Watanabe Takeo - Kaze Hikaru, vol. 01 (Eng. trans.)
Thu, Mar. 8th, 2007 11:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterIn order to avenge the deaths of her father and brother, Tominaga Sei shaves her head, disguises herself as a boy, renames herself "Kamiya Seizaburo" and joins the Shinsengumi. There, she's soon discovered by Okita Soji, who proceeds to take her under his wing instead of kicking her out.
This sounds like something I should love: girl-disguised-as-boy kicking ass, Shinsengumi, and right-around-Meiji-era Japan. And yet, I was so bored that I never even got around to finishing vol. 2.
I just don't like Sei very much, and I found that the humor of the manga really isn't all that funny to me. Sei freaks out every other second about the behavior of the Shinsengumi; she doesn't think that their bathroom humor, jokes about women, or assorted drunken parties are funny at all. Neither do I, but Sei objects on a more moral level; she doesn't think that honorable people upholding the honor of the shogun who have lots of honor (did I mention the honor thing?) should act that way. Mostly I want to slap her on the side of the head and tell her to get a life, or at least to get a better sense of how the real world works.
When she's not freaking out about honor and bushi and the bushi code, she's freaking out over Okita or getting teary-eyed about her revenge. Unfortunately, this also bores me and/or makes me want to slap her on the side of the head.
Sei seems to be the sort of person who doesn't actually know anything about how life works (why yes, you can be a promiscuous bastard and still be a folk hero to people), and the entire narrative on how she learns that wow, contradictions can actually exist in life, that the honorable and noble way of the bushi can also involve killing people in cold blood, and etc. isn't a narrative that interests me in the least.
On a more minor note, I don't like the art either.
Wow, I'm grumpy today.
On a less grumpy note, I'm not quite sure why this was published in Viz's Shojo Beat. The panel layouts, the narrative, the art and the main conflicts all seem to be very shounen to me. Maybe it's the Shinsengumi thing and the crush on Okita thing?
This sounds like something I should love: girl-disguised-as-boy kicking ass, Shinsengumi, and right-around-Meiji-era Japan. And yet, I was so bored that I never even got around to finishing vol. 2.
I just don't like Sei very much, and I found that the humor of the manga really isn't all that funny to me. Sei freaks out every other second about the behavior of the Shinsengumi; she doesn't think that their bathroom humor, jokes about women, or assorted drunken parties are funny at all. Neither do I, but Sei objects on a more moral level; she doesn't think that honorable people upholding the honor of the shogun who have lots of honor (did I mention the honor thing?) should act that way. Mostly I want to slap her on the side of the head and tell her to get a life, or at least to get a better sense of how the real world works.
When she's not freaking out about honor and bushi and the bushi code, she's freaking out over Okita or getting teary-eyed about her revenge. Unfortunately, this also bores me and/or makes me want to slap her on the side of the head.
Sei seems to be the sort of person who doesn't actually know anything about how life works (why yes, you can be a promiscuous bastard and still be a folk hero to people), and the entire narrative on how she learns that wow, contradictions can actually exist in life, that the honorable and noble way of the bushi can also involve killing people in cold blood, and etc. isn't a narrative that interests me in the least.
On a more minor note, I don't like the art either.
Wow, I'm grumpy today.
On a less grumpy note, I'm not quite sure why this was published in Viz's Shojo Beat. The panel layouts, the narrative, the art and the main conflicts all seem to be very shounen to me. Maybe it's the Shinsengumi thing and the crush on Okita thing?
(no subject)
Tue, May. 15th, 2007 06:37 pm (UTC)(er, are you by any chance the one who asked if I was Lt. Noin earlier? Feel free to comment anon, though it's always nice to know who it is handle-wise)
I love the Bakumatsu era.