The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya by Nagaru Tanigawa

I’ve never been a big fan of manga, which is probably why I’d never heard of this novel until quite recently.  Apparently, it’s more or less the Japanese incarnation of Twilight.  Not so much because of vampires and romance, but moreso because it’s a sub-par novel that has become an international craze.  At least enough of a craze for its English translation to have a display near the front of Borders.  When I mentioned it to my manga-nerd friends, they knew exactly what I was talking about.  The novel has been adapted into a graphic novel, as well as an animated TV show.  I figured it was about time for me to get my claws into it.

The plot of the novel caught my eye, and was the reason I picked it up in the first place.  The narrator, Kyon, attends his first day of high school and meets Haruhi Suzumiya, a beautiful and sour young lady who soon becomes infamous for her strange behavior and self-proclaimed disinterest in “ordinary humans.”  Together, Kyon and Haruhi start up the SOS Brigade, whose aim is to find espers, aliens, and time-travelers.  More importantly, the SOS Brigade is supposed to keep Haruhi occupied so that she won’t destroy the world with the amazing power that she unknowingly wields.  As Kyon gets dragged along for the ride, he discovers that his life is not as ordinary that he thinks, and probably never will be ordinary again.

My biggest beef with this novel is how much it tells and how little it shows.  I don’t want Tanigawa to tell me that Haruhi is angry.  I want to figure out that she’s angry by the way she slams her books on the desk.  I don’t want Kyon to say that he’s hot, I want the imagery of his sweat-soaked school uniform.  The lack of this type of description made the book very boring for me, and it took me over two weeks to finish its 224 pages, just because I couldn’t read more than a few without losing interest.

Beef number two was the overuse of similes.  Tanigawa is apparently very fond of them, and they’re not particularly good similes.  Sometimes there were several in the same paragraph (like college kids crammed into a phone booth?).

I was disappointed.  The premise of the novel was very good.  There were times when the novel surprised me with phenomenal insight just when I was about to throw it in the trash.  Unfortunately, Tanigawa failed to expand on the more interesting aspects of the plot, and mostly stuck to describing the characters mundane day-to-day school lives in lifeless detail.

One more thing, it irked me how every main character in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya seemed to be uncommonly beautiful.  I like to see flaws in my characters.  It makes them more real.  Mikuru Asahina could have had a crooked nose from a childhood accident.  Or Haruhi could have had frizzy, untameable hair.  But they didn’t.  Tanigawa described them all as being close to perfection, and that annoyed me to no end.

Why are you so popular, Haruhi?  Maybe I’ll just never understand what draws the masses.  At any rate, this will probably be the last time for a while that I’ll try anything manga-related.