Metamorphose by 十二の鍵

 I can only imagine the blog visits I'll get from people looking for ancient Greek / Roman poetry, or trying to buy a Gothic Lolita dress... so, mild nudity ahead. Be warned. Also, the author seems big on intellectual property, so I'll put only the cover up, and let you explore through the review's many links if you want more.  

The few and proud who follow this review blog, should know by now that I get a kcik when I happen to find something really quirky while shopping for dōjinshi, especially when it deviates from typical dōjin fare. I'm talking about self-published travelogues, reviews of Tokyo restaurants where you can stuff your face all you want - and, of course, weirdo art projects. Today's dōjinshi,12Keys' Metamorphose, squarely falls within this category.

A bit of background, so you don't get the wrong idea and assume I started reviewing softcore photography. 12Keys (十二の鍵)'s typical output is illustration, in an ornate, vaguely 'kawaii meets Art Deco' style that I actually find quite enticing. The other two dōjinshi to their name are, in fact, illustration books (and I do plan to get my hands on the awesomely titled Book of Books of Booby). However, they do dabble in other kinds of art, from felt sculpting to performance art, as their excellent web site shows. 

So, what's with the painted lady on the cover of this book? Well, according to the brief foreword attached, it's an attempt to create beauty, in order to lead us to the creation of a better world... cheeky statements aside, what we have here is a collection of pics from a photoset where model Tereza Nakajima poses on a rooftop, with three different, colorful body paints made by 12Keys themselves. The setting is mundane, and props are minimal: aside for an umbrella and a pair of sunglasses, only featured in a few pics, the rest is the model's body cast against the concrete of the building that acts as a setting. Some of the bodypaints are abstrat in nature, while others feature the stylized chibi forms typical of 12Keys' illustrations. The booklet is about 24 pages, full color, and ends with an interview with the model, and a few lines of afterword.

While these contents might not seem much to build upon, I have to say that the project does have some artistic and thematic merits, more than the format belies at least. Discourses about body representation and femininity are probably reaching (and part of an academic past I'll gladly spare you), but there is a lot to say about 12Keys work even just on a surface, aesthetic level: the contrast that the drab concrete, the model's pale complexion, and the colorful body paint is actually emphasized by the subdued, at times grainy and under / overexposed style of the photographs. 12Keys' body paint, and Nakajima's whimsical and quirky demeanor, reinvigorate a dreary, Lain-like cityscape. Also, while the subject of Metamorphose might seem offbeat, there is actually a long tradition of body paint (and performance art in general) in Japan.

All in all, an outlier that definitely deserves a second glance. It's a fairly old thing, published in 2013, so it might be difficult to get your hands on a physical copy. On the other hand, they have a very interesting Twitter account, where you can find more recent body paint works. 

  

 

私設図書館シャッツキステへようこそ

 So, for a change, I'm goign to review an item that is not a dōjinshi, as it was published by a proper publishing house (Kadokawa), and is available on Amazon, both in hard copy and Kindle... but! I enjoyed it, so you get a review anyway. Too bad for you.

シャッツキステ (German for 'Treasure Chest') is not an author nor a series, but a café in Akihabara, Tokyo. What makes it somewhat notable is its theme, which eschewes (for the most part) the atrocious tropes of 'manga cafes' (flyers for such places being forced in my hands every few steps is one of the worst memories I have of Akihabara), opting instead for an Old World, pesudo-Victorian aesthetics, including maids that actually dress as maids are supposed to, and - from what I've heard - actually decent country-style food, as well as a setting that reminds one more of an English tea house than a manga cafe. It was on my to-do list when I was over in Japan but, unfortunately, I eventually wasn't able to make it there.

Another notable point is that the café occasionally puts out books and comics as promotional materials, in the form of manga, short stories, and even music, usually attributed - fictitiously, I assume - to one of the actual people staffing the cafe.  私設図書館シャッツキステへようこそ (Welcome to Schatzkiste Private Library) , for example, lists 有井エリス (the real-world coordinator of the cafe's maids) as its author. A nice little conceit, to make this blatant promotional material some sort of in-world item, which I appreciate even more when, as in this case, the material happens to be decent.

