Yamamoto Naoki - Dance 'Till Tomorrow, vol. 01 (Eng. trans.)

[oyceter]

First new manga I've read in quite some time -- it's kind of funny having several people on the reading list start reading manga (and meeting the girl in Hawaii who was very into it) after having sort of passed my glomming stage.

I picked it up because it was at the store and because one of the books had some sort of Editor's Choice thing on it. Must remember sometimes that trusting the summary on the back is a good thing. It seems to be a fairly typical shounen romance, ala Marmalade Boy and Tenchi Muyo and all those other ones. By fairly typical I mean the setup, in which a young, fairly normal, down-to-earth guy (sort of the male version of the gawky girl with glasses), Suekichi, is interested in a nice, good girl (in this case, the director of his theater troupe, I think), while being sexually tempted by a morally dubious, very open girl. At least, that was the set up in the first book. Granted, the next few could have changed the formula a bit, but from reading the backs, it didn't much seem like it, so I gave up. I don't know if there is a similar setup in non-manga fiction -- I can sort of see echoes of it in Robert Jordan (Rand has three girls chasing after him!) and in Elfstones of Shannara (Eretria and Amberle), and I'm sure others have it as well, but maybe not so obviously? But I think it's safe to say that it's a pretty well-established genre or sub-genre or trope or whatever you choose to call it in manga and in anime.

It's also a trope that annoys me, mostly because the girls are really stupid and fight each other constantly for the guy. And while I am generally all for women who are open about their sexuality, the type in these works tends to turn me off because they feel so gratuitous. You know, I wonder if this is how guys feel when they read romance novels. Good but boring guy vs. hot and slightly uncivilized stud is a pretty common formula (see: Sunfire romances). There's a lot of sex in this book, and it's fairly graphic. I was actually surprised at what was drawn at times, give the censorship laws in Japan. Maybe they've changed? I do remember that they aren't supposed to draw any sort of pubic hair or genitalia, but I distinctly remember seeing a penis or two. Maybe I am making it up. Generally, the attitude is very literal, so you see pretty much everything, except the girl looks like she's giving a blowjob to a cylindrical white space (and etc.).

Anyway, it wasn't really my thing. I think people who like Tenchi Muyo and Love Hina would enjoy it.

I was also just reading it and thinking about the differences between the anime and manga fandom/readers/viewers in America and back at home. It's always interesting talking to people who've started reading/watching manga/anime here, as opposed to Taiwan. It's just a very different environment. In Taiwan, I bet everyone has read at least something or watched something. And anime is on TV all the time for afterschool stuff. I think sometimes here it's hard to remember that a lot of stuff in anime and manga isn't just genre, although, of course, a lot of it is as well. I think Akira has such a big influence on the market here that people or companies have the tendency to promote the sci-fi and fantasy anime and manga (or, heh, the really violent or really sexually explicit, or both) here, which has led to the misperception that I run into all the time. I spent most of freshman year telling everyone that really, anime wasn't just porn, that most of it wasn't horribly violent, and that no, not all of it involved young people running around piloting giant robots. I actually rather dislike most of the "canon" in the US -- Vampire Hunter D, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Ninja Scroll, etc. I'm not too good with violence.

I will also say that it's gotten so much better these past five years here, it's hard to imagine. (this is when I go into the bad old days spiel) I remember when the only manga I could find was Ghost in the Shell, maybe Lone Wolf and Cub. And they never had any of the series I watched unless it somehow involved magic or big robots. Or cat girls. Cat girls were always popular ;). And you know the Neil Gaiman piece on girls in comic stores? That was me at the local anime rental place. Completely stereotypical fanboys with Magic decks, and I felt so out of place, being a rather small and very Asian girl. Now I can just go to Borders and get manga (although it's still horribly expensive!!).

