Dream with Our Eyes Open

The Black Lagoon manga is back after another hiatus.

The crime organizations that run the city of Roanapur have reached a fragile and likely temporary peace. The ceasefire might be shattered by the latest events, though: someone (actually, several someones) has been targeting big black men around the city. The victims are associated with a variety of Roanapur's leading crime syndicates, so the heads of those organizations together request the Lagoon Company to investigate. It seems clear that Dutch will be on the list of targets, so the Lagoon crew don't hesitate for a nanosecond to accept the job.

And besides, this may give Rock, Revy, and Benny more information about their mysterious boss.

Hiroe's art style has gone weirdly backwards: he's using the classic manga Big Eyes, Small Mouth style seen in the first couple of tankoubon volumes. In the previous couple of volumes, his drawings of Dutch and Benny in particular were showing a craggier, more realistic look, and Balalaika, Rock, and Revy were drawn a bit more realistically as well. Now everyone except Dutch looks rather like the child assassins Hansel and Gretel from the early days: youthful and creepily doll-like.

This arc is not resolved. I hope we don't have to wait another two and three years for it to finish.

Hi! I'm back too!

A feckless young man has but one wish the day he's released from a prison term for minor charges: to take in some Rakugo, a Japanese art form consisting of storytelling by a single performer who does the narration, all the character voices, and some simple sound effects. He tracks his favorite performer, the master Yakumo Yurakutei VIII, home after a performance and insists on becoming his apprentice. Yakumo never takes apprentices, but somehow the persistence of this awkward and uneducated fellow wears the master down.

At first Yakumo treats the young man, to whom he gives the apprentice name Yotaro, as a combination of man-of-all-work, pet, and comic relief. In addition to Yakumo himself, the household includes Matsuda, his elderly valet/driver/housekeeper, and a moody young woman named Konatsu, who was Yakumo's ward when she was a child. The tension between Konatsu and her guardian is like an open wound: he ignores her most of the time, but when he does notice her, it's usually to remark on how much she looks like her father, and she reacts with angry words and tears. At this point in (recent) history, classical Rakugo was closed to women performers, and Yakumo is adamant that Konatsu will never become a storyteller while in his household.

Yakumo gradually starts treating Yotaro as an actual apprentice, but the young man's real teacher is actually Konatsu. Whatever her history, she has an encyclopedic knowledge of Rakugo stories, and although the master remarks disparagingly about her tutoring of Yotaro, he never outright forbids them to continue. Yotaro's cheerful antics, willingness to work at menial tasks, and enthusiasm make him popular in the yose (Rakugo performance hall), and it looks like he might actually succeed in his ambition.

One day, it all comes crashing down. Yotaro, exhausted from a late night, falls asleep during the evening's storytelling at the yose and snores so loudly that he interrupts his master's performance. Yakumo throws him out. Yotaro comes crawling back, but Yakumo rejects his pleas — and then suddenly has somewhat of a change of heart. He starts to tell Yotaro and Konatsu of his own history, back when he was known as Kikuhiko, and that of his fellow apprentice, the man who became the Rakugo artist Sukeroku: Konatsu's father.

I had never heard of Rakugo before. The theatrical arts always interest me (I used to be in stage crew in high school and college), and the human intrigue of this story adds another dimension, although the story starts out rather slowly. The artwork is pretty great: mangaka Haruko Kumota's drawings remind me a bit of Fumi Yoshinaga's work in its more relaxed versions (What Did You Eat Yesterday?, for example), although it's a little looser and sloppier (example here, showing Yotaro and a more senior apprentice watching Yakumo perform in vol. 1, from Sequential Ink), especially when drawing Yotaro.

You can find Rakugo in English online! Here is a brief comic tale told by woman performer (things have changed).

This josei series is compete in 10 volumes. The five I have read take the story from the beginning to the next section of the modern-day story, after the extended flashback about Sukeroku and Kikuhiko. I certainly intend to finish the series.

ETA:. This is an even better intro to Rakugo, with another woman performer.

