The first volume of CITY is a delightful slice of life slapstick romp that asks very little of the reader while eliciting a lot of great feelings.
CITY is a simple work at face value. Three young women – Midori, Ayumu, and Wako – all go to Mont Blanc University in a city named, well, City. There is no grand overarching plot or serious thematics (at least not at this stage) to be concerned with. We simply follow them in their everyday lives and observe what happens. Sometimes these events are outrageous comedic affairs with ever escalating goofballery, while at other times it is merely a conversation between friends about hobbies or life goals. There are situations, and there is comedy, but I’m not sure I would call it a sitcom. Slice of life seems overused and non-descript, but I struggle to find a better fit for what transpires.
There are supporting characters and locales, but they have a similar light touch to the proceedings. Midori works at Makabe’s Western Bistro, and so the Makabe family, who run the restaurant, are frequent guests across chapters. But just as often, a nameless but colorful restaurant patron might take up a significant amount of time on-screen, so to speak. We might also jump across town and peek at the editors of a local magazine who write horoscopes that one of our leads happens to read. Listing all of the characters’ names would give a stronger sense of being a coherent dramatis personae than the work itself tries to impart. These are all people who live in the city, some of whom we follow more often than others, but none elevated by the narrative to be of any grander importance than anyone else. To put it another way: CITY does not have stars, but the characters do make up a vast constellation.
The core appeal of the work is the charm of the art and comedy beats. Keiichi Arawi‘s style is very cartoonish – something I mean as a compliment, I assure you – and is of course reminiscent of his work on the much-beloved Nichijou. He is clearly at home drawing the exaggerated expressions, funny poses, and silly animals that populate much of the manga. That is not to say that it is lacking in detail, as the backgrounds and cityscapes are dense enough to give the strong sense of place needed to make CITY‘s city feel real. These two strands play well together in the more absurd comedic beats, where funny faces and detailed interior shots provide a one-two punch of support for goofball antics and out-of-control situations.
What struck me most of all while reading CITY was the sense of interconnectivity everything had. This is not a purely farcical comedy manga that revels in the outrageous and has no bearing on daily life, nor is it a straight-laced look at mundane life in the big city. Little by little, chapter by chapter, Keiichi Arawi assembles all the pieces to give you a sense of joyful serendipity. Watching characters ping off one another and the cause-and-effect domino chain of others’ actions is a pleasure to read. As often as it might cause you to laugh aloud while reading, it will also remind you to take stock of how our actions impact one another without ever realizing it. Something as mundane as pushing to meet a deadline might result in a life-changing piece of writing that changes the behavior of someone you have never – and will never – meet. CITY revels in the casual charms of our lives, delights in our mundanity, and provides more than a few chuckles along the way.
I don’t have any criticisms of the work as it stands. It’s the kind of work that feels like it could run forever, or just be a handful of short, loosely connected vignettes. It may not be a grand sweeping epic or heart-wrenching emotional drama, but there’s something unmistakably resonant in CITY‘s pleasant pages.
