The Fall 2017 Manga Guide

Wake Up, Sleeping Beauty

What's It About? 

In order to prove to his dad that he's capable of working a full-time job after high school in lieu of going to college, 16-year-old Tetsu Misato begins working for his father's housecleaning company. The staff members at the rich household where he's assigned warn him to stay away from the small house in the back of the mansion, where the homeowners' frail, sickly daughter lives all alone. While on a walk around the grounds, Tetsu falls asleep on a bench, only to be awoken by a beautiful young woman. Quickly figuring out she's the daughter in question, Tetsu returns to her house to entreat her to keep quiet so he won't be fired and quickly finds the quirky young woman a delight to be around. After a few shifts of getting to know her, he sneaks her out at night to view a meteor shower and confesses his feelings toward her, only for her to rebuff him unless he can return the next day and still feel the same. When he does, he finds the woman—Shizu Karasawa—utterly changed. He discovers she's been kept away from society because of her multiple personality disorder, but the more time Tetsu spends with her, the stranger her behavior seems and the less her diagnosis seems to make sense.

Wake Up, Sleeping Beauty (11/28/2017) is an original manga by Megumi Morino that will be published in paperback for $12.99 by Kodansha Comics.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Amy McNulty

Rating: 4

Wake Up, Sleeping Beauty has all the trappings of a traditional romance story at first: the sheltered love interest, the person who shows them something magical in the greater world, the meet-cute. However, it quickly turns into something deeper than that, though it still remains a strong romantic tale. Tetsu basically has to fall in love with Shizu all over again and accept all of her if he's to see his feelings returned, but he's willing to take it slow (after that initial misunderstanding) and be a friend to Shizu first because he knows she needs someone. Shizu's parents locking her away—they don't even visit her themselves or send her nurses—is cruel and a touch out of tone with the rest of the story, especially since her mother shows some compassion to the situation later on, but otherwise, it's a well-paced story that layers intrigue upon intrigue told through the POV of a relatable, likeable lead.

Tetsu has more than just parental defiance in mind when he vows to work full-time as soon as he's able and that gives him motivation that becomes essential to his actions by volume's end. Harumichi, the personality Tetsu originally falls in love with, is one of the best characters—unintentionally funny and charming—as is Tetsu's hilarious dad. However, if there's one plot element that actually weakens the story somewhat, at least this early on, it's the twist toward the end of the volume—the truth behind the multiple personalities. A love interest with dissociative identity disorder is an interesting enough story element on its own, and so far, the second plot twist seems hackneyed. Perhaps in future volumes, it'll make the story stronger instead.

Morino's art is often light on backgrounds, offering up far too many panels of characters against pure white, but the gardens in the rich estate and the scene at the park during the meteor shower make for some beautiful panels and the color opening pages are a visual treat. The character designs are pleasant enough and suit the shojo genre, though it's rare to have a male lead in such series. In accordance, he's smaller and softer-looking than the typical bishonen love interest.

Wake Up, Sleeping Beauty volume 1 is a romantic story with compelling characters and plenty of mystery. Because it's not as heavy on the romance as the reader might initially think, it should appeal to all readers of drama in general, as well as readers of supernatural fiction.

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this story. On the one hand, it's setting up to be an interesting tale about an abandoned girl misunderstood by her family, and possibly by herself, learning how to function in a world that has largely rejected her. On the other, I'm not comfortable with its use of Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder). Not that it treats the disease disrespectfully – the revelation that Shizu is easily possessed by ghosts rather than suffering from DID is more a case of brushing a real issue under the rug than using it for laughs. But it's also a stigma that her parents believe she carries, and since that has made them decide to lock her away in a separate house on the property rather than actually take care of their daughter, it becomes a problematic piece of the story.

Of course, it's also the root of the story. Protagonist Tetsu becomes friends with Harumichi, a ghost who routinely possesses Shizu, and this leads to him discovering what's really going on. He wants to help (in part because he really likes Harumichi), but once he learns that it is not DID but a case of serial possession, he becomes much less willing to do so. Tetsu's one weakness, it seems is Ghost Stories, so finding out that he's living in one is hardly a welcome revelation. But there's also clearly something else going on here that's underlying everything else, and that may make this story ultimately hard to put down: the question of Tetsu's mother.

When the story first starts, my assumption was that she was dead, thus perhaps feeding his fear of the supernatural somehow. It turns out, however, that she's in either a coma or a vegetative state, and while we don't know why yet, I'd bet on it having been a rainy day traffic accident on her way to pick up young Haru, who was stuck at school without an umbrella. (There's a mention by a childhood friend that he now never leaves the house without a folding umbrella, which further supports this.) His mother's hospitalization seems to have taken a toll on the family finances, which explains his manic drive to make money – in his mind, it's his fault that she's not actively living in the first place. Thus he may see his helping Shizu as part of his penance for his mother's state: if he hadn't been so scared by the ghost story, he might have been okay coming home sans umbrella that day. Now he needs to overcome that fear, not only because Shizu's mom is offering him cash to do so, but because he can't let this fear ruin anyone else.

