In the past few years, we've seen an explosion in the variety of manga available for translation in English. Long-time otaku have always known that Japanese audiences will read manga about a wide array of subjects, from wine-tasting to mahjong, but only so many of those make their way across the Pacific. Yet that's starting to change. With the Internet allowing for pixiv comics to reach audiences well outside Japan, more and more publishers learn that there's an audience outside of the usual shonen and shojo long-runners. The new-ish contender Denpa especially has made a point of picking up unusual titles, from known cult hits like Inside Mari to the twisty shorts anthology An Invitation from a Crab.

The author panpanya is a known and well-selling quantity in Japan and has been for several years, but it's easy to see why their manga might not have been the first choice to translate to North American audiences. Their short vignettes interspersed with diary-like essays would fit right in with a lot of avant-garde comics here, but they're not what we usually expect from Japan. But if you're into something slightly different from your normal manga offerings, I really enjoyed my time with this one. In these locked-down times, I've most enjoyed media that either reminds me of the best parts of "normal life," or transports me to another world…and An Invitation from a Crab somehow manages to do both. It tells stories of everyday life, but tilted slightly on its axis, like you're stepping into the Twilight Zone.

The Twilight Zone is actually not a bad comparison point for this collection, with its reliance on twist and finding the strange in the everyday. Some of panpanya's stories announce their weirdness right from the get-go, like "A Story About Fish," where as people cut up fish they scream their pain right back. But others slowly creep up on you, like "Incomprehensible Memories"—which starts out with a straightforward premise of the character's grandmother giving them toys throughout their childhood, but the toys get progressively more intricate and grotesque. Other times, they start out in bizarro-land and end up somewhere decidedly more mundane—and yet still odd in its own way. This is the case with "innovation," one of my favorites. The main character is working at a power plant cracking open coconuts, which they are told provide the plant's energy. They wonder throughout how this works and, well—I won't spoil the answer. But even after the shocking reveal, there's another twist at the very end, just slightly too late for it to matter. Each story was unpredictable in a different way, and I kept flipping the pages, eager to see how panpanya would turn this one on its head.

Perhaps the most memorable story in the collection is "Wandering Wondering," one of the longer installments. The main character falls asleep on a train and gets off at an unfamiliar stop. After lots of turning around trying to get home, they eventually realize they have left behind their physical body (their soul has been separated) and must retrieve it from the local lost and found. What made this story stand out is not just the long, winding road it took the protagonist to reach that conclusion, but it was one of the few where the situation was presented throughout as unusual. What makes panpanya's voice so compelling is how many of these strange situations are written about as though they are just normal, everyday curiosities. They are deeply strange for us, but not for the characters inhabiting that world.

The art style goes a long way to further this. panpanya works in a juxtaposition of broad-stroked simplistic designs for their characters, and lush, almost photorealistic backgrounds. Occasionally these switch places, too; for example, in "A Story About Fish," the fish as we initially see them are stick figures, but when they are gutted, we see the guts in textured detail. It all adds to the peculiar-yet-ordinary nature of the stories themselves. This is a work that knows how to deal in extremes, and still have them make a sort of internal sense when combining them. Adding to this is my favorite detail about panpanya's art: the weird heads on all the "human" characters aside from the protagonist. Their friends, neighbors and associates often have the heads of animals, or even of weird gadgets that resemble the toys from "Incomprehensible Memories"—but the protagonist treats them all like this is business at usual. It's everything else in the story that is extraordinary.

Interspersed with these stories are equally offbeat essays. They're presented like diary entries, with dates on them (mostly late 2013 and early 2014, showing just how late to this party English readers are), but the subject matter feels like a "shower thoughts" blog. panpanya sticks closer to the "everyday" here; it is what they notice in these common occurrences that makes it strange. One essay talks about the way that we perceive rain droplets as lines; another, the different colors that flit across your vision when you close your eyes, and how this actually makes it brighter when you are in complete darkness. (A few of the comics also have a similar tone, like "Pineapple Ignorance," which explores the "mystery" of where canned pineapple comes from.) The combination of essays and manga short stories gives the volume a presentation like a literary magazine, but all of these are clearly coming from the same surreal brain. While the protagonist makes sense of their strange-but-not-too-strange alternate world, panpanya themselves offers a similar perspective on our real one.

An Invitation from a Crab will not be for every manga reader. Even by the standards of more "episodic" or anthology manga, it's pretty out there. Fans of other kinds of alternative or indie comics will get the most out of this slim volume. But if you have even a slight taste for the strange, I encourage you to expand your horizons to check this one out. It's a breezy read, as you race to find out what each story's big twist is. And for me at least, it's the perfect accompaniment for the mundane-yet-bizarre reality we're all finding ourselves living in 2020.