Category: Manga

Manga of the Month: September

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Team Medical Dragon by Akira Nagai and Taro Nogizaka

I have to give credit where credit is due, it was actually Narutaki who discovered Team Medical Dragon and an excellent discovery it was. Team Medical Dragon is basically what happens when you take Say Hello to Black Jack and make it an insanely over the top critique of the Japanese medical institution. Or if you want a western analogy take Gregory House and make him sexier and crazier. It seems like crazy talk, I know. I will let you try to imagine that and then come back.

Asada Ryuutarou was a genius surgeon until politics and apathy forced him out of his medical profession. Katou Akira gets him to come out of retirement as the first step in having him help perform her radical new heart surgery technique. So Asada returns to medicine in Japan but insists on practicing his way causing him to be too good to get rid of easily but too brazen to get along with anyone conservative. Ijyuuin Noboru is an intern that Asada recruits whose main purpose is to whine about how they have to follow the rules so Asada can kick logic to the curb and do the impossible. Oh, and he is also sort of there to learn to be a great doctor but mostly the first part. Miki Satohara is a hot nurse who is mostly there to be hot and bad arse (which is a good combination).

The first chapter will tell you right off the bat if you want to continue reading this manga or not. If you read it and think that guy is cool I must read more of his insane medical madness then continue on because it only goes up. If you think that the first chapter is too crazy then stop right then and there. Those mere 40 pages or so have sex, action, over the top but well researched medicine, character conflict, political drama and just plain fun. As it goes on the fun just continues, I mean Asada jump starts a patient’s heart in the street with a car battery. He gets audience commentary during surgery like he was playing Mahjong or participating in a fighting tournament. It is just good crazy with a healthy dose of valid Japanese medical criticism.

Kagen no Tsuki by Ai Yazawa

This short 3 book story may be a bit unusual if you know Ai Yazawa’s more popular works. This piece combines the supernatural, friendship, love, mystery, redemption, and tragedy into a striking tale. One day, a girl named Hotaru chases after a cat, which she has mistaken as her own missing one, into a beautiful but abandoned house. After she realizes her mistake, she is drawn by a haunting melody which she follows to its source. There she discovers the house isn’t so abandoned after all and meets Eve a pretty young woman who says she is waiting for her boyfriend to return. Hotaru and Eve become fastly acquainted but when Hotaru brings her friends to meet Eve it becomes apparent that only Hotaru sees the mysterious woman. The rest of the story centers around these 4 friends as they uncover the mysteries of just who Eve is, why Hotaru sees her, and what exactly caused it all to happen in the first place. Hotaru is spunky and determined which plays off her friends who are in turn earnest, intelligent, and carefree. Through the increasingly strange information they unearth their bonds of friendship strengthen and young love blossoms. The story has a very dark undertone that only gets more pronounced as it goes on to the point of being spine-tingling at moments. Ai Yazawa’s signature style is ever present here with some added spice and doesn’t fail to intrigue to the very last page.

The thin line between moe and masturbation.

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Talking about moe was the third article we ever did for the blog. Moe is, for a wide variety of reasons, a topic that Narutaki is forced to discuss and debate with me on a regular basis. So this is an article that has been fermenting in our minds for quite awhile. A small discussion about the nature of moe and sexuality broke out on twitter. Scott VonSchilling was arguing that moe and sexuality are separate traits and should not be considered connected. I then used one example that turned the whole conversation into a fire storm of debate, Mikuru Asahina. She is a character who is famous for being extremely moe and extremely sexualized but more importantly sexualized for and by her moe. The conversation quickly spiraled out of anyone’s control.

It has been many moons since we last discussed this growing term and I don’t even remember what spurned on our first article. I honestly try to avoid such discussions when I can, it’s true but it still comes up pretty often whether I see it on Twitter or on a bus ride to Otakon. Sometimes I participate and sometimes I just take in the discussion going on around me. Moe, everyone’s got an opinion about it so what we are adding here is not just our overall perspective on the genre/term/thing, but rather a specific instance of it.

