Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers; in my last letter I promised some manga recommendations, so here are a few I’ve enjoyed recently:
Witch Hat Atelier by Kamome Shirahama. About Coco, a young dressmaker who gets caught up in a mysterious plot by a cabal of masked wizards to overthrow the established order. The art and story world both feel quite wholesome at first, but there’s a bigger, darker question lurking underneath—of just who is allowed to wield magic—that I hope gets answered in a satisfying way. I say “I hope” because the serial is still ongoing. I’m five volumes into the eight currently translated to English.
Chihayafuru by Yuki Suetsugu. Also ongoing. A friend introduced the anime version to me years ago, and I’ve been revisiting it in book form. Chihayafuru has all the fittings of a sports manga, but in this case the sport is karuta, a competitive poetry-memorization card game(!) In karuta, an announcer reads off, one by one, waka poems printed on a deck of one hundred cards. The first side to slap the corresponding card takes the point. It might seem relatively straightforward at first, but the game has tremendous depth—a depth I won’t deprive you from discovering for yourself through the series. I will say that this might be one case where I slightly prefer the anime to the manga, for being able to hear the poems read in their original Japanese. But I recommend both!
Fukushima Devil Fish by Katsumata Susumu. A compilation of shorter alternative comics by Katsumata Susumu, the highlight of which are a pair of haunting strips about laborers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors. Created twenty years before the 2011 meltdowns, the comics are journalistic in a David-Simonesque way—the characters might be made up, but it’s through them we get to see the invisible workers who bear the cost of a societal convenience.
