Another volume in this beautiful, dreamy series. Iwaoka keeps up the suspense in this Shintoistic manga about a young boy in a forrest where everything from animals to trees and even man made objects has a living soul, a spirit that takes a humanoid shape.
The driving force behind the story is the aim of the main character to help enough spirits so that he may be granted to become a wind spirit himself and rejoin a beloved wind spirit that he lost touch with in volume one. This is kept in the background, though, and most chapters focuses on various spirits and their stories. My favorite was the one about the turtle with moss growing on its back, which turned into a small humanoid figure riding it's back, until the turtle stayed out in the sun too long, which made the moss dry out and the little character disappear. Weird, but different and interesting.
As you can tell, the stories have a definite dreamy quality and Iowaka's style is also dreamlike, soft and evocative.
I'm very happy that Ordbilder is publishing the works of Hisae Iwaoka in Swedish, as this is just the kind of manga I want to be able to show those who think Japanese comics is only exaggerated, violent shonen comics.