Review: VOICES OF A DISTANT STAR

A romance set against the backdrop of space sounds epic, but stories like this prove that it can be intimate and longing as well.

VOICES OF A DISTANT STAR (Hoshi no Koe), based on the film by Makoto Shinkai with art by Mizu Sahara.  First published in 2004 and first published in North America in 2006.

PLOT:

Mikako and Noburo are middle-school sweethearts whose budding relationship is interrupted when Mikako is chosen to join a special space exploration force.  Her job will be to pursue a group of aliens on a chase through the solar system and beyond.  Now the two are literally separated by time and space; the further Mikako gets away from Earth, the longer it takes her messages to reach Noburo.  As time on Earth passes, Noburo has to come to terms with what Mikako means to him and how to move on in a world without her.

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.

Review: ASTRO BOY

 This month we're going to look at some science fiction manga, and if we're going to do that we might as well start with the sci-fi manga that changed everything.

ASTRO BOY (Tetsuwan Atomu), by Osamu Tezuka.  First published in 1952 and first published in North America in 2002.

PLOT:

In the not-too-distant future, humanity and robots live and work alongside one another, if not always in peace and harmony.  The most advanced robot of them all is Astro, built by a genius scientist to replace his dead grandson but abandoned in a fit of pique.  Taken in by the kindly Dr. Ochanomizu, Astro uses his power to help those in need, be they human or robot.

Review: YOU'RE MY PET

 Of course, just because a romance is strange does not mean it is inherently bad or that the manga itself is lacking, as today's example proves.

YOU'RE MY PET (Kimi wa Petto), by Yayoi Ogawa.  First  published in 2000 and first published in North America in 2004.

PLOT:

Sumire seemingly has it all: a great college education, a job as a journalist at a high-profile newspaper, and the tall, stately look of a model.  Too bad then that she's just been demoted from the politics section to the lifestyle page, her fiance dumped her for his mistress, and her coworkers are convinced that she's a stuck-up ice queen who deserves what she gets.  

Then she finds a boy in a box.

The boy in question, a teenaged runaway, likes the attention she gives him (along with her cooking) and begs her to let him stay.  She agrees, on one condition: that he serve as her pet.  They won't be dating, but she will provide him with a place to stay, food to eat, and as much attention and affection as he can tolerate.  He won't provide her with his actual name, so she dubs him "Momo" after a former pet.  Their strange arrangement seems to be working for a while until Sumire's old college friend Hasumi comes back into her life looking to rekindle their relationship.  Can she maintain a relationship while keeping Momo a secret?

Review: PRIMITIVE BOYFRIEND

Normally we here at the Manga Test Drive spend February looking at bad romance manga, but after this last year we need something of a break from badness.  Let's spend this month looking at strange romances instead!  And what could be stranger than a shojo manga about a girl falling for a literal australopithecine?

PRIMITIVE BOYFRIEND (Genshijin Kareshi), by Yoshineko Kitafuku.  First published in 2017 and first published in North America in 2020.

PLOT:

Mito wants a man as strong and sturdy as her garden, but all the boys in her class are self-centered and weak.  She gets her wish when the harvest goddess Spica wants to reward her with her soulmate.  The problem is that her soulmate is a 2.5 million-year-old hominid and being with him means Mito has to survive the dangers of Pleistocene-era Africa!

STORY:

In her author's note, Kitafuku notes how this story grew from a number of small ideas: a pure romance, time travel, a farm girl in the big city, and so on.  I'm not 100% sure how that turned into this particular premise, but truly original premises in shojo are rare so I'll take what I can get.

I do like how this story values how strong and capable Mito already is.  Her friends might encourage her to act more stereotypically weak and feminine to land herself a man, but Mito refuses to compromise herself and that's a very admirable quality.  Of course, no modern human is strong and capable enough on their own to deal with things like Ice Age predators, so it doesn't feel egregious or hypocritical when she finds herself needing her proto-human soulmate (nicknamed Garhi, after his species name) to save her. 

Of course, it's kind of weird to fall in love with a creature that's still more ape than human, but Kitafuku certainly tries to make that as palatable as possible.  She hobbles the competition by making all the modern hot guys self-centered and weak.  They are clearly meant to be parodies of some of the usual otome guy types, from the smug womanizer to the shy otaku.  That said, Garhi's whole strong and silent thing can only go so far, considering he doesn't have things like 'a concept of language.' 

All that said, as someone with an anthropology degree and someone with a long-standing interest in paleontology, Kitafuku's loose and fast approach to history drove me a little nuts.  I wanted to give her a little credit for making her story revolve around a fairly new species of hominid and making its status as an evolutionary dead-end a plot point.  But then she populates this world (which ostensibly Africa, based on the savannahs and jungles seen and where fossils of A. garhi have been found) with creatures that weren't found there.  Yes, there were saber-toothed cats in Africa, but not ones that look like the Smilodons she's drawing! Woolly mammoths wouldn't have been found alongside Deinotherium, and neither of them on that continent!  Was that a freaking Archaeopteryx I saw in one panel?  I realize that asking for scientific rigor in a goofy shojo manga about a girl and a monkey-man is kind of ridiculous, but sometimes it's the little things that can throw you right out of the story.

ART:

Kitafuku's art is a little rougher and less cute than you typically see in shojo art today.  This is most obvious in the faces, with their long squashed rectangle mouths.  It doesn't help that everything is so busy: the backgrounds, the panel layouts, the sound effects and shojo sparkles layered over it all.  Most of the emphasis is on the action, but they're put together in such a scattershot matter that it's hard to follow just what is going on.  It's only when she lets things calm down that any sort of charm can come through, something that's made all the more evidence in the side story.

PRESENTATION:

Kitafuku's debut story, "Giselle's Flash," is included here.  It's the story of a hapless teen ballerina who overcomes bullies at the dance studio and every sign pointing to her having no real talent for ballet through the usual hard work and perseverance.  It's OK.

RATING:

I want to go along with what Primitive Boyfriend is trying to offer, but I don't think it was poor research alone that put me off of it.  It feels like it should all be a big joke, but I don't think this series is quite sure what the punchline should be and the mangaka doesn't have the art skills to make it cute or funny or even all that interesting visually.  It's just there, being neither weird enough to recommend nor bad enough to fully shun.

This series is published by Seven Seas.  This series is complete in Japan with 3 volumes available.  All 3 have been published and are currently in print.