The Spring 2021 Manga Guide

Hana-chan and the Shape of the World

What's It About? 

It's the story of a girl. A girl who lives in the country. A girl encountering fragments, both bitter and sweet, of the world around her. It's the story of the shape of her world.

Hana-chan and the Shape of the World is drawn and scripted by Ryōtaro Ueda and Yen Press has released the single-volume manga in digital and print for $6.99 and $15.00 respectively.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

As children, we often live in our own versions of the world. That's true for people at any age, I suppose, but the worlds we inhabit in childhood are somehow more real, no matter how incredible they seem, either at the time or in hindsight. That seems to be the premise of Hana-chan and the Shape of the World, although I'm not one hundred percent positive about that. The story is deliberately bizarre, using elements of absurdity, magic realism, and surrealism as it follows elementary schooler Hana about her days.

The story seems to take place in rural Kansai at some point during the Showa period. Hana and her friends have a great deal of freedom to just ramble around what was clearly once a much more prosperous town, having adventures in the most outwardly mundane of places. Hana is usually accompanied by The Sun, her Picasso-eyed cat, and her friend Uta, and she's clearly the instigator of the friendship. Uta's no less imaginative, but certainly a lot more timid than Hana, which comes across pretty well when the world looks much less fantastical when seen through her eyes. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, she seems to be the one who ends up saving the day in most of their adventures.

If there's one thing I emphatically do not like about this book, it's the art style. I said that Hana-chan's cat has Picasso eyes, by which I mean they're drawn on two different levels on the cat's face, which is a little unsettling. But that's the absolute least nightmare-driven of the imagery in this single-volume story. Chapter two, wherein one of the town elders creates mecha suits for the townsfolk to wear in order to burn the weeds out of the old rice fields, is downright disturbing in its imagery. Not only do the adults not know that that the kids (and The Sun) are all playing in the neglected farmland when they start to set it on fire, but the burning weeds release some kind of hallucinogenic gas, causing everyone to see themselves and others as nightmare monsters with swollen, grotesque heads, deformed features, and other things that are absolutely unsettling to the point where I had a hard time looking at the pages. While other elements of the art, like the tide-wrecked houses on the shore or the way rain is drawn, are atmospheric in a good way, this can get to the point where some readers aren't going to enjoy the book simply because of the art style. That's okay – not everything needs to be traditionally manga or pretty, after all – but it's definitely something to look into before buying.

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Lynzee Loveridge

Rating:

I love this book. I want it in hardback, large print, with a slipcover so I could put it on my shelf next to other indie-adjacent titles that fall outside the typical manga borders. My praise for this book is equal parts respect for the amazing, fluid artistry and its ability to tap into a particular emotional response I haven't thought about since I was Hana's age, let's say roughly eight years old. It's about injecting novelty into the mundane through imagination, something that many of us straight-laced adults lose grasp of as responsibilities and routines take over our lives.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and heavy rainfall was just a matter of course for most of the school year. Whenever the usual rain would crescendo into an out-and-out downpour, lunchtime recess would be traded out for watching a movie. Usually Milo and Otis. But the point was to keep us from getting soaked down to our bones. Except when I was in third grade, downpours and high winds were exciting, especially for the small group of us who tried to fly on a near-daily basis. See, at the edge of the school property there was a slight incline before we were met by the metal fence that edged up on neighborhood property. Myself and a handful of other kids would take turns counting down from three before running full bore from the fence to the edge of the hill and jumping off while holding fully expanded umbrellas. I spent most of my third-grade year attempting to catch those rainy winds under my umbrella so I could float away into the sky.

That's what reading Hana-chan is like.