Suzume Volume 1 Review

Many of you reading this will recognise Suzume as Makoto Shinkai’s latest film, which followed in the footsteps of Your Name and Weathering With You to become beloved by fans worldwide. Today, I’m here to review the first volume of the manga adaptation from Kodansha to find out if it successfully captures the original’s magic.

Our story follows 17-year-old Suzume, who is on her way to school one morning when she encounters a handsome stranger (whom we later learn is called Souta) looking for ruins in the area. Suzume points him in the direction of some resort ruins before continuing on her way but later turns to follow him when her curiosity gets the better of her. Arriving at the ruins, there’s no sign of the man Suzume met earlier in the day but she does come across a mysterious door which, when opened, seems to lead to an entirely different world!

In her surprise, our protagonist ends up tripping over a cat statue which suddenly comes to life and runs away. Suzume follows soon after, realising there’s something off about this place and that she shouldn’t stick around but once she gets to school she spots a huge column of smoke coming from the ruins. Fearing it’s her fault, she heads back to the scene where she runs into Souta, who is desperately trying to close the door.

Unfortunately for Suzume, the statue she tripped over is a keystone that helps keep a supernatural “worm” from escaping and causing earthquakes across Japan. Souta is what’s known as a Closer, who goes around abandoned areas in Japan closing doors – but without the keystone in place, this is nothing but a temporary measure. Ideally, Suzume and Souta would just capture the keystone and return it to its rightful place, but finally having the ability to run around, the keystone has no intention of returning to its duty and swiftly turns Souta into a chair before running away.

So begins the adventure of a lifetime for Suzume as she travels across Japan with Souta in search of the keystone (now being nicknamed Daijin by people taking photos of it on social media) and closing more of the mysterious doors along the way. Will she be able to prevent a great disaster from hitting Japan?

Having just rewatched Suzume at this year’s Scotland Loves Anime, this is relatively good timing to be checking out Denki Amashima’s manga adaptation. This appears to be her first published series and it’s undoubtedly difficult to work on something as popular as Shinkai’s films, which sadly shows in this first volume.

Character designs are by and large fine; they’re not as attractive as in the film but they’re expressive. Even when they’re going off-model, it’s not as blatantly noticeable as it would be in other series because they’re so frequently off panel-to-panel, never mind page-to-page. This also leads to some intentional (and unintentional) hilarious expressions. The bigger problem when it comes to the artwork is that the backgrounds are all rather bland or lacking in detail, which is a major negative compared to the original work.

At the end of the day, this is a coming-of-age adventure story and when so much of it is based on the idea of Suzume travelling across Japan, it’s a shame when these different places aren’t better depicted. It would be impossible to recreate what we see in the anime and I don’t expect that level of detail, but I’d still hoped to see the gap bridged better.

Usually, I enjoy reading the manga and novel adaptations of Shinkai’s work since they tend to add extra details that we didn’t get to see in the original, but here in Suzume, I’m not sure that will be the case. It already feels like certain parts of the story are being rushed which means the extended cast such as Suzume’s aunt are going underdeveloped. There’s still time to turn that around of course, but I worry that starting on the wrong foot is going to cause further problems down the road.

It feels like a lot of the good here is purely down to the original rather than any new additions or being thanks to the manga format. Suzume and Souta are likable characters and the story has clear goals and plenty of interesting twists and turns. Like many of Shinkai’s works, it’s a journey of self-discovery for Suzume who spent most of her life living with her aunt after the death of her mother. She has a lot of complicated feelings about this, mostly due to feeling she’s stolen her aunt’s freedom and that’s something Shinkai does a good job of exploring while coupling it with the supernatural themes, but I don’t think Amashima’s depiction is capturing that part of the story to the same extent.

This leaves me with a conundrum as a critic because ultimately this is not a good first introduction to Suzume as a story and I’m unconvinced it’s going to be worth revisiting in manga form unless it adds something meaningful to the story later on. So right now, it’s a difficult recommendation unless you really love Suzume. And I say that, despite having enjoyed elements of it.

As mentioned earlier, Suzume’s manga comes to the West thanks to Kodansha under their Vertical imprint and has been translated by JM Iitomi Crandall. The translation reads well and is consistent with the film. There is no lettering credit as is often the case for a Vertical imprint release. The release includes colour pages, which are a little muddy in terms of the colouring but are still a welcome extra all the same.

The adaptation is complete in Japan with three volumes. Here in English Kodansha has already released #2 with #3 currently scheduled for a release in January, so not too long to wait if you’re eager to read the whole thing.

Overall, Suzume’s manga is a difficult adaptation to recommend for a variety of reasons. I do admire the attempt to couple Shinkai’s work with a rookie mangaka, but that’s a gamble I don’t feel has paid off – at least not yet. Maybe the later volumes will change my mind, but for now, I’d evaluate how much you like Suzume before picking this up.

A free preview can be read on Kodansha’s website. 

Our review copy from Kodansha was supplied by Turnaround Comics (Turnaround Publisher Services).