The terrible economy has sent more people than ever out into the yard with shovels and seed packets. Harvest time is fast approaching, and gardeners of every experience level will soon be pondering that universal question, “What the heck am I supposed to do with all of this stuff? Who needs this much eggplant?”

Leave it to Iou Kuroda to turn the ubiquitous, easy-to-grow fruit/vegetable into a manga series, Nasu, that I really, really wish someone would license and translate into English. It was originally serialized in Kodansha’s Afternoon magazine and collected in three volumes. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it:

“Nasu is a collection of stories, focusing on a returning [DW — does the author maybe mean ‘recurring’?] series of characters, such as Takama, a farmer, and a young girl named Aya Takahashi, who begins the series abandoned by her father and residing in Tokyo with her two younger siblings, and as the manga progresses to its second volume, leaves the city to reside in the countryside with her relatives, near Takama’s farm. Apart from the chapters concerning Takama and Aya, other stories are also featured, such as one telling the chronicles of samurai in the Edo period hunting forbidden eggplant (nasu), another set atop a futuristic Mount Fuji, another tale concerning a truck driver, and also ‘Summer in Andalusia’, the story concerning the professional Spanish bicyclist Pepe Benengeli, from which the film was adapted.”

It was also published in French by Sakka, but I can’t find it anywhere on Sakka’s web site. Here are the listings for its three volumes on Amazon France.

Aside from the fact that it sounds awesome, Kuroda is one of those creators who tops my “Please license more work from this person” wish list. This is based on my abiding love for his one work available in English, the splendid Sexy Voice and Robo (Viz), which was originally serialized in current buzz-anthology IKKI. Here’s some critical reaction to that book:

“So multi-layered is this manga that any attempts to explain the story end in ‘Oh, just read it and you’ll see.’ And there’s no reason not to read it—it’s smart enough for picky intellectual comics nerds, thrilling enough for action lovers, and deep enough for those who care about characters, emotions and drama.” Carlo Santos, Anime News Network

“Sexy Voice and Robo is a marvelous comic. Kuroda’s singular vision and craft transcend conventional ideas of genre and storytelling. It’s one of the best graphic novels I’ve read all year, and you really should try it, even if you don’t think you like manga.” Me, Comic World News

And here’s Shaenon K. Garrity’s image-rich celebration of the book in her Overlooked Manga Festival which, incidentally, is where I first heard about Nasu.

Seriously, I’ve never run into anyone (mostly the web version of “run into,” obviously) who has read Sexy Voice and Robo who doesn’t yearn for more of Kuroda’s work to be licensed and translated. And Viz, since you’re sharing IKKI titles online, why not throw Sexy Voice and Robo into the mix? It’s one of the best things you’ve ever, ever published, so give it a second chance.

Many may feel that I’m squandering this week’s license request on a sure thing. There are few manga-ka who have had as much of their work translated into English as Fumi Yoshinaga, so the licensing of her current food-fixated comedy, What Did You Eat Yesterday?, seems like a given. But you know what? I like saying nice things about Fumi Yoshinaga, so you’ll just have to put up with it.

What Did You Eat Yesterday? is being serialized in Kodansha’s Morning magazine, a font of some of some of the best manga currently available in English and a reliable resource for wish-list composition (just slightly less reliable than Kodansha’s Afternoon). It’s about a gay couple’s life as viewed through the prism of what they eat. One’s a lawyer who’s a gourmet cook; the other is a hairdresser who, if I know Yoshinaga, probably can’t make toast. There’s usually a disparity of culinary ability in her couples. Two volumes have been published so far, which seems kind of slim, but if English-reading Yoshinaga fans have demonstrated anything, it’s their willingness to wait.

Quite a bit of time elapsed between publication of the third and fourth volumes of Yoshinaga’s charming high-school comedy, Flower of Life (DMP). While fans would rather have had the concluding volume sooner than later, the results of this poll over at The Manga Critic indicate a healthy level of regard, tardy or not. Even more persuasive are the trends of this Manga Critic poll on hotly anticipated titles for the second half of 2009; Yoshinaga’s Ôoku (Viz) is right up there in the lead.

As anyone who’s read Yoshinaga’s Antique Bakery (DMP) knows, the results are almost always magical when she turns her attention to food. (And food never seems to be too far from her mind.) So whoever delivers this book to English-reading audiences will be regarded warmly and highly by lots and lots of people. If Kodansha ever gets its stateside operation up and running, it would be an outstanding debut title.

