This first volume of the series has six chapters, comprising five stories (one is a two-parter) set in different parts of the world and, if I am reading them correctly, different eras (Kezuka's short afterword, during which the characters from different stories gather, seems to suggest as much, with talk of a "time paradox").
The first story, "Recollection Record", stars Miyama, a young woman that works at a Japanese record shop called Miyama Records. She arrives at the home of the grandfather of another young woman, Mayana. Her grandfather has just recently passed away, and Miyama is there in order to buy his extensive record collection (That's Miyama on the cover, by the way, and Mayana behind her).
Just as Miyama has finished up and given Mayana an estimate for the collection's value, they stumble across one more album: A mysterious 45, with writing in a language they have never seen on it, and Mayana's name hand-written on the jacket by her grandfather, in English...or maybe in Japanese using romanji, I guess.
They play it out of curiosity, but the mystery only deepens. "What a curious melody...it sounds like ethnic music," Miyama says, and Kezuka tries to visually communicate the music's strangeness in the art, drawing a series of big black musical notes floating throughout a panel, the style they are rendered in vaguely suggesting a more exotic Middle Eastern or perhaps Indian font.
The girls go back to the record shop, and Miyama's grandfather, who is still alive and apparently works there with her, recognizes the instrument making the music, which points them to a country of origin: Pajal.
"Have you heard of this country before?" Miyama asks.
"No, not at all..." Mayana replies.
Me neither, so I Googled it. It turns out there's a good reason that these two young Japanese women had never heard of it, as it's not real...at least, not here in the real world.
Their curiosity leads them on a search that takes them to a Pajal restaurant, and then another one in the mountains run by a woman from Pajal, and they eventually unravel the mystery, including where Mayana's name came from, and a sort of secret history of her grandparents that she had ever known, this unusual music connecting her to her grandfather and, ultimately, to remark, "I can't believe I'm making memories with him after he's gone."
The next story, "Night at the Secret Record Shop," seems to be set in the Cold War Era, and in a country that looks and feels a bit like Soviet Russia, or a country they controlled, given various signifiers, from the style of fur hats to the Cyrillic alphabet. The country, however, is never named.
This one stars Lana, a young woman who listens to pirate radio of music from the outside world late at night and works as a server in a dining hall. When she overhears some patrons talking about a record shop that sells contraband, she visits Krot Muzika, looking for an album the Beatles-esque band The Staggs (I actually Googled this name at first too, just to check; the more I saw of the band in the manga though, I recognized that the foursome was a Beatles analogue, and the name itself likely a reference to stag beetles).
This minor act of defiance leads her to secret record shop beneath the record shop, and involves her in a world of policed contraband, thought crime and even smuggling, the dangers of which are conveyed at the beginning of the story, when she sees a group of soldiers chase down and beat up a man just for possessing a banned book.
This minor act of defiance leads her to secret record shop beneath the record shop, and involves her in a world of policed contraband, thought crime and even smuggling, the dangers of which are conveyed at the beginning of the story, when she sees a group of soldiers chase down and beat up a man just for possessing a banned book.
In the third story, "The Staggs Invasion", we meet The Staggs themselves, when their plane is unexpectedly grounded during tour in a small, poor country that is also never named. Their manager wants them to stay in their hotel room, but they escape to explore the nearby town and end up being chased around by their manager a bit.
Two of them stumble into a local record store, where a brown-skinned young woman recognizes them...but is insulted by their talk of how cheap everything in her country seems (Holding a homemade guitar when they enter, she angrily plays one of their songs at them in retort to their comments).
Eventually, she challenges them to a competition of sorts, which involves her jamming with them on the shop's rooftop, while her "master", the sitar-playing hermit from the crossroads acts as judge...and secretly records them.
Two of them stumble into a local record store, where a brown-skinned young woman recognizes them...but is insulted by their talk of how cheap everything in her country seems (Holding a homemade guitar when they enter, she angrily plays one of their songs at them in retort to their comments).