Well, it's been a while. I have been reading like crazy, but I doubt I can remember all I've been reading off the top of my head. Here's what I can recall at the moment:

For whatever reason, I have never previously read anything by Tamora Pierce. Recently, Big South American River had all three volumes of the Beka Cooper series on sale as ebooks for a pittance, so I bought them. And after a re-read for a writing project, I read them. And read them. Until I finished the whole thing.

Rebakah (Beka) Cooper is a child of the slums, but she, her siblings, and her mother come under the protection of a powerful nobleman and are taken into his household. The mother dies, and the children are trained in jobs that befit their station: the boys as couriers, the girls as maids ... except that Beka wants to be a Dog, one of the constables that their patron commands. She has a natural aptitude for it, as well as some supernatural powers that come in handy on the job (mages of various kinds are not uncommon in this world). The series opens as Beka as become a Puppy: a Dog trainee. It follows her as she becomes a full Dog and then one of the most skilled in her city's company.

It's very absorbing reading, vivid and enjoyable. I had a very strange feeling about the first two books versus the third, though. It was as though Pierce had conceived of and possibly even written the third book first, and then went back and wrote the first two. The first two are written as though they are the diary of teenaged Beka, and they work pretty well in that way. The third, where the stakes are much higher and where Beka and her team are crossing miles and miles of countryside, gets less plausible as a diary and also somewhat less engaging for me. There's also a plot twist that I'm not sure I buy as in-character for the person involved.

Is anyone here a Pierce fan? Which of her other books would you recommend?

I've also picked up the most recent volumes of the manga Black Butler (vol. 26) and The Ancient Magus Bride (vol. 9). When they arrived, I discovered that I had completely lost the plot of both series, and the previous volumes were lost somewhere in the house. The Mr. finally tracked them down for me.

Black Butler takes a serious turn after the arc about the mysterious doings in the popular music hall, in which we saw Victorian "boy bands" captivating the crowds (anachronisms mean nothing to mangaka Yana Toboso) as a front for far more sinister activities. Ceil discovers something momentous about his past... although this being Black Butler, I'm not sure of the truth of what he has discovered.

The Ancient Magus Bride covers the final part of the arc in which Chise has suffered grave effects after preventing a frightened young dragon from laying waste to London. She, Elias, and some fairy allies also put their main adversary to rest, at least for the time being. This is apparently not the end of the series, but a new major story arc seems to be next.

My, it's been a while since I've done this.

Last week and the first of this were spent having the flu, followed by bronchitis. This would have seemed a great opportunity to read, but I was too miserable. I read fanfiction and magazines and that's about it. The new manga series I meant to start (bought the first few volumes of each at Katsucon) remain untouched.

I did do a bit of manga series catchup:

Natsume's Book of Friends vol. 21 remains Natsume-ish: poignant little stories with gentle humor. There is one chapter with a young Natori/young Matoba flashback that is likely responsible for the lashings of Matobe/Natori slash and pre-slash fanfic I've been seeing. Matoba is the kind of dark, perhaps evil character that many fangirls love to love (like Ukoku in Saiyuki, yuck), but I'm not one of them, so the mangaka is going to need to give me more reason to like Matoba.

Behind the Scenes!! Vol. 5 explores high school crushes with a keen eye and much tenderness. We usually see Goda through Ranmaru's eyes as a charismatic and even brilliant leader, but at the end of the day, he's just as much of a geek perfectionist as rest of the Art Squad. It's unsurprising that he's not terrible perceptive about the nature of Ruka's reactions to him lately, nor that he's awkward in responding to her when he finally gets a clue. Mangaka Bisco Hatori (Ouran High School Host Club) is so sensitive in portraying these situations that I really wish se would cover even more groups of geeky teens. Still, I guess one series at a time, done well, is all I can reasonably demand.

Also, Goda's superpowered multifunction watch invention is all kinds of hilarious, especially to a former theater crew geek like me.

BTW, does anyone know the proper genre category for this manga? I would guess shoujo, like its elder sibling Ouran HSHC, but I can't find any such info.

