If you love a series because it plays to a whole array of personal fascinations, is that a bad thing? Nightmare Inspector is an anthology of things I adore without apology — 1920s Japan, gorgeously dreamy art, and of course manga itself — but at the same time, I know I’d be doing a disservice to anyone reading this if I didn’t review it instead of simply gushing about it.
And so with the third volume, the series has settled into a comfortable formula, although one where they ring enough twists on the basics to make it perennially interesting instead of leaden and repetitive. Each night a new customer comes to the Silver Star Tea House, seeking the aid of Hiruko the baku or dream-eater. He’ll devour their nightmares for them, and often play amateur psychoanalyst while doing so … but what his clients find is not always what they have been seeking. The way each search is visualized and played off is a big part of the fun, and the conclusions to each story often involve a clever O. Henry-style twist. There’s very little meta-plot in this particular volume, and so the individual stories tend to be highly self-contained, but the few times such connections come up they hint at a larger and more all-encompassing storyline that’s only just now being hinted at.
What I love most about this series is how it rummages freely about in both its period and its setting for inspirations, and then mixes them with its knotty psychological plotting. The opening story uses the horror of the 1923 earthquake as a backdrop for its plotline, wherein a young man tries to bring back memories of his beloved. The woman in question died in the earthquake, as you can imagine — but the exact circumstances of her death are what give this chapter its particular bite. And when another fellow comes to Hiruko with another problem — he can’t change his expression one iota, and worries he’s going to alienate a woman he’s fond of — the problem he has is merely a symptom of something much deeper and more troubling. I also loved an installment about a benshi — a narrator of silent films — who discovers he’s losing his voice. (In the early, early days of anime fandom, before fansubs were even a concept, they used a live interpreter to translate the dialogue and signage on the spot.)
Elements from across the series as a whole do show up, but they’re given a relatively minor role. The Delirium, the dream-granting shop we were introduced to in the previous volumes, appears at one point, and Hifumi — the wealthy lodger with relatively few clues about what sort of people he’s mixed up with — also appears as background comic relief (especially in the final bonus comic, where his solid-gold bathtub causes real problems for the housekeeping). The real focus here is on Hiruko and the revolving-door procession of clients who come through the Silver Star. To that end there’s not a lot of development of the series as a whole — but with a series this good-looking and creative from the git-go, that isn’t so bad.
Art: I’ve spent a good deal of my time in reviews of previous installments talking about how great this manga looks, but permit me to repeat myself: this is one of the best-looking comics I’ve come across lately. So much so, in fact, that I’m a little disappointed Viz didn’t print this in a larger format. Every page practically glistens with detail, and Shin Mashiba’s character and costume designs both pay homage to the Taishō period and extend on it. Mashiba also doesn’t neglect the more macabre side of what he’s depicting: there’s blood and some mildly disturbing imagery (although it doesn’t push too far against the envelope of the T rating for the book). It’s nice to be able to recommend a book this gorgeous without somehow feeling guilty about it. My only gripe, such as it is, is that many of the characters tend to have the same consistently androgynous look.
Translation: The text of the translation itself I have no objections with: it’s readable and free of any obvious problems. However, there’s a few things about the retouch job that bugged me — for one, effects and some signage have been reworked in English, but part of the beauty of the book is in the way such things are presented. I couldn’t help but feel that those things would have been best left as-is and annotated in the margins. They did preserve the right-to-left formatting of the original, though, which is something of a must for a book like this. Bonuses this time around include interstitial comments from one of Mashiba’s art assistants, a gag comic (as mentioned above), a thank-you note from the author, and a short excerpt from “The Sad Dog”, a story featured in one of the stories.
The Bottom Line: As much as I love this series for all of its innate invention and beauty, I have to take note of the fact that it hasn’t advanced a great deal this time around. It’s been content to repeat itself and explore its formula in a way that’s more stylistically impressive than anything else — but that’s not a bad thing. There are many comics out there that can’t even do that well.
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