As I mentioned in our Otakon 2009 report I am still not sure people in the anime business in Japan comprehend the full meaning of moe let alone anyone else. I am better at defining what moe is and detecting it when it exists in a show but on the other hand I am still light years away from a perfect understanding or acceptance of the term. As far as I can tell moe has maintained its bizarre dual meaning. In a general sense it means an attraction and devotion to any trait. You can be moe for maids with glasses, blond boys who are in gangs, or curry joints that serve their dishes on trains. In a more specific, pure, and otaku sense it means the desire to protect weak characters that cannot protect themselves. In its ideal and stated definition there is no sexuality in moe. You want to protect the moe character and have a chaste love for them. Some describe it as a fatherly need to protect and nurture someone weaker. This more specific definition is the one that causes the most problems and is the focus of the discussion.

Up until a couple of years ago I had no idea this word even existed or held a place in fandom. Obviously, since then a lot of anime watching has happened, a lot of reading has gone on, and numerous discussion have taken place and still there is no consensus on what exactly moe is. Luckily, we are telling you which popular theory of the word is up for debate. Moe is about security and affection given through supporting and protecting a character who for some reason can’t do so on their own. There are a myriad of reasons why characters exude this need. Despite the many things I could say about this scenario (and the many problems that arise), they aren’t all relevant to this particular discussion. It’s worth noting that while some moe characters are very young, many fall into the high school age so always equating moe and lolicon is a stretch even though that is a popular assumption. And by extension moe does appeal to the lolicon crowd. However, what is important for the current theory we are undertaking is that the characters aren’t supposed to elicit eroticism but rather endearment.

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Ongoing Investigations: Case #055

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Another Kara no Kyokai movie and other review. Movie number 6 is Oblivion Recorder which focuses on Mikiya’s sister Azaka Kokuto as she looks into students with missing memories with some help from Shiki. Apparently fairies under a mages control are stealing people’s memories. It is a flawed work without a doubt but I really enjoyed as I have all the other Garden of Sinner’s movies. This is really a movie all about Azaka co-staring Shiki. Azaka does most of the investigation and gets all the keys scenes. If there was any doubt that Azuka was the prototype for Akiha from Tsukihime they were dispelled by this movie. The animation stays fluid and while the action scenes with Azuka are very well done, Shiki’s action scene was quite brief and somewhat underwhelming. Satsuki Kurogiri hovers on the line between important and unimportant and his fate is ultimately left very vague. As I understand he has a much more expanded role in the original book which makes much more sense. In fact a post on Anime Diet goes into great detail on how the book and the movie are vastly different. I hope that Del Rey continues with their plan to translate the books so I can compare the two myself. Oh, the little omake scene at the beginning is all build up to one horrible pun. Of course I loved it.

I picked up a copy of My Japanese Coach for DS, I had been weighing whether or not to do this for quite a while because quite frankly I am just terrible at language. However, my fluctuating desire to know Japanese got the better of me. The program is broken into six stages of which I just completed the first one so it seemed like a good time to discuss how it is going. You are first given a multiple choice test to see what you might already know. Just from what I know from anime and the such I was able to skip 4 or 5 lessons. The game then does a quadruple duty of helping you learn vocabulary, sentence structure, verb conjugation, and kana through lessons taught by Haruka-sensei and games designed to help your memorization and writing skills. As you learn more, lessons unlock and new games appear. I haven’t gotten all of the games yet, but it is easy to see that some are much better structured than others. For example, Spelltastic would be much better suited (and helpful) to spelling in kana rather than romaji. The lessons themselves are set-up fairly well and for the most part don’t overwhelm you. Teachings that are long such as learning kana letters and verb conjugation are split up into many lessons with other things in between. This really helped me to learn what little was shown to me before heaping on more. It is also worth mentioning that after lesson 30, no more romaji is used in the lessons. By the end of the first 30 lessons I know all of my kana; I have started making sentences; my vocabulary is way up and I can catch more when watching anime; and most importantly, it seems to be sticking with me. I say that is progress indeed!

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