First of all, dear readers, allow me to apologize for the massive gap between my last review posting and this latest one. I have gotten into the habit of finding the nine manga I year that I want to review, and then writing all of my reviews of them in one big folder before posting them.
So, naturally, I first had to wait until I could find nine new manga to talk about.
And Covid has taken away all the good chairs at my local Barnes and Noble, so I don't exactly get to go there all that much any more, even if I didn't have an entire life to already keep me busy.
But enough of that: Let's get to reviewing Yoko Komori's "Mermaid Scales and The Town Of Sand".
Again, as with Kubo Won’t Let Me Be Invisible, this series was also recommended to me via banner ad on my phone’s Google Chrome home page. But, for those who didn’t have that luxury, the series that I am reviewing today was blurbed as “a cute manga with a dark twist”.
And I don’t know about you, but those terms made me instantly think of horror manga. So, supernatural mermaids and horror? I was all over it. Plus, it just so happened that I had the evening free on the release date last week, so I figured what the heck?
When twelve-year-old Tokiko’s parents divorce, she leaves with her father to the seaside town of Sunanomori, where she had briefly spent time as a toddler. But, back during those days, a sudden instance of near-drowning had led to the young Tokiko being saved by what appeared to be a merman.
Grappling with her own hazy memories and her new living situation, Tokiko desires to find the merman once again and thank him for what he has done. Along the way, she deals with conflicts from both inside and out (but nothing too apparently supernatural or dangerous).
The story felt very Stephen King to me, particularly his more child-based stories such as “It” and “The Institute”. There is mystery, the threat of danger and a hint of the supernatural, but there is also the occasional (okay, more than occasional) snippet of just plain, ordinary, run-of-the-mill life. There is even a conspiracy among the adults to keep the children from going into a certain sewer pipe and risk seeing what’s on the other side.
SPOILER ALERT: Sadly, all this secrecy comes close to a satisfying payoff, but it still falls short. This did not turn out to be a horror manga, per se; more like a supernatural-tinged slice-of-life mystery. (Which is still good.)
Art-wise, the artist pairs her simplistic character designs with almost watercolor backgrounds, leading to a nice artistic dissonance. Like adding salt to one’s caramel.
But be forewarned: While there is no real blood, sex or violence in this manga, there are a few scenes of our underage protagonist appearing naked in her dream worlds/Imagine Spots. No doubt this is merely meant to emphasize the scenes’ etherealness, but I figured a warning was better safe than sorry.
While this manga is only a single volume and not an ongoing series, I feel like I can still recommend it to you readers to pick up. Maybe I’ll even pick it up once or twice in the future from my local library…as long as it remains on the shelves…
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