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And then I ate 2 pounds of dried apricots and raisins, and went to bed for 22 hours. I don't really regret the rest and respite, though.
Planet Ladder vol. 1, Yuri Harushima, Tokyopop:
The end notes call this "retro sci-fi", and there are some gestures in that direction. The "organic gold" that the unmerciful visitors' pet robot is made out of would be "spirit gold" or some such term if it was an out-and-out fantasy. The way Kaguya's house gets its corner lopped off along a nice geometrical plane might be part of it, but perhaps that's stretching a point too far. If the worlds in the story are counted in the usual way, those floating women who laugh it up over Kaguya's awkwardness even as the place falls apart around her would be from Uranus, but they act more like they're from Neptune.
Oh yeah, sorry, high school girl Kaguya is a mysterious orphan whose tarot readings always come up with a blank card for the future. Weird handsome men and weird spooky women start tailing her, stuff blows up, and then her entire bedroom is ripped out of space and time and lands... somewhere, along with that creepy doll-like automaton I mentioned. Piles of back-story are referenced with no particular explanation offered, and in general it is one long endlessly serrated hook for the following volumes.
I had trouble getting a clear idea of what was going on with things spatially, given the way Kaguya's house gets chopped up. You only get a quick glimpse of the geometry and straight away they start violating it. Once they've fetched up Somewhere Else things proceed a little less confusingly, as the doll fellow (Kagami, I think his name is) turns out to be handy for wilderness survival and fashion design. The survival aspect also comes across as science fictional, come to think of it. Kaguya gets a drink courtesy of Kagami, and after knocking around in the back of her mind for several pages, it finally comes out that it reminds her of the distilled water from some experiment in science class.
Three paragraphs of blather is probably more than the cursory attention I paid this manga really warrants, but hey, it keeps me busy while I wait for the oatmeal to be done so that I can start the butternut squash soup.
