Antique Bakery 1
Posted: March 7, 2007 Filed under: Antique Bakery 8 Comments »Here, Fumi Yoshinaga, take my money! Please! You can have it all if you keep producing manga as consistently good as every single page of all the volumes I’ve read from you so far!
I actually had my doubts at the beginning of this one. I liked the focus on the bakery at first, but the story jumped around so much at the beginning it was hard for me to place the characters and link them to the brief glimses of the past I got. It was a really unique technique though, and I admired it. I got into the groove about halfway though, and I was sold on the full page that Ono got where he posed and said something about being a gay of demonic charm. It was totally random and wound up being an awesome chapter. He truly did get into every guy’s pants he sought, and it was also a testament to the strength of the story that the two guys who worked there were the only two guys on earth who could resist him and it was totally believable (or maybe just not something that you thought too hard about).
But it’s not a Boy’s Love series! Fumi likes to tease cause she knows that’s what you think she does. Mostly it’s a lot like Flower of Life where random events and conversations carry the series. A lot of the stories deal with the customers at the bakery and random little events in their lives, some deal with the backstories and lives of the three that work at the bakery, and the conversations at the bakery itself are interspersed with copious descriptions of every kind of delicious cake imaginable. It’s hard not to run to the bakery down the street and scarf a bunch of cheap cookies to curb my appetite for delicious French confections.
Also: three pages detailing the morning routines of the three main characters. They manage to be hilarious despite the slim amount of time you’ve spent with these three characters.
Also Also: Why didn’t anyone tell me these had scratch-n-sniff covers!? I would have bought them a long time ago had I known about that.
[...] Buttsecks-Less! If you don’t trust me, then trust the great Omni. Or JP. Or other ones who have read the manga and know what it’s really about. (That Antique Bakery review by [...]
Like just about everyone, I love Fumi Yoshinaga, and this August I’ll probably break my principle of waiting for a few volumes to come out and buy Oooku immediately.
I do have one issue with Antique Bakery. I no longer regard dairy or egg products as food. Therefore they might as well be describing the deliciousness of newspapers as far as I’m concerned. It’s not fun to read, and I had to start skimming the sections about food.
Fortunately, “gay of demonic charm” definitely makes up for the food business.
“Gay of demonic charm” could probably make up for any missteps the series could potentially make. I didn’t believe the joke was that funny when I heard people talking about it, but it made me laugh every time that character was proven right.
The disconnect from the food is sort of the problem I have with Oishinbo too, especially the one I just read on sake.
Ooku is a good series to break your rule for. I’m not sure what kind of schedule Viz will have for it, but I know it only comes out around one volume a year in Japan, so Viz will probably take a bit of time to release the current four volumes. I think they licensed All My Darling Daughters too, which I’m very excited about. I’m very excited to read anything by her, though.
Amusingly, it seems like she did illustrations (or at least the cover) for a new Japanese edition of Jacques the Fatalist, which I’ve always kind of wanted to read for its strange-sounding humor. I never really thought about it, but it sounds quite a bit like something that she would have drawn inspiration from.
The slow schedule is one of the reasons, but also Yoshinaga tends to not be as plot-driven as other stuff. But my main consideration is that she provides more to chew on in one volume than most mangaka offer in four, so it’s sort of like getting four-volumes-in-one.
I have never heard of Jacques the Fatalist.
That’s true about her work not being very plot-driven. I think Antique Bakery and Gerard and Jacques are the only two of her series that I can think of that had a semblance of a plot, and in Antique Bakery’s case the plot wasn’t really all that important and only offered up in brief flashes. I liked the narrative in that series a lot.
Jacques the Fatalist is a story about a butler driving with his master while telling him the story of his love life, with various people and their stories interrupting them along the way, and I’m not sure that they ever get where they’re going. The humor, the two characters, and the various incidental and meandering things that happen sound very much like elements that Yoshinaga would use in her stories. I’d only heard of it because I sort of enjoy reading (or reading about) humorous novels that age well. Their existence is sort of a paradox to me, since I associate classic literature with the very serious people that tend to study and read it. Plus, it’s just interesting to see what’s still in print after all these years since the idea of humor changes so much over time. Timeless jokes are very special indeed.
Ah, it’s by Dennis Diderot. Yes, it sounds like a very late eighteenth-century novel. And Fumi Yoshinaga, being a Berubara fangirl, would know about something like that (I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s read La Nouvelle Heloise, which I should read some day). I, on the other hand, I have read quite a bit of Voltaire, and he can also be quite humorous, or at least satirical.
The longest-lasting comedy I can think of is Lysistrata, which is not a novel at all. I’ve seen Lysistrata performed three times, and it’s not because I made any effort to see so many times. Theater comedy tends to last quite well, since good actors can always make good material funny. In fact, even Shakespeare’s lesser-known comedies such as Two Gentlemen of Verona and All’s Well that Ends Well are more popular than, say, Richard II or Coriolanus. In fact, in the past five years, both Two Gentlemen and All’s Well have each seen more local productions than, um, Hamlet (now that I said that, seven theatres are going to put on Hamlet next year).
I’ve read some Voltaire, I do like him for his satire. I’ve only read Candide, but I have yet to run across more of his books. Vanity Fair was probably my favorite as far as a book with humor that aged quite well goes. The author hates every single character in that book, and I was in disbelief the entire time I was reading it at how modern the sarcasm and cruelty seemed. It reads more like a modern book making fun of 19th century writing than something that was actually written back then. My coworker recently gave me a blow-by-blow while he was reading Don Quixote, too. I tried that a long time ago and wound up with a fairly boring translation that I couldn’t get into, but the book is scarily ahead of its time.
Its true what you say about comedy in performance, too. While I don’t necessarily have my ear to the ground about a lot of the smaller shows here, I have yet to even hear of any performances of Shakespeare’s histories. And as for Lysistrata, it’s kind of amazing that so much of the humor from that is still with us. I’ve not seen it performed, but it was something I went over in school.
One of the things that struck me about ukiyo-e and Japanese art in general was the somewhat base subject matter and humor that tends to be glossed over in a lot of texts. We looked at shunga a bit in school, but one of the images that stuck with me most was in Manga Manga, it showed a contest measuring penis length or strength, I can never quite remember. I just like the idea that some things appeal to everyone, regardless of time or culture. Lysistrata is another good example of the same thing.
Vanity Fair and Don Quixote are both on my list of Literature I Should Read but Won’t Anytime Soon.
Humor does get short-changed in the academic world. Probably because our culture devalues entertainment, and humor is too pleasurable to be good for you.
I really should read some more Aristophanes, because not much besides Lysistrata sees stage light. I’ve heard that some of his other stuff is actually better.
My goal is to see every Shakespeare play on stage. So far, the only English histories I’ve seen are Richard III and Henry IV Part I & II, though I have seen all of the Roman plays. The pleasure of seeing obscure Shakespeare is that you honestly don’t know what’s going to happen. Some of the plays are obscure because they’re not as good. And some, like Coriolanus, are gems. Great Shakespeare tragedy + excellent actors + never having the plot spoiled by your English teacher = awesome awesome awesome.