Can you believe the back of this manga actually describes a guyabano? I mean, sure, it’s nice to know considering the title has the fruit name in it. And you can likely guess there is a story about this in the work. But what about all the other stories that likely won’t revolve around this fruit that’s apparently hard to get in Japan? Can you really just put some of them as short stories and let us figure things out?
The answer is you have no choice. You just have to sit back, curl up on your couch, chair, or bed, and read. Accept all that panpanya has to offer, which either can be fiction, reality, or a reading experience you won’t get from anything else this year.
Guyabano Holiday, similar to An Invitation from a Crab, is a collection of short stories that can generally run the gamut of length and ideas. Like you’ll get stories that are 2 pages, a much longer story that’s a good amount of pages, commentary and afterwords, and there’s a good chance a few of these will resonate with you more than others. The main arc is of course the guyabano, known as soursop in English, and our unnamed main character experiencing the fruit for the first time as a drink. The moment didn’t last long: the store ran out of it. Enough research suggested that it was hard to bring into Japan and hard to actually find.
But one opportunity to go to the Philippines to have this fruit was apparently hard to pass up. So alongside a friend, they went there, experienced the differing cultures, and ate the fruit. If you think it might be a little crazy to just simply get on a plane and go international just to try a fruit, you might be right. But sometimes life throws you lemons…a curveball…etc? Well, an opportunity presented itself that was well timed, and it couldn’t be passed up. Sometimes it just happens, and you either ignore it or dive in. We got to see the results of said trip to Philippines, where they experienced new things (dogs are totally different there compared to Japan, possibly most places; security is super tight; tricycles are a big way to get around down there) and likely had a good time.
Not to say it’s always good to act on impulse…but sometimes if the situation works, going on impulse isn’t the worst thing in the world.
Aside from that main arc and learning a lot about the various stops they went to, the rest of the manga is indeed either simple tales of normal life or reality just going out of control (see our main character’s journey to figure out what to write in their journal for school, where they may have embellished or added details that might not be close to true). All of this is done in a seemingly basic, rough, but understandable style — like you’ll see characters seem lightly-drawn with either the photo background or detailed designs of buildings or ads. It manages to be charming and unique in its own way.
As mentioned earlier there’s a range of stories that will catch your attention, but out of all of them, Waiting at The Usual Spot was one that I couldn’t help re-read…and it’s only two pages. Let it be known that stories can be told in a variety of ways, and for visual ones, there’s a range of ways you can communicate what you want. So for a simple meeting between friends at the usual spot to somehow tell a story about the passage of time — you communicate that not always with the characters and what they say, but what’s behind them, what’s changed the most, and funny enough, what hasn’t changed a bit. Can even think, “Ok so this can last for years and years, but this food place can’t huh?”
There’s going to be a lot of manga that’ll catch your attention this year and beyond. But you would be doing yourself a disservice if you can’t make time to check Guyabano Holiday out. So please feel free to give this work a try.