Manga Review: Skull-Face Bookseller Honda-san 1 by Honda
Working retail can be a funny business, especially if you work in a popular bookstore. Or so claims Honda, the star and creator of this autobiographical manga. The “hon” in the name is written with the kanji (ideograph) for “book” but can also mean “bone”, so the artist depicts herself as a skeleton. Thus the title.
To protect the privacy of her co-workers, Honda depicts each of them wearing a distinctive mask that reflects some aspect of their personality. Customers, on the other hand, have faces (though as remembered by the author and probably not exact renderings.) This gives the mundane proceedings a surreal feel.
The OO Bookstore specializes in manga, which doesn’t quite match the social connotations of a comic book store in the United States. Amusingly, Honda’s specific job in the store is working with foreign comic books from places like America and Europe. It’s near an area that gets a lot of tourism, so foreigners looking for manga are frequent customers.
The stories in this volume cover topics from older folks trying to find obscure works their children want (and not fully aware of the content) through foreign women who are open and enthusiastic fans of BL comics (“boys’ love”), to over the top customer service training. Honda’s attempts to use her limited English and fear of difficult customers are recurring themes. As is her joy when a customer is pleased.
Honda dresses and acts in a gender-neutral fashion (and is a skeleton) so it’s easy to miss the specific references to her being a woman. (And in the animated version, Honda is given a male voice actor.)
As with many work-based manga, it goes into details of how the job is done and behind the scenes information about the manga sales industry. Unsurprisingly, it’s popular with bookstore workers.
Content note: Discussion of racy manga, with some relatively mild pictures of same.
Highly recommended to people who’ve worked retail and can sympathize with the bookstore workers.
And here’s the opening of the anime:
