Manga Reviews: Koi Kaze & Living Game
Good grief it's been a long time since my last post. I blame a variety of factors, most involving various conflicts of schedule and just about anything else that deflects responsibility from me. At any rate, today I've decided to give a 2-for-1 type review: "Koi Kaze" and "Living Game". Neither of these series is available domestically as far as I know and I just happened upon translated scans of them while browsing around the internet. It has been a month or two since I read these series and I'm writing this from memory, so I will say that least 80% of what I write will be true, with the rest having some probability of being a little muddled. So with that out of the way let's get started.
Living Game
This series is an older one, it's publishing run was from 1990-1993, and is a fairly cute slice-of-life/romance/comedy story. The main character is 25-year old salaryman Raizo Fuwa who is struggling to deal with the Japanese real estate boom and eventual recession of the '80's and early 90's. He lives in a small cramped apartment where he can't move without bumping into anything, and he works in a small cramped office with four other people where there is barely enough room to fit their desks. But change is on the horizon as he manages to find a new, larger apartment and his boss finds a new larger office and even hires on a new employee. Through a series of events both the new office and the old office get demolished, so the company begins to use Fuwa's apartment as a temporary office space, leaving it nearly as cramped as his old place was. To top if all off, the new employee is a 15-year old girl named Izumi who moves to Tokyo from the country and so has no real place to go. After her initial attempt to rent a place on her own ends with the building being demolished and since Fuwa is so worried about her, he agrees to take her in and let her live in his apartment. The rest of the story, split up over 10 volumes and three years of story time, follows the blossoming relationship between Fuwa and Izumi and their individual growth. There are other characters that pop in fairly regularly like Fuwa's friendly ex-girlfriend who crashes at his apartment every time she has a fight with her rich husband and runs away, the rich husband, and a couple more because what's a romantic comedy without some zany characters?
If I were to pick one word to describe this series, I guess that I'd have to go with "charming". It's hard for me to peg a single thing about the series that I really enjoyed because it all comes together so well that it's hard for me to pick it apart, but since I am writing a review I will at least try. As you can see from the image above, the art and the character designs are simple and clean characterized by lots of soft round shapes and the characters are easily distinguishable from each other and fairly cute. Throughout the story the characters appearance change to help convey the passage of time in their world so while Izumi looks like a schoolgirl when she first shows up on Fuwa's door (as pictured), she finishes the series looking like a much more mature woman. The art style and the usually subtle humor creates an upbeat and slightly silly mood that carries through the entire series, and even when the mood turns serious the two keep the series from getting too dark which is a welcome to "Koi Kaze", which I'll talk about a little later.
Another positive note for me, was this was one of the rare series where I didn't really hate anyone in the cast. Fuwa is kind of whiny at the start, but onlike some other protagonists who just seem to be whiny on principle, he has a legitimate reason to gripe (his home being taken over by his office) and he proves early on to be a reliable person in a pinch (despite constantly being called irresponsible) and has a good heart. As the series progresses and life forces him onto new paths that he'd never considered he manages to find something that he's passionate about and grows to rise to the new challenges thrown his way. Izumi starts off as just a cheerful young girl who seems ready and willing to help, but she occasionally acts as a compassionate counterweight to Fuwa's big city callousness in a handful of situations and she grows as she comes to terms with her feelings for Fuwa, the reason she ran away from home to Tokyo, and what exactly she wants to get out of life. All in all, the characters are very believable and relatable and the relationship between Fuwa and Izumi stays chaste, but emotionally deep, for the vast majority of the series. I tend to get a bit emotionally invested myself in series that I enjoy and so when I started the series I had some niggling issues with the ages of the protagonists and the nature of their relationship, but by the end they seem to be so genuinely in love with each other (and Izumi is old enough) that I finished the series pleased with the way everything had developed and ended. If you're looking for a charming little romance that's light on angst and moves at a decent clip without getting bogged down in years of limbo (Ah My Goddess! I'm looking at you) I'd recommend reading "Living Game".
Koi Kaze
To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what to think of this series now that I've finished it. It's one that I picked up on a whim without carefully reading the little plot synopsis. The premise goes like this: Nanoka and Koshiro are siblings who were separated when their parents divorced 10 years ago and they haven't seen each other since. Because his house is closer to her new high school, Nanoka decides to move in with Koshiro but they meet by accident and go on a date and some sparks fly, only later to realize that they are really brother and sister. Now this is more or less what I had to go on when I started reading so I was expecting some kind of light-hearted comedy or something, I don't really remember. One thing that the summary neglects to mention though are the respective ages of the brother and sister. Koshiro is 28 and works at an omiai company (meetings for marriages basically) and Nanoka is a 15 year old high school student.
Like "Living Game," "Koi Kaze" is a seinen series (young male adult) which explains the ages of their protagonists and I have to admit that "Koi Kaze" is fairly well written. After about chapter 3 I started having issues with the course the story and the characters seemed to be following, but I kept reading because I really wanted to know where everything was going to go. As I said near the end of my "Living Game" review, I have some problems with a 20-something year old guy hooking up with a 15 year old girl, but that series defused that particular feeling by being relatively light hearted and chaste. "Koi Kaze" has much less humor in it and maybe as a result, some of the stuff that happens seems a lot less innocent. For example there's a scene not long after Nanoka moves in where Koshiro walks in and sees the laundry basket with Nanoka's underwear. He's spent most of the day trying to reject the notion that he has romantic (or sexual) feelings for his little sister so what does he decide to do? He grabs a pair of her panties, crouches in the corner and starts sniffing them. Nanoka walks in at this point and because she didn't see what he was up to, she's startled by his extreme reaction. The whole series kinda plays out like this with Koshiro struggling with himself because he knows his feelings are not acceptable and the fact that she reciprocates his feelings doesn't help things at all. This internal conflict within Koshiro is probably the central element of the series and makes for a compelling read but I found myself in a situation where I couldn't think of an ending that satisfied me. The author has made it so that they're feelings for each other are powerful enough that if they conform to social conventions then there will be much heartbreak and pain all around. But if they flaunt society and act true to their feelings, I can't feel good about it because incest (and especially pedo-incest) is something I feel very strongly against. Koshiro's generally creepy behavior and his dirty looking sideburn/beard... thing does nothing to dispel the weird pedo-vibes I got from the guy. I won't say which way it ended, and if you don't mind reading something you disagree with, I'd say give it a whirl. I enjoyed reading it once, but I highly doubt I'll ever read it again. On the other hand, if you have absolutely no problems with the scenario the manga cooks up, don't contact me. Ever. Seriously.
-ZK