Many, many people wish that manga publishers would license more work from the Year 24 Group of pioneering shôjo creators. Unfortunately, the market doesn’t always seem receptive to classic works. No, it seems more commercially sensible to license recent works, especially award-winning recent works. But what if there was a way to give readers like myself more work from that august body of creators while working within the recent/award-winning subset? What’s that you say? There is a way? Well, heck, then, I’ll just dedicate this column to Moto Hagio’s Otherworld Barbara.

Hagio, as you likely very well know, is one of the high priestesses of the Year 24 Group. Some of her work has been published in English by Viz (They Were Eleven in Four Shojo Stories and A, A-Prime), but it’s all out of print. The Comics Journal ran a lengthy and fascinating interview with Hagio conducted by none other than Matt Thorn and even used Hagio’s art for the cover of its issue dedicated to shôjo manga. Inexplicably (all right, all right, maybe commercially explicably), publishers have not yet tripped over one another to get Hagio’s work on the bookstore shelves.

Fortunately, there’s Otherworld Barbara, which completed its four-volume run in Shogakukan’s Flowers anthology in 2005. (That was only four years ago! It’s practically new!) Otherworld Barbara, or Barbara Ikai, won the 2006 Nihon Science Fiction Taisho Award, which is presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan. The award is open to prose, comics, animation and movies, so Hagio’s win seems particularly impressive.

But what’s Otherworld Barbara about? For that, I was lucky to have the translation assistance of Erica (ALC) Friedman:

“2052 CE. The ability to step into another person’s dream exists, ‘Yumesaki Guide’ Watari Tokio has been asleep since something happened 7 years ago, when he undertook the job of entering a girl’s, Juujou (maybe Toujo) Aaoba’s, dream. And, living happily inside Aoba’s dream on the island of Barbara, a keyword unexpectedly materializes the real world.

“Watarai wants to return once again to the world inside Aoba’s dream. To procure eternal life living happily on the Island of Barbara, he conducts a strange ceremony upon himself. On the one side, a vision of Aoba’s appears, on the other an abundant ocean known as the ‘Beach of Mars’ as the story begins….”

I’ve also heard that the (catatonic? Comatose?) Aaoba was found next to her dead parents with their hearts in her stomach.

Now, it’s josei, and many publishers won’t touch that category with tongs, but it’s also award-winning, relatively recent science fiction. Just keep repeating that last part to yourselves. Plus, it’s Moto Hagio, which is reason enough to license it ASAP, in my book.

Before I get into this week’s license request, I thought I’d belatedly offer my philosophy for this weekly feature. I’m not looking for properties that I think would be commercially viable or even for ones that fill a gap in the cultural or historical record. There are people who are much better qualified to address either of those concerns. My sole consideration is the English-language publication of Japanese comics that I’d like to read. I’m just that selfish.

And really, why else would I request a comic that its original publisher (Shueisha) doesn’t even seem to have kept in print? I’m speaking of the three-volume Children of the Earth, written by Jinpachi (Benkei in New York) Mori and illustrated by Hideaki Hataji. I believe it was originally serialized in Shueisha’s Super Jump magazine, though I can find no mention of the series in the magazine’s Wikipedia entry. It was published in French by Éditions Delcourt under the title Les Fils de la terre. It was among the titles to receive the 2008 Prix Asie awards from the Association des critiques et journalistes specialises en Bandes Dessinées. But information on the book is thin on the ground; no one even seems interested enough in the book to steal it, which is kind of sad.

So why am I interested? Partly, it’s my fixation on stories set in rural Japan. Another point in the book’s favor is its subject matter: agriculture. While there’s a growing level of interest in where our food comes from and how it’s produced, it still strikes me that there’s a shocking amount of ignorance on the subject and a disregard for how hardworking and smart farmers need to be, especially if they want to engage in sustainable or organic production. Children of the Earth promises both; no wonder the French embraced it.

Here’s what I’ve been able to glean of the book’s plot from the remnants of my shaky college French: a newbie with Japan’s agricultural agency is sent to a rural village, Takazono, to help local farmers “reform” Japanese agriculture. The bureaucrat, Natsume, butts heads with a local farmer, Kohei, who has no use for the government’s reformation effort. Natsume is won over by Takazono’s charms and the inherent dignity of farming and dedicates himself to encouraging young people to pursue education and careers in agriculture.

