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Reviewed by Michael Aronson “Taiyo Matsumoto’s Blue Spring is a short story collection focusing on the lives of a small group of disenchanted high school students. Although spring usually connotes the blossoming of new life and a time of nurturing and anticipation, the spring for these characters is “blue.” They can’t wait for school to end and the summer to come. Their lives are balanced on the edge of a knife as they flirt with crime and their own deaths in the form of a deadly rooftop game. Each character has a different story to tell and the rebellion, questioning and frustration of these youth are palpable.” Though I don’t think I’ve seen it’s like before, Matsumoto might best be described as a manga indie artist. The sensibilities of his storytelling and composition of panels defy convention, jumping back and forth between separate scenes, emphasizing backgrounds as prominently as characters, shifting in and out of flashbacks with abrupt transitions and generally bucking linear dialogue exchange. Sadly, all this innovation – especially for a manga title – comes at the cost of a comprehensible story. Matsumoto’s been hailed as a genius and a great influence in the manga field, so I’d like to assume Blue Spring really isn’t so flawed. I’d also like to assume I’m an intelligent reader and can make sense of a story composed of sequential art. I’m suspecting that much of the failure rests in the rugged translation. The dialogue for the most part is disjointed and disconnected. Take these consecutive lines, all taking place in the same scene: “Heh heh heh . . . thanks.” “I . . . what?” “I have about 3,500,000 yen of my New Year’s money left.” “Yeah?” “I want another shot.” “Heh heh heh.” The visuals won’t make this exchange much clearer, as not all the lines are attributed. Conceptually, this loose and interspersed dialogue could function well within the context of a prominent story, but most of the stories feature bored high school guys mulling about. The one I just referenced, “Revolver,” stars a group of boys who discover a gun, fire off shots at a train, and play Russian roulette on a beach. Some of the moments are decent, but strung together, they lack a clear narrative arc. From the little I know of Japanese, one-word sentences have a little more weight in that language than they, or their translations, do in English. “If You’re Happy And You Know It, Clap Your Hands” is an interesting story featuring a game of chicken on a school rooftop. A group of boys hold onto a railing as they leave over the edge of the roof, then let go and try to clap their hands as many times as possible before they lose balance and have to grab hold once more. It follows the theme of idle indulgences, but it doesn’t function much further than as a segment of larger nonexistent whole. The stories in general don’t function too well on their own, but they don’t fit into a larger cohesive scheme either. It’s hard to keep track of the characters in each story due to their indistinguishable dialogue. It’s similarly hard to connect seemingly disparate juxtaposed scenes together considering the ambiguity with dialogue. It’s also difficult to keep matching up the footnote translations to the corresponding background graffiti, since none of it’s translation in the art and much of it requires explanations to references. Taken together, all these debilitation factors brings into question whether Blue Spring was suitable for a western audience to begin with or if it was just a botched localization job. It’s a shame that my first exposure to this alleged titan of manga ends in disappointment. Comment on this review of Blue Spring on the Manga Life Forums. |
7 May 2008
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