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Story and Art by Konami Shouko
Copyright © 1993-1994 Konami Shouko
Wings Comics
Collected in 3 volumes.
¥600


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by Eric "Scanner" Luce
After reviewing a number of shonen oriented titles one gets a bit
weary of the constant reiteration of similar plots. Boy has
problem/mysterious power. Boy goes through tribulations. Boy
eventually gets girl. Usually boy is given choice of several girls of
which he has to pick one, his true love. Sometimes this changes half
way through the story. Yada yada. Been there before. Granted,
some of the stories can be very engaging. Some have truly moving
pathos. Some strike a chord in a number of readers making us
sympathize with the protagonist strongly thus making us read more
stories of the same sort.
However there is a lot more to the world of manga than that and it
needs to be discussed as well. This title by Konami Shouko is a
wonderful find, with a good mix of humor and outlandish scenarios.
The main character of the story is a girl named "Iinchou." Actually,
her name is not Iinchou, but since she is always
elected class president (Iinchou) almost no one recalls her given
name, Aizawa Minoru. The other main character is Ryuuzaki Kaiji. At
the beginning of the story he is a new transfer student to her class
and he causes Iinchou a rather large amount of trouble. Where
Iinchou is always the nice person standing up for her classmates when
they are in trouble, handing out spare erasers and chopsticks as
needed, Kaiji is the son of the head of a Yakuza clan. The first time
he sees Iinchou he develops a liking for her and declares that she
should be his girlfriend. Iinchou is immediately put off and tells
him to stop playing around and to stop wearing paper tattoos to school
(which she immediately rips off of him.) With that refusal Kaiji
declares that if she is not going to be "anego" (the boss's wife) then
she must be anesan! Iinchou is upset yet again, declaring that she is
the same age as Kaiji. However it sticks and now the entire Yakuza
clan refers to her as "anesan."
Although Konami Shouko reuses many common short plots as the basis for
her stories, the humor that she applies to them gives them a very fresh
air. You have the old high school rival, the ghost story and so
on. The real fun begins when the characters start playing out their
own stories. Kaiji's family is probably the most entertaining in this
regard, especially as seen by Iinchyou. Kaiji's playboy
father, Masukazu, is head of a Yakuza gang by accident. Kaiji's
tomboy mother, Natsuru, (whom everyone mistakes for a male) is a
police officer. This whole family relationship is the subject of a
number of stories including where Masukazu accidentally asks Natsuru
out on a date and is forced to meet her father, the Yakuza boss.
The manga is simple and lighthearted. The relationship between
Iinchyou and Kaiji is slow with the usual rocks here and there. It is
almost never stressful which is another welcome relief from the
frequently over-angst ridden stories.
The story is fairly easy to read for the beginning Japanese
student. There are plentiful furigana for the Kanji and the sentence
structure is simple. You do get exposed to some colloquial phrases and
a lot of the visual humor depends on a basic knowledge of Japanese
culture. It is easy to pick up and you may learn a thing or two
reading this story.
This story is quite early in Konami Shouko's career. You do not see
it here but her style becomes a lot more abstract later on. In ANESAN WA
IINCHOU the art it is somewhat plain. Her lines are quite fine and the
character's faces are not cluttered with a lot of noise. The
expressions themselves range from the quite serious to the rather absurd
as a character will go from a solemn expression to a non-plussed or
surprised expression in one frame.
The backgrounds tend to be rather sparse and seem only to be drawn
when they are an integral part of a scene setting, such as a person
silhouetted in a doorway or someone hanging out of a window. Otherwise
the background is usually used to convey a mood or a feeling that goes
with the scene.
All in all quite an enjoyable manga even with some of the tired plots
it reuses. The fresh stories and the characters involved definitely
make it worth picking up. This story also serves as a good
introduction to other works of Konami Shouko that tend to be lot less
approachable but even more worth the
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