(If anyone has read the book in French or Japanese, please feel free to correct any of the above. Add my language “skills” to the often inaccurate shorthand of solicitation text, and you have a recipe for gross misinterpretation of a book’s content, you know? Ditto my inability to find it on Shueisha’s web site, which I suspect I would find difficult to navigate even with any Japanese fluency whatsoever. I did manage to find it on Amazon Japan, which leads me to suspect I could have found it on the publisher’s page if it was there. To summarize, I have strikethrough functionality and I’m not afraid to use it, so please don’t hesitate to tell me I’m wrong about just about anything.)

Admittedly, the English-reading manga fan need not suffer from an absence of farming comics. The first volume of Moyasimon (Del Rey) was just listed in Previews, promising an opportunity to really get to know the microbes so essential to food production. Viz’s Oishinbo gang always seems to be ready to head out to the countryside to see food at the source. (I want their jobs and their expense accounts, don’t you?) But Children of the Earth seems like it would be right up my alley and, as I said, this is ultimately all about me.

(P.S. Okay, it doesn’t have to be entirely about me. I’m open to guest authors on License Request Day, so feel free to drop me a line if there’s a book you’re burning to see published in English.)

My plan is to concentrate this feature on titles that have never been published in English, but I reserve the right to make the occasional exception and turn License Request Day into Rescue Request Day. This week, I’m inspired by the arrival of Kiminori Wakasugi’s Detroit Metal City (Viz). Perhaps, if it does well as it deserves, we will enter into an era where shamelessly coarse, stealthily brilliant manga can find a home on our bookstore shelves. Perhaps it will be time for the return of Atsushi Kaneko’s Bambi and Her Pink Gun.

Digital Manga Publishing released two of this series’ six volumes in 2005, breaking hearts by not completing the run. (I won’t guess how many hearts were broken; obviously not enough, or it would have been profitable enough to finish.) I won’t pretend that the audience for the book might not be a bit narrower than most. The art is unusual, the protagonist is a horrible person, and the violence and depravity are pretty much constant. Of course, the people whose response to that is “Sign me up!” are loyal sorts.

They’re especially loyal when a publisher lavishes as much attention to production as DMP did with its two volumes – crisp reproduction, nice paper quality, dust covers, colored ink, and so on. And the story it self is a fast-paced crime spree featuring one of those blank-slate protagonists who manage to be interesting in spite of themselves. Bambi has a foul disposition and a way with mayhem; she may or may not have a damaged emotional core that explains her behavior, but there’s no evidence of one yet, and it doesn’t seem like a reason for her behavior would be strictly necessary.

She’s kidnapped a horrible child at the behest of some mysterious “Old Men.” The child’s father sets a substantial bounty on Bambi’s head, and there are plenty of seedy types who are more than willing to off a teen for five hundred million yen. Good luck to them, honestly, as Bambi is much more likely to go through than around. Kaneko assembles a vivid, repulsive rogues gallery for Bambi, and one can only imagine what kind of human monsters lurk in the other four volumes.

Really, I shouldn’t like this book, certainly not as much as I do. Its saving grace is that the thoroughly gratuitous violence lacks the smugness of similar work by Quentin Tarantino and his ilk. It runs on adrenalin and meanness, and it’s undeniably exhilarating. So please, won’t someone rescue Bambi?

OR ELSE.

I thought that by now I surely would have devoted at least one License Request Day to a work by one of the members of the Year 24 Group of pioneering shôjo manga-ka. It’s time to rectify that, as their works are sorely neglected. Vertical has done a great service by publishing two of Keiko Takemiya’s science-fiction shônen works, To Terra… and Andromeda Stories, and, if you have the tenacity and the resources, you can probably still find copies of Viz’s out-of-print A, A-Prime (Moto Hagio) and Four Shojo Stories (by Hagio, Keiko Nishi and Shio Satô). But someone somewhere would earn a lot of goodwill (with me, at least) were they to license and publish Riyoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles.

As near as I can determine, two English-language volumes (translated by no less than Frederik L. Schodt) were published by a shop called Sanyusha in the early 1980s. Schodt included a sample in Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics, but that’s the largest quantity that’s even close to readily available. The book has been published in South Korea (Daiwon C.I.), France (Kana), Germany (Carlsen Comics), and Spain (Azake Ediciones), so basically we’re behind just about everyone.