Things that are still sort of weird and culture-shocky are that they're still now only starting to really translate the stuff that I read. I'm actually very surprised that it's taken so long to put out Rurouni Kenshin. Maybe there were problems getting the rights? I just saw vols. 1-6 in a Borders. That said, I'm also really surprised that they've already got translated versions of Paradise Kiss (by my favorite mangaka, Yazawa Ai) and Mars out, given that both of them are about fairly normal schoolgirls, no magic involved whatsoever. That's the sort of manga I sort of ended up reading. While I love the genre stuff, I also like the littler, everyday stories. Plus, shoujo fantasy can get really, really weird. Like X and the decapitations and the over-the-top gothicness, which is a subgenre in and of itself, of course. I don't know why I like genre so much in English book reading and not as much in manga. I think the sheer weirdness of Angel Sanctuary, which, while gorgeous, was also really hard to read in Chinese ("inorganic angels" in Chinese makes no sense. Then again, it's not like it makes that much sense in English). Actually, you know, the language barrier might have been the deciding factor. In the end, all those fantasy series and historical series on samurai and sci-fi series have waaaay too many technical terms. Normal shoujo (and shounen, but, as stated above, I don't much like shounen romance) on the other hand, is pretty easy to read in either Chinese or Japanese. Just learn a few key words (the specific phrase for confessing a crush, "I like you," "infatuation," etc.), and the rest is pretty easy to follow. The most technical bits I got was "contraception" and "pregnancy." It's sort of interesting looking at the general vocab acquired and what that tells you about the genres as a whole.

I learned "Omae wo korosu" (I will kill you, derogatory form of you), "Shinigami" (death god), "sensou, heiwa, kakumei" (war, peace, revolution) and "tatakai" (fight) from Gundam Wing. I learned "bara no kokuin" (the Rose Seal), "bara no hana" (the Rose Bride), "hikari" (shining/light), "eien" (forever/eternity), and "kiseki" (miracle) from Shoujo Kakumei Utena/Revolutionary Girl Utena. I learned "kouhaku" (the phrase that means confessing a crush) and "shiawase" (bliss) from various shoujo manga (along with contraception, pregnancy, infatuation, etc.). I think that in general really helps sum up the mecha, magical girl, and shoujo romance genres, respectively ;).

So I miss my shoujo romances. I admit, most of them are horribly cliched with gender roles that make me want to bang my head against the wall repeatedly, but there are a few that I was still reading. And the cuteness level can take some getting used to, if one is not already. I think that's also a big difference between the States and Taiwan (watch me pull giant generalizations out of nowhere!). A lot of people in America that I've talked to about manga and anime tend to comment on the excessive cuteness, or the SD-ness, or the chibi characters, not to mention the giant, sparkling eyes of shoujo doom. Of course, I am generalizing, and I'm sure there are people here who like it and people in Taiwan who think it's excessively cute. But that's been the general, non-scientific impression for me personally. I've always sort of wondered why that is and suspected most answers of being horribly nationalistically essentialist (ethnically essentialist? culturally?).

Anyway, I am still waiting for them to translate Nana (also by Yazawa Ai, which is my favorite manga right now) so I can stop buying the Japanese ones. I like Nana because it's got the sort of romanticized elements of most shoujo romance (come to think of it, some day I should write a post on the similarities and differences between shoujo romance and my romance novels), in which Nana is a friend of a girl (also named Nana, different characters in Japanese but makes the translation difficult) who is in a punk rock band, with all the glamour that entails. But I like it because it's about a girl who graduates from high school with no idea of what to do with herself (most shoujo takes place during middle or high school). I like that she worries about money and paying the rent and having to budget even though she wants to buy pretty clothes. And most of all, I like the way the love affairs are handled, and how Nana is a complete idiot when it comes to her own emotions and how the narrator knows this. I also like how there is cheating without a clear villain and how there are random hookups and loveless sex and emotional confusion. I also like how there isn't one single guy for Nana, as opposed to a lot of shoujo romances. Also, Yazawa Ai's drawings are really, really pretty ;).

I'm also waiting for them to translate Hana Yori Dango (Meteor Garden), also known as one of the most popular shoujo romances I know of (and have not yet read). And Slam Dunk, a fairly typical shounen sports manga. And have they ever translated Yuu Yuu Hakusho? I would think they would, given its popularity and the fact that it has cool ghosts and demon stuff. Also waiting for 3x3 Eyes (has that been translated?), which had stuff on Tibetan Buddhism that was way too hard to read in Chinese. But there does seem to be a trend of moving toward more non-genre things, which is good! It's kind of weird watching the sort of manga/anime "revolution" here that people have been predicting since the eighties actually take place. Hrm, that was a lot of random blathering ;)

ETA: Whoa!! I just ordered Dance, Judy Cuevas off ZShops, and Hana Yori Dango/Boys over Flowers popped up in the recs! It's in print! Wow, I wonder if everything else is too?? Cool ^_^.

