Ryushika, Ryushika 4: further adventures of Yoshitoshi ABe’s Yotsuba-with-attitude

by dm00

Cover

In volume four of Yoshitoshi ABe’s tale of a young girl, Ryushika has an encounter with mortality (saying farewell to Buuuuuunnnnnn, a beloved refrigerator), explores the transience of existence tutored by a Taiko-Taiko-Revolution game, and meets her match in a staring contest on the subway.

This old lady knows how to push Ryushika’s buttons (the actual manga page is in color).

Along the way, Hamu, her brother’s pet chameleon is Ryushika’s guide to the nocturnal world of lucid dreaming, and her family watches a movie.

The series is charming, surreal, and has a flavor of the word- and conceptual-games of Lewis Carroll.

The humor is primarily visual, but as always, Ryushika’s dialoge is in hiragana.  Some of the adults around her use kanji.  The books are easily read by anyone with a bit of Japanese grammar under their belt.

Available atamazon.co.jp or (with more affordable shipping) from: www.cdjapan.co.jp.

Ryushika, Ryushika 3 — Yotsuba’s evil twin studies optics and the onotology of the donut hole

by dm00

"No way!" the chameleon replies

Volume 3 of Yoshitoshi Abe’s Ryushika, Ryushika was released this week: more adventures of Yotsuba’s evil twin.

In this volume, Ryushika tries on her extremely near-sighted father’s glasses, and gets new ideas about the malleability of perception (a later chapter does much the same thing with her sense of smell, prompting the realization that rainclouds are cloths the gods use to wash the world). In the final chapter, her father asks her what happens to the hole as we eat the donut.

Along the way, Ryushika has nightmares about a creeper vine seeking revenge for being uprooted, and names her brother’s chameleon “Hamu” for the hamster she was expecting him to bring home, and more.

Almost all the dialogue is Ryushika musing, and misunderstanding, the world around her in the most energetic ways possible. Ryushika muses in simple sentences written in kana, so even someone with just a semester of Japanese can read it pretty easily (the adults around her do use kanji, some of which are moderately obscure, but clear from context, and with full furigana).

If you’re a fan of Yotsuba&!, especially if you’d like her more if she were a little brattier, and you have just a tiny bit of ability to read Japanese, the Ryushika, Ryushika volumes are certainly worth adding to your collection.

Yoshitoshi ABe creates Yotsuba’s evil twin

by dm00, not quite so cranky

 

Ryushika ponders the nature of personal identity and our place in the universe

 

I’ve been reading Yoshitoshi Abe’s Ryushika Ryushika, in which he creates a character who is half Yotsuba, and half Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes

.

 

...before going inside to yell at her brother to come see the sky that only she sees

 

Like Yotsuba, Ryushika is encountering the world for the first time. Like Calvin, she sometimes has an odd way of seeing things. In the chapter that concludes with the images here, she’s noticed that the world looks different when viewed from one eye or the other (parallax) — and wonders which world is the real one, and if the world looks this different to each of her eyes, it must look very different indeed through the eyes of other people. Another chapter sees her vowing vengeance on the world for a missing takoyaki, and suspects each of the people (plus a dog) she met on the way home of having snatched it (it was stuck to the lid of the box, as it happens).

Junichi Yamamoto — sad robot in rubble/Hot blooded alien/Kobe & I

by dm00

Thanks to an ANN news story about a Kobe tourism board-sponsored short animation, the quirky and eccentric Kobe & I:

I stumbled onto the director’s Youtube postings.

Kobe and I has a female lead with boyfriend-troubles, who also appears in the manic Hot-blooded alien:

Which reminds me a good deal of Yoshitoshi Abe’s I am an alien, and I have a question (don’t be mislead by the “graphic novel” — it’s only 20 or so pages long). I suppose it should remind me of Sunred, but I never got into that series, for some reason.

Half the films have a melancholy air, such as Melody, a Kunio Kato (Diary of Tortov Roddle, and the Oscar-winning
La Maison en Petits Cubes)-like short about a son’s memories of his deceased father. Watching it, I found myself wondering if my own children would have such memories of me (I fear I have no such memories of my own workaholic father).

It’s a bit trite and predictable, but sweet and affecting, and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

By far the best of the lot is the all-CGI Memory, which may remind some of Eve no Jikan (particularly the episode Nameless):

(If you like that sort of thing, take a look at this Russian adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s story There will come soft rains:

But be warned: the related links may turn into a TV-tropes-rivalling timesink.)

I don’t know if he’s got more animated shorts out there, or not. Google turns up some tantalyzing hints, but also hints that “Junichi Yamamoto” is not that unusual a name.

ABe Redux

Nothing to see here. Just more Yoshitoshi ABe drawings on Apple products. Sorry about the spamming, if you can call it that.

More Yoshitoshi ABe Scribbles and Doodles on the iPad

I’m not getting tired of seeing him work magic with his fingers on the iPad anytime soon. And with three more videos up, this feeling is not going to go away anytime soon. :3

ABe is probably the best possible way to get me to buy an iPad…

Seeing Yoshitoshi ABe working his magic on it is totally the coolest thing ever.

Wondering if one could actually draw on one (albeit not with fingers, but something more like a pen, but hey) was something that I had been wondering about ever since it was released. Silly, I know. But it’s great to see ABe at quick work here, and I hope to see more stuff like this in the future. Stuff like this is why I read his blog, as well as Google Reader Shared Items. And is why I’m really hoping for Despera to come out sooner. \o