Witch Hat Atelier 13

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 13

by Kamome Shirahama
translated by Stephen Kohler

Kodansha

2025

 

 

In Witch Hat Atelier 13, the annual Silver Eye Festival is still besieged by a monstrous leech that appears like a circulatory system, lowering over the fairgrounds like a cage. But in the previous volume, master witch Qifrey was able to defeat the disgraced former magical ambassador who created the monster, and most of the festival-goers have been evacuated to a safe distance. There's still great danger, but some of the most urgent issues have been addressed.
 
Coco was injured by the leeches, so Qifrey has brought her to the royal Healing Tower to receive medical attention. Master Beldaruit, Qifrey's old teacher and one of the three highest ranked witches, is there too. He creates a portable illusion of Coco, looking like a tiny little fairy with her face, to fly alongside Qifrey as he searches the evacuated capital city for Custas, the injured boy who learned forbidden magic in order to save his father.
 
Of all the things you might do with magic that are forbidden by the Pact, healing is by far the most tempting to try and the most difficult to understand restriction. The witches who use forbidden magic have used that possibility to draw in Custas, and may be trying to appeal to Coco along the same line. (Though Coco and her friend Tartah have both realized this on their own anyway, and are actively questioning why healing is forbidden, and if they might be willing to break the Pact to try it.) 
 
The forbidden witches hope that once someone tries one form of forbidden magic, they'll readily throw out all the rules and try the others too (and the Knights Moralis, who enforce the Pact, fear the same), but I wonder if the slope is really so slippery.
 
The Knights Moralis routinely use the one form of magic that directly affects people's bodies that the Pact allows - magic to erase memories. This lets them keep the secrets the Pact requires. Non-witches who learn how magic works can be made to forget it; witches who use forbidden spells can forget how to cast them. I suppose these spells are only allowed when they're defending the Pact, that you can't just erase someone's memory for your personal benefit and have it be okay, but there's an obvious contradiction here. Memory erasure is a much worse thing to do to somebody than healing them, and it does affect their body, so that the usual objection to healing sounds silly in this context.
 
That contradiction comes to a crisis point in this volume, because when Qifrey finds Custas, he's used more counterclock tattoos to save dozens of people from the poorest neighborhood from their injuries. Draw a counterclock spell on a shattered water jug, and its existence will rewind to a time before it broke, giving you a chance to pour the water into another container, or set down a cloth to catch the fragments, before it catches up to itself and shatters again, exactly as before. Draw it on an injured person and their body AND MIND will return to an earlier time before they were hurt. Custas saved his dying father and has kept him in a kind of half-life for weeks by drawing and redrawing the tattoo each day. For his father, it is perpetually the day before he died - he has no memory of being hurt, or anything else that's happened since then. He doesn't know and can't understand that his son is using forbidden magic.
 
While this is happening, the royal prince meets Riceh's timid older brother. (This is our first time meeting him too.) We learn that he was physically abused by a cruel teacher, who also tried to crush Riceh's creative spirit, which is why she reacts so badly against any compulsory or rote parts of her education. Shirahama has shown us over and over how bad teachers can basically destroy the students trusted to them. With the brother's help, the prince finds Riceh, Tetia, and Agott, and they use Tetia's sand-tents to provide temporary shelter to all the evacuees. We also briefly meet Agott's mother, who is pleased to see her daughter looking happy to be helping people in need.

The Third Reich of Dreams

 
 
The Third Reich of Dreams
The Nightmares of a Nation
by Charlotte Beradt
translated by Damion Searls

Princeton University Press

1966, reprinted 2025 
 
 

The Third Reich of Dreams is a work of social science by the German journalist Charlotte Beradt. Between 1933, when Hitler came to power, and 1939, when Beradt fled the country for refuge abroad, she collected over 300 accounts of people's dreams that seemed to be inspired by fears about the Nazi government. In this novella-length book, Beradt identifies about a dozen recurring themes and describes each along with examples and a bit of anaysis about the connection between the dreams and life under Nazi rule. Beradt wrote the accounts in code in the bindings of books, which she then mailed to friends overseas. She finally wrote her own book in 1966; it was recently republished by Princeton.
 
The first dream in the book is the one that led Beradt to start her project. A socialist factory-owner dreamt the Goebbels visited his factory. In the dream, the man knew that if he did not give Goebbels the Nazi salute that he would lose his factory, and if he did he would lose the respect of all his workers. He dreamt he spent an agonizing eternity raising his arm in salute, and as soon as he finished, his back broke from the effort. Most of the dreams are like this, they are dreams of submission and defeat. In one chapter near the end, Beradt discusses the handful of dreams from people who dreamt of defying the Nazis. All the rest are from people whose unconscious minds could imagine only terror, not resistence.
 
There were dreams of surveillance and snitching. People imagined being arrested for having private thoughts against Hitler that they never spoke aloud, they dreamt that ordinary household objects were listening to every word that was said and then speaking the most incriminating passages aloud in deafening voices. They dreamt of failed resistance, of writing a letter of complaint but, even in the dream being so afraid of punishment that they mailed a blank page, or of speaking out to denounce the Nazis, but choosing to speak in a made-up language so no one could understand them.
 
Some dreamt of new propaganda or new restrictions, new punishments for Jewish Germans. Beradt notes that many of these dreams seem prophetic, they anticipate real political events that happened later, years after they were dreamt. It is as though, Beradt claims, people subconsciously understood the direction the Nazis were taking the country in, and imagined likely signposts along the way. It is also as though living under the Nazi government was a waking nightmare, governed by a regime that operated on dream logic, that demanded and often received total obedience, so that people were afraid even to imagine themselves saying what they really thought. Some of the people Beradt spoke to had partial Jewish ancestry but dreamt that it defined them totally and led to them being treated exactly like other Jews, which was indeed what eventually happened.
 
The most shameful dreams are by those who imagined themselves knowing Hitler or some other Nazi official personally, who dreamt of wanting some form of praise or affection, of receiving it, and then in the dream of feeling inordinately proud after.
 
As a work of social science, this is a fascinating document precisely because it's so unusual. Beradt was a journalist rather than an academic, but this is not just a collection of interviews, and someone hoping for only the dreams, or a transcription of all of them, is going to be disappointed. Beradt quotes several dozen dreams in full, but these are examples. They show us the patterns she found, and they allow her to perform close-readings, looking for meaning. 
 
The strangeness of this as a study owes both to Beradt's status as an outsider to the academy and to the conditions of its production. Obviously Beradt has no strategy for sampling, beyond collecting whatever she can; her methodology is idiosyncratic, her theory minimal. But her subject was urgent and her data were collected under duress. It reminds me of mass observation, another early 20th century attempt to learn from directly from members of the public by compiling first-hand accounts of important events, a way of knowing that takes advantage of exigence, but is mostly overshadowed by more formalized academic approaches. There are good reasons to prefer rigor when it's possible, but I think there's also real value in projects like this, that manage to snatch something from the lion's mouth before it closes. 

Tower Dungeon 3

 
Tower Dungeon 3

by Tustomu Nihei

translated by Sam Malissa
Kodansha

2025
 
  

The previous volume of Tower Dungeon ended on a cliffhanger, with a party of rival adventurers ambushing our heroes. In the brief, losing fight, Yuva (our audience viewpoint character) got knocked off a ledge, guaranteeing a 10 meter fall and a hard landing on the stone floor of the story below.

 

The whole mission had been a mess from the start. The Necromancer killed the king and kidnapped the princess, caused the legendary Dragon Tower to reappear, and took his hostage up to level 100, a kilometer above the base. The titular tower dungeon is big like a mountain, with a perfectly circular base, flawless construction, an impossible height and size. The royal guard sent to save her was massacred by the tower's perils, and the survivors were recalled by parliament, who wanted the royal-blooded guard to sit as a place-holder on the throne until the princess could be returned. 

