Melinda Beasi and Michelle Smith took their Off the Shelf column on the road this week, discussing Saki Hiwatari’s Please Save My Earth (Viz) over at The Hooded Utilitarian. I enjoyed the discussion so much that I took a look at other works by Hiwatari. One of them features the ghost of Albert Einstein.

If you’re anything like me, this is all you need to know to want to read at least one volume of the series, because legendary theoretical physicists just don’t show up in shôjo manga as often as they should.

The series, Global Garden, ran for eight volumes in Hakusensha’s Hana to Yume in the early 2000s. In it, two young men share a precognitive dream that the world tree is dying because of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They foresee a young girl being able to heal the tree and save the world, so Einstein branches out into theoretical pharmacology and gives them something to slow their aging. Einstein dies, and his disembodied spirit offers these eternally youthful do-gooders guidance as they wait about 50 years for the girl who can save the world. Along the way, someone manages to make a clone that’s half psychic slow-aging guy, half Einstein. So, one of the protagonists has a baby with Einstein, basically.

Global Garden also promises several items off of the classic-sounding-shôjo menu: gender fluidity, a seriously magical girl, and complex blended-family dynamics, and mixes them in with an environmental message. Plus psychic powers. And Einstein’s ghost. Hakusensha offers some preview pages of the first volume.

It’s been published in French by Delcourt as Global Garden: Einstein’s Last Dream. I suspect this is because the French are better at marketing manga and know that, when you’ve got the shôjo Einstein card in your hand, you play it.

This isn’t Einstein’s only appearance in manga. Most obviously, there’s Edu-Manga: Albert Einstein (Digital Manga), written by Isao Himuro and illustrated by Kotaro Iwasaki. A teen Einstein clone is part of the student body of Kumiko Suekane’s Afterschool Charisma (Viz). It seems odd that he’s not a cast member of Kouta Hirano’s Drifters (Dark Horse), but perhaps the available information on that series is incomplete.

Since we’re on the subject, what are some of your favorite examples of actual people from history showing up in manga under unlikely circumstances?



The impetus for a license request can be very simple, but it can also come from a variety of triggers. For instance, someone might casually mention a Japanese magazine that interests me like Ohta Shuppan’s Manga Erotics F. (Any magazine that can host both Natsume Ono’s Ristorante Paradiso and Usumaru Furuya’s Lychee Light Club is bound to catch and hold my attention.) It might also be a week when The Josei Alphabet featured a number of intriguing-sounding titles that featured romances between women. And one might add to that the happy anticipation of the first volume of Takako Shumira’s Wandering Son, to be translated by Matt Thorn, who always has interesting things to say on the subject.

So, with these guideposts, we arrive quite naturally at Takako’s Aoi Hana, a complex yuri romance which is running in Manga Erotics F and has five collected volumes at this point. It’s about the web of friendships and romance among the members of a high-school drama club. For me, commentary on the quality of yuri romance doesn’t get more reliable than that provided by Erica (Okazu) Friedman, so let’s see what she has to say about the series, which she’s read in Japanese.

She’s described the first volume as “both cute and sweet – and I liked it quite a bit. Which is pretty surprising, as it is both genuinely cute and sweet.” (Erica often likes her heroines to carry powerful automatic weapons, as do we all, and it doesn’t seem like there’s much ordinance in Aoi Hana.) The second volume leads Erica to conclude that, “when I read any book, part of what goes on in my mind is ‘Would I want to hang out with any of these people? Would I let anyone in this story come over for lunch?’ No one, not one character in Life would be allowed in my house – while just about everyone in Aoi Hana would.”

Erica finds the third volume “emotional without being histrionic.” The fourth reveals inner strengths of some of the characters. The fifth earns praise for the careful rendering of the heroine’s gradual move towards accepting her sexual orientation. Erica has also reviewed the anime, which ran on Crunchyroll, and hosted a guest review of the first volume of the French edition, Fleurs Bleues, which is being published in Kazé’s Asuka imprint. Asuka offers extensive preview pages from each of the four volumes they’ve published so far, so you can get a look at Shimura’s spare, elegant visual style.

While my initial interest in Aoi Hana sprang from a convergence of whims, further investigation has led me to conclude that it’s the kind of series I always really enjoy: a sensitive examination of adolescence featuring kids pursuing an interesting hobby. It’s also got attractive art and an intelligent look at same-sex relationships. Why hasn’t someone published this already?

Erica (Okazu) Friedman and I are usually of one mind on most issues, but we’re having a really teensy difference of opinion at the moment. She says Reiko (Moon Child, Himitsu: The Top Secret) Shimizu’s Kaguyahime is josei. I say it’s shôjo. On my side of the argument is the fact that the 27-volume series ran in Hakusensha’s Hana to Yume and Lala. But Erica has experienced the series first hand. After a mesmerizing synopsis of what the series is about (kind of a fusion of an LGBT soap opera with Parts: The Clonus Horror), Erica makes this recommendation:

If you like a challenge, strange sci-fi, conspiracies, pretty boys, hunky girls, angst, fantasy, absolutely ravishing art, and a TON of yaoi/yuri, you need to read this manga.

I NEED TO READ THIS MANGA.

Honestly, I cannot be bothered to try and understand the plot, which seems to defy succinct description, but those are sometimes the best comics of all.

Those lucky, lucky French are able to enjoy this under the title Princess Kaguya, courtesy of Panini. Let’s see how their first-volume blurb translates, shall we?

Reiko Shimizu revisits an old Japanese legend in this new shôjo manga with the pace of a thriller. Children raised at an orphanage on an island off the coast of Japan are intended to be sacrificed to the princess of the moon when they reach sixteen years age. Some manage to escape, but they still feel the island’s pull. Will they be able to escape their destiny? A fascinating thriller with breathless suspense!

That’s so un-French of them not to mention the rich tapestry of sexual orientations Erica promises. Anyway, Panini seems to be about halfway through the series at the moment.

I think, in cases like this, it’s best to just conclude that everyone’s right. I’m technically correct in saying that Kaguyahime ran in shôjo magazines. Erica’s certainly correct in noting it has enough sex and violence to snap most comics for teen-agers right in half. And really, its category doesn’t matter. I just want to read it.