I happened to remember about this one when mulling over out-of-print manga I should have not given away that are now difficult to obtain.

I read this years ago on the recommendation of a friend, maybe in 2006 or 2007 at this point. It was my first introduction to anything illustrated by Jiro Taniguchi. I would come to find that I much preferred works where Jiro Taniguchi was responsible for the overarching narrative.

Jiro Taniguchi's art was beautiful, and I much would have preferred this with no dialog. If this was a noir assassin version of "Walking Man" or "Furari," that would have been rad. I found Natsuo Sekikawa's two narratives graphene-thin and derivative. The narratives seemed like an attempt at a mish-mash homage to noir and assassin films and comics (I regard those to actually be somewhat different, though related genres; noir films can have assassins and assassin films can have noir-ish vibes, but the underlying atmosphere and vibe of each genre are very different). However, I felt that the writing lacked the energy and zest for promotion to homage and was at the level of corny, half-hearted pastiche. For me, "Hotel Harbour View" is a reminder that some individual variation and remixing is necessary to contribute the energy necessary for an entertaining homage-filled work (see "Murcielago" for a work that collages cliches, but does so in an energetic, fresh fashion. The Hotel Harbour View chapters lacked identifiable freshness, and maybe part of the reason for that had to do with the brevity of the stories. But perhaps this was just a short diversion for Sekikawa and Taniguchi from their other projects going on at the time, which is fine.

That said, I still wish I did not give this away those years ago. Taniguchi's art is always distinguished, and I think I would be able to enjoy flipping through the pages of the oversized volume as an artbook. This is something that will assuredly never be released again in English; out-of-print, translated manga just gets so scarce from the lower print runs.

Some beautiful art here, with some strong atmosphere and expression throughout.
Exemplary in that way.

But the writing leaves a lot to be desired. Its fairly bland noir thats been done before, and while its fun to read that in the context of manga rather than film, otherwise there isn't much here to chew on.
Read it to be amazed at the art, but unless this is your first noir novel, there isn't a whole lot for you to latch onto from the writing.

the art, is absolutely not trying to be "artsy" that is the style of the 80's and this mangaka just draws like that, and when what you draw naturally can fool others then that's a plus.

as for the plot they where little short noir stories, nothing more. i liked the 1st one, and the 2nd one was as pointless as it gets, i mean the hell was that if you are going to kill him anyways?

... Last updated on March 7th, 2013, 9:50am

i'm sorry....but this is outdated and pretentious...stories don't have any depth or intelligence whatsoever

art is really outdated...it pretends to be something it isn't...it wants to be artsy but it fails miserably and comes out only as pretentious in the end

definitely not a must read