Tegami Bachi 1

Hiroyuki Asada – Viz – 2009 – 7+ volumes

There are two things this series has going for it that make me want to like it by default.  One is that the world that it is set in is cast in perpetual night, necessitating the use of lots and lots of black, something you don’t often see in manga.  The other is that it seems to be establishing a fairly detailed fantasy world for the story to live in.  You very rarely see these done properly, so I get kind of excited when I see a good one.

This volume was mostly exposition, so I want to sort of reserve judgment until I read a bit further and see what the actual plot of the series will be.  It looks like the story will follow a young boy named Lag Seeing in his quest to be a Letter Bee (a type of mailman), find his lost mother, and also locate a Letter Bee that helped him out years ago named Gauche.  We even get a short story introducing his assistant, a young girl rather than the dog that most of the Letter Bees seem to use.

On the other hand, most of the first part of the book focused on Gauche, and we got quite a bit of background on him, so I’d hate to dismiss him as the main character.  I also liked him a bit better, since it was harder to get an idea of what makes him tick.  Sometimes his position is ambiguous, but he has goals, and seems mostly like a good guy.  In the second part of the book, the Letter Bee with Lag doesn’t really comment on Gauche, so it’s possible that something terrible happened to him, too.  I may be all right with that.

Action and drama seem to be the orders of the day as of this volume, because so far we have absentee parents, orphaned siblings, more than one orphaned child, and lots of tears and whatnot from Lag.  The “caste” system in the world the book is set in (called “Amberground”) also seems to lend itself well to this.  The action elements are mostly played out around sudden attacks from giant beetle-looking creatures called Gaichuu.  The Gaichuu are indestructible save for firing at their “joints” with a special gun powered by the user’s heart, which goes back to the drama element.  Later, there are fights with corrupt circus men or something.  It looks like Lag’s assistant is also up for a good fight, so that will probably continue to be something that happens as well.

I was very nearly turned off after the first bit of the book since the elements establishing the fantasy world come in very rapid succession.  I stopped and let the book sit for a day, and that seemed to help immensely since I wasn’t nearly so overwhelmed when I tried it again.  Once the initial information dump is taken care of, the story flows pretty smoothly, and if you find your eyes glazing over during the explanations, there’s a helpful recap in the back of the book covering all the main points that make Amberground unique.

This was a very solid first volume, and while the story hasn’t established itself as addictive or a must-read just yet, I was intrigued enough that I will definitely pick up the next volume.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.