Voices in the Sea Foam Review

Can true love break a curse that crosses lifetimes?

When Aito Kasugai was ten, his whole life changed on meeting Kinoshita, a transfer student at his elementary school. Suddenly, he was overcome by terrifyingly vivid memories of an earlier life as a mermaid princess who was cursed by the sea witch to lose her voice when she fell in love with a mortal. The little mermaid was forced to endure terrible pain when exchanging her tail for human legs so she could walk on land and when her beloved prince married someone else, her body dissolved into sea foam (or so Hans Christian Andersen’s story goes). Aito, traumatized, stops attending school, determined never to risk falling in love.

We catch up with Aito again in his second year of fashion design at art college – and he’s just spotted the film department down on the seashore, doing a shoot for an upcoming project. Not only does this stir up more past-life memories but he notices one of the film crew and is triggered all over again. His friend Mizuki finds out that the student is Toru, majoring in sound and engineering – and Toru, finding a clip of Aito posted by Mizuki, comes to find the two of them. He’s writing a song for the film and he wants Aito to do the vocals. Aito, afraid that the curse will be reignited, refuses – but then they have one of ‘those’ accidents on the stairs. Toru saves Aito but Aito is afraid his feet and legs have been affected by the curse – and sure enough, he’s got a hairline fracture. However, Toru seems determined to get to know him better and lets him hear some of the music he’s been writing: his dream is to become a film composer. Aito is doing his very best not to fall for Toru but the more time they spend together, the more he realizes that he loves him. It’s hard to speak aloud but at least he can text his answers. He really wants to sing the song Toru’s composing. But are they doomed to be driven apart by his curse?

Voices in the Sea Foam is a romantic title for a romantic BL with fantasy elements, based on The Little Mermaid. The artwork, by Kotaro, is attractive and occasionally dramatic, especially when Aito recalls his first life as the mermaid princess, and again at the end when the action shifts to the ocean. Aito is a sympathetic protagonist, struggling with a curse and supernatural elements that threaten to overwhelm him.

However, the fantasy/supernatural elements on which the whole plot depends feel flimsy and are not always successfully worked out. There’s a talking turtle that feels shoehorned in from a completely different type of manga and that threw me right out of one of the most important moments in the story. The points of similarity with the original Hans Christian Andersen also seem to have been massaged to make this version work so that the ending feels somewhat rushed and contrived. The three main characters: Aito, Toru and Mizuki don’t get a great deal of development time. Mizuki, in particular, seems to be (like Yuka in Blue Period) a boy dressing as a girl, but we don’t really get any further explanation than that. Mizuki also seems mainly to be there to be support for Aito. Other readers, though, may feel differently and the Little Mermaid story (in all its versions) is a potent one and able to sustain multiple variations on its themes (Disney, for starters!).

This is Kotaro’s first manga to receive an English edition. The translation for Vertical is by Cat Andersen with lettering by Elena Pizarro Landas and the two blend well together to make for a good reading experience. There’s a brief three-panel afterword by the mangaka and an unexpected and pretty colour panel as the splash page (almost literally!) for Chapter 6.

Mermaids are a popular theme in all kinds of manga at the moment and this modern revisiting of Hans Christian Andersen will definitely appeal to mermaid fans. Kotaro’s art for the sea-based scenes is very pretty and I’ll be interested to see what this mangaka can achieve in the future.

Read a free preview at the publisher’s website here.

Our review copy was supplied by Turnaround Publishing Services.

• Voices in the Sea Foam © Kotaro/Libre Inc.