Book Review: Komi Can’t Communicate Volume 1 & 2

“I get nervous in front of people. my face freezes up and I get scared. but I actually want to talk”

Here’s something a little unusual for this weeks book review. Well, okay its less of a book more of a graphic novel-manga type thing, which I’ve never done before on this site. I’m not normally one to read Manga and this is the first one I’ve ever read, but I did see the anime version on Netflix as it was in my recommended… so I thought, why not? Try something new! Step out of your comfort zone! Now the way Manga works is that it’s done in Volumes that are divided into chapters of an ongoing story. Furthermore, so not to disrupt the artists and authors storyboards the English translation is still built around the Japanese format. Therefore, you’re reading from right to left or back to front… make sense? It took some adjusting but you get used to it very quickly.

This review covers the first two volumes of which o believe there are twenty-two? And I fancied something light-hearted to read over the summer. So, ‘Komi Can’t Communicate’ is set in a Japanese high school and is centred on the two main characters Tadano and Komi. Komi has a severe social anxiety disorder which means she struggles to speak to anyone. Even saying something simple as ‘Hello’ is a huge struggle for her. Tadano works this out when he first meets her, Komi, terrified that Tadano would make fun of her she starts to run away and hide. But Tadano says he will be her first friend and make it his goal to help Komi make One Hundred friends. Hence a journey of friendship and understanding ensues.

There’s a few things that are different with Manga. For one you have images along with words. the author literally paints a picture of the characters, the setting, voice, timbre and overall mood of the writings without you having to conjour an image yourself. You get to see the humour, the flow, the inner thoughts of the other characters all at once rather than chronologically. But there is a crux which comes with manga or comic books and that’s pacing. How do you pace a manga so that the jokes land, and not just in Japanese, but in the English translations too. There is always a worry for me when I read a translations, that certain meanings, cultural references just don’t translate. Sometimes it really, really doesn’t. but here it does. Maybe because the setting of ‘Komi Can’t Communicate’ is written now, in a time period we can all relate too. It is written for teenagers, I concede that fact. But being a teenager is something we can all relate to. We were all that age once, trying to navigate the difficulties and hurdles of high school life, trying to figure ourselves out as the world around us moulds us into who we may eventually become. Komi, our heroine, wants to have friends, she wants to being able to chat about such banal things like the weather. Or even have a normal phone conversation, which in these first two volumes, seems impossible. But she getting there, she’s learning, growing and most importantly, having fun and making friends.