That's a lot of supposition, I know, but with this first volume being primarily set up, it seems to lead to it. It's an interesting start, at any rate, and the art and page layouts are very easy to read, with the artist doing a particularly nice job of differentiating who is in control of Shizu's body by body language and hair style. I do want to give this another volume before I really decide how I feel about it, but I also admit that I'm now wondering about who, exactly, is our Sleeping Beauty – is it Shizu? Tetsu's mom? Or is it Tetsu himself who needs to wake from his nightmare and realize that sometimes no one is really at fault?

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Lynzee Loveridge

Rating:

Wake Up, Sleeping Beauty is a romance with a twist and then another twist and your mileage is going to vary depending on how on board you are for the second twist. I was all set after the first reveal but my interest waned dramatically with the second. I wish the manga could go back to being what I thought it was half way through instead of what it became by the end.

Money-minded Tetsu-kun finds himself enamored with the seclusive daughter Shizu of the wealthy woman whose house he cleans for a part-time job. The relationship seems to be moving along accordingly, despite Shizu's strange living circumstances and apparent abandonment by her parents in a detached mother-in-law suite on the property. The first reveal is rolled out after Tetsu confesses. Turns out Shizu has Disassociative Identity Disorder. 'Cool,' I think, 'I haven't read or watched any media that deals with DID in a frank way since watching Sybil. One of the personalities is even male, so this could get really interesting.'

But then the second twist came, and dashed were my hopes of a story that would honestly deal with trauma and mental illness and in its place was the demure, practically non-verbal real Shizu and her actual problem: she's prone to supernatural possession. Sad trombone. Unlike the earlier hints that we'd have a complicated romance with the chance of facing real-life hurdles of a rare disorder, the 'my fragile girlfriend has a supernatural problem' has been done before. A work has to elevate beyond its supernatural problems (or fully immerse in it, like Ancient Magus Bride) if the audience is going to relate to the core couple's troubles. Otherwise the drama hinges on forced, unbelievable situations that are bound to break the reader's suspension of belief.

Show of hands of how many readers have struggled with a relationship for mental health reasons vs their partner being susceptible to ghost possession? I've probably made a good enough point of my displeasure at the plot twist. What I will give creator Megumi Morino credit for is how aptly she hid Shizu's secrets in the dialogue. On a second read through all the hints skillfully click together. Shizu's other personalities, well at least the one that Tetsu immediately falls in love with, is really likable and seems like he would provide good chemistry for a couple. On the other hand, the story makes it pretty obvious that it's not interested in taking on the male-male romance possibility there and the “real” Shizu is a pretty dour replacement.

Wake Up, Sleeping Beauty lost me in its second half despite initially laying some pretty interesting groundwork. Readers going in with the knowledge that this is a supernatural romance might find it less disappointing than I did.

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Austin Price

Rating:

There will be uglier manga released this fall, there will be more tasteless manga released this fall, there will be less original manga released this fall, but it is unlikely there will be another manga released this fall quite so dumb as Megumi Morino's Wake Up, Sleeping Beauty.

How else but “dumb” could you describe a romance story that revolves around a flawless, universally loved and deeply earnest protagonist falling for an heiress who's not suffering from dissociative identity disorder as all signs suggest but is actually a medium regularly possessed by a rotating host of benevolent ghosts warding off less noble spirits? It's the worn-out tragedy of the young man whose affair with the gorgeous and terminally-ill is designed rings tears out of the audience, only now overlaid with a layer of supernatural fluff that needlessly complicates the premise. Bad enough that heroine Shizu has to be such an underdeveloped throw-pillow; how much worse now when she's so ill-defined as to be the least interesting character inhabiting her own body? When she's so absent from the story it's difficult to tell who she is at any given time? What does any of this nonsense add to but distractions? And why throw a layer of haunted high-school horror conventions atop it?

Romance stories are allowed to be a little bit silly; in fact, they often benefit when they choose to lean as far into their outlandish conceits as possible. We're all happy to suspend disbelief and supposed good taste when presented with the rare excuse to uninhibitedly indulge the kinds of fantasies we ourselves could never have concocted. The problem with Wake Up, Sleeping Beauty is that it's not even remotely aware of how stupid it is. It seems to think there is real romance in its premise. It plays its asinine story-beats arrow-straight, all earnest expressions and severely drawn close-ups of the characters' tortured grimaces and wistful glances. It's soppy work, without a recognizable human emotion or action motivating these first chapters. Tetsu falls in love with Shizu mere minutes after meeting her but it's presented as believable and sweet as opposed to naive; Shizu's mother sees no problem hiring the boy who nearly got her daughter to help draw the same daughter out of her shell.

Nor does it ever justify why these absurd complications it loves piling on should be necessary. It seems like it might be planning to tie into Tetsu's own mother's lingering demise – a chance for him to come to terms with her imminent passing. Though given how bizarre and sappy every other element of the story is it's likely Morino plans to write Tetsu an opportunity to tell his mother good-bye through the medium of Shizu after he misses her untimely passing. truly reducing this love interest to a cipher for the character's own unnerving and misunderstood romantic hang-ups. It's certainly possible that I'm wrong, but I don't intend to stick around long enough to find out.