 

Master archer Enriqo, fire magician Lilisen, and the recently conscripted Yuva were the only official rescuers left. A boom town sprung up outside the dungeon as ambitious adventurers sought to make their fortune by pillaging the tower. But the ambush wasn't just treasure hunters - they were a handful of former royal guards, now mercenaries, sent by an unknown rival member of the royal family to prevent the princess's rescue.

 

Now Tower Dungeon volume 3 opens with super-strong Yuva proving himself much hardier than anyone suspected. Until now, he's only used his strength to carry heavy supplies, and he's seemed to get hurt as easy as anyone. But he survived the fall, and we watch him scale the stone-block wall, endure several arrows, and overpower the mercenaries to save his friends. The trio seem bonded by the experience. Enriqo reveals something the mercenaries wanted - a magic arrowhead given to him by the departing guard captain, which should be able to slay the undead dragon on level 80. Lilisen was initially pretty dismissive of Yuva, but her feelings are warming rapidly.

 

Fearing there might be more mercenaries waiting back in town, they decide to push on despite their injuries. They find the all-girl adventurer gang the Excavators have been turned to stone by a basilisk, depicted here as a giant moth with eye spots on its wings. Yuva is turned to stone too, but Lilisen and Enriqo manage to slay the monster, returning everyone to normal. A goth gal from the gang kind of flings herself at Yuva which makes Lilisen visibly jealous. I think she likes him likes him. Later, she gives him a magic ring so they can hear each other's thoughts. The poor guy is so naive and innocent, but his thoughts reveal he likes her too.

  

The final chapter of this volume opens up the narrative a bit more. In his sleep, Yuva dreams of the kidnapped princess. It seems she's made a kind of psychic contact with him. Members of the royal family all have dragon blood, they live supernaturally long lives and some can transform into dragons. Lilisen's magic might be a draconic power too. The princess warns Yuva that the necromancer is trying to merge his consciousness with the zombie dragon, and that Bad Things will happen if he succeeds. When Yuva awakes and tells the others, Enriqo realizes something Yuva (raised by his grandparents in a tiny rural village) never guessed about himself - he's part of the royal family, and his super strength comes from his dragon blood.
 
Nihei continues to show us unusual takes on classic fantasy creatures. The basilisk moth is both imposing and different from any interpretation I've seen before. Up to now, interactions between Yuva and Enriqo have been a bit stiff and formal; between Yuva and Lilisen almost cartoony in their sibling-like antagonism. As the three become closer as a result of their shared experiences, their interactions also become friendlier and more genuine, with the barriers imposed by rank or rivalry coming down to allow more honest exchanges.

Witch Hat Atelier 12

 
Witch Hat Atelier 12

by Kamome Shirahama
translated by Stephen Kohler

Kodansha

2024

 

  

The previous several volumes of Witch Hat Atelier set up all the pieces of a comprehensive disaster. Now they've been set in motion, and everything's in chaos. The girls have traveled to the annual Silver Eve festival, attended by witches from all over the countryside and by even more onlookers. The festival is a chance for witches to show off their newest spells and compete for royal patronage, and for the public to enjoy the spectacle. 

 

The king is there, ready to meet with the most promising inventors, publicly affirming the agreement about witches' role in society, while privately studying old forbidden healing magic. The Pact, you see, says that spells should only be cast on objects (never on people), prevents ordinary people from knowing the truth about magic, and bans witches from learning anything about first aid or medicine. The Knights Moralis enforce the Pact by erasing the memory of anyone who violates it (the only spell they allow to be cast directly on a person). So the king's secret is a serious breach of the law!

 

Coco and Tartah have started realizing they have feelings for each other. They also have serious doubts about the Pact. It's not just that Coco fears that saving her mother (who's been turned to stone) might require forbidden magic, she's also increasingly uncomfortable thinking about all the other people magic could help if it were used for healing. Coco feels especially guilty about Custas, who was injured and lost his dad in a landslide. The accident was partially caused by one of Coco's spells, which came out much stronger than it was supposed to. 

 

Custas is at the festival too, angry and volatile, using forbidden magic to compensate for his injured legs. And his dead dad is here, returned to a kind of cursed half-life by forbidden magic. The forbidden witch who taught Custas is here - she looks young and innocent, like one of the student witches. She wants an audience with the king, and extorts Coco to try to get one. Among her threats is the tantalizing promise that the king could truly heal Custas and his father.

 

The Knights Moralis are at the festival of course, there to prevent any breach of the Pact in the setting with the most contact between witches and ordinary people. They've arrested a very important witch, the old ambassador to the king, accusing him of taking bribes. And they've arrested a dirtbag witch who was selling magic glasses that can see through clothes (a very timely bit of commentary on Shirahama's part, considering one common use of AI image generators). One knight tried to arrest the forbidden witch who tutored Custas, but she turned the tables on him and erased his memory, taking almost everything he knew.

 

Now, in Witch Hat Atelier 12, in the king's jail, the old ambassador and the dirtbag plot to escape. The whole castle is warded against magic; it simply doesn't work inside. The ambassador draws a spell on the skin of the creep, with the idea that he can stick his hand out the window and get it to activate. (Apparently the ambassador already knew forbidden magic even if he didn't use it before his arrest.)

 

And that's what starts the disaster. As is so often the case, the king's jail has a guard monster, a leech that lived between the walls. When the creep sticks his hand out, the leech bites him, his blood mixes with the ink used to draw the spell on him, and everything goes wrong. The leech and man merge into one gigantic being, an impossibly vast multi-headed creature, like a net thrown over the entire festival biting at everyone there. 

 

The ambassador wryly observes that this is the secret reason for banning magic medicine and spells cast on bodies - that blood mixed with ink produces extraordinary, unpredictable results. This is a totally different justification than we've heard previously! (The avalanche that injured Custas happened after a forbidden witch replaced Coco's ink with something much more powerful. Could it have been as simple as ordinary ink mixed with blood?)

 

This is a disaster that could kill countless people. Olruggio and other adult witches use fire spells to burn the monster. The Knights Moralis try to fight the leeches and evacuate the public. They want to keep people safe, but they also fear too many people witnessing just how easily all the helping magic they've been seeing at the festival can be used as a weapon of war. In a moment of irony, the forbidden witch who looks like a school girl gets rescued from the leech by the knight whose memory she erased - he doesn't remember her, or anything really, but he still feels a duty to protect others.

 

Tetia and the other girls feel helpless watching ordinary people bandage the wounds of the injured, and start having doubts just like Coco's. Why shouldn't they do something to useful? In the chaos, Coco confesses what she's been thinking to Master Qifrey. His reaction isn't instant rejection as she feared it would be. He understands her doubts about the Pact.

 

Right now everything is chaos and everyone is in danger. The leeches can just barely be held back, but seemingly not truly injured or defeated. It's an ongoing disaster, and it'll continue in the next volume.

The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All 1

 
 
The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All 1
by Sumiko Arai

translated by Ajani Oloye

Yen Press

2024
 
 
The cover of The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All stands out for its eye-catching electric green background, and while most manga are black and white inside, cartoonist Sumiko Arai deploys the same neon green in the interior, often in the background or between panels, but also to highlight moments of emotional intensity, like when one if the teen characters speaks from the heart and Arai briefly colors their irises green.
 
The color-scheme, the theme of high school girls in a burgeoning but still undefined relationship, and the long title that invites some sort of shorthand has led to TGSWIIWAGAA getting nicknamed "green yuri" online.
 

The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All is really something special. I was expecting a sitcom-like comedy of errors where circumstance and coincidence conspire to maintain a case of mistaken identity far beyond the realm of plausibility, the sort of thing you really only see in old superhero comics (or parodies of them), where a woman swoons over the handsome superhero and has no time for her boring, oft-absent coworker and never suspects the connection. 
 
