TOKYO AFTER HOURS: MANGA REVIEW

Tokyo and underground music protagonists of Yuhta Nishio's work

Tokyo After Hours (After Hours) is a three-volume shojo-ai, written and drawn by Yuhta Nishio, published in Japan by Shogakukan and arrived in Italy thanks to J-Pop Manga, which has collected the volumes in a practical and convenient box .


Emi Asahina is invited by a friend to an evening in a nightclub; not being able to find it, however, and not being a lover of certain places, he feels like a fish out of water. However, there he will soon make the acquaintance of Kei, a tough and confident girl who instead seems to be in her natural habitat. Emi is immediately struck by this mysterious girl, so much so that she follows her out of the club and ends up in her apartment, where she will discover her passion for records, music and her work as a DJ. After some chat, Emi does not go back to his house, but decides to stay and sleep with Kei, thus giving life to a new and particular friendship.

Almost prophetic are the words of Emi: After Hours not only tells the meeting between two girls, but first of all the path that the protagonist will have to take in seeking the strength to close with her past, the ability to break a bond with a world that it is no longer his and find a place that he can define as “home”.

Kei thus takes Emi under his wing, proposing her to become his VJ. But what exactly does a VJ do? "He is the one who chooses in real time the videos that adapt to the music", a job that seems simple, but which actually requires a certain knowledge and harmony with the DJ himself.

Right from the start, you can see Emi's strange attachment to her new friend: she settles in her house, begins to follow her in her work, meets her group of friends and colleagues. Initially, the girl does not seem to have a "home" or a past to return to, but as time passes we will discover a secret that she has kept from Kei and that will question their new relationship.

The story therefore follows a very specific path, namely that of Emi in chasing away the shadows of her past and finding a new life, a new light together with Kei in the underground world of Tokyo.

A problem that can be found in reading Tokyo After Hours is the lack of insight into the feelings of the girls. If on the one hand the world of nightclubs is best represented and with many details, on the other, the same cannot be said of the relationship that is created between the two protagonists.

Yes, we learn about Emi's past and problems, but we know little and nothing about Kei. She barely touched the surface of the character and it would have been preferable to have more information about her past love affairs.

If in other works of the same genre we dwell much more on the complexes of falling in love with someone of the same sex, here some situations are put in the background, giving much more space to the musical setting.

A point in favor is instead the use that the author makes of some really existing tracks, such as We Are Your Friends by Justice or Music Sounds Better With by Stardust, to be kept as background while reading some chapters to get deeper into the spirit of musical event.

Nishio's line is often simple and sometimes "dirty": he makes a wise use of screens, blacks, lights and shadows, giving the tables the right depth, as can be seen from some shots that the author gives us of a Tokyo night, its buildings and its streets, glimpses that anyone who has been to Japan will recognize as family. Not only that, but the darkness of some scenes allows the reader to identify with what the character is experiencing, better understanding his feelings.

As for the physical edition proposed by J-Pop on our market, the manga format is 12x16.9 cm paperback with dust jacket with relief elements; each volume has a handful of color pages, and contrary to how it is usually used, these are not placed at the beginning of the volume but in the middle of the volume. Moreover, if the first two volumes have a very similar number of pages, the same cannot be said of the third which appears much more often; to highlight in this sense the choice of the publisher who did not increase the price (€ 6.90 each) despite the greater number of pages.

I am Shingo: summary and presentation of Kazuo Umezu's work

I am Shingo: summary and presentation of Kazuo Umezu's work



The aforementioned series that began in 1982 and ended in 1986, in reality, is not really horror, but one of the few works by Umezu that are part of the Science Fiction genre. Io Sono Shingo therefore arrives in Italy thanks to Edizioni Star Comics which, after noting a great growth in the popularity of the mangaka in our country, thanks to its particular media representation in the Eastern world and its being incredibly bizarre and eccentric, has seen fit to publish one of his most important and famous works.