"This'll be worth good money someday," he tells her after The Staggs have left.
At the end of the story, we check in with Miyama and her grandfather, who have the bootleg Staggs record that the hermit apparently made of the jam session.
At the end of the story, we check in with Miyama and her grandfather, who have the bootleg Staggs record that the hermit apparently made of the jam session.
I'm not really conversant in Beatles trivia or lore (or that of The Rolling Stones, though one of the Staggs members looks like he has a Mick Jagger's bowl cut, and another resembles George Harrison at one point in his career), so I can't really comment on the degree to which this story might be a mini-Beatles pastiche. But, even to a novice like me, elements of it felt Beatles-esque, like the members running around on an adventure ala one of their films, or, like, the presence of certain keywords, like "rooftop concert", "sitar" and India.
Maybe this chapter will hit other, older (or at least more Beatles fluent) readers differently than it did me, though.
Then comes the two-part story, "Steer the Waves Over the Water!", which is about Seagull Radio, the same pirate radio station that Lana listened to in her story, broadcast from a boat. This too stars young women, and has a quite beautiful, evocative passage about the power of music, how it moves through the sky like the moon and the stars, and draws a sort of equivalence between the waves of the sea and radio waves.
Also like Lana's story, this one involves danger and adventure, as the Seagull Radio ship flees being captured by a ship likely from Lana's government (which shoots at them at one point). The two young protagonists are swept overboard at one point during a storm. And, when they finally arrive in London, one of the rare real-world locales in the book, there's a car chase.
Also like Lana's story, this one involves danger and adventure, as the Seagull Radio ship flees being captured by a ship likely from Lana's government (which shoots at them at one point). The two young protagonists are swept overboard at one point during a storm. And, when they finally arrive in London, one of the rare real-world locales in the book, there's a car chase.
The final story is "Ashlee's Diner," and this one is set in and around an old-fashioned American diner (not sure which country it's in, though). Ashlee is the young woman that works there and extols the restaurant's value as a community gathering point and loves its juke box, which she has named "Juke", and there's a local band that patronizes the place, which includes a man with a crush on Ashlee and a cynical young woman who makes fun of him over it.
When the band discovers an old-fashioned machine that presses vinyl, they set about making a record for Ashlee to put in Juke, leading to a fun moment where she struggles to express her reaction to the song properly, and the young woman, with little patience for Ashlee chastises her.
Depicting sound in comics, and particularly depicting music, is notoriously difficult. Kezuka's comic is about music, but doesn't spend much time ever attempting to visualize it, and thus leaves the particular sounds of the particular songs that appear throughout it to the imagination of the reader. Still, certain images, like Lana happily dancing to The Staggs album the proprietor of the secret record shop plays for her, or that of the Staggs and the young local girl with the homemade guitar playing on the rooftop (below), manage to evoke a feeling in the same way listening to a song might.
When the band discovers an old-fashioned machine that presses vinyl, they set about making a record for Ashlee to put in Juke, leading to a fun moment where she struggles to express her reaction to the song properly, and the young woman, with little patience for Ashlee chastises her.
Depicting sound in comics, and particularly depicting music, is notoriously difficult. Kezuka's comic is about music, but doesn't spend much time ever attempting to visualize it, and thus leaves the particular sounds of the particular songs that appear throughout it to the imagination of the reader. Still, certain images, like Lana happily dancing to The Staggs album the proprietor of the secret record shop plays for her, or that of the Staggs and the young local girl with the homemade guitar playing on the rooftop (below), manage to evoke a feeling in the same way listening to a song might.
In that regard, the artist's visuals are just as strong as the other parts of his storytelling.
As a fun bonus, at the end of each story, Kezuka provides a location drawing of each record shop or relevant setting, demonstrating how much thought went into each (In the afterword, Kezuka explains that these locations are composite ones of various real record stores he's visited for research.)