Comments

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

(come to think of it, some day I should write a post on the similarities and differences between shoujo romance and my romance novels),e (come to think of it, some day I should write a post on the similarities and differences between shoujo romance and my romance novels)

I would *love* this.

I read Mars in the week around Wiscon (some of it while waiting in the airport), and adored it, despite some misgivings about gender issues and a general embarassment about how *girly* it all was, which tells you all too much about me.

Manga in the US is still heavily slanted towards sf/f, I think, but I do know also that the people I know so far who read it are also big sf/f fans -- you and boniblithe I met through Buffy fandom, and rachelmanija I met through sf fandom. And I was in a very sf mood when I started looking at manga, so I selected for that.

[oyceter]

I picked up Mars and basically sped through the entire thing one winter vacation, and then only afterwards really realized just how melodramatic it was (still loved it though). I think I also spent a large part of the time arguing with myself if Kira was too passive, etc. etc. gender roles, etc. etc. Sigh. It's really hard to find a non-stereotyped heroine in shoujo manga, imho.

I was definitely first sucked in via the entire sf/f thing -- Gundam Wing! Pretty boys piloting large robots, heh heh. And then further sucked into manga via Kenshin and heroic sword-fighting escapades. It's interesting that I've sort of switched genres and headed toward the more romancey side of things, and I wonder what will happen in the States once more of those series are published here.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I'm really pleased at the improving quality of translations and the increased variety of genres being brought over -- even I can tell there's a real difference between the sloppiness and the Americanization in stuff like the older Viz translations of X and the newer Tokyopop translations of TB. I've run into some concerns about Orientalism and the fetishization of the exotic -- but really, the more the translation is willing to try to convey the original context and nuance to me, the more comfortable I feel about reading. (I'm not ready for the nine Japanese words for "I" to remain untranslated, but I would like to get a better sense of why things are sometimes translated into first person and sometimes into third -- and leaving "san," "sama," and "kun" untranslated works so much better than the very awkward English workarounds they used to come up with. "Missie"! I shudder.)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Levels of formality are so essential in Japanese I think it's best to leave them untranslated. In some ways I prefer anime to manga just because I can hear the Japanese as I read the English, and so can catch more of those sorts of things. (Including the many types of Is and yous.)

Regarding Missie, which is pretty awful, I'm having a hard time thinking of an English equivalent, since what he's literally saying, if I recall correctly, is "oneechan," or "sister (informal, friendly)." I might have gone with "Arashi-chan."

[oyceter]

It's interesting -- Chinese has this expression "La mei" (literally, spicy little sister), which means "hot chick." I wonder if it's anything like "hot mama" (or however that's spelled) and the interestingness of using signifiers for female family members as signifiers for sexiness in casual speak. Ok, weird linguistic digression...

I remember horrifying these nice Japanese people we went to dinner with when I asked them what "omae" meant.

[oyceter]

That's really interesting -- I actually haven't read very much translated manga at all, so I haven't noticed. I do remember lots of rants in the anime fandom about the Americanization of many shows for TV (rice balls turn into donuts, etc). In Chinese I think there was less of a translation problem, given the overlap in the kanji used. But it still doesn't quite manage to catch the gender differences in the pronouns and honorifics, which takes out a lot of the interesting-ness in gender-bending series like Utena. I think Utena was how I ended up taking a class in Japanese linguistics, heh.

I've actually not heard the concerns about Orientalism and exoticism, interesting. I really do wish there were a way to sort of grasp the nuances, but it's so hard to do that and to have everything sound non-stupid.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

I think there's a lot of visual skill involved with decoding the images in manga and anime. I consider it analogous to reading, and suspect that there are easy images somewhere for beginner practice. (Or maybe not. Young children might just be willing to peer through acres of chaos in search of some kind of pattern.) It's not just the coding of character expectations and plot devices that you and other reviewers write about. I'm thinking of very basic conventions like how faces are shown, or how characters are identified from one page to the next, or how one shows movement.

