Summary: Featuring Laios and Marcille of course, and even the Lunatic Magician and Elves, don't miss out on these new illustrations encompassing almost all your favorite characters. Within, you'll find various stories that couldn't be told during the main story, detailed character information ranging from age, height, BMI, family structure, and the first time they died—absolutely everything there is to know about the characters. Plus, descriptions of the magical creatures that live in the dungeons. This is the one-stop-shop companion full to bursting with world origin stories, monster guides, multiple dungeons, and descriptions of the various races that live in the world of Delicious in Dungeon. Smoking Is Glamorous: In the opening chapter of Volume 2 several panels are devoted to Kudou's point of view as he watches the original Kujirai take a drag on her cigarette. It's pretty clear that he's bewitched by the sight. After being surprised by how good After the Rain was, I eagerly awaited the release of Mayuzuki’s follow-up work, Kowloon Generic Romance. And now that I’ve read it, I am eagerly awaiting the release of volume 2!!!

Compared to After the Rain, which was very real-world based, Kowloon Generic Romance has more science-fiction and fantastical elements. How different was your approach to crafting a series like this after your previous one?MAYUZUKI: So, Kowloon Walled City doesn't exist anymore. It was taken down. There's a limit to how many photo books or photos exist of it. I actually tried to research a different place called Chongqing, which has a similar vibe to Kowloon. We considered going there to do our research since that place still exists, but that was right before travel became impossible on a global level. I haven't been able to go to see the places in person, so I try to look for materials for any other locations around Hong Kong that might have a similar feel to them. If I see a photo book of something in Hong Kong that showcases the crowdedness or the liveliness of the place, I just buy it on the spot. Honestly, I really want to go to meet the locals, to know what they're feeling, what kind of meals they eat, what the smell of the city is like, etc. I feel like that's something you can't tell unless you actually go there. I try to look for different ways to get a hold of that information. I follow people on social media and try to get information from Japanese people who are living in Hong Kong. I will look at their social media feed, thinking, “Oh, that's how much this meal costs,” or “Oh, that's how they live their daily life.” Or I'll look at their photos for inspiration and as a reference. Of course, I can't copy their photos for my drawings. That would be a total no-no, but I do look at it. OKUMA-SAN ( Jun Mayuzuki's editor): You know, you could do it. You have the ability and techniques to do it. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, Miyuki Hebinuma and his boyfriend Gwen have gone to see a classic film at the cinema: The Butterfly Dream, starring an actress so famous for her beauty that Miyuki says his clients still ask him to make them look like her. Jun Mayuzuki: I get asked about how I became a manga artist or how I got into manga a lot. My parents really loved manga, so we had a ton of manga in the house. I was just in the right environment for both reading and enjoying manga and for creating manga. Instead of getting angry at me for reading manga, my parents were like, “Oh, you're reading that? Well, then you should read this one too.” They'd keep recommending me different series. I've also loved drawing ever since I was small. You add that to the fact that I was in a household full of manga, and it was sort of an inevitable outcome.

First-Name Basis: After becoming friends, Youmei begins calling Kujirai "Reikpon," her given name with a cutesy honorific. It's a way to show their friendship and also conveniently makes it easier to distinguish Reiko from "Kujirai-B" when Youmei talks about the two of them. Either way, Kowloon Generic Romance is a nice, original read, one I look forward to getting more chapters released and one I wish it leaves me with nostalgia recalling it. The character development is far from over, but we can see the character’s layers being peeled slowly as the story progresses. SHUEISHA EDITORIAL STAFF: Maybe it's not "SF" like science-fiction. Maybe it's the way the manga artist Fujiko described "SF," which is ‘sukoshi fushigi’ in Japanese. So, "a little mysterious." Jun Mayuzuki is an acclaimed manga artist best known for the coming-of-age drama After the Rain. Her latest series, Kowloon Generic Romance, ranked third in Takarajimasha's This Manga is Amazing! ranking in 2021 and was also a prize winner of the Manga Taisho award that same year. In this interview with ANN, Mayuzuki shares her inspirations for Kowloon Generic Romance, the research that went into creating it, and her feelings about categorizing it as sci-fi.Office Romance: The two main romantic leads of the series work together in a realty firm, making the main genre of the manga this. In terms of genre, where my works fit in has always been sort of a debate. Before I started serialization, I was doing these one-shots, and there will always be this question, “Where does this fit?” I kept experiencing this phenomenon of putting a story in a shojo manga magazine, and then I would get comments that it belongs in a seinen magazine. I published After the Rain in a seinen magazine for young men, but then I would get comments that it belongs in a shojo magazine because it's more romantic. Different readers seem to have different perspectives of my works, and that gives them different opinions about where my works fit in. I'm trying really hard right now to not obsess over where my work fits in. It's quite clear that maybe it's not up to me. I would prefer it if the publishers just take it and put it in a place where they feel like it would be easiest for readers to understand. As far as calling Kowloon Generic Romance sci-fi goes, that's not my intention. Sci-fi has its own fan base. If I were to say it's a sci-fi romance, I feel like the fans of science fiction are going to complain because it doesn't actually fit the mold of science fiction. So, we always say that it's a mystery, or what they call ‘suspense’ in Japanese - a genre of mystery that focuses on building tension and anticipation and having these mysterious components. Obviously, people are free to consider it whichever genre, but I don't want the science fiction police to come after me. There are also people who police me about the Kowloon-ness of my work, so there are police everywhere. It's really like mystery suspense, close to the genre of horror in Japanese literature called 'Kaidan,' which is when scary things happen in a very realistic setting. J’ai aimé voir la relation entre Reiko et Hajime évoluer. Une forme de relation haine/amour, comme les aime. The characters, particularly the main pair, can feel rather inconsistent at times. Some out-of-character moments can feel incredibly forced for the sake of the story’s overall mystery. The characters aren’t necessarily bad, and actually do a good job at matching the tone and aesthetic of the series but attempts to make them deeper or more complex felt lost. That said, they get the job done, and their flaws only have a small impact on the overall enjoyment. Side characters are better in terms of consistency, and slowly become more fleshed out as more chapters pass. Themes of identity, nostalgia, and love are explored through the characters, and it will either come across as well-written and thought-provoking or a bunch of nonsensical ideas being thrown around in an attempt to make the story complex. for potential error; however, I have huge optimism for Mayuzuki’s work since she just completed a fantastic manga piece prior to this one.

