To list all of the rules and regulations involved in the proper use of a Death Note requires a book in itself: licensed Death Note replicas contain forty pages worth of rules gathered from throughout the manga as well as the anime series. These, then, are the fi rst four rules, governing principles upon which the rest build:
The human whose name is written in a note will die.
A note will not take eff ect unless the writer has the person’s face in their mind when writing his/her name. Therefore, people sharing the same name will not be aff ected.
If the cause of death is written within forty seconds of writing the person’s name, it will happen.
If the cause of death is not specifi ed, the person will simply die of a heart attack.
After writing the cause of death, details of the death should be written in the next six months and forty seconds.
A
ny English-speaking manga fan will be familiar withDragon Ball; they’re less
likely to have come across Akira Toriya- ma’s previous series, Dr. Slump, a showcase for the artist’s comedic skills that’s been slower to reach a Western audience.
When a mangaka names two of his core characters after different types of Japanese rice cakes, it’s likely a sign that he’s crossing over into zany shōnen territory. In this case, Dr. Senbei Norimaki and his robot girl Arale were set up to deliver a classic comedy series.
Toriyama never makes clear why Senbei, an otherwise brilliant inventor who goes by the nickname of “Dr. Slump” because he hasn’t created anything of note lately, was inspired to create Arale. Maybe he just wanted company around the house; maybe it was to satisfy his continual craving to invent stuff. Or maybe it’s because he needed a tool to spy on buxom junior high school teacher Ms Yamabuki. In any case, what he ends up creating is a humanoid robot... who, when fully assembled, immediately starts pointing out all of her maker’s design flaws, like giving her a flat chest, blurry vision that requires glasses to correct, and leaving
out the ability to fly and launch missiles from her stomach.
While Arale appears to be human to those around her, her mechanical nature manifests itself in several ways. She’s bliss- fully unaware of her superhuman abilities, tossing giant boulders and cars into the air like they were tennis balls and running off at super speeds screaming “KIIIIIIII- IIIN”. She unscrews her head and pops it off for fun. Her hobbies include poking at piles of poo with a stick, then using the stick to pick it up and carry it around like a lollipop. All of this drives Senbei crazy as he tries to pass off Arale as his younger sister, his daughter, or whichever relative suits the situation at hand.
Not that anyone in his home town would really notice she’s a robot, as in Penguin Village everything – from the sun, moon and sky to a tube of tooth- paste – can talk. Gamera, the famed giant mutant turtle of Japanese cinema and “friend to all children”, stops by regularly to chat, while residents can ride around in hippopotamus-drawn carriages. Surely a girl who can stand in the middle of the road, get hit by a car and walk away without a scratch while the car lies in a mangled heap wouldn’t make anyone blink.
Dr. Slump
Akira Toriyama; pub Shueisha (Jp), Viz (UK, US, Aus); ser Shōnen Jump
Adding to the surreal flavour, characters regularly break the fourth wall and talk to the audience, for instance promoting earlier volumes of the manga and commenting on how ridiculous some of the situations get. One character notes how Toriyama’s female character designs are so similar that she can successfully impersonate her teacher. Even Toriyama gets in on the fun, immortalizing himself and his editor, Kazuhiko Torishima, in the series. The artist himself is portrayed as a slightly inept bird (“tori” means “bird” in Japanese), while Torishima is less flatteringly represented by the comically inept foil to Senbei, Dr. Mashirito (“Torishima” spelled out backwards in Japanese).
Other characters are parodies inspired by Japanese and American pop culture. Suppaman is a parody of Superman, adding Japanese flair to the character (he eats pickled plums for his strength) while comically playing off his weaknesses (he really has no super- powers, often getting around by stealing some poor child’s skateboard). The full name of another character, Arale’s and Senbei’s flying companion Gatchan, is
Gajira – an amalgamation of the names “Gamera” and “Gojira” (or “Godzilla” in Western translations). References to Star
Wars and Star Trek also abound.
Is there a point to all of this insanity? Not really, although there are a few central story arcs, such as when Senbei and Mashirito face off or when Senbei gets married to Ms Yamabuki. Meanwhile, Arale unwittingly defends the planet from outside threats time and time again, simply by terrifying the aliens when they glimpse her power.
Arale and the gang eventually turned up for three chapters of Dragon
Ball (see p.116), helping Goku defeat
General Blue. It has been suggested that this crossover places Penguin Village squarely within the Dragon Ball universe. By the time the cast makes this cameo in Dragon Ball volume 7, though, Toriyama was already moving away from the nonstop gags of Dr. Slump and starting to develop Dragon Ball into a more action-oriented series. The sequence seems to be Toriyama’s way of telling readers that while he was taking
Dragon Ball in a different direction, the
madcap world of Dr. Slump would never be altogether lost.
