Status Updates From Hide and Seek

Essay by mangaka at end is great. Overall, def of interest from historical perspective. Suspect stories would hit harder if read by children, as originally published for. Specific 1970s shoujo flavor is a delight even when the melodrama and shallow characters persist.

Illustrations great, but intro needs work. Why was artist “much surprised and embarrassed” to discover they were published in SM Magazine rather than SF Magazine as she thought?
(SF Magazine= Japanese sci-fi mag published 1969s to now. SM= probably a sexual, potentially bdsm-related magazine)

The Snake God. The human element is appropriately horrible; the “isolated village that has its own terrible religious/cult ritual” is…y’know, a trope. I’m more distracted by that than the actual story.

Typos observed: “dieties,” “duites,” “you” in place of “your”
Typos can happen anywhere, but they are more obvious when the text is comparatively thin, as it is here.

They have straight-up forgotten to put the English title (The Snake God) on the title page. The Japanese title is there (Hebigami-sama), the other things got English text “shocking!” “The young woman will finally get her revenge!” “The day of the snake god’s selection approaches” but literally no English title.

Bloody Diary Pages. Cheesy melodrama, but at least it’s pretty cohesive.

Rainy Days. Would have been so much better without the thievery subplot (fixed and handwaved by attack of conscience). Not horror, barely trauma.

My Mother’s Necklace. Melodrama.

Our First Family Trip. Well, that one was actual horror. True to life. Might actually give me nightmares.

Death of a Bum. Once again, a short story that ends in regret but also feels very simplistic. Feel like I’m missing context for Emiko’s devotion to her doll, but otoh, I don’t actually fault a character for being that devoted; goodness knows I’d probably also mourn for years if the stuffed animal I’ve had since birth went missing.

Relevant thoughts because my library has this cataloged under YOSHIKO as the surname. Later when I’m on the computer, I can do more research to see if there’s an accepted standard version, but it’s bothering me.

Also I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but isn’t Naono the mangaka’s surname? That’s definitely what it looks like from the Japanese on each story title page. And while it’s not unusual for western publishers to follow Japanese order, there’s nothing in the info to indicate which way the names are presented.

Revenge. All right, finally, one I think is actually good. The complex web of emotions. Learning secrets about a family member. What Maki might choose to do after…

Hide and Seek. I mean. Okay. More of a nothingburger.

The Ribbon. I’ve had this thought a couple times already, but I feel as though either the translation or adaptation is lacking something. I’ve gotten the feeling several times that context is missing, which makes the story or dialogue feel disjointed.

Lady Otsuta. Solid ghost story, but very critiqueable. Why was the daughter cursed in the first place? Just because they lived in that house? Why the paralysis? How did they find it about the curse?
How could the old man have watched the slaughter as a child—the story published in 1971, surely even the late 1800s is too late for the era portrayed in flashbacks?

Wool Overalls. Kinda weird. I don’t understand how the string part worked—early on grandma says the string is tied to her hand. How could it strangle her?

There’s an essay in the back where the mangaka says it’s “a cruel story, depicting the onset of a lifetime of regret due to a single irreversible mistake. Maybe I took it too far. If the story upsets you, perhaps you’ll feel better by interpreting the ending instead as [spoilers] arriving just in time.”

Guilt, regret, def present even here at the outset. Key to tragedies, I think, are that they’re preventable, even foreseeable, but weren’t, and that’s definitely here.