Kamisama Kiss 1

Julietta Suzuki – Viz – 2010 – 8+ volumes

With all the recent talk about another Julietta Suzuki series (Karakuri Odette, the subject of a recent Moveable Manga Feast). I wanted to read something by this author, and while Karakuri Odette does sound wonderful, a plot about a girl stepping into the shoes of a rural nature deity is more my cup of tea.

So, Nanami isn’t doing so well. Within the first few pages, her deadbeat dad skips town and her house is repossessed as a result of his enormous debt. Destitute, Nanami has no place to go. After saving a random stranger from a dog, she spills her guts to him. He gives her a kiss and offers her a place to stay, which turns out to be a shrine. Of course, since this is a shoujo manga, it turns out the mysterious stranger was actually a kind of deity, and he, of course, ditched his shrine and passed the power onto Nanami. She has two servants who beg her to stay in the role and a surly fox assistant that could care less. She is, understandably, reluctant, seeing as how she’s never been a deity, and who is she to pretend? But her life’s such a mess… why not?

This has a lot of good ideas, but hasn’t quite clicked with me yet. I’m having problems with story logic, of all things. It bothered me that Nanami’s school life disappeared and the time frame became unclear after she entered the shrine. We saw some schoolmates at the very beginning, and school comes up infrequently after that, but being the kami seems to mean that she can’t go to school, and this isn’t something that’s addressed directly. There’s also a lot of things going on at once in this first volume. Nanami gets her powers, uses some power, grows her power, has a lot of off and on moments with Tomoe, the assistant, some crossing over into the spiritual world and issues with that, and there’s even time for a one-shot or two. All of it is good, but it’s too much at once.

It’s clear that Tomoe, a fox spirit and Nanami’s intended assistant at the shrine, is being set up as a love interest, and his fickle nature is a lot of fun so far. I also love the detail that goes into the telling of the story. I’m fond of stories that lean heavily on Japanese folklore, and we see a lot of spiritual creatures and learn about how shrine prayers work in the world of the series. One of the shrine clients so far is a kind of fishwoman/spirit that Nanami has to help find love. We pick this story back up in volume two, but I wonder if the shrine will have many such supernatural clients. Nanami’s powers as a kami are also a lot of fun (it has to be an ability she has, and she executes them by writing them down on a piece of paper), and that can turn into something spectacular. There are issues with mortality versus being a kami in the spiritual realm, too, and that might also be something that is pursued later.

Nanami herself is showing a lot of promise in this first volume, too. She’s got a lot of backbone, and I liked that she had moral quandaries about acting as kami, that it even came up, rather than her just “accepting” her new powers. She does have a messy life at the beginning of the book, and I like that she just does her best… not with a whole lot of optimism, but she does her best anyway.

The first volume is messy, but has a lot of great ideas and shows promise. If it focuses and develops its ideas, I think it could go wonderful places, and I’m looking forward to the second volume.