Kingyo Used Books

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Year: 2004-2011 (Japan), 2010-2011 (America)

Writer/Artist: Seimu Yoshizaki

Availability: Only volumes 1-4 were released in American and are in stock at U.S. retailers like Amazon and RightStuf.

More Info: ANN

Manga Review (Volume 1)
This is a manga about the appreciation of manga. That should explain the extent of its potential appeal.

While readers from other cultures can certainly grasp the concept, Kingyo Used Books relies on the uniquely Japanese experience of growing up surrounded by manga. In America, many kids read comics, but they generally aren't exposed to the breadth of subject matter available to kids in Japan.

This first volume of Kingyo tells several disconnected short stories about people reconnecting with their childhood love of manga. This works because each person has a favorite manga in a particular genre. A sports manga series will teach different lessons than a shoujo story.

Kingyo Used Books centers on a manga bookstore (of the same name as the title) that also hides a secret that is appropriately improbable: beneath the store lies a massive manga library. Kingyo Used Books' employees all love manga and, just like the titular character in Bartender recommending drinks that resolve customers' problems, they recommend manga titles to customers that suffer from emotional crises.

On the one hand, the overall thrust of the manga feels pretty heavy-handed at times: manga is wonderful, and can help you solve life's problems! On the other hand, manga could use the defense in a world that sees comics as temporary, disposable pop culture.

The art is clean and easy to parse, avoiding lots of close-ups or odd viewing angles. There are enough backgrounds to ground you in a location, but long dialogue scenes omit backgrounds where they're unnecessary (avoiding the strong sense of reality in, say, Akira or Ghost in the Shell).

Those looking for a complex, long-form narrative or incredibly complex characters should look elsewhere. Kingyo uses manga as a crystal to reflect a rainbow of stories and emotions evoked by an idiosyncratic medium.