Title: Yoshi no Zuikara Vol. 1
Author: Satsuki Yoshino
Publisher: Yen Press
Language: English
Format: Digital
Pages: 208
Genre: Slice of Life
Publication Date: September 29, 2020
The Story
The manga starts off with a huge misdirection. At first, you think the manga is about four boys growing up in a small town who deeply miss their elementary school teacher. Their school building gets torn down and one of them ends up writing letters to their teacher every month. The letters eventually stop and they decide to track their teacher down by opening up a time capsule they left at their old school as a way to look for clues.
Once that stop wraps up, you realize that you were reading a manga within a manga. The first chapter of Yoshi no Zuikara is actually the work of a manga artist named Tohno Naruhiko. He loves to draw fantasy-style manga but he hasn’t had a hit. He’s had three series and two one-shots but hasn’t really amassed much fame or fortune. He decides to pitch another story to his editor but she suggests he draw a slice-of-life series.
Seeing how he already did the storyboard for one, he goes with the idea, albeit with reluctance. He goes around town and starts snapping pictures of the scenery. He even runs into people he knew growing up who all thought he had up and disappeared. The truth of the matter is that Tohno is just a shut-in and doesn’t really get out much.
Once he gets his reference material, he draws the manga and it gets accepted. And thus, begins the tale of Tohno… the insignificant manga artist living his unimportant days.
Characters
Tohno Naruhiko is as much of a shut-in as possible. When going outside, he wears a mask and a hood because he believes the sun’s UV rays will give him liver spots or skin cancer. He also hates the idea of drawing boats, yet, he puts one in his newest manga idea. He’s about as laid back as laid back can be except when he has to interact with people. He has a case of social anxiety which makes it difficult for him to do so but he ends up doing it anyway because it’s unavoidable. He really loves drawing fantasy manga and even criticizes his own storyboard, poking fun at the fact that the highlight of his story was opening a time capsule. He said it was pretty boring but when his editor suggested doing something involving slice-of-life, he knew he had no choice but to create something he didn’t care for.
In that aspect, Tohno is a reflection of a lot of us. We go on day-to-day and do the things we don’t care for because it is necessary to do so. I don’t like grocery shopping but I do it anyway because I need food to eat and it’s not just going to magically come to my door. I don’t really care for my job but I do it anyway because it pays me money that I need to use to pay off bills, therefore it’s necessary. For Tohno, drawing slice-of-life manga is something he doesn’t care for but he needs to do because it’s his only shot at getting serialized right now which will, in turn, give him money to live off of. In that way, Tohno is a very relatable main character.
Tohno isn’t alone in this. He lives with his friend Toshibou who is highly energetic and friendly. He is kind of easy to please, though, as every time Tohno asks him about his storyboards, he always seems to like them no matter what. Despite that, Toshibou does like his latest storyboard because it seemed more realistic and more like Tohno. Toshibou must have been onto something because Tohno’s manga did really well. To me, Toshibou kind of just seems like the energetic cheerleader of the two. He’s always there to life Tohno up and, pretty much, plays the role of the good friend perfectly. He can be Tohno’s energy as well as his voice of reason, all of the good qualities of a strong supporting character.
Final Word
As much as I am praising the manga’s character work as well as relatability, this series has one major flaw about it in the fact that it is PAINFULLY slow-paced. The manga spends a lot of time going through simple explanations… especially when it came for Tohno to do research. He couldn’t just go anywhere and take pictures. He had to run into townsfolk and while, yes, it does help with world-building and also gives some things for Tohno to reflect on, it just seemed to drag on forever. There was one point where I stopped reading and skipped about ten pages and still had no problem figuring out what was going on because the story hadn’t even moved in the pages that I had skipped.
When you can do that with a series, there is an obvious pacing and holding of interest problem and I feel that this manga suffers from that greatly. All throughout the volume, I was practically begging for the story to move forward and to something more interesting. When Tohno got the results for the first chapter of Wakkamono, it was like a breath of fresh air as it felt like something of interest finally happened.
Another thing that really throws you off is the way the country slang is written for some of the characters. For some reason, Tohno and Toshibou are the only ones who can speak normally. Everyone else has that Japanese-style southern drawl. I get the reason why it’s there, though. There are different dialects in Japan… much like how people sound and talk different in various areas of the United States but this was just very painful to read. It actually broke my suspension of disbelief as I struggled to understand what was being said. The only clever tie-in was that Tohno used this dialect for one of his characters in his storyboard which added a bit of unique flair to it but when it’s overdone outside of the manga with almost every character that isn’t Tohno, it gets a bit much. I think it would have been fine with a simple ‘y’all’ or something of the like to indicate that there was a dialect but when you start writing them as if they are very heavily accented, it creates a very jarring experience.
Sorry to say, that the weird character dialogue and incredibly slow pacing made for an unenjoyable experience for me. Even if a manga is less than adequate, I always like to give it the benefit of the doubt and find the good points in it. Yoshi no Zuikara has its good points and it has some interesting concepts but the execution of them wasn’t handled all too well and it really turned me off on this series. However, I know that while I may no continue with this series, I know there are some out there who do enjoy slow-paced stories, so this may be interesting to some. If you enjoy the process of making manga and having it wrapped up in a slow-paced slice-of-life setting, you’ll probably love this series. For me, it just wasn’t doing it, sadly.
Follow me on Twitter @JJPiedraTOH
You can also check out other The Outerhaven reviews on your favorite social media networks:
Subscribe to us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/theouterhaven
Subscribe to us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheOuterHaven
Subscribe to us on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/theouterhavennet
**This item was provided for review
