The Casanova complex
The Casanova complex ( Japanese う ろ し ま 物語 , Uroshima Monogatari ) is a manga by the Japanese illustrator Yōji Fukuyama .
action
A middle-aged man is fascinated by the schoolgirl across from him during a train ride. When she forgets her monthly pass when getting off and he brings it to her, the train continues without him and he stays in the town of Uroshima. He quickly realizes that the people here only have sex on their mind and are not afraid to act it out on the street. Every man also aims at every woman and vice versa. He now wants to take advantage of this to get together with the girl from the train.
But that turns out to be more difficult than expected, since all other men now also have a “right” to them, as do all women to strangers. In addition, this creates a competitive situation that ultimately leads to violence. Soon the old man from Uroshima would like to go back to Tokyo , but he does not manage to escape the city.
Style and allusion
The style of the manga is simple with few details about the background.
The name of the place, Uroshima , alludes to the Japanese fairy tale of the fisherman Tarō Urashima . In this a fisherman finds himself in an underwater world from which he soon wishes to get away. When he succeeds in doing that, he realizes that he has been away for a whole generation. In Uroshima, too, a season lasts only one day.
Publications
The manga was published in 2001 in the alternative manga magazine Manga Erotics F . The publisher of this magazine, Ōta Shuppan , then published it as an anthology with a volume of almost 200 pages.
The work was published in German translation in 2007 by the publisher Schreiber & Leser as Der Casanovakomplex . The translation is from Tsuwame and Resel Rebiersch. Under the title Voyage à Uroshima , the manga was published in French by Casterman in 2006 on the Sakka label .
reception
The manga is sometimes referred to as "unoriginal soft porn" , but others referred to it as a profound work. The plot is eccentric, surreal and asks questions about male sexual fantasy. The scenario is crazy, with grotesque humor and increasingly nightmarish features. The story adopts the cliché of older men with a preference for schoolgirls and turns it into a spectacle. There are also opinions that the work plays more with moral ideas and looks like comedy than to be "flat porn" . The work is a "multi-layered parable about consumerism and media sharpening" .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Review at stadtpark.info ( memento of February 13, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) by Oliver Ristau
- ↑ a b The Title: Manga about the work
- ↑ a b Review at goon ( memento from October 22, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), by Zuzanna Jakubowski (text must be marked, because black font on black background)
- ↑ splashcomics about the manga , by Bernd Glasstetter
- ↑ a b deep culture about the manga
- ↑ Christian Maiwald in OX # 74 October / November 2007
Web links
- Writer and reader for German publication