Instead, The Guy She Was Interested In is much more emotionally-realistic, with its setup mostly serving to set events in motion before allowing them to unfold in a more believable way. Arai really captures the intensity of teenage feelings, the way finding a song or a musical style feels like discovering something brand new, like something could define your whole identity if you wanted it to, the way making a new friend or getting to spend time with your crush feels like the most important thing in the world, even if you don't know what to call these exciting new emotions, or how to describe the way you spend so much time thinking about them and wondering if they're thinking of you. The fact that Arai's characters are often confused or hesitant or overwhelmed makes them feel all the more like real people, especially real teens, for whom all of this is completely new.
 
Popular high school girl Aya looks and acts a lot like her popular friends, but she's got two things special in her life right now. First, she's gotten really into American rock music from the 1990s. She talks it up to her friends, but they don't really see the appeal, so she always listens privately, at home or on headphones. The second big thing in Aya's life is that she's got a huge crush on the cute, mysterious guy who works at the CD shop. The guy has a goth or emo fashion sense, wearing all black, including a hoodie and dust mask, and likes the same music Aya does, even playing Nirvana at the store the same day she listened to them at school.
 
Aya tells her friends all about the guy, not noticing that the shy, nerdy girl sitting next to her is having a panic attack hearing this, because while Mitsuki tries to go unnoticed at school, she gets to dress how she wants at her after-school job at her uncle's CD shop... Mitsuki knows she should tell Aya right away, but she's too shy to do it at school, and at the store later, when Aya comes up to flirt with her, Mitsuki can't resist flirting back. She finds that she likes Aya too, and she likes that Aya likes her. Their friendship builds naturally, chatting at the shop, exchanging phone numbers and playlists, and all the while, Mitsuki knows she needs to get up the courage to tell the truth, even as she fears losing her new friend when she does...
 
Rather than using comedic mishaps to drag things out, Arai has Aya begin to suspect, then discover the truth, and has Mitsuki confess even after she worries Aya already knows, and then allows the girls to continue their friendship once the truth is out. Aya freely calls her feelings a crush when she thinks Mitsuki is a guy; later neither one seems to know what to call what they're feeling, except that they want to spend time together, and share their love of music with each other, as much as they can. I kind of think this might still be a romance, but it could also be a passionate friendship between two unexpected kindred spirits. It's clear the girls don't know what it is yet either. It feels authentic to a high school relationship, especially if neither girl previously thought of herself as queer.
 
Arai writes in 4-page scenes, which allows her to vary her chapter length in a way that most other manga artists can't. She varies the viewpoint across the scenes, mostly showing us things from Mitsuki's and Aya's perspectives, but sometimes others as well. We see them through the eyes of Mitsuki's uncle, who's simultaneously happy for his niece and feeling very old watching her grow up, and who intially fears the playlist Aya sent Mitsuki might've come from an adult man, a realistic concern that helps establish that not every possible young crush is appropriate or safe. 
 
We see them from the perspective of a good-looking boy in their class who's shocked that neither girl seems interested in him, but who gets over himself enough to become a friend (and to "ship" the two girls once they start hanging out more). And we see them as one of Aya's popular friends would, watching her bestie spend more and more time with a nerdy girl she seemingly has nothing in common with. Aya's friend might just be jealous, or she might be homophobic, but not everyone in the story is as happy about this new relationship as we in the audience are.
 
I was very pleasantly surprised by The Guy She Was Interested In, and recommend it to anyone who likes this kind of story.

The Story of My Teeth

 
 
The Story of My Teeth

by Valeria Luiselli
translated by Christina MacSweeney

Coffee House Press

2013, reprinted 2015
 

  

The Story of My Teeth is a kind of rollicking first-person narrative telling the life story of Gustavo Sanchez Sanchez. Gustavo has a larger-than-life personality. He's a former security guard, an auctioneer, a collector of knickknacks, a raconteur, a teller of tall tales, a man about town, a storyteller but also a bullshitter. As a character and the book's narrator, he's fun to read. The book was originally written in Spanish, and it's set in a suburb of Mexico City.

 

The Story of My Teeth is divided into a handful of chapters, and moves across the unpredictably. In the first chapter, Gustavo tells most of his life story. He grew up poor, got a job as a security guard at a juice factory, eventually got a promotion to crisis manager. He met a rich woman and lived as her kept husband, learned auctioneering, got divorced. As an auctioneer, he made his own money, bought a house and a collection of curios, including a supposed set of Marylin Monroe's teeth, which he paid to have implanted in place of his own.

 

The next chapter shows a single auction, where Gustavo sells off ten of his own teeth while claiming they each belonged to a different famous historical figure, from Plato to Virginia Woolfe. We get to read a vignette for each one. At the end of the chapter, Gustavo meets his long-estranged son, now an adult who works at the art gallery adjoining the juice factory.

 

In the third chapter, Gustavo wakes up drugged and disoriented in an art gallery. His son has removed all his teeth and stolen all the collected tchotchkes out of his house. Gustavo meets an aspiring young writer and makes him his apprentice; we learn that the first chapter was written by the apprentice taking dictation.

 

Chapter four has another auction! Gustavo and his apprentice break back into the gallery to steal back his teeth and some other things to resell. Gustavo makes up entirely fictional stories about the origin of each object to tell at auction, and we get those vignettes too.

 

The fifth chapter is a posthumous retelling of Gustavo's life by his apprentice. Seen from the outside, and without Gustavo's grandiosity, it all looks a bit smaller and sadder. This one is illustrated with photos of the real neighborhood where the book takes place. The sixth and final chapter was written by the translator, not the author. It's a timeline that covers Gustavo's life, key events in Mexican history that overlap with it, and anniversaries of events in the lives of the famous people Gustavo references in his tale telling.

 

Gustavo is an enjoyable narrator, and via his fictional auction catalogs, we get a collection of very short stories within the larger narrative. A running theme is the question of how much the value of objects depends on the objects themselves and how much depends on the stories we tell about them - and relatedly, how much depends on the truth of those stories. Gustavo freely quotes and tells anecdotes about real philosophers and other thinkers, often claiming them as his uncles or cousins. Jean Paul Sartre becomes cousin Juan Pablo Sanchez Sartre, for example, a whiny brat who yells at the other relatives that spending time with them is hell. There's also a fair number of quotes and anecdotes specifically about teeth.

 

The story of how The Story of My Teeth was written, explained by author Valeria Luiselli in the afterward, is nearly as interesting as the book itself. Jumex is a juice factory in Ecatepec, Mexico. Ecatepec neighbors Mexico City, and the way it's spoken about in the text makes me think it's a bit like the Jersey City to Mexico City's NYC. Some of the profits of the factory have been spent to amass a contemporary art collection in a private gallery next door. Luiselli got a commission from the gallery, and wanted to write something about the connection between the factory workers and the collected art. After she wrote each chapter, a book club made up of factory workers met to read and discuss it. She incorporated their ideas and feedback into her revisions and used them as her basis to write each new chapter, making them true collaborators. Some even took the photos that appear in the book.

Invisible Planets

 
  
Invisible Planets

An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation

edited by Ken Liu

translated by Ken Liu

Tor
2016 
 
 
Invisible Planets is a collection of scifi short stories originally written in Chinese. The stories were selected and translated by Ken Liu, who's a science fiction writer in his own right, and a prolific translator of Chinese fiction. The authors included in this anthology have all won awards, and most of the stories are award-winners or nominees as well. As a result, the book functions as a kind of "best of" collection of recent Chinese science fiction.
 
