Crossroad and the Devil Within
Posted on | December 9, 2007 | 4 Comments
Shoujo heroines need their love triangles. One common way of setting up this situation is for the main female character in a manga to suddenly find herself forced to change her living situation so she’s in close proximity to a bunch of boys. Today I’ll look at a couple books from GoComi that share this premise, but express it in different ways.
Crossroad by Mizuki Shioko 
(amazon
Kaijitsu has an extremely flighty mother, who seems to get a new husband every other year. Kaijitsu lives with her grandmother, but after her grandmother dies she’s thrown into a household with her two step-brothers Taro and Natsu. Taro is the oldest, and Natsu used to be one of her closest friends, but when Kaijitsu meets him again he seems oddly cold. Kaijitsu’s mother decides to abandon yet another child, 6 year old Satsuki. The kids make the best of their improvised family, with Taro bumbling as he attempts to take on a paternal role. He tends to pop up whenever Kaijitsu and Natsu are together in order to remind them “No Incest Allowed”. Kaijitsu begins to open up a little as she begins to rely more on her new family. Crossroad is a mildly amusing dramedy, with art that is attractive but not very distinctive.
The Devil Within by Ryo Takagi 
(amazon
This manga was truly weird, and not in a good way. It had the most unsavory mishmash of plot elements I have yet to encounter. Rion is psychologically traumatized from a film she watched in childhood; as a result she detests men and focuses her attention on boys. She calls all men “devils” and her nickname for her father is “Big Devil”. This is oddly appropriate since his name seems to be Satan. Her father announces that he’s picked three fiancees for her, and they move into her building. Of course she wants nothing to do with them, as her focus is on Tenshi, a mouthy boy who appears to be 5 but is actually 15 – he has a convenient medical condition that has stunted his growth. Somehow the three boys have angelic wings, but Rion has batwings. So there’s some sort of war between good and evil that is being played out with Rion and her relationships? This book was incoherent.
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4 Responses to “Crossroad and the Devil Within”
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December 12th, 2007 @ 6:45 am
[...] Pop, vol. 1 of Megami Deluxe, and vol. 6 of ES Eternal Sabbath. Tangognat takes a quick look at Crossroad and The Devil Within, two series that handle similar themes in very different ways. About Heroes posts brief reviews of [...]
March 7th, 2008 @ 12:32 pm
[...] “2 volume rule” when evaluating a manga series. I liked the first volume of Crossroad well enough, but I thought that the second volume was much funnier, and the third volume sets up some [...]
May 11th, 2008 @ 10:28 pm
I actually really liked Crossroad–I think the art style was very distinctive! But I agree with you on The Devil Within. It’s kinda like, WTF–especially in the second volume. The boys grow angel wings because they are angels, and she grows batwings because she is the real devil (hence the Devil within), but it never really goes into how they cure themselves. Several possibilities are presented, but… The second volume doesn’t give a satisfactory ending, and it seems like there will be more, but all appearances point that it is the last one. The idea would’ve sufficed for, say, a SHORT story, but a full length manga–let alone two–when it wasn’t very well thought out… well… no.
June 28th, 2008 @ 2:31 am
I find the review of The Devil Within rather harsh. I believe you have royally failed to recognize several of the underlying plot elements present in this story. For one, consider the fact that the three “angels,” who had initially started out pursuing their own selfish interests without regard for others’ emotions, ultimately developed love for Rion because of the compassion she showed them throughout their time together (as evidenced in the final chapter, when they claimed that Rion was the “love” who would help them contain their alternate personas).
Furthermore, the ending note of the series was based on the comedic aspect that they were seemingly right back to where they started, and I believe you are looking too vigorously for a definite solution to a comedy series.
Also, the concept of “angels” and “devils” in this series is not based on the Western concept of their correlation with “good” and “evil.” In many of these Eastern works, angels and devils are simply equivalent to rival clans, neither presenting a precise scale of good and evil, and both can possess desires and traits that Westerners describe as “devilish,” hence why the “angels” are not the epitome of “good.”