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krpalmerAll in all I don’t lack for manga to read. Only going back every once in a long while to any of the series I have shelved or just stacked seems evidence of that. With that said, I must admit to a certain recent impression of not having begun many new series from among the great number being translated and published. Every once in a while a series I’m reading ends; to wind up returning to completed series just because I’ve run out of attention-catching new manga to replace them doesn’t seem the most appealing way to do that.
It was therefore somehow heartening to take interest in a new manga called Whoever Steals This Book. That its main character Mifuyu was described as “descended from a long line of book collectors” and “surrounded by books in every aspect of her life” but just happens to “hate books” had me thinking this wasn’t a case of “seeing yourself represented in fiction,” but I have been willing (even if it’s because I’m in a position of only sometimes acknowledged privilege) to suppose that different types of people in fiction also give larger audiences the chance to just perhaps understand different perspectives.
After saying all of that, I am ready to suppose this manga isn’t quite a matter of “learning to understand the non-reader” given Mifuyu’s active resentment rather than indifference towards books. It also happens the books in the vast hall stocked by Mifuyu’s family have curses on them, and when someone steals a book (which happens twice in the first volume) the curse affects the bookstore-rich town outside the hall in strange and surreal ways linked to the story in the stolen book. (These “stories within the story” are interesting, but don’t quite get to the point of “I’d rather read that.”) Mifuyu has to first convince herself all of this is really happening and then chase down the thief with the aid of the “mysterious” white-haired girl Mashiro. It all happens with such speed that it didn’t quite seem a matter of “detective work.”
The last thing I do have to admit is uncertain feelings at confronting a “story about books” being presented as a manga. That I don’t read prose fiction every day (turning to nonfiction instead) does bring to mind how comic books were being looked down on as inadequate substitutes for established and legitimate literature right from the start. By the end of this volume, anyway, I gathered that it was an adaptation (by Kakeru Sora) of an “original story” by Nowaki Fukamidori. That it ended on a cliffhanger after demonstrating how a first storyline is resolved does have me thinking I could look for the next volume, and as it turned out I took long enough picking up the first volume to read it that the next volume should be available pretty soon.
It was therefore somehow heartening to take interest in a new manga called Whoever Steals This Book. That its main character Mifuyu was described as “descended from a long line of book collectors” and “surrounded by books in every aspect of her life” but just happens to “hate books” had me thinking this wasn’t a case of “seeing yourself represented in fiction,” but I have been willing (even if it’s because I’m in a position of only sometimes acknowledged privilege) to suppose that different types of people in fiction also give larger audiences the chance to just perhaps understand different perspectives.
After saying all of that, I am ready to suppose this manga isn’t quite a matter of “learning to understand the non-reader” given Mifuyu’s active resentment rather than indifference towards books. It also happens the books in the vast hall stocked by Mifuyu’s family have curses on them, and when someone steals a book (which happens twice in the first volume) the curse affects the bookstore-rich town outside the hall in strange and surreal ways linked to the story in the stolen book. (These “stories within the story” are interesting, but don’t quite get to the point of “I’d rather read that.”) Mifuyu has to first convince herself all of this is really happening and then chase down the thief with the aid of the “mysterious” white-haired girl Mashiro. It all happens with such speed that it didn’t quite seem a matter of “detective work.”
The last thing I do have to admit is uncertain feelings at confronting a “story about books” being presented as a manga. That I don’t read prose fiction every day (turning to nonfiction instead) does bring to mind how comic books were being looked down on as inadequate substitutes for established and legitimate literature right from the start. By the end of this volume, anyway, I gathered that it was an adaptation (by Kakeru Sora) of an “original story” by Nowaki Fukamidori. That it ended on a cliffhanger after demonstrating how a first storyline is resolved does have me thinking I could look for the next volume, and as it turned out I took long enough picking up the first volume to read it that the next volume should be available pretty soon.