manga review: Reiko the Zombie Shop

In a recent manga review for the Daily Yomiuri, Stephen Taylor wrote about Reiko the Zombie Shop.  Here is an excerpt from his review:

Death. It comes to everyone, and with it go our secrets, never to be resurrected. Unless your kin employs the services of Reiko the Zombie Shop.

Rei Mikamoto’s gloriously gory tales of necromancy and horror fully deserve to be called graphic novels, as very little is left to the reader’s imagination in the six volumes available in English.

Reiko Himezono is a high school student with the ability to raise the dead and get answers regarding the circumstances surrounding their deaths–straight from the corpse’s mouth.

But in Volume 1, Reiko warns that her services do not come risk-free.

“If someone dies violently…or suffers from any pent-up guilt or rage, there’s a chance they could go berserk,” she warns.

Of course, we’re in zombie territory here, and the more you read, the more disgusting the undead become.

Many of the characters meet their demise in gruesome fashion, with dismemberment and disemboweling commonplace in Reiko’s world. Mikamoto writes of Act 20, in which victims are forced to eat their own entrails, that, “I wanted to create something really scary–I mean terrifying, not just gory…but I only got letters telling me that it was ‘revolting.’” Never has public opinion been more accurate.

Apart from Reiko, other characters include her older twin sister, Riruka, whose aim is to turn the world into a zombie-filled paradise, and Saki Yurikawa, a serial killer. Saki is responsible for the murder of 29 girls in the town of Shiraike and is Reiko’s deadly foe throughout the series.

Grand Theft Auto IV hits Japan

Stephen Taylor of the Daily Yomiuri wrote:

It would be easy to write about how much fun the violence and crime is in Grand Theft Auto IV, but that’s not the only aspect of the latest installment of the phenomenonally successful game series, which does make shooting and stealing very engaging.

While many gamers in Japan will have already enjoyed the delights of gratuitously blowing away Liberty City’s law enforcers through imported copies of the game, the official Japanese version was finally released yesterday.

Originally created by Dave Jones, the first GTA game was released in 1997 by Dan and Sam Houser, two brothers based in Scotland who established Rockstar Games, the company responsible for developing most of the series.

On the surface, GTA appears to be based on a simple shoot-’em-up scenario with little or no ethics, with the controversy that surrounds the series in Britain and the United States testimony to its apparent ease at offending public sensibilities on both sides of the Atlantic.

As a complete newcomer to not only the fourth version of the game but the entire concept of GTA, I approached a recent press demonstration of Grand Theft Auto IV with an open mind, though aware of the reputation that preceded the game.

more

manga review: whistle

In a recent review of the manga “Whistle” for the Daily Yomiuri, Stephen Taylor wrote:

Like Captain Tsubasa, who inspired a generation of Japanese soccer players in the 1980s–including a certain Hidetoshi Nakata–and Roy of the Rovers, who was required reading for any teenage fan of the round-ball game in the ’70s, Daisuke Higuchi’s Whistle is sure to find a place in the hearts of a new generation of soccer players.

Originally published in 24 volumes in Japanese, with the 20th volume in English published last month, this story of how a young boy pursues his dream of becoming a professional soccer player is a good read, with good graphics and an engaging plot.

The story opens in 1998, with the Japanese national team preparing to make its debut at the soccer World Cup. Sho Kazamatsuri, a soccer-mad middle school student, has transferred to a new school, Josui Junior High School, from a prestigious private school, Musashinomori, simply because he was unable to command a regular place in the soccer team.

His move doesn’t turn out to be as smooth as he imagined, especially when his new schoolmates mistakenly assume he is going to bring some star quality to their first XI.

Higuchi takes readers through the trials and tribulations of Sho’s rigorous training schedule and introduces a range of characters who all impact on our young hero’s aspirations.

The star of the struggling Josui team is Tatsuya Mizuno, whose father is the coach of the Musashinomori team, and Sho and Tatsuya form the core of the team from the beginning. They are joined by a former professional soccer player, Soju Matsushita, who agrees to coach the team, and Ko Kazamatsuri, Sho’s elder brother.

more of this review

Manga review: Tokyo Zombie

In a recent manga review for the Daily Yomiuri, Stephen Taylor wrote, “According to Yusaku Hanakuma’s Tokyo Zombie, somewhere near Tokyo’s Edogawa Ward there is a mountain of garbage that hides a sinister secret.”

“In this single-volume black comedy manga, Hanakuma explains that the trash mountain, known to locals as Dark Fuji, is used not only for the illegal dumping of TVs, refrigerators and air conditioners, but also for burying dead people.”

“Afro-haired Fujio and bald Mitsuo, the protagonists of Tokyo Zombie, are keen judoka who know all about this, so when Fujio inadvertently kills their boss during a disagreement at work, they know just the place to get rid of his body.”

“When they get there, they find a middle school gym teacher disposing of his former students. The man is literally dismembered (with the emphasis on member) by a naked woman who rises from the dead. It seems the mixture of sewage, garbage and rotting corpses on Dark Fuji has unleashed a plague of zombies.”

“All of this within the first 13 pages of this good example of heta uma, or “bad, but good,” manga that, like the 2004 British zombie movie Shaun of the Dead, treats its gruesome subject with tongue firmly in cheek.”

more