Summary: Japan Tengu Party is awesome and you should read it.

This is a four volume long manga created by Iou Kuroda. It's currently unlicensed. I picked this up on a whim a bit over a week ago after seeing that mangascreener had finished their scanlation of it - they tend to do pretty well on translations and I think that their translator works professionally as well (or something like that). At four volumes long, it's hardly anywhere near as drawn out as most shonen type stuff you hear people talking about these days. A lot of stuff happens in those four volumes, though, so it ends up feeling like a fairly expansive story. The art style is also quite different to what you'd usually expect from manga as it's kind of blocky and looks like it was made via woodcut or a very thick pen as you can see here:


This picture explains JTPI's art style much more correctly and elegantly than I can. I picked like page two to avoid any spoilers.

The whole thing comes together as a fairly surreal tale about the place of tengu, a kind of mythical Japanese creature known for their vanity, in modern society living undetected amongst humans. It begins as being about the tengu themselves and their interactions with people, and then develops into something about the political party they form out of said vanity (as you can probably guess from the title). On it's way to the satisfying conclusion, it also makes a number of interesting and cleverly phrased points about things which I won't mention here to avoid ruining anything.

After finishing, I'd definitely look for this author's works again in my future reading adventures! You should too, especially if you haven't read this one.

Anyone else read this previously? Opinions? Anyone planning on doing so now?

Brushpen manga? I have to check it out for that alone.