According to Liu in his introduction, one of his other goals for the book is to show off the versatility of Chinese scifi by including the widest possible range of topics and writing styles. Because of this, it's difficult to identify any recurring themes. We get military scifi, a couple of cyberpunk stories, robots inheriting the planet after the humans are gone, a couple of dystopias, an homage to Italo Calvino, and from Liu Cixin, a pair of stories that have the same pro space exploration message and feeling as the so-called "golden age of American scifi." He'd be right at home on the pages of Amazing Stories, I think.
 
The one theme I think I notice is social commentary, which is common in the science fiction of any country. In his introduction, Liu discourages us from interpreting any of the stories as being 'about' Chinese social problems. On the one hand, this feels disingenuous, like including a story about a mass shooting in an anthology of American fiction and then telling the readers not to think of it as a commentary on gun violence in America.
 
On the other hand, I think part of what Liu means is that we shouldn't read these stories as being only about China. We get stories about young people having trouble finding employment, pollution, overcrowding in cities, economic inequality, the difficulty of caring for elderly people who can't support themselves. These are problems of capitalism, we have the same problems everywhere that people don't have the right to life's necessities, but only the right to buy those necessities if they can afford them. The one story that reminds me of the Chinese government's efforts to control the internet is also an intentional homage to 1984, and reading it makes me think about the way America and Britain starting to use age verification as an excuse to restrict online anonymity, or the way some websites censor certain words, so that people have to write 'unalive', because if they wrote 'dead' or 'killed' then no one else would be able to see their post.
 
The censorship story, "The City of Silence" by Ma Boyong is one of the best in the collection. It's one I think I heard of when it was first published in English, but never read until now. It's set in a city where everyone has a government issued internet username, there are only a handful of accessible websites, and people can only write using words from an approved list. Everyone also have to wear a listening device that beeps whenever they say an unapproved word, and that automatically calls the police if they say too many. So mostly people say nothing at all. Our protagonist is a man who notices a word puzzle hidden in plain sight online. When he solves it, it leads him to a small in-person gathering where the listening devices don't work, so people can talk about whatever they want (and enjoy casual sex). Joining the club revitalizes his love of language, and he starts to notice other ways that people try to use approved words to express forbidden thoughts.
 
"Folding Beijing" by Hao Jingfang (who also wrote the title story) is about a future where the capital city folds and rearranges itself like a Transformer robot, turning it into three different cities that share the same footprint. One is spacious and luxurious for the rich, another is kind of like a modern city, and the third is an overcrowded dystopia for the poor. Everyone uses a hibernation device to sleep through the other two cities' time on the surface. We follow a poor man who's trying to make some money by crossing between the different Beijings as a courier. "Invisible Planets" is written in the style of Invisible Cities, and it reminds me of Liu's own story, "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species".
 
Two of Xia Jia's stories, "A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight" and "Night Journey of the Horse-Dragon" depict abandoned robots attaining consciousness and sentience after all the humans have disappeared from the Earth. They feel like ghost stories, or fairy tales. Cheng Jingbo's "Grave of the Fireflies" reminds me of Staislaw Lem's robot fables, except sadder and perhaps a bit more lyrical. There's a princess, a magician, a castle in the shape of a giant robot knight, and also last surviving humans migrating to an orbital city around the last star as the rest of the galaxy goes dark.

Tower Dungeon 2

 
 
Tower Dungeon 2

by Tsutomu Nihei
translated by Sam Malissa

Kodansha

2025 

 

 

In the first volume of Tower Dungeon, super-strong farmboy Yuva got conscripted into the royal army to rescue the princess, who's been kidnapped by a necromancer and taken to the mountainous Dragon Tower. Yuva helped defeat a slime monster and recovered a gem that the necromancer says he's willing to trade for the princess. Then many of the royal guards were recalled to the capital, leaving Yuva with a straitlaced master archer and a bratty woman who knows fire magic.
 
Now in volume 2, the trio continues to explore for a safe (-ish) route up to level 100 where they can trade for the princess. Enriqo the archer leads them very cautiously. With their familiar staircase now guarded by giant suits of armor, he insists they map a new route. We learn that the dungeon is circular and 3 kilometers in diameter, which must make it like 15 or 18 km tall, given its proportions. Each level has numbered support pillars and is exactly 10 meters tall, though it seems that the very regularized main structure also holds more irregular and less well-built secondary features, perhaps later additions by less-skilled builders than the originals.
 
The trio gets lost in some repetitive, identical looking sections, then comes close to dying of thirst. Their equipment is stolen while they're sleeping, but when they give chase, they learn that the primordial human dungeon dwellers only wanted their salt (a precaution against another slime monster) for cooking. Yuva and his friends get back the rest of their stuff, plus some treasure, and the location of a water source and a secret staircase.
 
Back outside the fort, a boom town has sprung up to supply the soldiers going in. Besides Yuva's group, we meet a team of badass women adventurers who look like a roller derby team and all carry hammers, and a cat woman who wears a suit of armor. Fire mage Lilisen is eager to go back in the dungeon to beat out the new competitors. Yuva's sister has arrived from the village to work at the inn. She gets attacked by a 10 foot tall nobleman who can turn into a dragon, but the cat-lady knight protects her. Apparently everyone in the royal family is like 10 feet tall and a 'dracomorph', presumably including the princess.
 
Nihei seems to be drawing on tropes from both Dungeons & Dragons and dungeon crawling computer games like Rogue. The appearance of the stair guardians feels like a classic dungeon restocking procedure, and confusing architecture that trips you up as you make your own map is a staple of megadungeons as a genre. The sheer size of the place, and the identical superstructure of each level, is more like a video game though. Lilisen also shows Yuva you can break clay jars to find minor treasures, which is straight out of the Zelda games.
 
Yuva is our viewpoint character. He's from a small village and knows little of the outside world, so he needs Enriqo and Lilisen to explain how dungeons work to him. Along with us, he goggles at the noble cat woman and at the news that the kingdom's royalty are all giant shapeshifters. Yuva is kindhearted, which is why he talked to the salt thieves instead of fighting them. So far, his incredible strength has only been used for carrying heavy packs and breaking through a weakened wall into a secret passageway, but presumably he'll eventually use it for fighting, too. Yuva treats Enriqo like a boss and Lilisen like a sister, much to her annoyance.
 
The world Nihei is building here seems rough, crude, and brutal in a way that matches the style of his linework. The monsters are dangerous and strange in a way that borders on horror. The royal family is monstrous and inhuman, and at least one member is a Bluebeard-type who wants to cannibalize Yuva's actual little sister to prolong his life. Enriqo got a bladder infection when they ran out of water. The details add up to a world that's harsh and uncaring, where only people of incredible skill can survive.

My Dear Pierrot

 
 
My Dear Pierrot

by Jim Bishop

translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger
Magnetic Press

2024
 

 

As near as I can tell, Jim Bishop's career as a comic artist is making dark variations on themes from Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. My Dear Pierrot is absolutely a more adult, more erotic, more sinister take on Howl's Moving Castle, and the character of Pierrot is very recognizably a riff on the wizard Howl.
 
Clea is the daughter of a wealthy family. She loves to dance, but in her social class, that can only be a hobby, not a career, not something she can perform for others. She has an arranged engagement to Berthier, the son of the local baron. She'll become his wife, and then a mother. The city follows the Church, artists and dancers are suspected of being pagans, and the nearby forest is off-limits and supposedly full of witches.
 
Clea meets Pierrot, a magician who can do real magic, and flies away with him to his house inside a giant oak tree in the forest. Pierrot begins teaching Clea magic, and she quickly falls in love with him. Everything seems perfect and they sleep together ... and then he vanishes for three days.
 
When Pierrot gets back, the mood has changed somehow. Every time Clea tries to talk about her feelings, he scolds her for feeling them wrong. A lot of what he says is sound relationship advice, except that it's self-serving coming from him, and in context, he's only saying it to dismiss her valid complaints. He's gaslighting her.
 
