| Author: Minekura Kazuya
Imprint: STC (Stencil Comics)
Publisher: Enix
ISBN: 4-7575-0503-5
Reviewed by Jeanne
It's not that Minekura tries to make her titles hard for gaijin to understand. It's just that her titles are hard for gaijin to understand. 'Bus Gamer.' Sounds like London schoolboys trying to find the cheapest fare from Hounslow to Surbiton or seeing who can spot the most B5 route buses or something. But then you notice the katakana version of the thing is Bizu Geimaa (is why the Japanese clerk didn't know what I meant when I asked in proper katakana for basu geimaa.) And there are no buses at all in the book. So how come...? Because the bus of the title is not an autobus, it's short for business. Useless to protest that you can't shorten the English word that way without altering the sound. The comeback is that this bus isn't an English word, it's how you write the short form of bizunesu in romaji. Tell you, there are times I could cry.
But to continue. If you go by the comments at the back of Minekura's Backgammon illustration books, it seems all her main series began life as doujinshis. Saiyuuki, Wild Adapter, Bus Gamer, even Executive Committee- all have doujinshi illustrations dating from the mid-90's, four or five years before they ever saw the magazine page. There's a little story at the end of this volume about her pulling out the first episode of BG for publication, that she'd drawn two and a half years earlier, and taking to her bed at sight of her outdated art style. "And that's why the characters' vital statistics as given here are a bit different from the ones in Backgammon I." And why they look a bit different too. Just in case anyone was wondering about that.
So what we have to start with is a 'business game', played by bored executives in high-power corporations with too much money. They put all their most crucial information on a minidisk and hire a three-man team to protect it from the other company's team that's trying to steal it. The protecting team is 'Home', the invading team is 'Away', the matches have time limits, and the team members are rewarded handsomely with quite stunning amounts of money. Only, in the first episode our team guys (the undefeated AAA team) discover that guys who lose maybe wind up dead in the harbor. A coincidence, surely, they try to convince themselves. Umm- no. Next match someone on the defeated team dies in front of their eyes, killed by some kind of remote control. Our three guys, strangers to each other and only in the game because of a pressing and private need for money, begin to realize that maybe there's more to this than a bunch of crazy execs throwing their money away, and that if so, they themselves have only each other to count on.
(Follows semi-spoilers. Skip if intending to read the book.)
This is not the easiest information for them to digest. All three are loners. The youngest and sunaoest (no don't ask me to translate sunao- open, readable, sincere, anh, I don't know- *sunao*) is Saitoh Kazuo, the blond with the glasses. Nineteen, highschool student, orphaned as an infant, adopted at age six by an electrician, and preparing happily to follow in his father's footsteps. We, and a mysterious commenting voice who seems to be watching the guys on close-circuit TV, wonder why he needs sums of several hundred thousand dollars at a time. We see him reading a letter from someone he thinks of as Sensei, who addresses him as Kazuo-kun- as a teacher from grade school might do- assuring him that she and hers are well and he mustn't worry. Which seems to confirm his need to worry about her. "I'm doing the only thing I can."
The oldest of the three, Nakajo Nobuto, seems to need his fortune for women, or possibly a woman. He's the dark-haired one with the long hair in his eyes and the incipient chinbeard. (Let me say now, I've rarely had so much trouble keeping names and characters straight. May be just that the names are so very mundane they make no impression at all.) He's 22, lives alone, attends a trade school, and spends his spare time teaching shogi, the Japanese version of checkers (and not nearly as high-class as go, the Japanese version of chess.) Possibly more to the point, he was expelled from his high school for getting involved with a gang, and if I'm reading this correctly, the suggestion is his home background is petty criminal as well. The notes about him comment that he's the most neutral of the bunch, able to maintain just the right distance from people, but possibly capable of changing sides if it's in his interest. 'Put nicely, he's objective; not so nicely, he's just cold.' 'Could be the most dangerous of the three.'
Certainly the most mysterious is Mishiba Toki, the one with the weird clothes and the short red hair that doesn't show up as red in the b&w illustrations. (The one who starts by wearing a boot on his head and ends wearing a cowboy hat. Boy needs someone to dress him.) Twenty years old, attending a design school in Tokyo, master of the fighting arts. Three years ago his parents, who ran a dojo, disappeared suddenly along with his twin brother. Since then he's spent all his spare time working to earn money. He's the one who has the strange dream where he's sitting with someone called Shigi under the hanged bodies of a man and a woman. Toki means 'ibis. Shigi means 'kingfisher. Brothers, definitely. 'Toki, do you care about me?' 'Of course I do. There's just the two of us.' 'True. Just the two of us. So I've a request to make. Buy me for the night.' But this Shigi, whom Toki at one point thought he'd seen in the streets of Tokyo, turns out to be a rotting corpse.
Not enough mystery for you? There's more. Financial institutions are going bankrupt one after another, and being taken over by the insurance company who backs the AAA team. A result of the Bus Gamer game? Our guys feel they're being watched, and Toki finds bugs in his room. Two different kinds, Saitoh the electrician's kid points out, in a room so small only one would be necessary. So they're being watched by at least two different outfits. There's our mysterious commenting voice and his TV sets, which may belong to whoever orchestrates the whole Bus Gamer game itself. And there's something called Team Bug, whose leader seems to be a kid called Jun'ichi who has the run of a prison somewhere. The warden's son, they call him, though why a kid is able to threaten inmates with moving up the day of their execution is anyone's guess. Because this isn't an ordinary prison, maybe? The other two are his bodyguards, or possibly inmates of the prison itself-- the guy with bandaids on his face and the guy with the glasses and dreadlocks. (Though if Bandaids is a prisoner, what's he doing in episode 1, running into our guys in a park zone and telling them Bus Gamer isn't a game?) Team Bug is employed by the Bus Gamer administration itself. And these guys have access to the TVs that watch the AAA team, where they watch the match that ends volume one. And they're going to take the team on at some point in future. And maybe we'll get answers to all our mysteries, and maybe we won't.
There's a thing mangaka do a lot, which is called following their noses. As in, "I don't know where this story is going, I'm just following my nose." They start with an idea of what's going to happen, maybe even a specific notion of what the end will be, but then they get into the swing of things or the series becomes too popular and the mangaka just wanders onwards, throwing in random elements and the kitchen sink as the whim takes her. (Think Angel Sanctuary for a notorious example.) I won't say that mangaka who game are more likely to do this than others, if only because it looks like all mangaka game and many mangaka incorporate the randomness of games into their stories. But Bus Gamer gives me the sinking sensation of being a follow my nose series. I won't bet that we ever find out what's going on, not least because BG may have been a victim of the palace revolution at Enix, which saw Minekura and several other mangaka leave that publisher and take their series with them. There's been no word yet of her continuing it elsewhere.
And anyway the various plot devices may not be what appeals to Minekura about the series in the first place. Minekura's forte is the way guy-guys express their feelings, or come to actually have feelings for other guys. Her characters aren't those perfect BL men who already speak the language of the emotions fluently. Usually they're hiding behind some macho-ish façade, presenting a face of indifference to the world. Gradually they come to feel an attachment to someone else, however casually they express it. And that's what happens here, where the cold Nakajo and the closed-up tight Toki start coming out of their shells when they realize that their lives, and the young uninhibited Saitoh's, are in danger. I suppose it's to see what happens among the three of them that I hope Bus Gamer continues.
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