And I remembered that my bro-in-law gave me (at my request) for Xmas the first of the "Rivers of London" comics volumes, Rivers of London: Body Work. The depictions of the characters aren't bad (although Nightingale really doesn't look like my idea of him), and the main story (about a strange sort of haunting involving an automobile junk yard and chop shop) was decent. Not enough Beverly, IMO (but Sahra Guleed does play a large role). But I really enjoyed the little one-shot side scenes at the end, There's one involving Molly, Toby, and an old car that never would have worked from Peter's POV, but as a comic, it's just delightful.

So I have finished not only The Invisible Library but also its sequel, The Masked City. At this point I am enjoying the series enough to continue. And yet, and yet ... I keep feeling that author Genevieve Cogman is not making as good use of her elements as might be. There are bits and pieces here that remind me of many other fantasy works, ranging from Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" comics series through Diana Wynne Jones' Multiverse books (both Magids and Chrestomanci) to Jim C. Hines' "Magic Ex Libris" book series, and as I mentioned last week, the tone and settings remind me somewhat of Martha Wells' "Fall of Ile Rien" series. That's not meant to be a negative: I feel pleased rather than otherwise every time I spot a resemblance.

Still ... we have a series set mostly in a parallel Europe (or rather, a series of parallel Europes), we have a recurring minor character from India, we have dragons that are mostly based on Chinese legend ... but I don't have a feeling that somewhere across the ocean are the Americas, that there is Africa off to the south, that east Asia includes also Japan and Indonesia. The Fae are mostly the British Isles Fae: we don't even seem to have any of the European mythological peoples. The settings we see are fairly well drawn, but I don't have a feeling that anything lies beyond them. I'm not sure what Cogman could have done about this, but it's a lack I felt.

I will say that the series does turn out to have a bit of wit I'd been missing when I wrote last week; still, Irene is not as amusing a viewpoint character as (say) Martha Wells' Tremaine Valiarde. I think part of it is that Irene takes herself more seriously.

I realize that I never wrote about the new-to-me manga series I'd started. Golden Kamuy is a seinen (young men's) series about a whole heap o' gold that's hidden somewhere and the people who are trying to find it. It's set in the early 20th century, right after the Russo-Japanese War, and the two main characters are Saichi Sugimoto, known as "Immortal" Sugimoto, a former Japanese soldier with remarkable powers of recovery, and a petite young Ainu girl named Asirpa who is a superlative hunter and tracker. Weirdly, the series also has a dash of cooking manga: Asirpa's cooking is described with the same enthusiastic reverence shown toward traditional Japanese cuisine in the famous food manga Oishinbo. The rest of the series reminds me of Blade of the Immortal more than anything else, although the artwork is not quite as gorgeous as that (it's still well-drawn, though).

Complex Age is about a cosplay enthusiast, Nagisa Kataura, who is starting to have second thoughts about her hobby. She's 26, older than most of the other cosplayers she knows, and she is keeping her hobby a secret from her co-workers at the office and even to some extent from her parents, with whom she lives. The second volume is mostly taken up with a possible cautionary tale about her stern supervisor at work, who also turns out to be a cosplayer. When people at the office find some pictures online of the supervisor in revealing costumes, the disapproving gossip and sidelong looks get to the supervisor, and she quits. I have to say that this really hit home for me: mainstream folks can still indeed be obtuse and unkind about fannish pastimes. I find myself rather worried with where the series might be going with Nagisa. Note that this is also a seinen series (this is something that confused the hell out of me when I first encountered the idea, with the girls' kendo team series Bamboo Blade), so there are a certain number of panty shots etc. — although the series is self-aware enough that this very subject becomes a plot point in the first volume (someone takes an up-skirt photo of Nagisa when she's in costume).

I've actually been mainlining new (new to me, anyway) fiction like nobody's business. I had a lot queued up for the vacation last month, and for various reasons, I didn't get to it. Now I have. Some quick takes:

The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin is everything most reviewers have said. Very satisfying ending to a very dark, sad series. Happy was not going to happen, but hopeful *did*, and beautifully so. It was a positive ending that was most definitely earned. And I really loved the world-building all over again.

