After reviewing Anything That Loves last week, I found myself paying attention – for the first time – to Anna, another aspiring model and peer of Shuuichi’s sister, Maho.Īnna is not presented to us as a nice person. In this story we see the complexity of sex, gender, gender roles and sexuality laid out in the messy mishmash that it is. The children are just beginning to enter puberty, and their bodies are not necessarily their friends. Manga scholar Matt Thorn has gotten out of the way of his own translations, so the story flows as smoothly as a story as jangly as this can possibly flow. By this point, Shimura-sensei’s characters are finely wrought, so the tension in each panel is palpable. In Volume 4, the story remains complex and emotional as always. The early volumes introduce us to Shuuichi, a boy who wishes to become a girl and Shuu-chan’s classmates, friends, enemies (among whom I have to count his sister, the aspiring model) and Yoshino, a girl who wishes to become a boy. We’ve covered Volume 1 and Volume 2 and I hope those reviews were enough to encourage you to buy and read Volume 3. We’ve covered a few volumes of Shimura Takako’s Wandering Son, published in English by Fantagraphics here on Okazu, but it hasn’t been featured regularly.
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