Tag: Azuki

June 19, 2022 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Hikaru likes to sing while she is sweeping up at work. But she is good at it. Good enough to turn it in to a career? Nobody would take it that seriously, until her old friend Ran-chan returns from the Big City and announces that she is going to audition for a […]

March 11, 2022 · 1 comment

By Jeannette Ng. One of the most arresting things about Hico Yamanaka’s manga The Prince in His Dark Daysis how profoundly wrong its protagonist, Atsuko, looks in a schoolgirl uniform in the opening chapter. It is what made the rather familiar prince-and-the-pauper identity-swap setup hypnotically compelling to me. Atsuko Okawa is a struggling teenager who […]

November 27, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jeannette Ng. Much as the Motion Picture Academy loves films about film-making and writers love nothing more than a protagonist who is also a writer, manga about making manga has become its own little subgenre. There is an art to balancing the indulgent navel-gazing and insider-jokes with the bluntly realist looks behind the proverbial […]

November 2, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jeannette Ng. Interviews with Monster Girls by PETOS starts off more or less as its title promises. Tetsuo Takahashi is a biology teacher who has long been fascinated by the existence of demihumans. Some combination of narrative contrivance and fate has resulted in him sharing a school with four of them — Hikari Takanashi […]

October 12, 2021 · 1 comment

By Jeannette Ng. I was running out of To Your Eternity (also by Yoshitoki Oima), which I was also absolutely loving, so I thought I’d read about the adventures of Shoya Ishida, repentant class bully. My interest in redemption arcs tends towards the melodramatic and fantastical – grand, blood-drenched villains who discover their heart of […]