Manga Village

Over the past three years, I have come to admire the work of Jiro Taniguchi. Through The Quest for the Missing Girl and A Distant Neighborhood, I have come to appreciate Taniguchi’s masterful draftmanship, his unique stories, and his strength as both a writer and a cartoonist. Of all his great qualities throughout books adapted by Fanfare/Ponent Mon, I have noticed one key feature, one slight detriment to his impressive works: Taniguchi has a difficulty creating people. His characters are impressively constructed, but like the craggy cliffs and towering skyscrapers he so ornately crafts, they are inscrutable. It is hard to understand their emotions, and their faces are mask-like in quality. And while the beauties of the scene that surround each character are readily apparent, the beauties of the characters themselves are often hidden behind a wall. Written and Illustrated by Jiro Taniguchi Publisher: Ponent Mon S.L. (June 23, 2011) Age Rating: Older Teen Genre: Slice of life Price: $23.00 In A Zoo In Winter, Taniguchi sets his sights on himself – and thereby, other people.  The focus he puts into drawing the emotions of his characters is equal if not greater than the usual care he devotes to mountains…

One of the most used, and possibly most cliché phrases in the English language is “Hindsight is 20/20,” that is, that everything is clearest when looking back on it. There are parts of a situation where you have missing information, where decisions that seemed like good choices turned out to be catastrophic. Even more frustrating, there are scenes, moments of our lives where we’d like to use our perfect hindsight to change. That fight in elementary school, that comment in high school, that one night stand in college. These moments that changed who we are for better or worse are some of the most vivid in our minds, and are the ones we’d most like to manipulate. By Jiro Taniguchi Publisher: Fanfare/Ponent Mon Age Rating: Older Teen Genre: Drama Price: $23.00 While this idea has been toyed with in film (most notably, in the dreadful Butterfly Effect), nothing brings the concept to life more realistically than Jiro Taniguchi’s A Distant Neighborhood, a two-volume affair that has been co-published by Fanfare and Ponent Mon. In this sweeping childhood tale, we meet Hiroshi Nakahara, a middle-aged man who, under the influence of a nasty hangover, misses his train from Kyoto to Tokyo…

Many people wonder about the motivation behind a mountaineer’s desire to risk their life in order to scale a dangerous peak, and George Mallory (1886-1924) has been attributed to have given the most famous (and also simplest) reason why. When asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain, legend has it that he simply said: “Because it’s there.” While the authenticity of this quote has come into question in recent years, there is no denying the profound, yet puzzling nature of those three words. Perhaps only the bravest of mountaineers will be able to fully comprehend them. If Mallory and his partner Andrew Irvine had survived their ill-fated 1924 Mount Everest expedition, further light could have possibly been shed upon the subject. Review written by Matthew Rozier Writer: Yumemakura Baku; Artist: Jiro Taniguchi Age Rating: Not rated, Older Teen (16+) rating Genre: Drama, Adventure Price: $25.00 Jiro Taniguchi’s five-volume manga adaptation of Baku Yumemakura’s original novel of the same name attempts to solve the mystery behind what makes a mountaineer tick. The novel was written between 1994 and 1997, and the story itself takes place in 1993, both before Mallory’s body was found sans his Kodak…