The Spring 2017 Manga Guide

your name Vol. 1

What's It About? 

Based on an anime film of the same name, your name. is a limited manga series with art by Ranmaru Kotone inspired by Makoto Shinkai's script. High schooler Mitsuha Miyamizu longs to escape her rural surroundings and family shrine to live an urban lifestyle, going so far as to wish she could be reborn as a “handsome Tokyo boy” in her next life. Surprisingly, her wish is in a way granted as she wakes up one day to discover she acted noticeably different the day before and the “dream” she had of living as a Tokyo boy named Taki Tachibana actually happened. Several times a week over the course of a month, Taki and Mitsuha switch bodies for a day, leaving each other notes to communicate about their experiences. While they inadvertently seem to cause more trouble than not for a while, eventually, they get on the same page and help each other grow somewhat. Throughout it all looms the promise of a spectacular night sky event when a comet is poised to pass by Earth.

your name. volume 1 (6/20/2017) will be available from Yen Press as a paperback for $13.00 and in digital format for $6.99 via comiXology. The animated film on which it is based has been licensed for release by Funimation and was in theaters for a limited time. A home video release is coming soon.

Is It Worth Reading?

Amy McNulty

Rating: 3.5

your name. is getting buzz virtually unheard of for an animated movie from Japan outside of a Studio Ghibli release. So far, release of the movie in North America has been limited, so this manga adaptation may be many fans’ first introduction to the material. Unfortunately, volume 1 is only half a story—but what a magical first half it is. Both Mitsuha and Taki feel like real teens. While neither has devastating problems they're currently coping with, they have smaller, everyday issues that they manage to improve or otherwise change for each other simply with a new perspective. Seeing their friends’ and families’ reactions to their changes in personalities is especially amusing. Taki's dad getting wistful that Taki calls him “Daddy” on Mitsuha's days like he did when he was a young child is especially heartwarming and delightfully embarrassing for Taki.

If there's one drawback to the plot, though, it's the relatively fast pacing. The body-swapping alone could actually justify a much longer series, even if that's been done before. Granted, it's based on a film with a limited run time, and the body-swapping isn't supposed to be the point of the overall plot, but so far, it's the most heavily showcased part of the manga and it feels a touch lacking. After the first couple of swaps, the other swaps are told quickly through highlights and the teens’ shocked reactions when they realize what the other has done the day before. Still, seeing them argue humorously with one another via notes and texts adds some tension to an otherwise largely tension-free first volume. There are potential issues there—both teens’ moms are absent, and Mitsuha has issues connecting with her father—that the manga only scratches the surface of, never taking the reader to darker places as of yet.

Thanks to gorgeous landscapes and highly detailed backgrounds, Kotone's art shines in this volume. The color pages that open the volume, featuring the comet in the night sky, are a particular highlight. The character designs are nice to look at, if somewhat generic. your name. volume 1 is an excellent introduction to the international phenomenon, but it's just that—an introduction. It feels unfinished, and for a story meant to be told in just under two hours of screentime, it's difficult to get the full effect with only half the plot.

Rebecca Silverman

Rating: 3.5 

Somewhat ironically, at this point I have read both novel and manga without seeing the your name. film. While that doubtless influences my view of this book, it can't take away from the fact that it is a beautiful story. This volume only tells the first half of it, and as such it doesn't really capture what it is about Makoto Shinkai's tale that really makes it special. That's a shame, because once the major reveal happens next time, the power of the story comes through.

As it stands, this first part offers a fun, lighthearted body-swapping story. Mitsuha goes to high school in the countryside and is a hereditary shine maiden alongside her younger sister. Her grandmother is raising the girls, since following their mother's death, their father left the priesthood and went into local politics. Mitsuha herself is very conflicted about her life – she's angry at her father, she's not sure she likes the cultural burden her grandmother places upon her, and she feels trapped by her remote location. She remarks to her friends that she wishes she were a boy in Tokyo, seeing both being male and in the big city as indicative of more freedom. Meanwhile, Taki is a high school boy in that very city, leading Mitsuha's ideal life. One night the two swap bodies in their dreams, and somehow over the course of a month, the two get to live in each other's bodies and each other's lives.

