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krpalmerCruising to Iceland and back by “the Viking route” did have me thinking back to having watched the latest block of Vinland Saga anime. When those idle memories swam into my mind the way a song might come back to you without quite desiring that, I did get to thinking “good grief, you can’t process everything through an anime/manga filter.” Eventually, I read a nonfiction book on the subject of the Vikings from the ship’s library (Neil Price’s Children of Ash and Elm). When I got back to my own place, though, in the last days of August I did go back to the original Vinland Saga manga rather than take on the stack of unread volumes from assorted series down in my living room. As impressive as that series remained, to get back to taking on manga I hadn’t read before I did start thinking of how the first three volumes of a series had been waiting for some time, and picked up Shunsuke Sorato’s The Girl with the Sanpaku Eyes.
Not that many months ago I flipped through the first pages of the copy of William Gibson’s Neuromancer I’d got during a self-indulgent course on science fiction at university. For all that the novel seemed to have flown somewhat over my head by its close (adding to a self-sabotaging impression that any fictional prose I can grasp can’t really be that worth reading), this time around I did happen to notice Gibson explaining the word sanpaku as “the whites of your eyes showing below or above your irises.” That was after I’d bought the manga with the thought that what Denpa picks ought to have merit to it. Starting to read the manga, anyway, I did notice it wasn’t going to lengths to define the Japanese word in its title.
To be honest, before very long I had the feeling the manga was not that complicated. Amane Mizuno has a conventional crush on a boy named Katou in her high school class, the sort of thing where you can barely get out words to your love interest; it’s just that her small-pupilled eyes lend an impression of curt hostility to what she can say despite her oft-prominent ears turning red. That part of the story is obvious through the manga being printed in colour; I suppose I wondered about “new ways of first serializing manga” beyond cheaply printed and cheap to purchase anthology magazines. The chapters get a bit longer as the first volume progresses, and some blues that weren’t very evident at first (beyond Amane’s nail polish) creep in as well. I was at least able to finish the volume without feeling detached from the two other volumes in the series.
Not that many months ago I flipped through the first pages of the copy of William Gibson’s Neuromancer I’d got during a self-indulgent course on science fiction at university. For all that the novel seemed to have flown somewhat over my head by its close (adding to a self-sabotaging impression that any fictional prose I can grasp can’t really be that worth reading), this time around I did happen to notice Gibson explaining the word sanpaku as “the whites of your eyes showing below or above your irises.” That was after I’d bought the manga with the thought that what Denpa picks ought to have merit to it. Starting to read the manga, anyway, I did notice it wasn’t going to lengths to define the Japanese word in its title.
To be honest, before very long I had the feeling the manga was not that complicated. Amane Mizuno has a conventional crush on a boy named Katou in her high school class, the sort of thing where you can barely get out words to your love interest; it’s just that her small-pupilled eyes lend an impression of curt hostility to what she can say despite her oft-prominent ears turning red. That part of the story is obvious through the manga being printed in colour; I suppose I wondered about “new ways of first serializing manga” beyond cheaply printed and cheap to purchase anthology magazines. The chapters get a bit longer as the first volume progresses, and some blues that weren’t very evident at first (beyond Amane’s nail polish) creep in as well. I was at least able to finish the volume without feeling detached from the two other volumes in the series.