Clea continues learning magic and practicing dance and starts to get to know some of the other witches in the forest. She realizes Pierrot's had a lot of girlfriends, and she might not even be his only one right now. One forgetful witch keeps calling her by someone else's name, and there's a mysterious ghost of a young woman haunting nearby the treehouse...
 
If any of this is starting to make you nervous, you have good instincts. Pierrot has a secret (very similar to Howl's), and a plan for Clea that relies on her falling into suicidal despair. But despite Pierrot's attempts to undermine her self-confidence, Clea has good instincts too, and while she's nowhere near as strong a magician as Pierrot, she's strong enough to get away.
 
While all this was happening, Berthier was humiliated that his fiancee left him for another man (a pagan, no less!) and went into the forest, ostensibly to rescue Clea, but mostly to restore his own honor. A witch plucks out one of Berthier's eyes to punish him for not being able to understand his own motives, and he spends the rest of his time in the woods feeling sorry for himself, until he runs into her as she's running away from Pierrot, and they get married after all. 
 
Clea gives up magic and dance to become a wife and mother, and it seems her fire has gone out. In the end though, she rekindles it, and abandons her family to go live as a witch in the forest.
 

Clea and Pierrot hide from the ghost in the forest.

  
 
I like Bishop's art. Pierrot is otherwordly and good-looking enough to make his role in the story believable. When we see magic, it really comes alive. It reminds me a bit of Ghibli, but it's definitely his own style, not a pastiche. It's very clear and colorful, and Bishop really has an eye for movement and composition. The layout of the panels matches the pacing of the scene. Characters sometimes extend beyond the boundaries of their panel when they're being especially active or expressive. Important moments are drawn oversized and practically leap off the page.
 
I liked Pierrot more than Bishop's Lost Letters, which I read over the summer. In general, I think this one is even darker, and both comics show a young woman's life falling apart to the point she becomes suicidal. But Clea is at the center of My Dear Pierrot, and it's clear Bishop knows that Pierrot is mistreating her. The fact of his intent, and not just the mistreatment itself, is central to the plot. 
 
In Lost Letters, Iode completely wrecks Sista's life, but he does it sort of by accident, and it's actually not clear when reading if Bishop himself assigns cause and effect to that chain of events. That book is also fully Iode's story; Sista's problems are a side plot. Even her death is portrayed solely in terms of how it affects him. I'm willing to see men mistreat women in fiction, but I also want to see evidence that the author appreciates the significance of what they're showing me. 

I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up

 
 
I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up

by Kodama Naoko

translated by Amber Tamasaitis
Seven Seas

2019 

 

 

I kind of love the trend of Japanese fiction with long, descriptive titles. I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up is a standalone manga about two young women who are friends who make a marriage of convenience, and I know you're not going to believe this because such a story has never been told before, but after awhile of living together as roommates, they slowly, awkwardly start to develop romantic feelings for each other. The closest thing to a twist here is that one of them is already an out lesbian and has some feelings from the start.
 
Machi has a job in a corporate office. She works hard, has no interest in dating, and imagines herself living alone in the future. Her biggest problem is that her parents keep pressuring her to get married and have kids. She's lied to them and said she has a boyfriend, but that hasn't helped, and she doesn't want a real one. She wishes she could have a sham marriage just to stop them talking about it!
 
As luck would have it, Machi tells all these thoughts to Hana, her friend since high school. Hana is a couple years younger and wants to be an artist, and she's about to be evicted because her apartment building wants to upgrade. Hana suggests they help each other out. Machi will convince her parents to leave her alone, and Hana will have a chance to save up money and work on her freelancing by moving in. And same-sex civil partnerships are legal in their prefecture...
 
In general, I think Hana gets the better end of this bargain. She really is able to build up her artistic career, and she is very fond of her 'senpai' who she used to have a crush on back in high school. What Machi gets is an excuse for a blowout fight that lets her completely cut off contact with her parents, and to feel secretly smug when her male coworkers talk about wanting to marry their girlfriends.
 
But neither of them seems to expect how it'll affect them emotionally. Machi's spent her whole life being pressured to achieve certain visible markers of success by her parents, and meanwhile her boss assumes she'll quit when she becomes a wife or mother, so why bother promoting her? Seeing Hana do something she likes and cares about inspires Machi to try to get ahead at the office by taking on more ambitious projecs. And while Hana likes living with her friend, the marriage of convenience rekindles some rather inconvenient older feelings. It's hard being close to someone you're romantically interested in who doesn't like you back, and every time Hana expresses that interest, Machi rebuffs her and seems disgusted, which, you know, hurts. Hana doesn't like that she feels like a creep whenever she flirts, and decides that it'll be healthier for herself to try moving on.
 
Machi is our viewpoint character, and we follow her more closely. We see her warm up to Hana, and come to rely on her as a housemate. It's Hana finally saving enough money to get an apartment on her own again that forces Machi to admit what she's started to feel, and even when she does, Hana is worried that it's going to be hard to have a relationship with someone who doesn't really want to kiss or touch her. But she agrees to give it a try.
 
This is a pretty short one, told in three chapters. I'm not sure if Machi is asexual - she doesn't think of herself that way, but she also doesn't seem to be attracted to men, and her feelings for Hana are more platonic than physical. I think if I want to see a similar style of relationship, I could try reading the series How Do We Relationship? 
 
I think the thing author Kodama Naoko does best here is to use little flashbacks to show us Machi thinking about earlier incidents and gaining new perspective on them. I haven't read many fake dating romances, but the decision to have Hana know she's a lesbian, to have her attraction be part of her identity and not solely a consequence of her situation is an important part of the plot, and I think it might be a bit different from the typical. 

Witch Hat Atelier 11

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 11
by Kamome Shirahama
translated by Stephen Kohler

Kodansha

2023

 

 

In the previous volume of Witch Hat Atelier, we met a new witch who uses forbidden magic, a young witch who could easily pass for a fellow student. She threatened Coco and Tartah unless they can get into the Silver Eye parade and cast a spell that impresses the king enough to earn a private audience. It's a seemingly impossible request, especially since the parade is the next day! But Coco agreed to try, and then immediately started worrying herself sick over the difficulty of it.
 
Volume 11 opens with Coco accidentally waking Agott up because she's panicking. She's exactly like a student trying to do a big assignment all in one night. (I mean, I guess she's not just like that, I guess she technically is that, but it's not like Coco procrastinated - the assignment got sprung on her at the last minute by a bully who goes to another school!) Coco breaks down crying, begging Agott for help. She has writer's block, and she's overwhelmed by the stakes of what she's trying to do, although she can only tell Agott part of what's going on.
 
Agott catches herself thinking that Coco failing would mean less competition, and realizes she doesn't want to be that person anymore. She tells Coco about her own self-doubts, and that everyone feels like a hopeless failure sometimes. Everyone produces drawings they don't like, starts drafts they're not sure how to finish. (There's a bonus comic at the end of this volume that shows Master Olruggio working through these exact same doubts.) Agott encourages Coco to draw some spells for her own enjoyment, just to clear her head, and shows her a set of glyphs that, when added to another spell sigil, cause the finished spell effect to look like an animal.
 
Agott tells Coco about how she's sorry she was unfriendly when Coco first came to the atelier. This seems like a turning point in their friendship, like they'll be closer after this. Coco even stands up for Agott when another student witch who knew her before her falling out with her family tries to tease her.
 
Master Qifrey has noticed that something's up with Coco that she's keeping a secret. Olruggio has correctly noticed that Coco and Tartah are experiencing some form of young love, and encourages Qifrey to give her some privacy. Qifrey still thinks there's more than that going on, and he's right too, although I doubt he realizes Coco's being coerced, or that she and Tarah are harboring such intense doubts about the laws against healing magic.
 