Trust me when I say that there's a lot more to this than it sounds like. We do start to get hints of it towards the end of the book, when Mitsuha mentions watching a comet that Taki has never heard of. There are also pieces of local folklore and history that Granny repeats that are significant, from the (totally gross sounding) kuchikami sake, which is when shrine maidens chew and spit rice into a fermenting container, to the fact that the god's body lies so far from the actual shrine. The idea of musubi, or an intertwining of things, is also significant, and really forms the backbone of the story in its entirety.

But we're not there yet. This volume instead plays with jokes about how obsessed Taki is with Mitsuha's breasts (it's actually something he lists in the “stuff I know about this person” notes he writes) and Mitsuha making Taki appear cuter when she's in his body. There's a real sense that she's getting more emotional fulfillment out of the swap than he is – she betters his relationship with his father, for example, and makes the most of her new surroundings. The question of what Taki will get out of all of this will also be answered later, which I feel like I'm saying a lot here. But that's really the major thing to take away from this volume – more than is normal in a first book, we're not getting the whole story.

It's a story worth reading, however you choose to experience it. The manga is a little less detailed than the novel, and we don't spend as much time with either Mitsuha or Taki to get to know them. Ranmaru Kotone's art is beautiful and has a soft feel that works well for the plot, and Yen Press’ translation reads naturally, with a good get-around of the tricky translation for different forms of “I” when Mitsuha initially becomes Taki. If this is the version of the story you're planning to consume, I'd probably wait until the whole thing is out before picking it up, because the first half of the story is nothing without its sequel.

Nik Freeman

Rating: 2.5

A lot has been made of the your name. film released a couple short months ago. It looks absolutely gorgeous, and the acting and animation are really convincing when Mitsuha and Taki are in each other's bodies. Chop off the latter two thirds of the story and put the remainder in manga form, however, and the result isn't particularly impressive. It's a gripping, emotional story in the moment, but after I put it down, I found myself liking it less and less the more I thought about it.

It's a nice touch that Taki is barely featured at all in the story for the first two chapters, so instead the reader is forced to learn about his personality the same way that Mitsuha does – through things she discovers while in his body, and what her friends tell her about how he acted while in hers. It might be a matter of condensing the story for the manga, but it feels like a step gets missed after that point, as Taki doesn't leave a very big impact before the story dives into heavy drama. Apparently Taki falls in love with Mitsuha by the end of the volume and not only is there no build-up to this revelation or hint that his feelings for her are anything but negative still, you haven't followed Taki enough to know what he's normally focused on at all. Mitsuha has clearly defined desires and personal issues, but Taki's just the kind of grumpy guy she switches places with, so that he's fallen in love with her means nothing.

It also really bugs me that Mitsuha and Taki really don't do a lot to figure out the cause of their switching. The first thing that both of them do after waking up (besides fiddling with their junk) is to look at their cellphones, and yet in the entire month of their switching places, neither seems to even consider the idea of calling their own cellphone to see what happens. Obviously, this would spoil the twist of the story (which, to its credit, is possible to spot coming if you catch certain details), but the more you think about it, the more ludicrous it is that neither Mitsuha nor Taki find out what's going on. It's literally right in front of their faces from the beginning, and it seems like the only thing keeping them from discovering it is the switch's tendency to make them forget incredibly arbitrary details.

your name. is not a story that should be experienced with a scientific, logical mindset. It's more modern fairy tale than science fiction, and requires you to think about the plot in the same way its characters do. Ultimately, while it's a fairly nice and relaxing read, it's not especially interesting. The characters and art and pacing are all fine, but not strong enough to recommend it on. The volume ends on a cliffhanger that didn't make me want to read anymore, so it instead felt like a dull conclusion to an average quality manga.