City of Miracles by Robert Jackson Bennett also ended its series well, if a trifle oddly. Alas, most of my favorite characters didn't survive. There were nods to all sorts of other works, including rather a lot of Terry Pratchett, I realized after finishing the book.

Murderbot: All Systems Red (novella) by Martha Wells was a lot of fun, about a snarky, introverted android that has circumvented its "restraining bolt" programming and becomes something of a sleuth+superhero on behalf of its humans. There are already three more Murderbot stories in the pipeline. Yay!

The Furthest Station (novella) by Ben Aaronovitch at first disappointed me because I didn't realize it was a novella. But viewed in that light, it was an enjoyable brief addition to the Peter Grant/Rivers of London series. The identity of the cute little tyke whom Peter encounters was absolutely no surprise to me, though.

The Gates of Tagmeth by P.C. Hodgell was OK. These most recent Kencyrath books have rather disappointed me. I respect Baen for acquiring and continuing this series, and even attempting to obtain suitable cover art in the last couple of volumes (although crap, I still think that even a casual persual of DeviantArt would turn up better choices), but holy crud, a good editor would have helped the last few a lot, I think. And Baen is not the publisher to supply that. Jame and her fated love still generate no heat that I can discern, sadly, and I wish PCH hadn't matched up Kindrie as she did. I like both characters, but not together. This makes me think of the manga Fruits Basket, where the mangaka seemingly decided that everybody needed to be matched up at the end, regardless of whether it made any sense. Also, poor Lyra is becoming a pawn of fate/God's chew-toy more than is necessary, IMO.

What Did You Eat Yesterday? vol. 12 by Fumi Yoshinaga continues Ken and Shiro's low-key relationship and Shiro's cookery. This volume seemed to have less melodrama/tension than the last few (nothing dire happens to either partner's family, for example), although someone makes Shiro a very interesting proposal ... and the results are both very funny and very realistic.

Ooku vol. 12, also by Fumi Yoshinaga surprised me because ... they solved the problem of the redface pox. And yet it is not the end of the series! I do have to say that in retrospect, I feel a little ... ticked off? that the solution comes under the reign of the first male shogun in ages (although his mother thinks she is still in control of things) and by the efforts of an exclusively male team (although they all constantly acknowledge the inspiration of the late lamented cross-dressing genius Hiraga Gennai, who was cis-female). That might not be a worthy way to feel, but that's how it is.

Reading Now

The Brightest Fell, which is the latest installment of Seanan McGuire's October Daye series. Speaking of people who are chew-toys of the divine: Toby continues to be messed with physically and magically, over and over. I do have to say that one of the events had me going "Oh, no, not again."

I finished All the Birds in the Sky. It wasn't bad, but it just sort of ended: too much build up, not enough resolution. And now I'm annoyed by the title, because although it sounds really nifty, it doesn't have all that much to do with the story. This is not going to be my top vote for best novel, I'm afraid.

Also in Hugo reading, I read through Ursula Le Guin's Words Are My Matter, a collection of recent short non-fiction pieces. I love Le Guin as an essayist, and the first part of the book contains some good examples. But the back half-and-a-bit is introductions to books and book reviews, and I found those less interesting. A number of them were for non-genre literary or magical realism works that didn't sound as though they'd appeal to me. She did mention a couple of Western (as in, Western U.S.) novels that I might want to look up, which I will mention here partially for my own reference: Crazy Weather by Charles McNichols and The Jump-Off Creek and The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss. Also, although Perdido Street Station pretty much put me off China Mielville for life, her review of Embassytown is making me reconsider.

Overall, unless the rest of the Related Works are very mediocre, I don't think this will be my top pick in that category.

I have just started Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer, which is short-listed for Best Novel. A number of the readers on File 770 had trouble with this book, but I'm not finding it problematic thus far. Possibly the fact that I actually like Anthony Burgess' A Dead Man in Deptford (link goes to Kirkus review), which was also purposefully written in the style of an earlier era, has something to do with this. I'll have to see where the book goes, of course.

Finally, I'll be re-reading some of Fruits Basket, Because Reasons. Does anyone recall the number of the exact volume in which Machi shows up? It's when she wrecks the student council room, if the Wikia is to be believed.

