Taranta Ranta, Vol. 02

たらんたランタ [Taranta Ranta] #2

by Yōko Maki

The main character is named Hikaru. She misses her dead brother and speaks to him in her mind as she begins her first day of high school. Here she has many ordinary adventures.

She becomes fast friends with a girl named Nene, who lets nothing stand in her way and pushes Hikaru to kiss her new crush, Michiya, who reminds her of her brother. He lets her kiss him, which as it turns out is not a good sign. He seems to be a jerk, whose personality is nothing like Hikaru's brother's.

Michiya's best friend Jun warns Hikaru ahead of time. Later, Hikaru finds out the bad side of her new friend Nene. When Hikaru understandably gets upset about this, Nene gets angry at her and tells her to find another friend.

Genres: Manga, Romance

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

槙ようこ, Maki-sensei speaks of herself in the third person. Has a mangaka sister, Aki Mochida.

Pet: Leo, dog
Height: 164.5 cmv

Reviews

[Bibliothecat · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although I like Yoko Maki very much, some of her earlier works are quite weak and Taranta Ranta is one of them. It neither has bad characters nor a particularly bad plot, but the pacing is all over the place making a lot of choices made questionable and it doesn't really come to much of a conclusion.

Ever since Hikaru's older brother passed away, she has had a hard time feeling happy with her life. Once she starts high school, her goal is to be a happy girl - to achieve that, she carries around a notebook with notes and tips to herself on how to be happy. It doesn't take long for her to make friends and even fall in love so all seems to be going in the right direction.

As this manga only consists of two volumes, there isn't much room left to explore this concept of happiness, which could have actually been interesting. It doesn't at first seem as though this would be too focused on romance, especially given that it opens with some nice scenes between Hikaru and her new friend Nene. But the focus soon shifts almost entirely to romance which is actually one of the weaker parts of this story. Firstly, Hikaru falls in love at first with Michiya - the reason is plain and simple that he looks like her brother. That might be a little creepy when you think about it, but at the same time, it doesn't surprise me that someone who is mourning their lost brother might turn to a look-alike. This could have led to an interesting arc but it is dropped pretty fast as Michiya turns out to be a bit of a jerk. It only takes a minute before Hikaru turns her attention to Jun, Michiya's friend, instead.

The remainder of the series focuses on how Hikaru chases after Jun and the problem I have with that is that I don't feel that we ever get to know much about him. We see a lot more character development with Michiya who doesn't turn out to be such a bad guy after all. I just feel like there are multiple aspects of this story that could have offered some interesting or even meaningful plot lines but instead it all just kind of fell flat. There is no real conclusion which also kind of destroys the whole point of the story.

It isn't really a bad manga but you would do a lot better picking up one of Maki's newer works. In addition, the art is a bit odd as well. I like Maki's art but her older works often have weirdly bulging eyes which is at times creepy and at times gives characters a bit of a dead look.