Umezu has always been famous for using a unique and inimitable stylistic trait, characterized by the incredible exaltation of human expression. If this was initially only a fundamental feature of the horror genre, in Io Sono Shingo it is found within a more real and everyday setting. More intimate topics such as love and melancholy are dealt with, but it is done through the growth and development of a latest generation work robot.


The robot, between curiosity and love


The robot is the central focus of a story set in 1982 that features Satoru, a funny and funny elementary school student. He is basically a rebellious and very eccentric kid (a sort of allegorical representation of the author Kazuo Umezu) with a great passion for technology and for anything even vaguely futuristic. One day the boy's life is completely turned upside down when a mysterious and particular mechanical robot arrives at the factory where his father works.


Satoru is ecstatic, especially when he watches him perform even complex tasks with a practically zero margin of error. During a school trip to his father's factory, little Satoru also makes the acquaintance of Marine, a little girl who immediately breaks into the boy's heart. The center of their knowledge will be the robot and the desire for knowledge, strong in both, which will allow them to grow and unite by learning the mechanics of the new tool.

The robot (initially called Monroe and then Shingo), from the first volumes, is as if he represented the narrator of the story. He explains how he manages to learn the reality that surrounds him through the meetings of Satoru and Marine who, in turn, try to strengthen their knowledge thanks to the common interest that is present within the factory. Their strong curiosity, reinforced by the classic feeling of butterflies in the stomach given by the first crush, gives rise to both new feelings and new ways of communicating with each other and with the unknown technology.


The importance of the family in modern society


However, there is no lack of problems and obstacles imposed by their respective families. This is another relevant theme of Io Sono Shingo since the family represents the centrality of the life of the two children who, day after day, move towards the suburbs giving priority to other interests. Certainly Umezu wants to pose a very heated criticism of the consumerist and capitalist society which continues to give great importance to the figure of the father (in particular that of Satoru) who, however, is portrayed as a rough man and who places a great interest only towards the job.

I am Shingo
Just the father, endowed with a disproportionate ego, when he sees his central figure as a parent begin to falter because of Monroe, begins to hate with all his strength the exact day he decided to let him enter his assembly line. A day that saw the dismissal of many workers no longer needed by the manpower and that technological optimization could cause it to be repeated continuously. This too is one of the many accusations and analyzes on modernity conducted by Kazuo Umezu's masterpiece.

The humanization of the robot and the robotization of humans
In reality, what Umezu showcases in his I Am Shingo is the slow, yet powerful and currently unstoppable process of globalization. The robot tries to be a human, while the human itself tries to overcome its mental and physical limits by trying to equal the machine. This contrast is shown mainly in the narrative of the work which depicts and describes the aforementioned concept with a very ambiguous duality.

The author's style is so precise and realistic that it seems disturbing, yet it is so detailed and delicate that it makes the reader fly in a whirlwind of sensations ranging from amazement to anger and from melancholy to happiness. Everything is even more mystified by the fact that the protagonists are essentially two children and by the presence of a particular robot that performs the role of narrator.

I am Shingo
The world of I Am Shingo appears almost fairy, far from the wickedness and rawness of adults. Despite everything, important topics such as the exploitation of workers, technological development, a sense of responsibility and above all love, albeit between two elementary school children, are still dealt with.

Each theme, even the crudest, is argued with extreme delicacy by the author without ever being afraid to do so, but in turn without ever exaggerating. The reader finds himself reliving a constantly evolving society like the man-machine relationship and the love relationship between the two young protagonists.

The work was written in 4 years and includes 10 volumes (the version brought by Edizioni Star Comics sees 7). Since its first release in 1982, it has been considered a milestone in Japanese culture, tradition and mythology. Small note: if the first volume should seem a little futuristic, it is from the second volume onwards that the story begins to follow the science fiction branch.


The love relationship between the two boys becomes stronger and unexpectedly true despite the age and the robot, which in the meantime acquires more and more awareness of itself by also changing its name to Shingo, represents the good and evil of life of young people in love. So you just have to start immersing yourself in a story that will captivate and excite you page after page.