Originally serialized in Viz co-owner Shueisha’s Margaret magazine, the comic has seen all kinds of prestige printings since its original run. It’s been adapted into an anime, a movie and a stage musical. Now, lots of comics have been turned into animated series and motion pictures, but a musical? That, my friends, is hardcore. So what’s the appeal? Let’s start with noted shôjo scholar Matt Thorn’s description:

“The genre of shôjo manga really burst into the popular consciousness, however, in 1972 with the huge success of Ikeda Riyoko’s Berusaiyu no bara (“The Rose of Versailles”), which features a woman, Oscar, who was raised to behave and dress as a man. A captain in the French army, Oscar manages to draws the romantic interest of both Andre (a man who is a subordinate in the unit she commands, as well as a childhood friend) and of Marie Antoinette, whom she serves as personal bodyguard.”

Deborah Shamoon of the University of Notre Dame noted that the series “began as a frothy romance for girls, but by the end had become a serious examination of gender roles and political issues. This transformation encapsulates the larger changes in shôjo manga in the 1970s, when authors used melodramatic conventions received from earlier shôjo magazines and novels, to create stories that explored the psychological interiority and sexual agency of girls.”

I don’t usually single out an English-language publisher in these pieces, but I’ll make an exception here. Viz, your Signature imprint has become perhaps the go-to purveyor of deeply satisfying, commercially risky material. Go a step further and fold some more classics into the mix, starting with a handsome, library-friendly, hardcover edition of The Rose of Versailles. (And you could put the Hagio books back in print while you’re at it.)

Hey, did you know? It’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month! The President of the United States said so! We can’t marry in most states or openly serve in the military, but other than that, June is all ours, bitches! (In fairness, I have no desire to do either, but I would like the chance to decline both and have it mean something.)

In the spirit of celebration, I’ll devote this week’s License Request Day to a title I first heard about in Paul Gravett’s essential Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics (Harper Design): Marimo Ragawa’s N.Y.N.Y. Here’s a bit of Gravett’s description of the book:

“It follows the lifelong relationship between Kain Walker, a New York cop who has hidden his homosexuality, and his younger blond boyfriend, Mel Frederics, an orphan with a troubled past. Ragawa portrays the strength of their devotion to each other as they face the challenges of coming out, of sexual jealousy, and of living as an openly gay couple.”

If you’ve read any of my thoughts on Saika Kunieda’s Future Lovers (Deux Press), you’ll already know that this paragraph amounts to catnip for me. I just can’t resist yaoi where the protagonists are grown-ups with lives and where sexual orientation actually matters.

Ragawa is probably best known among English-reading manga fans for Baby & Me (Viz), one of the earliest Shojo Beat releases. It follows the ins and outs of a young boy who must help his widower father care for his toddler brother, and it’s got some really moving bits in it. (It’s also got some silly, horrifying bits that will have your hand twitching towards the phone to call Child Protective Services, but it’s fiction, so you shouldn’t have a problem stopping yourself.)

N.Y.N.Y. was published in Japan by Hakusensha, which has given the world such gifts as Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket (Tokyopop), Bisco Hatori’s Ouran High School Host Club (Viz) and Kentarō Miura’s Berserk (Dark Horse). I note this only because I wanted to mention those three books in the same sentence. I’m having a little trouble pinning down precisely where N.Y.N.Y. was serialized, so if anyone has any pointers, I’d be happy to update with the information. Updated: That didn’t take long! Commenter Sean reports that N.Y.N.Y. was serialized in Hana to Yume, which has been the fertile soil for a number of impressive titles. Updated again: Commenter JennyN notes that the book has been published in France by Panini Comics, which led me to find that it has also been published in Germany by Planet Manga. Those might be the same company; I can’t really tell.

But back to my original point, it’s always nice to see some yaoi that’s got some real-world roots. (I think so, at least.) So come on, manga publishers! Don’t violate the spirit of LGBT Pride Month! Give us the four-volume N.Y.N.Y., or at least announce it!

P.S. Not that I’m anywhere close to running out of titles to feature, but if anyone would like to do a Special Guest License Request Day, I’m totally open to that. Contact me if you’re interested.