Review: Ohikkoshi

Ohikkoshi
by Hiroaki Samura
Dark Horse, $12.95

Ohikkoshi is mature manga for mature readers, not because it’s filled with bare breasts and panty shots—it isn’t—but simply because it’s written for grownups. Samura doesn’t give us clever plot twists or neat endings. His characters are messy, and the stories are as illogical as real life. This work is full of caricature, exaggeration, and just plain ridiculousness, but in a way, it also feels more real than other manga.

This satisfyingly chunky volume collects three stories by Hiroaki Samura, who is best known for a completely different work, Blade of the Immortal.

The longest story, “Ohikkoshi,” is a romantic comedy that uses manga elements but is still very unlike any manga I have ever seen. The main characters are a bunch of slacker art students who seem to spend all their time in bars, and much of the story unfolds through their conversations. Along the way, Samura uses blackouts, exaggeration, and frequent breaks in the fourth wall to convey emotion and ridiculousness at the same time. Somehow, it all works.

Samura drops you right into the middle of the action on page 1, and it’s disorienting at first. He puts up character profiles at the end of Chapter 1, which is a bit late; by then I had pretty much doped it out. The basic story is simplicity itself: it’s a love triangle, with a male lead who has delusions of inadequacy, the girl he loves (who is pledged to an absent boyfriend), and the childhood friend who pines after him. What makes it different from every other love-triangle story is the way it is played out. Ohikkoshi isn’t any more realistic than other manga, but the characters behave more naturally. They drink, they strike poses, they misunderstand each other, and they have moments of clarity where one character has to set another straight. The very pretentiousness with which the story is told, with background music, pseudo-literary pronouncements, and obscure pop-culture references, is part of this realism. As a former art student myself, I have to say that it all rang true, even if it is a manga-ized version.

The second story, “Luncheon of Tears Diary (Vagabond Shoujo Manga-Ka)” is almost a parody of the shoujo manga genre, in that the heroine, a manga artist, goes through a series of extreme personal catastrophes: her comic fails, she moves in with a guy, his café burns down and he dies, she moves in with another guy, he turns out to be a heel, she becomes a mah jong player… on and on it goes, but each episode of her life seems separate and unrelated to the others. The ending is satisfying, though, and the story is quite entertaining, just somewhat disjointed. The third story is short and basically an omake, with a lot of in-jokes about Kyoto.

Samura’s scratchy, sketchy drawing style is different from the more polished style of most manga. His figures are more solid than most comic figures, and his command of anatomy, gesture, and expression suggest a lot of time spent drawing from life. In fact, many of the manga panels could be taken straight from a sketchbook, all the more so because of the self-conscious poses the characters strike.

At just over 240 pages, Ohikkoshi is thicker than most manga. The paper quality is not spectacular but the cover is very nicely done, with muted colors on heavy matte stock. The volume includes translator’s notes in the back, which are very helpful given the number of in-jokes. My only criticism is I could have used twice as many, because references to things like “Tokyo bananas” went right by me.

Ohikkoshi is in a class by itself. It’s manga for grown-ups, especially those who can grasp complexity and ambiguity. These are not stories you whip through in an hour; I found myself going back and re-reading parts in order to really understand what was going on, particularly in the beginning. But that’s part of its charm. Samura doesn’t talk down to his readers; instead, he winks and invites them along on a very bumpy ride.

(This review is based on a complimentary copy supplied by the publisher.)