manga: Yuyu Hakusho Vol 1

[meganbmoore]

Yusuke Urameshi is a 14-year-old delinquent punk who skips school, smokes, and always gets into fights. He also likes to flip up the skirt of his childhood friend (and class president) Keiko to comment on her panties, and panics when she cries, both of which are typical shounen coding for “I like you but am 5.” One day, he knocks a little kid out of the way of a car, only to be hit by the car and die himself. He figures out that he’s a ghost pretty quick, and meets Botan, the personification of death in the form of a cute, cheerful girl in a kimono who flies around perched on…uhm…the spawn of a broomstick and an oar (someone else knows what it’s called).

Botan tells him that he wasn’t supposed to die, and his death was actually pointless. The kid was supposed to be hit by the car, but his ball would have provided a cushion, saving him from any serious injuries, so Yusuke died saving someone who would have been fine anyway. This leaves the afterlife in a bit of a quandary as to what to do with him. His lifestyle should have resulted in one fate in the afterlife, but his unscheduled death-and how he came by it-shakes things up. So Koenma, the son of Enma, ruler of the underworld, who looks about 1 and has a huge hat and a pacifier, gives Yusuke a test. All he has to do is take care of an egg until it hatches. Meanwhile, his body is revived so that it appears to be in a coma, and if he passes the test, he gets to live again. What he doesn’t know is that when the egg hatches, it will be either an angel or a demon, depending on whether the soul who takes care of it is good or evil. Whichever it ends up being will determine what happens to Yusuke.

Meanwhile Yusuke is Strictly Forbidden from talking to his mother and Keiko, since they’re the people he was closest to in life, and the only person-aside from those near death and those of the supernatural variety-who can tell he’s there is Kuwabura, the only other punk to give Yusuke a run for his money in the delinquent department. We know Kurabura isn’t so bad because he lets people beat him up and studies hard so his friend can keep his job. We know his friends aren’t so bad because they see Keiko and her friends being bullied and decide to save them.

So far, it’s fun with lots of mythology, but not overly involving, focusing on Yusuke adjusting to being a ghost and helping ghosts and people near death come to peace, but I understand it eventually turns into normal shounen action.

Unrelated to the book as a whole, in one of the author’s notes, the mangaka says that a manga he wrote that never saw the light of day “was a weird sports manga with homosexual characters and cross-dressing (I may have turned off a lot of Weekly Shonen Jump readers just by explaining this much of the story).” Clearly, he said this before internet fandom took over! 

Comments

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Not only does it turn into normal shounen action, it becomes a tournament manga. :D

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Of course it does.

Though, personally, I long for ghost detective...

[rhap-chan.livejournal.com]

This series is a guilty pleasure of mine, I have no idea why. ♥ I guess because it used to be on Cartoon Network all of the time. It gets kinda weird but it's not bad.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I understand the manga gets weirted than the anime.

[rhap-chan.livejournal.com]

I may have to pick it up again then.XD

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

It's a guilty pleasure of mine as well, though I prefer the anime to the manga. The English voice for Yusuke is great. Sometimes when I have a massive load of grading to get through, I put YYH on the dvd player and attack the stack of papers.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

It seems to be everyone's guilty pleasure.

[amandioka.livejournal.com]

This is one of my favorite series. I prefer the anime to the manga, though. Maybe 'cause that was how I got introduced to this series. If you can/want check out the anime ;)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

It's beeing rereleased pretty cheaply, so I probably will.

[kitsune-no-ame.livejournal.com]

Aww YYH <333
Been loving it for years, France loves this series and we even had a decent dub. *pets manga volumes as well*
It's one of the few shounen series I think is entirely original and fascinating nomatter how often I re-read it. I'll never get tired of it.
Honorable mention to Youko who started my kitsune-silver-hair-fetish. I was only ten.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Well, it's certainly starting off a little bit differently.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I've been meaning to pick this up for ages, as one of my fave 585 writers is also an absolute YYH fiend, so I know there's bound to be a ton of yummy reading once I know the source material better than my current "caught a few episodes out of order on Cartoon Network a few years ago".

(Said friend, btw, is yet another voice chiming in on the "anime is better than the manga" vote for this particular series.)

[shediao.livejournal.com]

Yuusuke is a staple shounen action hero, but somehow he's likable and just...different. Let us know how your opinion of him progresses.

[shiegra.livejournal.com]

Keiko is one of my favorite shounen heroines ever.

[anenko.livejournal.com]

Seconded. Keiko is *awesome.*

YYH has a lot of cool female characters (relative to the other shonen manga I've read).

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

So far I really like her, but I fear a future where she isn't allowed to do anything but wait for Yusuke. Which I hope I'm wrong about, but that's shounen's thing. (I wouldn't mind as much if fandoms didn't use it as an excuse to talk about how much the girls suck.)

