Toryumon Takeda is a relatively new character to the manga, but One More Step, Come Stand by My Side has us hoping she’s here to stay for a while. This collection of seven short stories of varying lengths reveals a versatile and innovative creator. While not all of them make a solid impact, the variety of themes and characters is fascinating. Genres range from slice-of-life to post-apocalyptic and lengths range from just a few pages to over 80 pages, making this a great introduction to Takeda and offering readers more than just one collection author. If you like short story writing, that alone is a great reason to pick up this story.
In the collection, the first and last stories have the greatest impact. (That’s a pretty sure sign that real thought was put into compiling these works since we tend to remember things by how they begin and end.) The story opens, When the Time Comes, is a fantasy story inspired by the Middle East. It’s about a princess who remains unnamed until the very end—she’s kidnapped shortly after coming to power, and her anonymity makes it clear that her kidnappers don’t care about her as a person; they just need her signature and seal. Kidnapping her is the best way to get those things. She was always blindfolded the entire time she was with them and a single guard was responsible for her care. Since she couldn’t see him, the princess recognized him by his scent and that he was missing his “heart finger,” the little finger on his left hand. The guard looked after her kindly, and the young princess—about thirteen years old—began to fall in love with him, eventually confessing her feelings. The outcome of this and the truth about her protector do not come to light until she is rescued, and the ending is less romantic and more about the kidnapping causing the princess to reconsider her feelings. your emotions and circumstances. Although Takeda plays with ironic elements here, they don’t make any sense; instead, the point is that the princess gradually understands and accepts her place in the world, and when we finally learn her name, it shows that she has made a decision. Before, she could have been anyone. Now, she must be a princess.
Using one’s emotions to find their place in the world is seen in several stories in the book. Ten Minutes Later, the Police Appear, the second entry in the collection, is set during the ten-minute period between when a woman returns from work and finds a strange man in her apartment for until the police showed up. The work is a meditation on the woman’s part—why does the man follow her, why has she never noticed before, and how does she feel when a man is interested? to her to the point where he became a stalker in the first place. This is actually more annoying than the princess falling in love with her captor because this is a grown woman wondering if she did the right thing and starting to have second thoughts about it. It all comes across as completely normal: she’s normal, he’s normal, and perhaps the circumstances are too. Like the princess, she never fully comes to terms with things, but pondering helps her reflect on her place in her own life, which may be the most uncomfortable part of the story .
The Wife I Love, which concludes the volume, is the third story to make use of emotions and the characters’ struggles with them, although Nothin’Wrong with That does something similar between two friends. . In the previous story, a man and his wife discover that she has an aggressive form of cancer and only has about six months to live, and they both struggle to find ways to cope with their impending death. her happening. Told from his perspective, he tries to cope with the changes he notices in her treatment of him until he finally learns that she has been intentional about them. The most obviously sad story (though I would classify them all as melancholic), it looks at how love is shaped by tragedy, and it is the most important work in the book, although also the The hardest to read and understand. discuss without revealing too much. That’s true of the four-page Ain’t That Nice? also – the lightest tone in volume; it’s also powerful in the way Takeda tells a complete story in very few pages. However, its brevity means that more cannot be said without covering it all. Suffice it to say that it is also an outstanding book.
One More Step, Come Stand by My Side is a book that is best described, without irony, as “enjoyable.” Takeda’s detailed photography helps highlight her versatility in length and genre, and each story in the book is unique. From fantasy to an interesting dark tale of colonialism, this show has a lot going for it and true fans of seinen manga shouldn’t miss it.