|
Friday, September 3, 2010
Extra Helping
David explores the tasty world of foodie manga
For many, this is the run-up to eating season. Barely has the last of the leftover Halloween candy been consumed before the daunting string of holiday meals present themselves, not to mention thoughtful gift baskets filled with the kind of food you’d never eat in quantities that would challenge a family of five.
I’m a big fan of eating, so this prospect doesn’t bother me. I also like to cook, which always helps to make the eating more interesting. Combine this with my love of comics, and it should come as no surprise that I love food manga. While there isn’t as much in this category as I’d like, there is a tasty sampling of choices if not a full buffet.
Del Rey offers Natsumi Ando’s Kitchen Princess, with story by Miyuki Kobayashi. Najika Kazami is the orphaned daughter of two great pastry chefs. She has a formative childhood experience with flan and determines to track down the kindly boy who mended her broken heart with store-bought custard. This involves enrolling in an elite private school to track down her “Flan Prince,” encountering snooty classmates and winning them over with her culinary skills.
The first volume isn’t great shakes – it comes off as a cuter, sweeter Fruits Basket, with a plucky, alarmingly optimistic orphan thrown into the orbit of a pair of temperamentally dissimilar boys who take a shine to her. Things pick up fairly quickly, though, with Najika using cooking as a way to help the people around her. Stuck in a class full of the school’s elite, she proves she’s special enough to keep their company at the stove. A part-time job at one of the restaurants on campus (yes, it’s one of those schools) brings her into contact with a variety of personalities, and Ando and Kobayashi throw in a nice variety of culinary challenges for the young cook.
The romantic triangle at the manga’s core is pretty drippy. Even Najika doesn’t seem that invested in the search for her Flan Prince, which is really for the best. It’s a lot more fun to watch her master new cooking techniques and find the right recipe for solving the problems of the people around her. And Del Rey has included the step-by-step recipes for everything Najika cooks, which makes this the most usable of food manga. The dishes present varying degrees of difficulty, but there are some that even a novice cook could tackle.
I can’t say I’ve ever been motivated to reproduce anything prepared in Shinji Saijyo’s Iron Wok Jan! (first published by the defunct Comics One, then picked up for the remainder of its 27-volume run by DrMaster). The titular chef is a complete bastard, and his plates are the very definition of discomfort food. For Jan Akiyama, cooking is blood sport, and if you don’t like it, you can get out of the way.
The series is a string of insane culinary showdowns, giving Jan the opportunity to push the boundaries of physics and common decency in his quest for startling flavors. If Jan has a softer side, I haven’t seen it in the dozen-odd volumes I’ve read, which makes him something of the leading anti-hero in battle manga. He’s all about culinary shock and personal glory, but his dyspeptic personality doesn’t keep the series from being entertaining.
This is due to Saijyo’s completely over-the-top approach to the material, which is really the only sensible way to go. Knives fly and stoves scorch in dizzyingly kinetic illustrations; diners’ astonished reactions are rendered with almost grotesque detail. It’s the only cooking manga I’ve seen that can actually make me lose my appetite, but it’s bracingly fun reading if you’ve got the stomach for it. (I recommend it be consumed intermittently and in small portions.)
Equally nuts but a whole lot sweeter is Takashi Hashiguchi’s Yakitate!! Japan (Viz). This generally charming series became available in English just as people were starting to wonder what in the hell they were thinking by embracing a wave of carbohydrate-demonizing diets. I can’t really credit it with reintroducing eaters to the wholesome pleasures of breads, but it certainly couldn’t have hurt.
It follows a motley group of passionate bread-bakers working at a lesser outpost of Japan’s premiere boulangerie, Pantasia. Young Kazuma has developed a passion for loaves, and he has a dream. (Yes, he’s one of those.) He wants to create a national bread for his rice-loving homeland, and his general ignorance of bread-making basics is leavened by his “Hands of the Sun.” (They give him an uncanny ability to knead dough and bring out its yeasty goodness.)
Like Iron Wok Jan!, it’s over-the-top battle manga with a culinary bent, but it’s much more likely to leave readers’ mouths watering. Kazuma is as open-hearted as Jan is hostile, and his devotion to a craft he’s fundamentally ignorant of is endearing. In fine shônen tradition, Hashiguchi surrounds him with mentors, friends and rivals. They’re even quirkier than the average for this kind of crowd, and Hashiguchi takes full advantage of their comic possibilities. If the manga-ka has an unfortunate tendency towards bursts of fan service, the proclivity is balanced out by the book’s more sweet and savory qualities.
While only one of her translated series centers on a restaurant, acclaimed and versatile creator Fumi Yoshinaga always remembers that sexy men can’t live by sexy men alone. The sublime Antique Bakery (Digital Manga Publishing) stars hunky pastry chefs of varying sexual orientations, but professional and talented home cooks crop up in several of her other series.
The Moon and Sandals (Juné) is extremely foodie-friendly. It follows two couples, one grown-up and the other student, and cooking is key. One of the grown-ups is a professional chef, and the younger twosome comes together when one pays for tutoring with homemade bento. The way to a reluctant suitor’s heart is at least partly through his stomach in Ichigenme… The First Class Is Civil Law (801). Well-to-do Tohdou may have trouble getting earnest Tamiya into bed, but he never has trouble luring him to the dinner table with his prowess at the stove. Flower of Life (DMP) even includes a lengthy recipe for pumpkin bread.
So yes, there’s a reasonable supply of cooking manga available, with side dishes of crazed battle comedy, adolescent romance, and hot man-on-man action, depending on your personal tastes. There’s plenty of room for menu expansion, though. MangaCat’s Ed Chavez has written a column on booze-centric manga for Otaku USA. (May I start you off with a beverage?) And I’ve heard rumor of a highly regarded series about a bureaucrat in Japan’s agricultural agency. (No farm, no food, people.)
Let’s have more cooking manga, with more stops along the food chain, shall we?
|
April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