[shiegra.livejournal.com]

I'd say that, while necessity (she isn't superpowered) bars her from being deeply involved in his fights, Keiko is not the kind of person to wait googly-eyed at the sidelines. And the writer shows it.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

So far, what I've read and what you say makes me think of Yuya. Which is very, very far from a bad thing.

[shiegra.livejournal.com]

A little, I guess? Only she's much more composed and self-assured, her blows land (presumably he lets them) and while she's very important to him and he to her, she very much has her own life. Also, she's not as involved in the storyline as Yuya is. (DAMNIT.)

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

I love Yoshihiro Togashi. YYH is hard to read, being so old, but it is cool too, because of the sympathetic take on delinquents (which Shaman King and Jojo's Bizarre Adventure also share).

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

Oh, and Bleach plays on the idea of the sympathetic delinquent hero with Ichigo, who is mistaken for a delinquent but isn't one.

[tokyofish.livejournal.com]

Unrelated to the book as a whole, in one of the author’s notes, the mangaka says that a manga he wrote that never saw the light of day “was a weird sports manga with homosexual characters and cross-dressing (I may have turned off a lot of Weekly Shonen Jump readers just by explaining this much of the story).”

I loved that when I read it (and I would love to read it if he ever manages to write it XD). Haha, given that he is now married to Naoko Takeuchi, I can only guess that their son will grow up pretty accepting? XD But, YYH had a large yaoi fandom in its day too (hehehe, the infancy of internet fandom in the mid-90s was a sight to see, let me tell you). Same with HunterxHunter (I admit I also think this . . . but there are barely any female characters!). So it's okay, because someone, somewhere, will always assume your characters are homosexual anyway! :D

I'm buying the manga (never managed to finishing catching the series on TV due to no TV in college and the fact that they aired the ending at some weird time slot), but I'm really behind. ;___;

And I'm not sure if I just missed it, but did you read the second half of CCS yet?

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I should recognize the name Naoko Takeuchi, but can't quite.

You may have pinned down why HXH hasn't looked interesting when I've flipped through it. (Though what I mostly noticed was how young many of the characters were, and it threatened to be a "loud 12 year old lead" series.)

I haven't read the rest of CCS yet. Still need 3 vols. I do have some Tokyo Babylon, RG Veda and Magic Knights Rayearth lined up, though.

[tokyofish.livejournal.com]

LOL, mangaka who wrote Sailor Moon, the series that features a lesbian couple (pretty much the first acknowledged one in a mainstream show that otherwise revolved around het relationships, I think), cross-dressing (or in the case of the anime, gender-swapping) characters (one of whom also has a lesbian crush!), oh! and a homosexual couple in the anime too. <3 Haha, yeah, they got married and had a son and are, I assume, really, really rich (not that this has to do with anything, but that's a lot of star power under one roof - it's like a celebrity couple!). XDDD

Yeah, like the post below says, Gon is pretty adorable, actually. The leads are generally very likeable. There are just . . . like, two women.

. . . that's some heavy reading. I might advise spacing those out a lil' bit with some fluffier stuff in between. But you have so many things to read I'm sure you won't be reading them all in a row. XDDD

[snarp]

As has probably been kinda obvious from my posts the past few weeks, I have been reviving my high-school love for Togashi manga. I regret to say that Keiko and all the other female characters have a bad habit of disappearing for entire plot arcs at a time. When Togashi does female characters, they're great, but he just can't seem to keep them on-screen for long.

Also, if you keep going with the manga, do not expect to get any closure at the end. Togashi got in a fight with his editors and cut off the last arc mid-fight-scene.

(In defense of my beloved Hunter x Hunter: I feel like it's not really a "loud twelve-year-olds manga" in the sense that, I don't know, early volumes of Naruto are, because the twelve-year-olds are, for shounen manga, bizarrely polite. The main one, Gon, is extremely innocent and happy and loves everybody - sort of, uh, Sakura as a shounen hero? The secondary one, Killua, is the Guy With The Dark Past and he is obsessed with Becoming Worthy Of Gon's Purity and occasionally (when Gon nearly kills himself doing something Heroic) with Protecting The Princess Gon, and I swear to god this manga is secretly BL. There's a scene between Gon and Killua that's staged suspiciously similarly to one between Yusuke and Keiko late in YYH.)

[tokyofish.livejournal.com]

. . . and then there's Kurapika and Leorio who are also generally polite. Though it's been a while since I've watched the anime, Leorio had the Kansai-ben, right, so I assume he was a bit louder. (Secretly BL? I think they're too young for the most part, excepting Leorio, so . . . more like shonen ai? But yeah, I don't normally slash characters, but with HxH I can't help it. See also: Hikaru no Go, Prince of Tennis.)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Well, given the manga he couldn't get published, you may be right about it being closet BL.