図書の家選書9 涙の讃美歌 立東舎

This is the first of 図書の家's republished vintage 'ballet manga'. I bought it out of curiosity, and it was quite the wild ride compared to what I expected. I would say this is more of a drama that incidentally includes ballet at the end - which the author herself notes that she drew entirely from her imagination, because it was still rare to actually see a ballet in Japan when she was drawing the story.

I'm interested in reading more of the series in part because the manga was SO different from modern works in two ways that I'm curious if it's representative of the era those respects. The first is the lettering: the lettering is pretty wild compared to even the worst-lettered modern manga I've read. The speech bubbles are often more horizontal than vertical, and unlike in modern manga, words are frequently broken across lines; sometimes the last kana is just tacked on with its own line. There's a few bubbles where the text is diagonal. This made it harder to read for me just because I'm not used to having to deal with putting words together across lines like this!

The second is the pacing. The story kind of ping-pongs all over the place for a while and jumps from one character to the next, and events often feel very compressed. At one point, the following happens in (I'm not joking) less than ten pages:

• A character's father dies suddenly
• Her mother, who has gone crazy with the death of her oldest son, dies of a cold
• The character, left alone in the world, goes to find her cousin but is overtaken by despair on the train and attempts suicide
• She is saved by a famous ballerina who hears her story and offers to adopt her</spoiler>

That should easily take up at least a chapter, but it's only a small slice of this one!

Although I ended up rating it low, it was an interesting experience, and I did really enjoy the vintage art style! I also thought that it was interesting that there is a Christian character whose faith, while not given a lot of detail, is treated seriously and realistically, and there is definitely that period feel of older traditions and 'modern' Western ones meeting and mixing in various ways. The female characters also all speak in fairly polite language, and there was an unusual amount of narrative prose sprinkled in, usually at the beginning of chapters.

For the most part, I don't think the language itself is that difficult; there were a couple of literary expressions that tripped me up, and you do have some ゝand 〱 repetition marks.