Manga Notes: Maison Ikkoku 2
Feb. 19th, 2021 08:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhen I read the first volume of the new release of Rumiko Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku, experiencing a title in the background of my anime and manga knowledge at last, and realising it was just a bit different from my impressions of it, had got me to the point of making up a post about it. With that settled, I might have just gone on to the second volume of the series and not said anything about it. Just around the time I was getting to it, though, I noticed the blurb for a review of it on Anime News Network with the ominous declaration it just happened to include the least impressive chapter of the whole manga. It might only reveal something about myself that I imagined something “controversial,” thinking of certain moments from a few anime series just a few years older than this manga.
Chapter by chapter went by without anything that grated on me, though, and I did keep thinking the certain edge to the rooming house manager Kyoko kept her a bit more memorable than the cover illustrations and my old impressions had summed up as. The “competitor characters” in the slow-developing romance were definitely causing more trouble, although the tennis instructor Mitaka did seem more prominent there than the male main character Godai’s fellow student Kozue. Approaching the end of the volume, however, did start to raise a certain “maybe there’ll be no chance to let my reactions recover this time around” tension. I did start wondering back to a thing or two I had merely noticed at the time.
The end of one late character had an angry Kyoko throwing a can of food at Godai, and for a moment I wondered if that was the “controversial” moment. In the context of the chapter, it didn’t bother me, and with the thought it wasn’t (quite) what I’d most worried about I was able to shrug and head for the end of the volume. Afterwards, I did look up the review anyway, only to see the criticized chapter had been a much earlier one I’d read through without complaints for all that it had apparently been left out of earlier translated versions. If it’s out of the way, though, things might be that much better ahead.
Chapter by chapter went by without anything that grated on me, though, and I did keep thinking the certain edge to the rooming house manager Kyoko kept her a bit more memorable than the cover illustrations and my old impressions had summed up as. The “competitor characters” in the slow-developing romance were definitely causing more trouble, although the tennis instructor Mitaka did seem more prominent there than the male main character Godai’s fellow student Kozue. Approaching the end of the volume, however, did start to raise a certain “maybe there’ll be no chance to let my reactions recover this time around” tension. I did start wondering back to a thing or two I had merely noticed at the time.
The end of one late character had an angry Kyoko throwing a can of food at Godai, and for a moment I wondered if that was the “controversial” moment. In the context of the chapter, it didn’t bother me, and with the thought it wasn’t (quite) what I’d most worried about I was able to shrug and head for the end of the volume. Afterwards, I did look up the review anyway, only to see the criticized chapter had been a much earlier one I’d read through without complaints for all that it had apparently been left out of earlier translated versions. If it’s out of the way, though, things might be that much better ahead.