[oyceter]

I think so too -- I got a lot of "why are there random flowers everywhere?" and etc. when I showed my manga to a few friends. I can't remember who -- either Frederik Schodt or Scott McCloud or both -- did an interesting little rundown of the "grammar' of manga and how it differed from American comics (mostly thanks to Tezuka Osama).

I guess it's sort of like having to get your mind around another prose style when reading books written during another century.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

>I read Mars in the week around Wiscon (some of it while waiting in >the airport), and adored it, despite some misgivings about gender >issues and a general embarassment about how *girly* it all was, which >tells you all too much about me.

Except for the part about Wiscon and the airport, me to. Were we separated at birth, or is our reaction symptomatic of how an early exposure to feminism and both political and personal issues with gender roles leads to both critical reading and an automatic bristling at anything which society dumps into the "appropriate for females" basket, even if there's nothing inherently wrong with it?

On another subject, great post!

When I show people manga or anime for the first time, their first comment-- always-- is that the characters don't look Japanese. They have a really hard time reconciling the characters being Asian with their eyes not having epicanthic folds. The hair colors don't help. I generally give them the standard story about Osamu Tezuka having been influenced by Disney and it them becoming a convention, plus hair colors making it easier to distinguish characters, but even people who are familiar with the idea of genres having conventions (like sf fans) seem to have a really hard time with it.

And once they get over that, THEN they have a hard time with the tone shifts and the concept of chibi. Not the cuteness so much.

(Regarding non-sf fans having trouble with conventions, my Dad once read a fantasy novel where the characters travel from Los Angeles to Magical Alternate Los Angeles. He had no problem with the cops riding on giant butterflies and so forth. But what completely destroyed his suspended disbelief was that the characters there spoke English. He kept insisting that since everything else was different, they should speak some fantasy language. I kept saying, "It's just a convention, like the way Tolkien's characters aren't really speaking English, but we couldn't read the book if it was written in Hobbit." But for some reason he could not wrap his mind around it.)

Yes, YUU YUU HAKUSHO is available, and I'm pretty sure I saw SLAM DUNK in a bookshop the other day. The first volume of HIKARU NO GO also just came out, and PRINCE OF TENNIS is supposedly available but I haven't been able to find it anywhere.

[oyceter]

When I show people manga or anime for the first time, their first comment-- always-- is that the characters don't look Japanese.

Me too! Every single time. And I remember a rather controversial article in Time back in '99 (or '98) on how the lack of Japanese-looking characters meant that the Japanese all wanted to be Caucasian.

I had a friend who could just not get over the fact that the characters would change from "normal" mode to chibi mode, and freaked out over the fact that chibi people had no fingers, or whatnot. I think it's really interesting seeing what people have trouble accepting. It does take some getting used to, particularly the attention given to the background and the relative lack thereof to the characters in the foreground. It's funny because now when I watch some Disney films, I notice the backgrounds more because of anime.

It's so cool that so much more stuff is getting published!

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

When I show people manga or anime for the first time, their first comment-- always-- is that the characters don't look Japanese. They have a really hard time reconciling the characters being Asian with their eyes not having epicanthic folds. The hair colors don't help.[...]

And once they get over that, THEN they have a hard time with the tone shifts and the concept of chibi. Not the cuteness so much.

Er. Yes. Guilty.

Even when you're familiar with the idea that all reading is shaped by genre convention (whether you're conscious of the conventions or not), it's startling to run up against conventions operating by a logic different from your own. After a while, I think, you get that, say, in Western lit, a genre romance novel must end happily with a marriage, while the same story told as a bildungsroman might end happily with a divorce -- but it's still startling to encounter a story from another literature where the marriage subplot is subordinate to the protagonist's intimate friendship with a tree.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Have you been reading PLEASE SAVE MY EARTH?

I think one of the reasons I've become some enchanted with manga and anime is that the conventions are different, and hence seem fresh and new. Stories and characters seem more original (even if they're actually not) and harder for me to predict where they're headed. There's nothing like the thrill of discovering an entirely new genre and set of genre conventions.