Agott and Coco both get their spells finished and approved by the parade committee, so when the sun sets and the parade begins, they'll both get their turns to show off on one of the elevated platforms. The king is there watching (he secretly belongs to the last family of witches to know healing magic), along with large crowds of ordinary people. They reactions will help decide which spells the king will meet with the caster to buy.
 
When it's Coco's turn, we see that what she's made is new infrastructure for the sanitary disposal of sewage! Currently people empty their chamber pots into cesspits, and channels carry all the effluent to a single magical gate. As the sewage passes through, the water in the canal turns clear, and the concentrated filth drains off into a side channel. We learned earlier that in every city, this side channel drains into a Muckpool, which is always borders the poorest neighborhood. Coco's innovation is a purifying pot for each home. Empty your chamber pot into that, and you can dump cleaned water into the cesspits. Widespread adoption would dramatically improve life in the slums.
 
The crowd is not at all interested though. This would be a physically demanding extra step to dispose of their wastewater, and for people who don't live near the Muckpool, there'd be little direct benefit. Agott hops in to save the day though, making it look like Coco had only shown the first half of her spell, and like what happens next is the planned second part of the demonstration. (Agott marvels again at Coco's open-heartedness; that she accepts help easily without feeling threatened or undermined.) A new rune added to the spell makes to clean water flow back out of the purifying jug looking like flying fish, and the fish swim themselves through the air before diving into the nearest cesspit. Now the crowd is excited! No more lugging a heavy clay pot of wastewater to the dump site? That bit of saved labor appeals far more than the cleaning alone. Together, Coco and Agott have basically invented flush toilets.
 
They get a moment to celebrate their success, but only a moment, because from atop her parade float, Coco sees something, and the whole crowd sees it a moment later - a towering monster approaching the city from the harbor! The creature looks really weird, in a way that's hard to describe. It's hugely tall, but seems to be made of some kind of organic strands, so it's also quite insubstantial. 

We learn the truth, though none of the characters know it. In a jail cell in the king's palace, where no magic works inside, the witch ambassador and the guy who was selling glasses that can see through clothes, both of whom were arrested in volume 9, are imprisoned together. The ambassador smuggled in some ink for drawing spells, and convinced the other guy they could use it to escape by sticking an arm out the window, outside the spell dampening effect. I thought they'd try to draw a sigil on the outer wall, or perhaps on a scrap of fabric that they could just hold out the window ... but it seems the ambassador tricked the other guy into letting him draw on his skin, with disastrous consequences that will play out in the next volume.
 
I think Shirahama uses magic as a flexible metaphor that lets her talk about a number of different things, under the guise of simply telling a children's story about witches. So when some character asks, 'what is magic for?', they're really asking what is art for? what is technology for? what is power for? Why do we have these things? What are we supposed to do with them? Just because we can do something, should we actually do it? What are we doing it for? And at different times, magic is a stand-in for each of those different things. Because the spells are drawn, it's easy to see how the students' struggles to perfect their spells resembles the more general challenge of learning to draw well, including the importance of repetition, and the frustration that comes with struggle. We even saw that in this volume.

But some of the most interesting debates, I think, come when magic is being used as a metaphor for technology. In Shiraham's world, spells that are drawn are spells that are most useful for creating enchanted objects. And yes, there are unique works with a single owner, or specialty creations that only other witches ever use, but most enchanted objects, once they are invented, start being mass produced, used as city infrastructure, or owned and used directly in the households of the non-magical masses. So when Qifrey and Olruggio teach the girls about which spells should be allowed to be public, and why, they're instilling a set of values about what people deserve, and what they should be allowed to have if they want, and what should be forbidden.
 
Shirahama has created a flawed utopia, intentionally so. This magical world is upheld by artificial restrictions of who is permitted even to learn magic, and what they're allowed to do with it, and these rules are enforced in some of the most draconian ways possible, short of execution. But the world those rules create, the world they allow to flourish, is one where ordinary people have access to universal basic services that deliver a fairly decent standard of living to everyone, and where at least some of the people in power are constantly thinking about how to use their power to make people's lives better. 

There's a certain irony in Coco and Agott's new spell. Last volume, Master Qifrey gave a speech defending unobtrusive, reliable spells as more important than big flashy ones - but here it is the flash, the water turning into fish and flying away, that makes it work. 

 

Flush toilets and sanitary sewers are also emblematic of a certain way of thinking about what people need, and deserve. Access to clean water, the ability to go to the bathroom when you need to, and a way to dispose of wastewater so that it doesn't sicken you or contaminate your drinking water - these things are literally vital to human health, to life itself. They're also generally considered impolite or embarrassing to talk about. Milan Kundera devotes a whole chapter of The Unbearable Lightness of Being to the idea that you cannot truly love humanity unless you also love shit. You can't really help people if you're only willing to help them when their problem isn't distasteful or unsavory. 

In the early 20th century, the term 'sewer socialism' was initially used to mock the politicians and members of city government in Milwaukee who kept bragging about the benefits of the city's new sewer system. But they embraced it, and they were right to be proud, because they accomplished the very thing Coco hopes to do for the poor residents of the Muckpool neighborhood - save them from having to live alongside the stench and disease of an entire city's waste collecting beside their homes. There are a lot of magical effects Shirahama could have picked for Coco's spell. Through her choice, she's inviting her young readers to think about certain conveniences they've likely always taken for granted, and to consider why they're so important.

Donald's Happiest Adventures

 
 
Donald's Happiest Adventures

by Lewis Trondheim

art by Nicolas Keramidas

translated by David Gerstein

Fantagraphics

2023 

 

 
Earlier this year, I read a comic by Lewis Trondheim and Nicolas Keramidas that pretended to be a reprinting of a rare (and incomplete) Mickey Mouse comic from the 1960s. It was a wild ride! They exploited the metafictional conceit to show only the high points of a globe-spanning adventure, without needing to worry about how to connect them. Any transitions or bookkeeping just became 'lost chapters' and 'missing pages'. That also made any dialogue briefer and more episodic.
 

Donald's Happiest Adventures also pretends to collect a 1960s comic, although this time, it's a complete sequential storyline. Donald is once again called in to search for lost treasure at Uncle Scrooge's behest, but this time he's looking for the secret of happiness. What follows is still a madcap trip around the world, with stops in an Eastern European dictatorship and a Himalayan monastery, but the story this time is a bit slower and more coherent, with fewer locales and more talking. The most important thing happening here is the sharing of ideas, as Donald (and us alongside him) hears many different perspectives on the philosophy and psychology of happiness.
 
Years ago, I attended an undergraduate philosophy presentation. Each of the students had picked a philosopher and studied up on their writings so that they could adopt their chosen thinker's persona, so you had some wearing bed sheet togas and others in thrift store suits. The theme of the event was something like how to be a good person, or how to live a good life, and what the students said was improvised instead of scripted. Anyway, the thing that stood out to me was that at first, they all seemed to try to out-compete each other to see who could prescribe the harshest asceticism, and then later, once they all agreed they could take it as given that of course being a good person meant forsaking all worldly pleasures, giving up rich foods and alcohol and music and dancing and sex, once they agreed on that, then they started to argue about what else you might add to this life of austerity and self-denial to make it truly good, things like education and charity and so forth. (And of course various forms of worship and devotion to one of the many interpretations of God.)
 
I feel like attending that talk actually got me to clarify some of my own thoughts, because instead of thinking of total self-abnegation as the starting point for any life worth leading, hearing that claim articulated over and over again clarified for me that what I believe in is hedonism. I don't really want a life of unlimited dissipation; I understand the argument that too much pleasure-seeking has diminishing returns, that it can come at the expense of worthier pursuits. But as a baseline, as a starting point? I say yes, give me hedonism! Give me pleasure; give me happiness! Yes, we should cultivate the higher virtues of education and art. Yes, we should seek to spend time with others, and help them when they're in need. But I agree with Maslow that we can only really focus on those higher goals once our basic needs are met and baser desires are fulfilled. People deserve to be happy, they deserve to be comfortable, deserve to feel good. It is those feelings, and not their denial, that should serve as the foundation of life.
 
