Manga Thoughts: Red River Volumes 1-2-3

[krpalmer]

In some fashion familiar to me, including how I can’t think back to a resonant moment of discovery but have to resort to saying “one way or another,” I became aware of a manga now available called Red River. The thick “three-in-one” omnibus volumes might have been obvious enough in the bookstore with their red spines. At a certain point I happened on a brief explanation of it as a “thrown into the past” shojo manga that had begun in the mid-1990s. While some past concerns that I’d been running low on manga to read with new titles not catching my attention have faded, perhaps the sense of an older manga that wasn’t “long familiar” amused me and had me thinking this was a chance to broaden my outlook, if only by a tiny bit. I went and bought the first collection.

The familiar complaints about there being too much isekai anime these days include insistences that “transported to another world” used to be an interesting way to develop a story, and the age of Red River might seem to help it there. (Before I’d thought of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, though, I did happen to think that a certain number of the antique science fiction stories Isaac Asimov once selected to explain his development as a fan had involved their heroic protagonists being transported to other worlds, if with guns in hand and plenty of ammunition...) My initial understanding that the manga’s main character, the typical teenaged Japanese girl Yuri Suzuki, had been transported not to a generic, vaguely European fantasy world or even into some part of East Asia’s past but to the Hittite Empire had built up my interest.

When I began reading the manga I was a just a little surprised by an impression it was going to some length to set up the typical life (and first love) Yuri was about to drop out of, although looking back now the setup doesn’t seem that lengthy before hands have erupted out of a winter puddle (where they’d been bursting out of a bathtub before) and dragged her in. The language barrier (with cuneiform in speech balloons) gets cracked almost at once with a kiss from a handsome prince, though, and that had me realising there was a continuing element of “magic” to the past. An explanation was soon offered of how Yuri could get back to her own time, with the analytical part of me supposing that a hedge against the manga being cancelled early; the explanation of why she decided to not just leave as soon as she could seemed quite adequate. All of that did have me sort of shrugging off too many thoughts of “a realistic examination of history” and sliding towards thinking the story as not that different from a “typical” “transported to another world” tale.

With that said the manga did move at a good clip, with Yuri neither stuck as a hapless damsel in distress or overqualified at once to dismiss challenges. In looking a bit different from “more recent manga art” the appearance of things was interesting; eventually, I did happen to think of the Sailor Moon manga, which is probably the closest in time and demographic to this series as I’ve got before. A dark side to this “product of another time,” though, might be some of the threats Yuri faces; it’s a little too easy to imagine some becoming indignant about them (and others just sort of wallowing in offensiveness while insisting they were driven to it). I did wonder about Yuri saying a few times that she was from “the 21st century,” and then I looked back and saw the first page of the manga dated “February, 1995.” If there’s a mistake there, though, it didn’t quite stop me from tracking down more omnibus volumes to continue the story.