Translucent manga #1: first impressions
After reading Russell’s favourable review over on UK-A and Anna’s equally glowing appraisal at 2 Screenshot Limit I decided to hang up my shoujo reservations again and check out the first instalment of Translucent.
Firstly, I don’t think it matters a damn if the genre appeals to you or not. The story and its characters have a really appealing warmth and bittersweet quirkiness, regardless of gender or age of the target readership; this is a story about ordinary people, ordinary lives but with a fantastical twist that serves as both an interesting plot device and a metaphor for some of life’s common issues.
As is so often the case, I think there’s a lot of overlap between well-written shoujo and seinen, a comfortable but blurry middle ground that this particular title falls in. It could be a shoujo title I guess but I think it appeals as much, if not more to, the seinen demographic because the topics covered take on slightly different, but nonetheless insightful, relevance when viewed from differing points of view that vary according to age and life experience.
The story focuses on Chizuka Shiroyama, an ordinary teenager with aspirations for a career in theatre but suffers from a mysterious condition whose only symptom is that of rendering her partially invisible. In all other respects she is completely normal and in perfect health but the periodic transparency makes an already quiet and shy individual even more insecure and introverted. Successive chapters explore the day-to-day life of Chizuko, her family and friends, and other people who share the strange ‘Translucent Syndrome’.