The book, a meaty and mostly-color 223 pages, consists for the most part of 4-koma, short gag stories consisting of only four panels cum punchline. The many (real world) maids of Schatzkiste are the protagonists of these (fictitious) adventures, in which jokes largely center on every character's one-dimensional idiosincrasies and retorts in a boke-tsukkomi (straight man and fool?) style. So yeah, no sweeping storylines, but cute little jokes garnished with chibi maids and a fluffy JRPG, Animal Crossing  style aesthetic. Pretty neat stuff, and the Japanese is basic too - good if you want some intermediate practice. 

You can get a copy here. 

ギルティごはん by COSMIC FORGE

 ... and it's thanks to a dōjinshi from this circle that I learned the Japanese word for 'normie'. What makes it even funnier is that jisho.org has 'normie' as an actual definition. Sign of the times...

A different dōjinshi, that is. I reviewed in the past a couple of works by COSMIC FORGE, all of them rather high-quality - glossy, full color, and fallign right into that 'bizarre, specific take on a narrow otaku interest' that I dig so much. This one is no exception - ギルティごはん, a 20 pages, full color work from 2015 is dedicated to showcasing a few places in the Tokyo area where you can have your fill of, as the title says, 'guilty pleasure' meals. 

This blog is not new to food-centric circles, as I happen to be a big fan of SAYU Studio's self-published books of recipes. This is the first time, however, that I got my hands on a restaurant-reviews dōjinshi, which I know to be a rather florid subset... I simply never bought one. Still, it's a purchase I don't regret, and not only because the publication itself is rather high quality - the pictures are nice and crisp, the descriptions and field reports clear and to the point, and the horiziontal layout really brings it all together in a 'magazine insert' kind of way. 

ギルティごはん also happens to be a time capsule of sort. As globetrotting foodies might know, restaurants and eateries in Japan, big cities especially, are very short lived; and, as far as I could research, none of the places reviewed here are still standing. I might be wrong, though, as my Japanese Google-fu has failed me before. 

So, yeah, not much to say beyond this. Still, a nice interesting read, especially relevant if you happen to be into this kind of stuff. There is a volume 2 available as well, though I'm not sure I'll bother buying it. We'll see...

着艦未満 by シギサワカヤ

 Sometimes we get pleasantly surprised, even in  the times of coronavirus. Be it the reduced airmail traffic, be it that print material packages tend to fly under the radar (in years of collecting I had to pay customs maybe once), I got in two weeks a Mandarake delivery that usually takes months. It's a mystery...

But! This also means that the blog is coming back to life, and reviews will pour forth once again. We're starting nice and easy with a dōjinshi by シギサワカヤ (Shigisawa Kaya), titled 着艦未満 , which translates to... insufficient landing strip? I'm not sure to be honest, as 着艦 is some kind of military navy term I'm not familiar with. However, as you might have guessed from this, the dōjinshi I'm reviewing is a KanColle parody, which I was not expecting... as this specific work is actually filed as 'original' on doujinshi.org. 

Now, as you might know, I'm not a fan of parody works. I'm also not a fan of KanColle, one of those otaku obsessions that really never stuck with me. On the other hand, I am a decently big fan of Shigisawa Kaya - if you're unfamiliar with the author, she usually dabbles in yuri romances between salarywomen, plus some forays into the sapphic supernatural. She doesn't have a huge catalog of commercial work, but she participates often in anthologies and used to put out a lot of dōjin works, especially in her early career. She has a very distinctive, simple and sometimes abstract graphic style that fits very well the kind of love stories she usually focuses on.

Gag manga based around anthropomorphizations of battleships? not so much. In fact, I'm afraid to say that this thin, 24 B&W pages booklet is really nothing special. The story is the usual gag where the battleship girl of the day (can't really be bothered figuring out which one it exactly is, I'm not that much of a weeb) fails to satisfy the commander in some way, feels but but is forgiven in the end. From what I read of KanColle dōjin works, that's pretty much a trope. The drawing style is Shigisawa's own, which is a plus, but really doesn't blend too well with this bland fan fiction. Or maybe I'm just shocked at the scandalous lack of yuri...

All in all, I can't really reccomend this dōjinshi, but I can reccomend Shigisawa Kaya - go get one of her commercial works, or the good dōjinshi, like ヴァーチャル・レッド.