Banana Fish
I figured I should probably start posting some stuff on this LJ, since I do stalk people on it, and it might be a bit creepy to have an empty journal... (Or do lots of people do that? Hm...) So, uh, here goes...
I just finished a 19-vol series of a manga called Banana Fish, by Akimi Yoshida. And, holy crap, it is one of the best manga series I have ever read. The basic storyline follows a 17yo teenager named Ash Lynx, who was picked up off the streets and raised to take over the New York underworld by a sadistic man known as "Papa" Dino Golzine, who also used Ash as his sex toy. Ash's brother was in Vietnam during the war, but suddenly went crazy one day and shot most of his comrades dead, before uttering the words "banana fish" and ever since, those two words were all he would say.
Banana Fish is classified as a shojo manga, but I sure as hell don't agree - it's brutal, violent, bloody, gory, and deals in rape and pedophilia (although the latter two are not graphic). The only "shojo" part of it would be the underlying homosexual implications between Ash and Eiji Okumura, a Japanese boy who came to NY as a reporter assistant and met Ash while doing a story on the NY underworld - and even that's not explicitly defined; it can be viewed as extremely tight friendship if one chooses to.
The art took some getting used to at first - I had a lot of trouble telling people apart, but stays fairly consistent throughout the whole series, which was good as there were a lot of characters that appeared in this series. As I was reading it, I kept on relating it to those corny cops-vs-mafia movies, and how if this was made into a movie, it would be so fucking good despite the fact that it uses some cliches that only became cliches because they were used too much in the recent past (this series was published in the 1980s). It is a rather dialogue-heavy series, but the storyline is clear and is one long journey, instead of several story arcs like most manga.
I'm not too sure I like the ending, but I think the epilogue makes up for it quite well. (I actually teared up a bit.) At the same time, I find I can't get into the fandom very well, because everything that needs to be said about the relationships between any of the characters has already been said, if not explicitly stated then implied by the mangaka. Overall, I'd say this manga deserves to be read and reread, just to fully grasp most of what the mangaka intended to state. Viz did a fairly decent job on translating this series, so I think I'll be looking for my own copy of the series now (I borrowed from a friend this time...). On the other hand, I noticed in some volumes they'd say "fudging" instead of "fucking" (as in, "that fudging bastard"), and that really got on my nerves/pulled me out of the story, because really, do gangsters in NY say "fudging"? Other than that, I'm fairly happy with what Viz has done, and I think anyone who enjoys more realistic manga would like this series too.
I just finished a 19-vol series of a manga called Banana Fish, by Akimi Yoshida. And, holy crap, it is one of the best manga series I have ever read. The basic storyline follows a 17yo teenager named Ash Lynx, who was picked up off the streets and raised to take over the New York underworld by a sadistic man known as "Papa" Dino Golzine, who also used Ash as his sex toy. Ash's brother was in Vietnam during the war, but suddenly went crazy one day and shot most of his comrades dead, before uttering the words "banana fish" and ever since, those two words were all he would say.
Banana Fish is classified as a shojo manga, but I sure as hell don't agree - it's brutal, violent, bloody, gory, and deals in rape and pedophilia (although the latter two are not graphic). The only "shojo" part of it would be the underlying homosexual implications between Ash and Eiji Okumura, a Japanese boy who came to NY as a reporter assistant and met Ash while doing a story on the NY underworld - and even that's not explicitly defined; it can be viewed as extremely tight friendship if one chooses to.
The art took some getting used to at first - I had a lot of trouble telling people apart, but stays fairly consistent throughout the whole series, which was good as there were a lot of characters that appeared in this series. As I was reading it, I kept on relating it to those corny cops-vs-mafia movies, and how if this was made into a movie, it would be so fucking good despite the fact that it uses some cliches that only became cliches because they were used too much in the recent past (this series was published in the 1980s). It is a rather dialogue-heavy series, but the storyline is clear and is one long journey, instead of several story arcs like most manga.
I'm not too sure I like the ending, but I think the epilogue makes up for it quite well. (I actually teared up a bit.) At the same time, I find I can't get into the fandom very well, because everything that needs to be said about the relationships between any of the characters has already been said, if not explicitly stated then implied by the mangaka. Overall, I'd say this manga deserves to be read and reread, just to fully grasp most of what the mangaka intended to state. Viz did a fairly decent job on translating this series, so I think I'll be looking for my own copy of the series now (I borrowed from a friend this time...). On the other hand, I noticed in some volumes they'd say "fudging" instead of "fucking" (as in, "that fudging bastard"), and that really got on my nerves/pulled me out of the story, because really, do gangsters in NY say "fudging"? Other than that, I'm fairly happy with what Viz has done, and I think anyone who enjoys more realistic manga would like this series too.