Manga Review: Sundome Volume One

[Jason]

Title: Sundome
Volume: One
Manga-ka: Kazuto Okada
Serialized In: Young Champion (Akita Shoten)
Genre: Comedy, Ecchi, Romance, School Life, Seinen
Publisher: Yen Press
Rating: Mature (18+)
Price: $12.99/US

In the old measuring system of Japan, one sun equals approximately 3.03cm. In old styles of kenjutsu, one way in which they could practice at full speed and full force was to stop their stroke one sun before hitting your practice partner. This was known as "sundome" and it has come to mean "stopping just before".

Sundome (sun-do-meh) is one of those delightfully unapologetic manga that is totally obsessed with ecchi things and unashamed of it. Hideo's life is completely boring and stuck in a rut until Kurumi Sahana shows up. Now instead of boring, Hideo's life is frustrating! Kurumi is slowly making the little otaku into her dog (thus, the names of the chapters are "collars"). She says up front she'll never let him have sex with her, but makes him fight for little glimpses of her collarbone or the sight of her taking off her side-tie panties.

Is she just cruel, using him for her own private laughs at his expense? Or does she actually like him in her own twisted, totally hentai way? If manga has taught us anything, it's taught us this: she's going to run him through the emotional and physical wringer before it's all said and done.

I can't say I'm totally in love with Okada's artwork. There's far too much use of wildly distorted faces and stylized backgrounds. On the other hand, there's no question of telling characters apart -- even distorted, we're never in doubt as to who is who in this manga. Subtlety of expression isn't in this manga, but there is a fine line walked in the story without a doubt. Is Hideo a total otaku pervert loser? Not completely. Are the girls mere cardboard cut-outs of characters instead of real characters? No way. Is Kurumi a sadist? Not completely. So I'd say where this manga succeeds is in its story.

Despite it's content, and obvious obsessions, don't get this manga expecting soft core to fap to. Okada takes pains to never really show girlish attributes in ways that can be said to be 'glamorous' or sexualized. Fetish-ized, for sure, but never sexualized. Nevertheless, don't underestimate the "M" rating for "LNSV": language, nudity, sex and violence. The scenes where Hideo endures a judo arm-bar for 20 seconds had me squirming.

So, who is this manga for? Who would like this manga? While that's a really hard question to answer, I'll first cop out by pointing out that it originally ran in a seinen magazine in Japan, Young Champion, which has also run the almost-ero-manga Love Junkies. At the risk of over-analyzing, this is a magazine for sexually frustrated young men who have a vague suspicion that their lives are going nowhere. Isn't that all of us?

Reviewer: Eric Turner
Proofer: Jason Punda
Editor: Lissa Pattillo