Review: Jyu-Oh-Sei, vol. 1

Jyu-Oh-Sei, vol. 1
By Natsumi Itsuki
Rated T for Teen, 13+
Tokyopop, $14.99

Jyu-Oh-Sei is perfect summer reading. It’s sort of a manga version of 1950s sci-fi movies, with a bizarre setting, a plot that revolves around sexual attraction and power struggles, and interesting characters in sexy, semi-historical outfits. It’s good enough not to hurt your brain but light enough not to tax it, either. Tokyopop has thoughtfully packaged it as a double-thick manga, which is how it was originally printed in Japan, so this first volume brings the reader well into the story.

The book starts with a classic opening: Twin brothers Thor and Rai are the pampered children of a high official on a space colony somewhere far from Earth, the planet of their ancestors. Almost immediately, their parents are killed and the twins are shipped off to the planet Kimaera, a penal colony reserved for those who receive the death penalty.

Kimaera is harsh. It revolves slowly, so there is just one long day and one long night per year, and few people survive the night. Plants are at the top of the food chain, and the inhabitants must take extreme precautions to keep from being eaten. To survive, they have evolved a rigid social system that separates people according to gender and skin color, weeds out the weak, and gives women the upper hand in most situations, including the right to choose their mates.

Life on Kimaera is not only nasty and brutish, it’s short. Even on the twins’ home colony, few people live beyond 30 without life extension surgery; the harsh climate of space seems to age them faster than on earth. Of course, things are even worse on Kimaera. Rai disappears early in the book, and the betting is that Thor won’t last long. He probably wouldn’t have made it to page 150 if he hadn’t caught the eye of the lovely and skilled Tiz, a high official who tosses away her status to team up with him. It’s almost mandatory that a story like this includes a character who is skilled, attractive, and ambiguous, and that role is ably filled by Third (named after his leadership rank), who teams up with Tiz and Thor but may not entirely be on their side.

The story is episodic, but there is a driving motivation: Thor realizes that he is doomed if he doesn’t get away. The only person who can leave Kimaera is the supreme leader, the Beast King, so Thor must defeat all others and become the Beast King himself. It’s a bit far-fetched, but it gives structure to the story.

Jyu-Oh-Sei is the sort of sci-fi that you don’t have to be a fan of the genre to enjoy. All the characteristics of the alternate world are spelled out, so the reader never feels lost for long, and mechs are kept to a minimum. In fact, the setting looks vaguely like a 19th-century painting of a primitive society—no one has books or microwaves or plastered walls or telephones. They live in big stone buildings and eat at long tables. The only technology on view, aside from the spaceships that dump people there, is jet-bikes and machine guns.

Obviously, there is plenty of action, some of it crazy, as when folks have to battle the killer plants, some of it of the more ordinary quarrels-and-duels type. What makes Jyu-Oh-Sei work, though, is that the characters, while flawed, are solid. Despite the weirdness of their world, they are identifiably human, with human obsessions and reactions: fear, jealousy, impulsive behavior driven by sexual attraction. And they are capable of ambivalence, sometimes loving and hating at the same time. They are not the cardboard cutouts of pulp fiction.

The art really helps the story along without getting in the way. It’s clear, expressive, and easy to follow; in fact, this is a good book for readers who don’t usually like manga, as the art is not excessively stylized.

Tokyopop puts everything together in an attractive package. Some color pages would have made it a lot better, but there are a few extras—a map of the solar system, a timeline, and an author’s postscript. And really, for $14.99, Jyu-Oh-Sei delivers a lot of reading.

With its oddball setting and quirky cast, Jyu-Oh-Sei is solid escape reading that’s perfect for a lazy afternoon. It’s not great literature, but it is good enough to make the world go away for a few hours, and Tokyopop’s wise decision to publish double-size volumes just makes it that much more addictive.

(This review is based on a complimentary copy supplied by the publisher.)

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Comments

  1. I have really been looking forward to Jyu-Oh-Sei. We definitely need more sci-fi shoujo! C’mon, Viz, license 7SEEDS already!

  2. I saw the anime version and was good, with some plot twist that makes more interesting the story.
    I hope some editorial buy the rights in spanish. Will be nice to read tha manga.

  3. This sounds good, I’ll have to check it out.