Mushi-Shi By Urushibara Yuki.

Usually I don’t much care for manga, but "Mushi-Shi" is an exception. It’s about Gingko, a mushi-shi—a type of herbal doctor who deals with infestations of magical creatures called mushi. Gingko is one of the few people who can usually see them. In fact he attracts them—he has to smoke constantly to keep them partly at bay.

Gingko wanders through a world that looks a lot like old Japan, a place of villages separated by mountains. In each story he deals with a different mushi problem. The critters do weird stuff like cause severe rainstorms to fall wherever a person goes. Sometimes Gingko can fix the problem; sometimes things end badly. Although the mushi seem magical, they are portrayed as a part of the natural environment, They live out natural lifespans of their own, and operate according to knowable laws. Gingko deals with them more as a kind of specialized doctor than as a wizard.

The backgrounds and details of everyday life in Gingko’s world are beautifully rendered. It's interesting to compare the landscapes to old Japanese and Chinese landscape paintings--the art is so obviously derived from that tradition. The stories are also sometimes affecting. They do tend to get repetitious, though. Having read one big “omnibus” volume of them, I don’t feel the need to track them all down. I liked this one so much I gave it to my comics-loving oldest niece for Christmas to enjoy.

According to the translation notes and author's notes, many of the mushi are inspired by Japanese folklore of one kind or another.

Magic Knight Rayearth By CLAMP.

In this one three Japanese schoolgirls who’ve never met before encounter each other during a field trip to Tokyo Tower and are suddenly zapped into a world of magic called Cephiro. It seems that Cephiro’s survival depends upon a sorceress who has been kidnapped by an evil wizard. According to a prophecy, only outsiders from another world possess the power to deal with the threat. The girls are the “chosen ones”, but first they must become Magic Knights.

Obviously aimed at a tween and teen girl readership, this is a high-spirited, mostly rather funny fantasy adventure wish fulfillment story. Near the end, though, it turns serious and finally tragic, as the girls learn that what they have not been told everything and must make a terrible choice. At the end it gains a surprising gravity. I’ve always been amazed at how the Japanese so often combine really silly humor with high tragedy.

It’s not my cup of tea, but it was a readable and engaging story. This was only the first installment of the saga. Apparently fantasy manga are sometimes collected into multiple volumes a lot like the young adult fantasy novel cycles that are so big now. It’s very much that sort of story. I gave this to my niece too, since she’s really into fantasy.

Incidentally, CLAMP is the collective pseudonym of a team of artists who are evidently very big in Japan.

Solanin By Asano Inio.

This manga is a graphic novel that actually is a novel in comics form. It’s a slice-of-life story about a twenty-something in Tokyo and her twenty-something friends, who are all trapped in a grind of dead-end jobs and frustrated dreams. I don’t usually touch American slice-of-life stories like this with a ten-foot pole. They’re too drab and dreary. This one interested me, though, because of the way it shows a different culture.

The highly detailed art gives fascinating glimpses into the environment in which the characters live. I can’t blame them for being frustrated. Tokyo does not look like a fun place to live.

I guess modern twenty-somethings all over the developed world are coming to have the same sort of experiences during the increasingly long time it takes between graduating from college and actually getting on with one’s life as an adult. I spent most of my 20s in that sort of holding pattern, thanks to a decision to go to graduate school for what turned out to be a doomed degree. Lots of people I knew around my age got married and started careers and families while I kept plugging along at that grad program before finally giving up and going into library work. Reading “Solanin” made me thankful that I’m past that now—and that even during that time I still had a sense that God was helping me to get through it. I don’t know how I’d have made it otherwise.

Fortunately the story, despite some tragedy, is not a complete downer. Apart from the look at another culture, it also is fascinating to see how the author uses the comics medium to tell this sort of a realistic story. Comics are mostly associated with fantasy and such because they lend themselves well to that sort of story. But in the right hands a realistic story can be well-told through comics as well.