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MANGA REVIEWS

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




—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 time.


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