“Finally,” I thought to myself while I was getting ready to read Midori Days last night. It was back in June when I made a trip to New York City and found a Book Off where I bought some Japanese manga, including the first volume of Midori Days. I don’t really know what I was thinking because I didn’t know a lick of Japanese. All I knew was that it looked cute and was only a dollar.
But at a local bookstore just a few days ago I spotted a used copy of volume 1 of Midori Days … in English! Now I could finally read and understand what the hell the characters are saying!
If you’ve read Midori Days, you already know how messed up this manga is. This isn’t like Naruto, where a nine-tailed demon fox doesn’t strike you as odd in the completely fictional world of Konoha Village. No, this is present-day Tokyo in a fairly realistic setting. Girls don’t come out of nowhere and replace appendages. Whatever. Let’s get on with the story.
The positives, of which there are many, far outweigh the negatives. Ohba does an excellent job of pacing and not letting the story develop too quickly. Instead of using the death note right away in his quest for creating a perfect world, Light at first dismisses it, then to satisfy his curiosity, tests it on a criminal who dies of a heart attack. Knowing that this may simply be a coincidence, Light tests it on another subject who also dies, but in the manner that Light wrote down. Only then was he convinced that the death note was legitimate.