W
hen Japan sought an ambassador to promote its animation worldwide, it turned not to a real person, but a nearly forty-year-old Japanese pop culture icon: Doraemon, the robot cat from the future. And for good reason: generations have enjoyed the animated series, an annual animated movie and piles of merchandise, since the work of “Fujiko F. Fujio” – actually the pen name used by artists Hiroshi Fujimoto and Motoo Abiko – first appeared in December 1969 in six educational magazines published by Shogakukan targeting children from nursery school to fourth grade. From there, the manga expanded into more magazines; got its own flagship title,CoroCoro Comic, in 1977; and earned
Shogakukan’s first manga award for children’s manga in 1982.
The Fujio partnership dissolved in 1987, and Fujimoto died in 1996. Yet Doraemon continues to thrive, and is to Japan much as Mickey Mouse is to the US, a character with a simple, easily identifi- able look – in the case of Doraemon, a round head, giant eyes, whiskers and a rounded body – whose adventures appeal to audiences of all ages worldwide. It’s a
shame that English-language publishers have yet to formally license the series – the material holds up remarkably well in the only official English translation to date, a bilingual edition released under the Shogakukan English imprint.
The first chapter establishes the framework for what would be a successful formula for years to come, introducing Nobita Nobi, a rather unexceptional child. He’s below average in sports, a bit low on the intelligence scale, often the butt of jokes played by other children in the neighbourhood, though he does have a love of nature and respect for all living creatures.
Enter Doraemon, a mechanical marvel created on 3 September 2112, and sent back by time machine to what was then present-day Japan by Nobita’s great- great-grandson, Sewashi. Sewashi wants Doraemon to help improve Nobita’s standing to ensure a happier, more prosperous future for his descendants. Doraemon and Nobita don’t start off on the best of terms – when Doraemon first shows up in Nobita’s desk drawer, he warns that Nobita will hang himself and burn himself in short order, then eats all of Nobita’s rice cakes and disap- pears again. When Nobita subsequently
Doraemon
Fujiko F. Fujio; pub Shogakukan (Jp), Shogakukan English (UK, US, Aus); ser
does hang himself (accidentally off a tree branch, while getting his friends’ shuttle- cock off the roof) and burn himself with hot water in his bath, he begins to take the robot cat more seriously.
Doraemon’s secret weapon in helping Nobita is a four-dimensional pouch, from which he can pull out any conceiv- able device. Unfortunately, these don’t always work as expected, landing the pair in an even deeper, often more comedic predicament than before. Doraemon isn’t exactly the pinnacle of twenty-second- century technology, either. He has no ears because a robot mouse bit them off, and he’s turquoise because he felt embar- rassed after his robo-girlfriend laughed at him.
“To the Beach by Submarine”, featured in the second volume of the Shogakukan English edition, is a typical episode. Nobita is left out of a trip aboard the neighbourhood rich kid Suneo’s new boat. To compensate, Doraemon pulls out “the submarine”, a vessel that expands and contracts to fit its surroundings when placed in a body of water. However, the submarine can only teleport short distances, so to get to the beach, the pair have to board the craft sitting in the
bathtub and then take a trip into some poor guy’s glass of ice water, and then a goldfish bowl, a cup of green tea, a kiddie pool, a toilet and an underground sewer line. They finally end up on the boat – but in Suneo’s container of hot tea.
Many of the scenarios play out identi- cally: Nobita has a problem; Doraemon pulls out a gadget; something goes horribly wrong; hilarity ensues. Granted, there are variations to the theme – such as when another character gets their hands on one of these toys and encounters disaster in short order. But this comfort- able comedic rhythm is what drives the manga, in much the same way as a Looney Tunes cartoon of the same era.
Doraemon has pulled hundreds of gadgets from his pouch over the years, like the Dokodemo Door (a door that acts as an instant portal between any two points in the universe), the Take-copter (a propeller attached to a suction cup to enable flight) and Memory Bread (bread that, when eaten, helps the consumer remember information from book pages imprinted on the slice beforehand). The sheer depth in variety no doubt has inspired generations of readers in their creative thinking as well.
T
he story of Dragon Ball is also the story of Akira Toriyama’s storytelling evolution, one that led him away from the gag-filled whimsy of Dr. Slump (see p.114) to a more intense world packed with action and suspense, precisely the qualities that have given it mass appeal worldwide. Both Japanese and English- speaking audiences have embraced series hero Goku, albeit in different ways.Before Dragon Ball, Son Goku was best known to Japanese audiences as the hero of Saiyuki, the Japanese trans- lation of the sixteenth-century Chinese epic Journey to the West – also known as Monkey. A mischievous monkey with magical powers, Son Goku formed part of a Buddhist monk’s entourage on their journey from China to India in search of sacred scrolls. Similar traits appear in