Anyway, Donald Duck hears many different ideas, but Trondheim and Keramidas seemto favor the idea that it's harder to seek happiness than it is to avoid unhappiness, and that a big part of that, beyond having enough for basically comfortable living, is to avoid setting too-high expectations or making comparisons to others who have more. Both will tempt you to chase something you can't catch, and diminish your ability to enjoy what you already have. That's an idea that comes up not just in the philosophical discussion, but that we see played out by watching how other characters act.
 
Mickey's Wackiest Adventures is definitely the wilder of the two books, and possibly it's just all around better - more fun, more ideas, more experimentation, more adventure. But I did like Donald's Happiest Adventures, and I think there's some merit to its more thoughtful writing and slower pace. 

Tower Dungeon 1

 
 
Tower Dungeon 1

by Tsutomu Nihei

translated by Sam Malissa
Kodansha

2025 

Tower Dungeon is a new fantasy manga series by an artist who's best known for a couple of scifi series. In the first volume, it appears to be a fairly straightforward story about a quest to rescue a princess from a tower, although there are hints that things might become stranger as the story goes on. 

 

The tower, for example, is a megastructure. It's not big like a medieval tower, or even big like a modern skyscraper; it's big like a mountain, big like something only magic could make. It's white a covered in pillars, and it hovers hundreds of feet above the ground, accessible only by vertiginous staircases, and only when it floats past. One of Nihei's previous series, Blame!, is about an infinite city, and since we've only glimpsed the lowest levels of the tower, I suspect we'll see more fantastic architecture as we go. The way things work seems directly influenced by D&D and Delicious in Dungeon. The tower also reminds me of the one in Senlin Ascends, but I don't know if Nihei was influenced by it.

 

The first volume of Tower Dungeon opens in a small village, where superhumanly strong teen Yuva spends his days doing chores for his grandparents. When news reaches the village that the princess has been kidnapped and taken to the Dragon Tower, and that the royal army has already been decimated trying to rescue her, Yuva's neighbors are quick to offer him up to the military recruiters to spare their own sons from conscription.

 

Yuva travels to the base of the tower with only a barrel lid as a shield and a small metal cookpot that looks like a wide-brimmed hat to wear as a helmet (a bit like Don Quixote and his shaving bowl). The surviving soldiers are covered in bandages and eye patches and slings. A small expeditionary force of the leaders and the new recruits go back in. Yuva's strength is put to work carrying barrels of salt on his back to use against a slime monster on level 50. Along the way, they find rare mushrooms that can be used in a powerful healing potion, fight off several waves of skeletons in armor, and meet a badly-wounded but still firebreathing dragon.

 

On level 50, the 'slime monster' is a bizarre giant humanoid that's protected by a thick carapace of translucent slime. Yuva manages to dissolve the slime with the salt, but before anyone can finish the fight, a strange tentacled man appears and threatens to kill the princess unless they spare the monster. The princess speaks up to say that he wants her as a live hostage for now, so they shouldn't let this threat scare them! When the slime monster dies, a coin-like token appears, and the tentacled man says they can trade the token for the princess up on level 100.

 

Back on the ground, we learn that the remaining royals have decided to coronate a replacement, and are recalling the guards to the ceremony. Outfitted in better armor, Yuva is left behind with a master archer and a young woman who can use fire magic to continue the rescue on their own. I suspect the main plot next time will continue following Yuva and his new companions, but I hope we'll also learn more about what's going on in the kingdom, why the princess was kidnapped, who the weird man who took her is, and so on.

 

Nihei's art has a kind of rough quality to it, like his pens can only produce thick lines with wobbly edges. It immediately looks harsh and brutal compared to Witch Hat Atelier, for example. The story here also seems more violent and might go on to include more sex. Nearly all the soldiers except Yuva have been injured or maimed; the fire magician wears a modest black cloak ... but nothing underneath, as we realize when her cloak floats away from her body while she conjures a bonfire.

 

In addition to monumental architecture that, for all its neoclassical and gothic flourishes looks more science fictional than fantastic, Nihei's monster designs are strange enough to spill over from dark fantasy into weird fiction. The slime monster, for example, might've been a traditional cube shape or an amoeba, but instead it was a humanoid secreting its own slime armor. The dragon looked like pterodactyl. The tentacled man is so asymmetrical he looks less like Cthulhu and more like Swamp Thing or Man Thing. I'm curious to see what's next.

Witch Hat Atelier 10

 
Witch Hat Atelier 10

by Kamome Shirahama
translated by Stephen Kohler

Kodansha

2022

 

 

In the last volume of Witch Hat Atelier, the girls and their teachers went to the Silver Eye festival, where ordinary people can watch demonstrations of magic and buy magical contraptions, and where witches can show off for each other.
 
Now in volume 10, cool aloof girl Richeh sells all her crystal bracelets and discovers she really enjoys helping the old wandmaker operate his booth. She's kind of shocked herself by discovering something she genuinely wants to do, which is to open her own magic shop someday.
 
Cheerful Tetia sees someone sneaking around, hiding from the royal guards, and discovers it's the young prince, a boy about her age. She helps him get away and temporarily swaps accessories with him, wearing his expensive royal cloak while he dons her witch hat and capelet. Tetia is happy to declare the two of them friends, but the way he accepts her friendship suddenly makes her uncomfortable in a way she doesn't really understand. He announces that when he's king, she'll be beside him as a friend and advisor 'like in days of yore.'
 
Tetia doesn't know it, but we've seen the witches who use forbidden magic use that 'days of yore' phrase too - and what they mean is the time before the current age, when magic was widespread and wildly destructive, used as a tool of politics and warfare. Tetia also doesn't know that the king, who last volume seemed so respectful of witches' self-imposed rules, is secretly the last person in a very long line of witches who knows how to use healing magic, which is now forbidden because it affects human bodies directly. Presumably his son will learn it too. Master Qifrey does know this secret, and tells Agott and Coco, which will be relevant later.
 
Agott, the best student in the atelier, has an emotional breakdown because Qifrey and Olruggio won't let her march in the Silver Eye parade, which would be her chance to show off a spell. She was hoping to catch the attention of her distant mother, the librarian of the Great Tower, who she hasn't seen in years. Agott is semi-estranged from her family because despite her talent and hard work, they consider her some kind of disappointment. 
 
Qifrey explains that personal glory is the wrong reason to use magic, and also, he warns her that her mom won't be the only one watching, and that there are people who's attention she doesn't want to attract. Then he tells her about the king, which makes Tetia's situation seem even more ominous. Qifrey also articulates a defense of unobtrusive, utilitarian magic that's maybe the clearest we've heard so far, and that could apply to almost any technology. He notes that softly glowing lanterns that never go dark are less impressive than giant serpents made of fire streaking across the sky; the ever-refilling water jugs people use to get clean drinking water aren't as showy as a perpetual typhoon pulling water from the clouds; but the lantern and the jug help far more people in far more consistent ways than the serpent or the storm ever could. It sounds a lot like a call to use technology to provide people with basic universal services.
 
Meanwhile, Coco and Tartah have some big problems that they're keeping secret. They met Custas, the boy who was injured when he fell in the river. Now he has magical wooden leg braces, and he seems to know forbidden magic. The young witch who taught it to him shows up too, dressed more-or-less like any other young witch instead of looking obviously evil like the others we've seen. (That's her on the cover. She could easily pass for a student witch.) She demands that Coco and Tartah get themselves into the Silver Eye parade, do something so impressive it gets them an audience with the king, and then allow Custas and this forbidden witch to join them and meet the king too. That's a big, maybe impossible request! I feel like there ought to be some kind of 'or else,' but it's not explicit. Coco agrees to try anyway. We also don't know exactly why they want to meet the king, although presumably the reason is not good.
 