Regarding the eyes and so forth, I wonder if part of what's going on is that as America is a far more racially heterogenous society than Japan is, Americans are more used to sorting people by racial markers and hence are confused when, instead of using visual markers for race, it's assumed that if the story's set in Japan and the language is Japanese, everyone's Japanese unless otherwise stated and there's no need to get fussy about eyelids and hair color.

As for chibi and the flower or star backgrounds in shojo manga (not to mention the extreme self-referentiality and breaking of the fourth wall that's also common in manga) I wonder if that's an outgrowth of other Japanese visual arts, which may make more use of nonrealistic conventions than is common in Western visual arts. Sure, these are no longer popular art forms, but Kabuki and Noh and Bunraku all have a very conventionalized set of visual symbols with more-or-less fixed meanings, whereas Western theatre has far less emphasis on signifiers. (I hope that's the right word.) (Musical theatre is an exception, but the nonrealistic elements are aural rather than visual.)

I should say, I don't mean so much that manga is influenced by Kabuki and superhero comics are influenced by Eugene O'Neill, as that everything's coming from the same set of ideas about how visual storytelling arts are supposed to work.

Though I personally am intrigued more by differences at the story level, perhaps the conventions of manga which are least like any that Western readers are familiar with, and so the ones that people "stick" the most on, is the use of non-realistic visual images to convey emotional or symbolic content.

[oyceter]

I don't know.. I wonder if one could argue that post-Code Hollywood had the same sort of visual signifiers (I haven't watched enough to really know). Ditto with what seems to be rather codified symbols in European renaissance and medieval art (again, something I don't know much about). I also wish I've read enough Osama Tezuka to figure out just how much of those signifiers came from him.

And (to pile on the questions) I wonder how much easier it is for someone who reads lots of American comics to get into manga. I do remember one of the most interesting things about reading Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics was his very basic breakdown of the "grammar" of comics because I had never really thought of how much subconscious processing was going on.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

You're probably right about symbols in European renaissance and medieval art. The rose, for instance, is very significant there, and I remember being puzzled regarding UTENA over whether roses were symbolic according to European symbolism, or whether they were symbolic in Japan in an entirely different way. But I don't think that particular set of codified symbols really penetrated into American popular or even elite culture. (But I'm not an expert!)

Post-code Hollywood--- were you thinking of trains going through tunnels and other signifiers for sex? I'm not sure. I tend to think of those sorts of symbols as being less abstract than, say, flower backgrounds, but that may just be because I'm more familiar with them.

I wonder too about previous comics reading being a factor, but the popularity of manga with American girls and women argues against it. I'm sure many or even most of the small audience of female American comic readers are also reading manga, but I have a feeling that a lot of the manga readers didn't come from that audience. I know that a) manga is booming in the US b) American comics are doing so-so, c) women make up something like fifteen percent of the readers of American comics (higher for non-superhero books like Neil Gaiman's, and d) half to more than half of manga readers are female.

I'd love to see some real numbers to find out if more American women are reading manga than are reading American comics, but I haven't seen that comparison anywhere. I cna't figure it out from the percentages, as presumably there's far more American comics than there are translated manga.

[oyceter]

Heh, I'm guessing the rose symbolism in Utena was meant to be according to European symbolism as filtered through Japanese knowledge.

I'm a bit leery of attributing set cultural reasons for the style of manga (actually ended up writing the entire thesis about it, which was not originally my intent!)... I don't know... mostly I looked at it from a bit of a removed angle because I was writing about the scholarship. I think a lot of what we may think of as obscure symbolism isn't very obscure at all to them, much like a rose meaning love or something here.

Sigh. I wish I had more statistics on readership and etc. I wonder if anyone's writing articles or books on manga/anime in the US?

[oyceter]

Gah, I wish I remember or wrote down thoughts when I first got into anime. I don't remember if I thought all that was weird or not. I suspect I did, because I used to make so much fun of Sailor Moon. I think the initial squee factor and the fact that half my class was into the same anime helped get past that genre convention wall.

[ebonbird.livejournal.com]

I really love hana dori yango. The art is a mess but the story itself and all those elements? So very fine.

[oyceter]

I really need to read/watch that sometime (everyone has been yelling when they find out I haven't) ^_~.