

 As this blog enters its 13th year, I'm celebrating it in the usual fashion: a month's worth of reviews.  This time around, it's all One-Volume Wonders, starting with this collection from notable shojo mangaka Arina Tanemura.

SHORT-TEMPERED MELACHOLIC AND OTHER STORIES (Kanshakudama no Yuutsu), by Arina Tanemura.  First published in 1998 and first published in North America in 2008.

PLOT:

Kajika is the heir to an old ninja family and is proud to show off the skills her grandfather taught her...at least, until her crush Fujisaki tells her to be more ladylike.  Her attempts fail, but after her childhood best friend gets into a fight with Fujisaki for her honor she learns that it's better to be true to herself than to meet some boy's unrealistic expectations.  This is followed by other simple tales of teenaged love, including a girl who uses her ditzy best friend as a stand-in during a date with a pen-pal, a girl trying to convince a stubborn boy to not give up on love, and a girl who gets over her crush on her best friend's boyfriend thanks to a particularly persistent admirer.

STORY:

I've not made a secret that I am not an Arina Tanemura fan, despite more than a few tries on this site.  Yet here I am trying again, this time with a collection of early short stories from her.  Maybe I was hoping that I would find her more tolerable in smaller portions.  Alas, it was not to be, as overall this collection is kind of middling.  There are some decent premises to be found here, but too much time and effort was put into the gimmicky ones while the others find themselves wanting for a little more time and a few less forced plot points.

The longest story is the titular one, whose title apparently comes from a J-pop song since Kajika is anything but melancholic.  Instead she is your standard-issue Spunky Yet Oblivious Shojo Heroine, albeit one with some ninja skills.  Her love interests come in two flavors: Grumpy and Sneaky.  One is your standard Childhood Best Friend who is too emotionally constipated to fess up to his crush on Kajika while the other is a rival ninja clan heir who has more interest in pursuing a pointless family feud than he does in Kajika.  You'll see every story beat coming from a mile away, but it's fast-paced enough to keep things from getting unbearable.  

"This Story is Nonfiction" is also rather gimmicky, but in a weird way I found it more enjoyable.  It's a rather weird little story as you would presume it would focus on Yuki and her pen-pal but instead follows her friend Karin falling for the pen-pal's substitute Ryono.  Theirs is not exactly a romance for the ages, though, considering Karin is won over by general kindness and a dolphin pendant.  

I also kind of liked "The Style of the Second Love," if simply because Mana's dilemma is treated with a bit of dramatic restraint.  That being said, I can understand why she would prefer fixating on her best friend's boyfriend and not on Shi-chan.  He's annoying, loud, constantly insists he is her boyfriend, and constantly invades her personal space.  He's basically a stalker-in-training but he's treated more like an irritating running joke than anything else.  Still, Mana's conflict over her loyalties and coming to terms with her unrequited love is dealt with in a comparatively understated manner, and emotionally it's the most effective story of the collection.

The least of these stories is "Rainy Afternoons are for Romantic Heroines."  It's about a chipper girl trying to connect with her crush, only to discover that she accidentally became the reason he refuses romance in the first place.  She's obsessed with romance but completely unexperieinced, so her attempts to seduce him (which mostly involve recreating the rainy day mishap which brought them together in the first place) are suitably blatant and clumsy.  It ends with a shrug, and the whole thing is so trifling that it's all but forgotten the moment you turn the page.

So in the end only half the stories did anything for me, but that's actually better than average when it comes to my experience with Tanemura.  She did demonstrate the ability to make some emotional impact in a short amount of time and space, and considering these stories weren't far removed from her debut that's rather impressive.  I just wish she could have focused more on the emotional nuances and less on the gimmicky set-ups and cheap drama, as the latter would come to define much of her career.

ART:

Even at this early stage, Tanemura's particular style of character design is already well-established.  She's still working out things like proportions in some of the earliest stories, and everybody has distractingly enormous foreheads.  Still, it's basically the same cutesy, hyperdetailed look that her fans love (and that I personally hate).  She does draw some good reaction shots, even if they have to compete with all the flowers and patterned screentones she likes to shove into her panels..  She also might have recycled some of these characters for her later, better-known works.  Kajika bears a suspiciously strong resemblance to Phantom Thief Jeanne's Maron, while Karin looks an awful lot like Mitsuki from Full Moon o Sagashite.  

RATING:

Short-Tempered Melancholic is far from a perfect collection, but it is a perfectly good showcase of what Arina Tanemura could do as a mangaka (for better or worse).  Fans of her work will likely enjoy this a lot, but it's harder to say whether it works as a good introduction to her works for newcomers or if it'll come off as little more than a curiosity.

This book was published by Viz.  It is currently in print.