Either way, it has been completely demolished since 1994, just three years before Hong Kong’s handover from Great Britain to China. Apparently not so in Kowloon Generic Romance.MAYUZUKI: I actually started feeling attracted to the structural appeal of the walled city in my elementary school years. I saw movies, documentaries, and photo books, and I really liked the concept and structure. I had this feeling of “I really love Kowloon City” in my heart. That led to this desire of one day drawing a manga that's set in Kowloon. I had this desire for a long time, but I couldn't come up with a story that I thought would fit the setting. I kept my love for Kowloon deep inside of me and just figured that one day, I'll come up with a story that matches this. “It'll come to me.” And it did! According to Mayuzuki, she had the idea of launching a series about Kowloon Walled City even when her previous work After the Rain was still being serialized. She liked the topic of Kowloon Walled City and first learned about it from Kowloon's Gate when she was young. [3] Publication [ edit ] Mayuzuki continues to excel at the art of communicating feeling purely through art and the progression of panels, rather than text. Her art is very charming, the world of Kowloon is very gorgeous and gritty, feels very in line with Dorohedoro’s The Hole (which was also likely inspired by the real life Kowloon) Reiko Kujirai and Hajime Kudou are both in their thirties and colleagues in a real estate business. On first sight, seems like typical work romance in work.

The setting of Kowloon is definitely one of this manga’s strongest points. It’s clearly designed to give off a nostalgic feeling, and the idea of nostalgia is something this manga has really held onto over the course of over 40 chapters. LikeKowloon Generic Romance is written and illustrated by Jun Mayuzuki. The series began in Shueisha's Weekly Young Jump on November 7, 2019. [4] [5] Shueisha has collected its chapters into individual tankōbon volumes. The first volume was published on February 19, 2020. [6] As of October 19, 2023, nine volumes have been published. [7] doppelgänger element which makes it all the more interesting, because I personally enjoyed that anime). Manga’s based in Hongkong, Taiwan etc have a particular vibe that I enjoy and even though they are manga’s they’re really different from manga’s. I didn’t know about Kowloon prior to this but just from this manga I could feel the emotions of people living there. It reminds you a lot of any other Asian country’s middle class locality tbh so anyone can relate with the atmosphere depicted here. Through a brief Google search I saw that this city was demolished in mid 1990’s and now the area is a shopping complex. So in that sense this manga is like an ode to that era when it was a thriving city. MAYUZUKI: I used to draw everything analog. I never used digital, but then COVID hit, and I changed to brushing up my manga with digital tools. Even now, if I really feel like I want to do it with pen and paper, then I will. When I was starting the serialization for Kowloon Generic Romance, I had this vague idea of possibly switching to digital or incorporating some digital tools. I decided to go with analog, but then COVID happened, and I bought all these expensive tools and equipment for digital work. Now I incorporate it, but I really only just use it for brushing up screentone. I still draw the basics by hand. All of the covers of Kowloon Generic Romance are drawn by hand - the line art, the colors, all of it. So basically, it's still mostly analog, with a little bit of digital sprinkled here and there. MAYUZUKI: I decided on having a woman in her 30s early on, and I feel like the reason might be because of my tendency to draw manga like I write diaries. In After the Rain, we had this teenage character, and it's not fun to do the same thing over again, so the characters in Kowloon Generic Romance are in their 30s. MAYUZUKI: Kowloon doesn't exist anymore, as previously mentioned, so it makes it difficult to draw it in today's world. I decided to make it a story about the not-so-distant future since I'm setting it in Kowloon, which is a place that no longer exists. There are some mysterious elements, such as people who aren't supposed to exist, yet they're alive in the story, but I don't think of my work as science fiction. I do think about the timeline of it, setting it in the near future.