It's a Hardback Life

(I received an ARC of this title from the publisher via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review)

Manga Classics has tackled several works of Western literature, including Pride and Prejudice, Les Miserables, A Tale of Two Cities, and most recently Emma (which I’m currently reading. Short take: it’s nuts), but The Scarlet Letter seems to be the first work of American fiction the series has tackled. It’s an odd choice. Not because Letter isn’t a classic or impossible to adapt, but because manga tropes operate in almost total opposition to the intentionally repressed, historical tone of the original. Hawthorne used a deliberate style to convey the time period and the Puritan mindset, and manga is by nature (or at least by tradition) pretty much the opposite, even when being serious. I don’t want to generalize too much—there are a lot of different genres hanging out under the manga umbrella—but a decade and a half of experience with the form gives me some confidence in this opinion (though I am nowhere near being an expert).

The story itself should be pretty well known at this point: In 17th century Puritan Boston, Hester Prynne is forced to wear a big letter A on her chest as punishment for having a child out of wedlock with an unnamed father. Her much older husband, who has been missing for a couple of years, conveniently arrives in town the day Hester and her baby are displayed on the stocks in front of the village and Hester refuses to name the father. Her husband vows to root out the baby daddy and make his life miserable. He assumes a new name, Roger Chillingworth (subtle, right?), insinuates his way into Reverend Dimmesdale’s life (the aforementioned baby daddy) and pretty much drives him to his death. Meanwhile, Hester, who is about one million times tougher than Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, proves that all the Puritans are a bunch of hoity-toity, hypocritical jerks and raises her weird daughter Pearl all on her own while being a charitable lady of kindness. (I’m making a poor attempt at being glib; there's a lot more to it, but let’s move on).

This adaptation does forgo a lot of manga tropes for a more straightforward storytelling style; there are no random sweat drops, bishie sparkles, or chibi effects (though there might be one or two instances of hidden eyes). However, it does feature some moments of exaggerated melodrama and hyperbolic visual cues. For example, there are several scenes where Chillingworth is drawn surrounded by the coils of a giant snake- just in case you didn’t get the message that he is the bad guy. Also, he’s an alchemist, I guess? He holds fire in his hands, which I’m pretty sure is not a Hawthorne thing. I’m assuming it’s another visual metaphor like the snake, but literal and figurative blur quite a bit. There is also a lot of shouting.

Something that really pulled me out of the story at first (and made me giggle) is the character design for Reverend Dimmesdale. He is pretty hardcore bishounen. In fact, it looks like he hasn’t even hit puberty yet, which honestly undermines the whole I-can’t-confess-because-I’m-a-leader thing that is supposed to be at the root of all of his problems. The townspeople have to talk about how wonderful he is all the time, just to drive home that he is 1) actually an adult, and 2) the best preacher ever, apparently. There is a lot of internal and external exposition going on, which is par for the course in most comic forms, Japanese or otherwise, but it seems like Dimmesdale requires it to be taken seriously at all. Hester is generically anime-pretty, and Pearl is revoltingly cute, but Dimmesdale is a walking distraction.

The adaptation itself—the translation of the story into this visual medium and into the framework of another culture—is not terrible. It is certainly a gekiga manga, a “serious” story, and appears to be geared towards middle-school age and above as a way to experience classic literature in a more palatable way. The Scarlet Letter is one of those books that seems to take more than its fair share of abuse from students required to read it in high school, so perhaps the manga treatment is the best way to translate something so definitively American (the manga’s attempts to define Puritanism are laughably simplistic, but get the job done) into something more understandable for Japanese student readers. I guess the irony is that we then re-translate the manga version into English for the otaku who prefer their American literature Japanese-style.

(Cross-posted at Goodreads: MC: Scarlet Letter)