Hiromu Arakawa
Noble Farmer
Review
- a closer look into Arakawa's life
- no value whatsoever besides it
| category | manga |
| genre | comedy |
| author | Hiromu Arakawa |
| published | Dec 28, 2006 - 2009 |
Outside of Bat in a Blue Sky, there was one more minor work that Arakawa took on the side. Noble Farmer, a periodic in Wings magazine (Wiki) debuted in 2006 and lasted for three years. It would be a stretch to call it serialized work though, as the release frequency was low and the content was slim too.
Fans of Fullmetal Alchemist remember Arakawa's avatar - a cow - which debuted in manga's first volume. Now, instead of giving her occasional guest appearances, the artist decided to give it its own manga.
Inside, the cow shows us all the nooks and crannies of the farmer life, and of an ex-farmer life in Tokyo too! The animal is nothing more than an avatar - Hiromu could just as well be drawing herself. In reality, she just tells us about her life experiences.
Before Noble Farmer, Arakawa gave hints of her agriculturist roots in her earlier mangas, but this is the first one that is completely devoted to them. Still, main plot is nowhere to be found. The whole thing is a compilation of various anecdotes without any glue which would keep them together.
Everything feels rushed here. The drawing is as poor as you'll see from Arakawa, the content clearly came as spontaneously as it does in a drunken pub conversation between two old friends who haven't seen each other in a long time and have so much to catch up to. Everyone expecting a thought-out story with interesting characters will be totally disappointed - this is something completely different.
You could argue that since it's not supposed to be an epic tale but a get-together with an artist, it shouldn't be measured using the same metrics that we apply to the likes of FMA, but Hiromu should still put more work to polish it, as what we get looks like scratchpad pages at best.
The manga is very light and jokes come one after another, but even they feel rushed. While I love her unique sense of humor, here things often get too abstract, some of the jokes go way overboard for me. For people who don't know Japanese, another problem is that a lot is very hard to translate to retain the meaning of these jokes.
In a way, Noble Farmer is a biographical work, but Arakawa doesn't exactly write down her life story. When the cow talks about life on the farm, she talks about peculiarities in the life of your average farmer, not something exclusive to herself. Similarly, when she talks about her first years in Tokyo, the struggles with adjusting to the big city life for a country girl apply to everyone who has made that switch.
On the other hand, we still find out a lot about Hiromu, because she describes what surrounded her while she was growing up, often in painful details.
This is probably the reason why Noble Farmer came to life. It doesn't have to tell an interesting story, it is just a nod from the popular manga artist to its fans. She is so secretive about her identity that nobody even knows how she looks (well, her parents probably do). This is a way to compensate for that.
That's why it can't be judged as a regular manga. If you're looking for one, you will be totally disappointed because it fails in every category. If you're Arakawa's fan though, you will probably enjoy getting to know her a little bit better.
