Let’s Dance a Waltz Volume 1
Ian Wolf •
“I can’t dance, I can’t talk. Only thing about me is the way I walk. I can’t dance, I can’t sing. I’m just standing here selling everything.” – Genesis
One of my favourite ways to sum up any anime is to use the sentence: “It’s like [insert show, book or film], but good.” In the case of Let’s Dance a Waltz, its like Strictly Come Dancing, but good.
Created by Natsumi Ando (Zodiac P.I., Kitchen Princess, Arisa) the story begins with a boy named Tango Minami, a high school student who also works at his mother’s dance studio, teaching students ballroom dancing. However, he is not keen to let anyone else at school know about his job for fear it would ruin his cool reputation. At school he overhears another boy rowing with a rather unattractive girl named Hime Makimura. Tango steps in to help Hime for which she is grateful. Hime, deciding to improve herself, decides to apply for dance lessons at Tango’s school.
This horrifies Tango, who fears that his secret will be leaked. Tango first makes Hime dance without her glasses on, but eventually Hime discovers the truth. Hime decides to take up more lessons, particularly admiring the star couple of the studio, Yusei and Sumire. Yusei is especially keen on seeing Tango dance competitively, but Tango displays reluctance. Tango also keeps trying to avoid Hime, which means she ends up being trained by Yusei. However, it is really Tango that Hime has affections for.
One of the plus points of this manga is the translation notes, which are especially useful for explaining certain elements of the story, like how Tango is able to hide his passion for ballroom dancing despite his name being a big giveaway. Namely “-go” is a common suffix for boys names in Japan, and the word “tango” can mean either “vocabulary” or “Boy’s Day” (5th March). Also, certain elements of the story can be traced back to the 1996 live-action Japanese film Shall We Dance?, which was remade in America in 2004.
The story itself is a pleasingly pleasant. The romance between the two leads is already beginning to flourish in this first volume, plus there is also the slight rivalry between Tango and Yusei. The one obvious disadvantage to this manga however is that it is rather static. This is a medium which uses still pictures to depict something that requires movement. You get the feeling, however that if this manga becomes a success, it could be made into a decent anime.
The other slight niggle that has been mentioned by some people, and indeed I also personally felt, is the way the character of Hime develops over the course of the first volume. At the start, she is depicted as quite a large girl, but because she puts so much practice into dancing, she loses lots of weight and becomes thin. Like many readers I felt a tad disappointed by this change because I liked the fact that the heroine did not look like the typical thin, attractive girl, but now she has ended up that way.
Overall, however, Let’s Dance a Waltz is pretty fun: there is romance, competition and a cast of entertaining characters. Something you tend not to get on certain BBC One prime-time reality shows.