This past weekend was Katsucon, so I have a stack of new manga. Most were recommended by "Year's Best Manga" lists on various sites, but one was something that looked intriguing when Great Big South American River brought it up in response to something else I was buying. As might be expected, I'm finding them a mixed bag.

Nichijou (Nichijou - My Ordinary Life) by Keiichi Arawi, vols. 1 and 2
Um, no. This comedy + slice-of-life high school series was billed as whimsical and surrealistic. It has a blocky, primitive drawing style that I'm presuming is deliberate. This does mean, however, that some of the surrealistic events have to be called out by the characters, or you wouldn't know what was up. When a wooden hand falls from the sky onto someone's head, for instance, it looks just as realistic as any of the characters' hands. And when the school principal tangles with a deer outside a character's classroom window, the student gazes at the spectacle with the same blank look she gives to just about anything.

The killer for me, however, was the treatment of the one character I found sympathetic, a robot schoolgirl who just wants to be a normal human being. Her creator, a child mad scientist, delights in tormenting her creation by refusing to remove the large windup key on the robot's back. She seems to have created the robot for just this purpose, plus some light housework. The whole thing left a bad taste in my brain. This one is going straight into the give-away pile.

Haikyū!! by Haruichi Furudate, vols. 1-3
On the other hand, I pretty much inhaled the first volumes of this shounen sports manga. While short, hyperactive Shōyō Hinata was in middle school, he saw a televised volleyball game featuring a player who was called the "Little Giant" for the way he dominated the game despite his small stature. Shōyō is inspired to nag and cajole his way to the creation of a boys' volleyball team at his own school. Despite their complete lack of a bench or any real experience or coaching, the team manages to avoid completely embarrassing themselves in their first and only real tournament, in which Shōyō encounters cerebral, athletically talented Tobio Kageyama.

In his mind, Shōyō paints Tobio as his nemesis, but when they both start high school, they find they're rookies on the same team. Not only that, but when their contrasting skills are put together, they become something special. At this point the story line kicks in for real as the remaining players on the team are introduced, along with their genial faculty sponsor who knows nothing about volleyball (and thus serves as the viewpoint character for similarly naive readers) and their coolly elegant manager, the only female character to make an appearance thus far. I especially enjoy the sweet senior player who has exiled himself from the team because, after freezing and woofing a key shot in a tournament, he feels he can't support his team mates properly (all the feels, Asahi!). This is probably nothing more than a typical example of its genre, but I'm enjoying the characters and their interactions.

Hey, long time no post, and this one will be short, but I've got to start getting back to posting somehow.

So I just started what looks like a delightful new-to-me manga series. It comes with an impeccable pedigree for being delightful: it's by Ouran High School Host Club's Bisco Hatori.

Behind the Scenes!! stars awkward, terribly introverted Ranmaru Kurisu, who was the odd one out in his family of hearty, hardy fisherfolk. Now at university, he's been creeping around trying not to draw attention to himself. One day, he encounters an apparent Zombie Apocalypse and is so shocked that he passes out. When he wakes from his faint, he discovers that it was a movie scene and that he has been rescued by the eccentric, creative members of the Art Squad, who provide costumes, makeup, sets, and special effects for the university's three film-making clubs.

Can Ranmaru find himself with this bunch? The answer is, of course, yes, and it's as much fun for us as it is for him.

There are two more volumes so far (I only have vol. 1 currently), and I will be picking them up ASAP. It's a good (if temporary) antidote to the current sociopolitical horror show.

I have finished Hidden Figures. It was interesting and I am glad to have read it, but I wasn't enthralled. I realize that one of the factors in that was the lack of images. Most histories of recent times have photos and so on. This had absolutely none. I'm puzzled. NASA could have supplied a number of them, because you can find them online (examples here and here).

Next, I should start the book I just got in preparation for the Days of Awe: This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transfiguration, by Alan Lew (1944–2009). The author was a rabbi who was also an adherent of Buddhist thought: he's been called the "Zen rabbi."

However, I am sure that instead, I will start with volumes 2 and 3 of A Silent Voice, the manga I started last week.