vignette00's manga / #supernatural(38)

Mindreader is torn between his childhood best friend and his sympathies for his abused cousin. Features a twist you saw coming miles away, a classic Weepy and Woobie Uke, and completely undeveloped and sudden Family Drama, and tolerable if only because the right man ends up the victor for the main character's nascent understanding of romantic relationships. One day we'll get a manga that tries to guide its main character healthily and sympathetically through a road of separating sympathy, empathy, pity, and love. Until then I guess we have I Can't Even Breath Without You http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/i_cant_even_breeth_without_you/.

Basically Minekura Kazuya's Saiyuki, now with explicit sex and more spiders and none of the reincarnation angst. A monk finds himself traveling with his spider-human lover. The setting lends itself quite naturally to all varieties of mildly kinky sex scenarios, like bondage (with spider webs!) and tentacle/nine-tails porn. There's a plot point introduced midway about the monk's true nature that is promptly dropped, for lack of a better word, but on the whole, charming and sexy and funny.

Though it doesn't advertise this fact, Yuri Danshi-kun is the 4-koma-esque spin-off of Yuri Danshi (http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/yuri_danshi/bt/302602/Vol1_Ch1/). Yuri Danshi (the original) is much talkier, with traditional paneling, but also stars Hanadera Keisuke as a high school boy obsessed with yuri. In some ways, Yuri Danshi-kun is a meta-joke: Yuri Danshi takes fujoshi characters like Tama from Barakamon and makes them into yuri-obsessed fudanshi who see yuri-undertones in every casual girl-on-girl interaction. The tropes about the pure, barely sexual, and completely idealized relationships in yuri give a World Only God Knows vibe to Yuri Danshi. Yuri Danshi-kun, on the other hand, panders straight back to the Tama's of the manga-reading world. Hanadera, along with a handful of other male yuri fans, are thrown into a bizarre alternate world where there are no women at all -- and thus, obviously, no yuri. So the parody of the parody becomes the thing parodied in the first parody -- not confusing at all! I think part of the reason why Yuri Danshi-kun may seem so confusing is that I rather suspect the other guys in Yuri Danshi-kun are characters we meet later in Yuri Danshi, and Yuri Danshi-kun assumes we're familiar with their personalities and interactions. Once you get around to figuring out who is who (not an easy feat, as everyone shares the same SD-face and there are two megane characters, one of whom shares a haircut with a non-megane character), the jokes are relatively stand-alone and entertaining, but I strangely find myself more interested in the mechanics of this alt-universe, like where DO babies come from?!

A journalist and his friend take it upon themselves to try to solve a series of supernatural murder mysteries in the first year of Meiji era Tokyo. What they end up uncovering is a family drama that manages to make the main characters doubt not only themselves but the very nature of truth and causality. Think of this as a weird cross between Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress, Ishiharu Satoru's "So wa Reirei no Yukini Mai" (a bl-lite mystery, http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/so_wa_reirei_no_yukini_mai/), and the criminally underappreciated "Summer of the Ubume" (http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/the_summer_of_the_ubume/). The culprit's identity was oddly obvious to me very soon in the story, but the twist that comes in the end is uniquely and fundamentally a product of Japanese literature and sentiment. The atmosphere is the star of the story, with its particular mix of fantasy, folktale, and unambiguous anxiety about modernity. In the end, what it reminds me the most of is a more adult and less emotionally wrought version of Kaori Yuki's "Count Cain."