It’s been a long time — five years and nearly 20 volumes — since I last checked in with Case Closed by Gosho Aoyama. It launched in the US in 2004, and it’s quite impressive to see how it’s still going strong. Although this is the latest book out here, there are 85 volumes in Japan so far, where it began in 1994. Volume 52 was a great choice to try again, since all the mysteries are self-contained, starting and […]

Honey Blood is a strange choice to translate. It’s only two volumes (with a bonus book of short stories), because it got cancelled in Japan, and its plot is both very familiar and sadly unresolved in its short length. The author, Miko Mitsuki, isn’t well-known here — I couldn’t find any mention of anything else she’s done that’s been translated — so the question arises: why this series? The answer seems to be “vampires” (as you might guess from the […]

The cooking competition manga Food Wars kicks into high gear with all the students heading out to a luxury resort hotel for a training camp and a new challenge. The “Friendship and Team-Building Cooking Camp” in Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma volume 3 has big consequences for the aspiring culinary students — if they don’t pass the assignments, they will immediately be sent back to school to be expelled. The challenges are set and judged by school alumni, making for […]

Ooku: The Inner Chambers volume 10 feels like a final volume. The cover, a group shot with a white background, differs from the stark single-figure-against-black theme of the previous books in the series, and there’s an incredibly valuable extra included that wraps together many of the previous events. It’s a family tree showing all the shoguns and their key retainers that makes me want to reread the series, now that I better understand the relationships. I wish we’d seen this […]

Chika Shiomi’s previous manga in English, Rasetsu and Yurara, provide a hint of what you’ll get here. They’re both supernaturally tinged romances involving well-meaning young women involved in forces beyond their control. Yukarism starts with an explanation of Yukari’s unique situation. He “was born without forgetting his previous life”, so he’s become quite popular for writing novels about the Edo Period that feel incredibly realistic. He’s able to do so without research because he previously lived then, in the Pleasure […]

Now that the massively masculine Takeo and the delightfully delicate Yamato have realized they like each other, as we saw in volume 1, we settle down to the confusion of dating in My Love Story!! volume 2. The writer, Kazune Kawahara, has good ideas for short moments that convey how the characters are perceived by others. For instance, when they come across a woman struggling with a baby stroller on a flight of steps, Takeo immediately grabs the stroller and […]

What felt sympathetic and accomplished to me in Spell of Desire volume 1 here reeked too strongly of cliche and stereotype. Perhaps it’s that I wanted the story to move along more quickly, and this felt too much like treading water to pad page count. Perhaps it’s that I recently read a much better done romance. Perhaps it’s just that the supernatural genre isn’t my cup of tea. Regardless, I found my patience strained with this latest volume from Tomu […]

The punctuation in the title Happy Marriage?! is really important, because the series by Maki Enjoji does not focus on good times. Instead, every book, Chiwa and Hokuto face another challenge. Sure, by the end, they’ve usually reinforced their feelings for each other, but it’s important to remember that the premise is that these two people got married without knowing each other. (And I feel silly that I just realized that this series probably reads very different in a culture […]