A title chronicling a manga editor's lifestyle switch from the city to the countryside while also becoming a rice farmer. It's autobiographical with a few manga/anime references and a cosplaying wife.

It talks about the author's troubles adjusting to his new life in the countryside (finding a house, quitting his job, seeking an alternative means of employment through farming & dealing with the stress, leaving his manga editor job behind & his thoughts about that & how the two lifestyles compare). It has quite a few profound things that it talks about & would be eye-opening & thought provoking to city dwellers. There is certainly a calming effect created by looking at the countryside vistas. It gets sort of educational & informational about farming in specific during many chapters. Much of this information disinterested me but there's some things that are important in understanding how agriculture works nowadays & the fallacies of it's bussiness/capitalist side of it. It talks a lot about organic farming vs. pesticides. These things are generally important for anyone to know since we all buy the produce of agriculture whether we live in the countryside or not.

There's many things I didn't have a clue about regarding organic farming, how it's more beneficial to the soil & not just in what's being produced. The monopoly of modern seeds, which are called f-1 seeds in the manga. In essence, they are genetically modified seeds with exceptional yield & similarly looking produce. One major drawback is that they can't be re-used by farmers like normal seeds with farmers having to keep buying them for every crop (corporations selling them are also prohibiting farmers from breeding their own seeds). All the above explanation in the manga made me realise how the forces of capitalism have grabbed hold of agriculture for the purpose of profit like in any other business disregarding the general good & the future of agriculture, feeding & the planet in general. The same short-sighted plans like in other fields of business keep taking hold in order to gain short-term profit. That was nothing short of revelatory. This manga is not a thesis in agriculture but it does make a concerted effort to explain these facts in parallel to the story unfolding. It's not at all a bad title just for this.

I have to say that from vol.2 onwards the artwork quality dips & is not as good as it was in the 1st vol. The character art & panel compositions with nature's flora & fauna seemed more technically skilled during the first volume.

Another (minor) gripe I have with the title is how the artist is using barely edited photos of skies and plasters them against actual manga art. It feels jarring and unnecessary. Could have easily edited them to make them look more like manga art. But at the same time that's something I see many other manga artists are doing.

Furthermore, both the author and the artist have changed careers late in life. The author has changed his lifestyle in his late 30's and the artist is a new mangaka in his 40s. I'm under the impression that both have made their debut with this title which is an interesting tidbit & it was probably intentional to pair them.

ps: I would love to read the artist's other work at some point that's published at Enterbrain!!! Must be edgy/alternative.

... Last updated on April 15th, 2024, 9:16am