Review by Karl Verhoven
Asadora is Naoki Urasawa’s look at Japan from the late 1950s onward via the eyes of Asa Asada. She’s a confident young girl in 1959 as the series opens, on her way to fetch a doctor to see to her mother who’s gone into labour with a typhoon imminent. She pauses to run alongside a schoolmate training who intends to carry the Olympic torch for Japan in 1964, and then disappears. She’s been abducted.
Urasawa actually begins in the present day with a few colour pages of a monster attacking Tokyo, which is entirely at odds with the broadly realistic events playing out over the remaining pages. Asa is one of a dozen children, which accounts for her adaptable nature and an ability to fight her corner verbally, although she’s not without resentments about her family. “Everyone else has good names, but I’m just Asa”, she complains, “so they always forget about me”.
She’s fetchingly drawn with a mischievous spirit about her, so an instantly likeable character, and is also shown as kind and caring, even in circumstances that would leave others fearful. Her kidnapper is rapidly shown not to be cut out for the trade, a World War II veteran pilot who’s fallen on hard times. Kasuga’s desperation has caused him to attempt the unthinkable, yet in a clever piece of plotting, his impulsiveness is likely to have saved Asa’s life.
In this opening volume at least there’s a broad streak of whimsical and heartwarming sentimentality not far removed from a Studio Ghibli film, the similarity heightened via use of a small plane on an inspirational mercy mission toward the end. Urasawa efficiently invokes the hardships of the times, and how that forges personality, for better or worse, and spares no artistic detail. The typhoon does hit, and the effects are devastating.
As the introductory volume of a series that rolls out slowly, Urasawa lays on an abundance of charm, a touch of mystery and a tragedy that Asa doesn’t yet seem to have fully taken in. Perhaps in Volume 2. As a starter it’s extremely readable without yet being compelling.