After getting away from that, Coco and Tartah run into Custas's father Dagdah, who's looking for his son. We saw him get attacked by bandits, but he doesn't seem to remember that. Coco realizes there's a spell drawn on his chest, which is forbidden, and when she realizes what the spell is, it completely breaks her heart. It's a counter-clock spell that can be used to temporarily mend broken things ... but it's a short spell, and when it runs out, the thing breaks again just like before. Coco realizes Custas has been reapplying this spell several times a day to keep his father alive, and she knows that if she could've, she would've done the same for her mother after accidentally turning her to stone. 
 
In fact, Dagdah was killed by the bandits, and while he was dying, the forbidden witch showed up, drew the spell on him, and taught it to Custas. But Dagdah has only a half-life. He has no memories since just before the attack, and he keeps dying painfully each time the spell runs out while Custas is redrawing it. Knowing the king's secret, Coco wonders if he could heal Dagdah, and becomes even more committed to inventing a new spell in time for the parade. (Although it's not clear to me that the king would be willing to heal a traveling musician, even if he's able.)
 
A member of the Knights Moralis shows up and tries to arrest Dagdah, but Custas arrives and attacks him with the wooden tentacles of his leg braces. Coco and Tartah run away. Then the forbidden witch uses one of the Knights' own spells against him - erasing all memory of magic from his mind, which in this case means erasing almost all his memories altogether.
 
There's one really noticeable change to Shirahama's art in this volume. They style is the same, but there are a lot more large panels showing close-ups of people's emotions at key moments. I don't know if this is easier for her because it means fewer panels, or harder because they're more detailed, but it makes this volume look different than the ones before. She uses this new approach to pretty good effect though. There's not as much action this time, but there are several moments where someone feels a powerful or complex emotion that motivates their actions going forward, and seeing those moments enlarged both emphasizes the strength of what's being felt and makes it easier to see the nuance.

I think the parade's going to be in the next volume, and thus that several of these plots will come together dramatically. Coco may really, really want to march, but I don't know how she's going to be able to invent a new spell that's worthy, and convince Master Qifrey to let her. I'm pretty sure the parade is the next day, which doesn't seem like enough time. 

Witch Hat Atelier 9

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 9

by Kamome Shirahama
translated by Stephen Kohler

Kodansha

2022 

 

 

It's been a minute since I've read any Witch Hat Atelier. In volume 8, Master Qifrey agreed that he and his students would help run a booth at the upcoming Silver Eve festival with the wandmaker and his grandson Tartah. Coco and Tartah are clearly developing feelings for each other, but neither seems to know how to say so out loud yet. Coco and Tartah are also both harboring doubts about some of the witch laws against magical healing, and they help Custas (the son of a traveling performer who was injured in a landslide) by making him a new mobility aid he can use instead of a walking chair - a cloak that allows him to levitate.
 
At the start of this volume, one of the Knights Moralis, the special order of witches who enforce their laws about magic (mostly by erasing the memory of anyone who breaks them), learns that Custas has returned his magical walking chair to the hospital, not because he recovered, but because he got other help and no longer needs it. This is unusual, and the knight finds it suspicious. I don't think Coco or Tartah broke any rules, but it's still not great that the witch police might suspect them.
 
Qifrey and the girls are taking a horse and wagon to the festival so they can perform acts of service along the way, something that's required of full-fledged witches as a kind of noblesse oblige. In this case, they're fixing worn out magic fenceposts that help keep wild animals from venturing into settled places. When they get to the festival, they'll be selling magical devices at their booth.
 
Tetia plans to sell walking sticks that let you make a tent anywhere by pulling up the surface of the ground like it's a tarp. Riceh made paired bracelets that will shine a light between them when you push a button, which causes two half-sigils inside the bracelet to line up and activate. She also made six rings for everyone in the atelier plus Tartah; I suspect will see this emergency locator beacon get some use in a future volume. Coco made more levitating cloaks, like the one she gave to Tartah - not enough to sell, but a few so festival goers can essentially put one on to experience the power of magical flight as a carnival ride. Surprisingly, Agott hasn't made a contraption, because she wants to perform a spell in the parade, which Qifrey and Olruggio seem reluctant to allow her to do.
  
When they arrive at the festival, the kids go explore for a bit before helping set up, and we get an interlude to check on a couple other things. Our first stop is inside the royal palace, which has been enchanted so that no magic will work inside, and no magic devices can even enter. The local kingdom is on a peninsula, and has five member states. Several of the state-leaders are hassling the new witch-ambassador to request that, in addition to helping with natural disasters, the witches start helping to protect people from bandit attacks. (In fact, we saw Custas and his dad get attacked by bandits at the very end of the last volume!) The king shows up and reaffirms his commitment to the witches' independence, but it seems clear that relations between the general public and the powerful, secretive, self-governing magicians in their midst are a bit tense.
 
The old witch-ambassador is very surprised to learn he's been replaced, and the Knights Moralis arrest him for accepting bribes to do personal favors for rich patrons that go beyond the scope of what the king and new ambassador just laid out.
 
Then, separately, we see one of the knights rush off to arrest someone for selling an illegal magical device, in this case, glasses that can see through clothing. He makes excuses, but she's having none of it, and arrests him. The case causes her to think back to when she was an apprentice and her teacher lent her to a rich patron who tried to abuse her. She got in trouble with her teacher when she complained. He even tried to get the Knights Moralis to erase her memory so she'd stop protesting. But the knight who handled the case believed her and stood up for her, which I suppose is why she became a knight herself.
 
It's interesting to me that twice in this volume, we've seen the Knights Moralis portrayed fairly positively. Up until now, their inflexible moral code and incorruptible resistance to any requests for mercy have basically made them, if not exactly antagonists, then at least a looming threat to Coco, but here we see some value in those traits. Because Coco has done what no one is supposed to do - become a witch by learning the secret of magic, which is that it's not innate in the caster, it's a skill that anyone can learn to use by drawing sigils. Coco also accidentally turned her mother to stone by copying a sigil from a book of forbidden magic, and she wants to learn how to undo the process. If they knew all that, the knights would probably erase Coco's memory all the way back to before she learned the secret, and also leave her mother as stone forever. But here, we see them doing necessary self-policing of witch misconduct.
 
Tartah and Coco walk around the festival together. Coco is sad because she remembers being like so many of the non-witch kids who are attending. She loved magic and wished she could become a witch. She's not allowed to tell anyone the truth, but she can't bear lying to them either, or seeing their dreams crushed. Tartah really wants to hold hands with Coco, but instead gives her the custom wand-pen he designed for her, with a grip like the chalk stone Coco used to use to mark fabric when she worked in her mom's tailor shop, before she learned magic. Tartah doesn't know about that, but he saw how Coco wrote with her old wands, and inferred the right shape for her.
 
And because you just know that things can't remain calm all the way to the end of the volume, Custas shocks Coco and Tartah when he shows up at the festival. He's walking now, thanks to some new magical wooden leg braces, given to him after the bandit attack by a witch who uses forbidden magic, and he now seems unhinged and angry with Coco and Tartah for not healing him. The leg braces can like, grow terrifying root-tentacles, which he uses to capture his former friends, and up close, his legs now look withered and dying, which I guess is a consequence of the spell. I kind of think his wild-eyed derangement is because of the spell too, but Coco and Tartah feel guilty regardless, because they both secretly want to break witch law to heal people, although they haven't done so yet. The witch who gave Tartah the braces shows up too, so the next volume is going to be exciting!