The Credits Roll Into the Sea Volume 1 Review

Umiko Chino, sixty-five, has come to the end of the mourning period for her late husband and she feels restless. She’s always been interested in films but the old VCR machine is on the blink so she ventures out to the cinema. There she happens to encounter Kai, a student, who notices that she watches the audience reactions as much as she watches the film – something her late husband used to notice too. Emboldened, Umiko asks Kai to come back to check out her VCR. Kai, it turns out, is a film major at the art school and not only do their names have the characters for ‘sea’ in common, they also have a passion for films and how other people experience them.

Finding that Kai has left his pen case behind, Umiko goes to the art school to return it and gets to watch some short student films, one of which has been made by Kai. Inspired and enthralled, she decides to enrol on the film course so that she can make her own films. However, finding herself in a class of young people who all call her ‘grandma’, she begins to examine everything about how she sees the world. Do her sixty-five years’ life experience count for nothing? Has she made a mistake in signing up for this course?

It’s been a long wait for an English version of The Credits Roll Into the Sea but this Dark Horse edition is trade paperback-sized and attractively presented with good quality white paper which helps to bring out the cinematic qualities of John Tarachine’s art. Dark Horse have already brought us John Tarachine’s four-volume fantasy Witch of Thistle Castle and some of her BL appeared on the now-defunct futekiya website under her other penname John Taratsumi. But it’s this series (currently being developed into a full-length anime film) that has attracted the most critical acclaim and attention. Happily, with a translation by Jocelyne Allen, editing by Carl Gustav Horn and lettering by John Clark that really does justice to the original material, it’s easy to see why this story of one older woman’s pursuit of an unfulfilled dream has attracted so much praise.

The symbolism of the sea washes throughout the whole volume, from Umiko and Kai’s names via Umiko imagining Kai as Poseidon, to Umiko imagining herself on a boat being pushed forward by the wind as she goes to her university entrance interview, culminating in Chapter 5 when Umiko and Kai go to the beach so that she can film him there for her movie assignment. It’s such a simple device but when used so appositely by the mangaka, it carries the reader along with Umiko as she gains in self-confidence.

And then there’s Kai. Kai has some demons of his own which are not immediately apparent, given his distant expression which gives little away and his ambiguous looks (Umiko thinks he’s a ‘a chic girl’ when she first sees him at the cinema). But the friendship that develops between Kai and Umiko is one of the most compelling aspects of reading this first volume, an instinctive understanding that develops between the two and makes the age-gap irrelevant. Nevertheless, this volume is very much Umiko’s and it’s difficult not to be moved by her quiet determination and resolve not to let anything deter her from her goal.

My only very minor disappointment with this volume? I’d had liked some translation notes and maybe a word or two about the splash pages that introduce each chapter. Are they all based on films? Some, but maybe not all, I think…

The good news is that if you’re hooked (as I am), Volume 2 is due out in October and #3 in February 2027. If Dark Horse can keep up this regular release rate, it shouldn’t take too long to reach the ninth and final volume which will really help to keep reader involvement from fading away (as inevitably happens with a much slower release rate).

Sometimes moving, always page-turning (Umiko is a great role model for anyone who wants to take a new direction in later life) and with sea imagery that makes a powerful impression, this is a terrific first volume – highly recommended!

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

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