I'm trying out a different type of post. As I've seen others do on reading blogs, I'm going to try focusing on one book or series per post, with the goal of giving more in-depth discussions while still keeping the posts a manageable length. So I'm going to start with the only comic I managed to read during my trip, thanks (ironically) to a nasty bout of insomnia: Shin Mashiba's Yumekui Kenbun: Nightmare Inspector, volumes one and two.
I rented both of these from the Clark County library system. It's a completed, nine-volume manga set in the 1920s that follows the various exploits of Hiruko, a baku. Baku are a type of mythological creature that subsist on dreams, and Hiruko specializes in nightmares. People come to him who are plagued by nightmares, and he enters their dreams to resolve them, taking the nightmare itself as both payment and sustenance when all is said and done.
Hiruko is an unpredictable main character. He comes across as mischievous and claims his only motives are selfish, but his actions don't always bear that out. At times he's altruistic, but at other moments I'd say he almost crosses the border from mischievous into malicious. Baku aren't human, and sometimes that's jarringly apparent. I have trouble with deliberately unlikable main characters, but he isn't consistently bad enough to drive me away.
It's a highly episodic story, at least so far, with not much continuity between chapters beyond the occasional two-chapter arc. The only recurring characters (again, so far) are Hiruko and Mizuki, the girl who runs the tea house he uses as a base of operations. There's nothing wrong with that type of story, but it's not usually my particular cup of tea. Additionally, I was hoping for a story more on the fantasy side of the spectrum; Nightmare Inspector veers much more strongly into horror than what I normally read. There's no gore, but most chapters end with a horrific psychological twist. For instance, one client who is in love with a film star has recurring nightmares of her suicide; once the nightmare is resolved, a news story comes out about the actress's actual suicide, and it's speculated that she has manipulated her lover to do the same. That chapter ends with the client's new, happier dream, but one of the last panels zeroes in on the dream-lady's sinister grin. Not all the stories have these grim endings, but as I said, many do.
That's not to give the impression that I haven't enjoyed this manga, because I have, and I plan to continue reading it. It has a lot of the flavor of its setting (the 1920s), at least on the surface. The film star is on the silent screen; news is delivered via radio; one client's social standing is indicated by the fact that he has a telephone in his home. One of the things I look for in my reading is that otherness of time and place; it's one reason I enjoy fantasy and science fiction so much. The dream logic on display in most stories is also intriguing, such as the character who can't see objects in his dream, only letters that fill in the outline of the objects, or the character who dreams only of an endless hall of mirrors. It reminds me somewhat of Neil Gaiman's Sandman stories, the first comics I ever read, though that series is a classic and I wouldn't give the same title to this one.
This turned into a much longer post than I expected. Overall, Nightmare Inspector is an interesting manga, and I do want to read the rest of the volumes. I'd recommend it to fans of horror and dream logic, and it would be a good one to read in bursts rather than as a marathon.
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