Narutaru
Disclaimer, I'm writing this with a 38C fever and I'm feeling mega incoherent today. Enjoy!
I was in the mood for the Cabbage Special... Krpice sa zeljem? No... an edgy and angsty story about children killing each other, all being a thinly veiled metaphor for puberty of course. I watched and reviewed Bokurano a while back, so I'm kind of familiar with Mohiro Kitohs style. I also read one other manga of his that I don't even remember reading, OR rating it with a 6 for that matter... I've always been too lazy to read Bokurano, despite the anime and the manga having drastically different endings, but this time around it wasn't just the ending that was the issue. After the disappointment the anime was, I moved on to the manga quickly enough - so I'll start by reviewing the manga first. I'll have a little section for the anime as well. Warning, everything is full of spoilers.
The manga Narutaru consists of 68 chapters. It was published in Afternoon, a seinen magazine, between 1998 and 2003. The main story is centered around a girl, Shiina, and her finding this weird Fresh-level Digimon type of creature she decides to call Hoshimaru. Hijinks ensue, shit gets existential. As it turns out, the little dragon creatures are not so nice, and they feed on humans and manifest their subconscious in one way or the other, or something much more than that...
I'll quickly jot down some of the technical issues this manga has. For starters, the length and the pacing do not go in its favor. 68 chapters is far too short for the ambitious symbolism packed story this seems to be, and the pacing is really all over the place too. The story has a pretty unconventional way of introducing characters and forgetting about them completely until later on, and even though the characters might seem incredibly important they didn't get a proper send off with only a tiny panel being used to showcase their sudden death. The death part doesn't really bother me - in this story everybody ends up dying. But it feels like ideas and characters get discarded far too quickly sometimes, despite things seeming very preplanned and very meticulous at other times.
Another part is the lack of focus. The manga reads as if it lacks direction and it constantly meanders from being a story full of lore on very niche things, lore that we're missing as everything feels very in medias res sometimes and the protagonist is only showing up for a very small part of the story, to a story where characters are merely vessels for the authors ideas and symbols and therefore the actual backgrounds and pasts of these characters matter very little. We've got a few very long chapters (of which I apparently missed one when I began to read about the manga online a bit more) that explain the lore of the dragons, and yet it still feels like we hardly scratched the surface sometimes. Meanwhile there's a neverending slew of characters that keeps being introduced that at times it felt hard to keep up with.
And lastly, I'll complain about the art style just a bit. All of the female characters are too samefaced. That can be solved by hairstyles, clothes and gestures but all of the hairstyles are almost exactly the same too. On closeups, characters like Akira, Ozawa and Aki look the same to me, and Shiina herself gets close when she puts her hair down lmao. It's clear Kitoh preference is in drawing heroine-chic bodies, hiking gear and cars and bikes haha...
The story has multiple points of conflict and each character, or group of characters, is meant to contrast one another. But since I said it earlier, there's too many characters, so there's a lot of... contrasting.
Adolescence, sex, power, instincts Bear with me, this will be a little stream of conscious because I can't seem to get my thoughts straight.
It's extremely common for media to be centered around the theme of adolescence because it's probably the most traumatizing part of growing up in every single way. Obviously we're all marked by it even if we get tired of this theme in media (even I do, despite this genre being my guilty pleasure), especially because it usually implies main characters will essentially be children. While teetering on the line of being uncomfortable, this manga leans into the more sex side of things regarding adolescence a handful of times, and while cold and clinical at times, it gets weird... Especially once it gets to the characters that only act things out because they're avatars for something the story wants to tell you.
The most fascinating part of this theme was the character of Takeo Tsurumaru. While everyone else is a teenager dealing with serious teenager issues more or less (including but not limited to: Akira is being sexually abused by her father which in turn makes her a target for every man that can sniff out her obvious lack of confidence, Satomi is actually poor and has a complex about it along with hating her mother for being a housewife that gave birth early, and she hates herself for going in the same direction by being in relationship with Bungo, a sociopath secretely obsessed with control... ), Takeo is pure animal and instinct. We don't know his background at all, and we're not aware of his motives. He's a total mystery and his character arc is just... strange. For the first few chapters he seems to appear in close proximity to the protagonist, Shiina. But only once she decides to follow him home do we learn something about him. We find out he lives in a warehouse, he's knocked up multiple girls because it's his lifes desire to be a baby daddy (he just says he wants to procreate and nothing else) and his best friend is a gay dude that's in love with him, but knows his love will be unrequited because he's not a woman and he can't get pregnant. Which btw, the whole theme of womb envy was so random too, but I must admit, it was well placed. Kitoh really went and put every single theme centered around human nature in this short manga. It's never explained why exactly he took a liking to Shiina, until BAM turns out Shiinas dragon, this whole time, is actually Takeo's (we still don't really know why he decided to protect her). As he continues to help Shiina, he grows impotent. I haven't figured out yet why exactly that happened besides it maybe having a relation to his gay friend's dragon which is called Vagina Dentata so we're channeling some Freudian fear of castration here, but anyway, when Shiina got her period she confessed her love to Takeo, they somehow had sex despite his reproductive issues and she got pregnant. Takeo meanwhile, died with no big fanfare as I assume he fulfilled his function in the story as the symbol of the animalistic need to procreate. This is just one example of the average character arc in this anime. Characters are being led to do things by some higher purpose, and there's always lots of unanswered questions - the whole story is like that.
I don't know where I was going with this but I really wanted to make a note of some of the insanity I've witnessed while reading this manga and I think Takeo was a good example. At this point I'm not even sure if I'm shit talking the manga or praising it. The manga just feels like a big undertaking, and something that would benefit from being re-read. When it comes to works that try really hard with muh symbolism, this manga is on thin ice. On one hand I think a lot of thought was put into what each character represents and how it contrasts with somebody/something in the story. The myths and concepts used range from a wide variety of cultures, but they're all tied by the weird creatures known in-universe as dragons, which I think is neat because they're such a commonplace concept. On the other hand, I don't like stories where characters are purely used to represent something and they don't have a lot of agency. Which happened a lot here, especially at the end.
Now on the contrary of what I just said, as for the ending itself, I actually liked it. It's rare for.. things to play out in the way they did.
Another thing to note, after searching online, it seems the english translation suffered from a lot of censoring, as can be seen on this blog. Aside from what's mentioned on that blog, some of the censoring was fair enough, like when the bully, Aki, was seen naked from waist down talking to some guy and climbing onto his lap in her death scene. The nakedness seemed out of nowhere considering the guy wasn't naked, and they were having a conversation about bullying lmao. The censored version added a thong, which, fair enough. Now here's the weird part, the man in that scene is referred to as her brother in the anime. In the english version of the manga it's her boyfriend. I don't know whether the japanese version has him as the brother or if it was an anime only change. She's already fucked up enough for wanting to put a test tube into a girls vagina and then try to crush it by kicking her stomach, yet her being into incest is a bit too far? Hmmm. The animekritik blog has a lot of interesting notes regarding the manga so do check it out. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the context I was missing was due to the weird choices made in the translation, and the total lack of TL notes as well. To have removed all of the instances of parents being fucked up also made us lose a lot of context of why the children are so messed up too. Those types of censorship changes really irked me...
I also managed to find another blog, hanagasaitayo, talking about it. It seems like a lot of people tried to make sense of all the symbolism packed into this manga which is cool.
The anime I'll keep this brief, the anime is really disappointing. Not only is it a "read the manga!!!" type of anime, but it cuts out so much from the first half of the manga that it supposedly covers that either way you'll have to read the whole thing anyway, which is what I ended up doing. It's just such a waste of time.
