Read This: Yotsuba&!
I’ve been meaning to say something about the Yen Press translations of Kiyohiko Azuma’s Yotsuba&! since the seventh volume came out last month. My favorite volumes in this series are the ones where the story flows most smoothly from episode to episode, so #7 is high on my list; most of the back half consists of the anticipation and fulfillment of a promised trip to a ranch to see cows (because that’s how milk gets made), with the added bonus that Yotsuba’s arch-enemy, “useless” Yanda, invites himself along for the ride.
I also love Azuma’s range of facial expressions, especially the number of different ways he has of drawing Yotsuba’s eyes depending on the mood of the scene. And I haven’t done a point-by-point comparison, but the new Yen translations seem to catch the impulsive goofiness of the strip a bit better than the previous editions—there’s detailed explanations from a senior editor online, and you can find readers who appreciate the new style (sometimes with reservations), too. Over the weekend, I plunged into the Yen versions of the first five volumes (the ones that had been published before in the US) and I found there were things that I liked better now, things like the little tweaks to the personality of Jumbo, the best friend of Yotsuba’s father, that make him seem a bit more grown up at times but still capture his immature goofiness when he’s interacting with the kids in the series.
I always appreciated the grounded-ness of the series—the idea that this isn’t too far off from how a precocious and energetic child with understanding adults around her really can spend her days—and that seems to come through a bit better now. The stories are clear enough that you could start anywhere, but I do think it’s worth it to start from the beginning and then work your way up to the fireworks show, and the fishing trip, and the day at the zoo… then, too, the little bits of continuity will accumulate from volume to volume and you’ll have even more reason to smile.
18 January 2010 | read this |
Read This: Oishinbo
Over the New Year’s weekend, I plunged into four volumes of Viz’s translations of the Tetsu Kariya/Akira Hanasaki manga Oishinbo—which, rather than run through the 27-years-and-counting storyline, picks out individual chapters and arranges them thematically, with volumes devoted to subjects like Japanese cuisine, fish, sake, and pub food. The effect is somewhat disconcerting, because you’re frequently skipping over huge gaps in the characters’ relationships and struggling to fill in the pieces; imagine watching Happy Days for the first time out of sequence so that sometimes it’s about Richie and his pals, then it’s about Joanie and Chachi, and sometimes Arnold runs the diner and sometimes Al does, and Ted McGinley wanders in and out of view…
Still, this arrangement gets at the real heart of the popularity of Oishinbo, which is its obsession with Japanese food as a matter of honor and national cultural identity. Seriously: Kariya and Hanasaki once spent three chapters on a debate over the propriety of serving raw salmon, and six on every single thing that was wrong with Japan’s sake industry—imagine if Steve Ditko took all the passionate intensity of Mr. A and poured it into a comic book about cooking, and you’ve got a rough idea of what to expect. Speaking of intensity, the one core element of the narrative that does come through in the retelling is the feud between Yamaoka, the protagonist (he’s the one who looks vaguely bored up above), and his father, Kaibara.
9 January 2010 | read this |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
