“Gacha Gacha” Vol. 1 by Hiroyuki Tamakoshi

First and foremost, I must say I am not a fan of Manga. For me, the characters all look alike, the pacing is slower than a bad daytime serial, and I find it really hard to follow the through-line with the backwards paneling. Not that the plots are overly deep – most remind me of skimming across the top of a pond on a still, hot day … no levels to be plumbed at all. Lastly, I’m not wild about the seemingly constant sexualization of women, most coming off barely better than your average Barbie. All that being said, take this review with a grain of salt.

So, why review something I don’t like? Because there was a complaint. Not from our community, mind you, but from someone outside the program, who chose to make their concerns known via a so-called “anonymous” word to TPTB. TPTB decided that, gee whiz, as the librarian, I would know what was best. Thank you.

So, I’ve spent several hours of my vacation time reading over this dreck. By dreck, I don’t mean that this is trash to be thrown out, rather, this is trash one reads when one wants to read trash. The first book of the series sets up the general tone – a teenage boy, Kouhei, is attracted to a girl he has grown up with (Kurara), finding it increasingly difficult to ignore her maturing body and his natural responses. So far, so good. The first chapter came off not unlike any one of the several “American Pie” movies. But then, Kouhei discovers Kurara has a secret! Her behavior has become more and more bizarre and increasingly sexual. She is finally forced to confess that she has developed multiple personalities. One of them, “Arisa” is a slut. How very convenient. Kouhei spends the rest of the book trying to protect his friend from herself and from his (almost impossible to control) urges. The thing plays out not unlike a combination of “The Stepford Wives” and teen boy’s wet dream. Any attempt to assign some greater psychological meaning to the story is a stretch – I mean, you could see this as metaphor for the difficult paths trod by boys and girls as they try to understand the nature of themselves and their sexual roles with one another in the teen years, but my sense is that this is really just all done in fun. By volume #2, we discover that Kurara’s personalities are a result of a video game that her mother developed which accidentally created several artificial intelligences in her daughter. So, you have a lusty teenage boy, a hot girl and a video game gone wrong … needless to say, this has been a popular series. Will I keep it? Yes. If I were to throw out every book that offended my feminist sensibilities (“Twilight”, Piers Anthony, Gossip Girls) then the fiction section wouldn’t have much. I guess the question is, does everything we own have to be an award-winning piece of brilliant literature? Nope. And this one definitely balances the scale in that department. If it offends – well, good. Books should offend, and challenge, and show the diversity of who we, as people, are. And yes, some of that humanity is horny little teens. What a shock. How dare we expose some element of the reality of their lives in the books they read. And for the record, I grew up reading anything (and everything) I wanted. And I became a librarian. There are worse things.