Occasionally the need for language emersion takes over. Whether that be listening to the French radio broadcasts from Medgar Evers College, watching Telemundo's Sadabo de Futbol, or reading Japanese manga based on my favorite childhood video games, I enjoy trying to find the familiar in the unknown. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't really work. After an hour my head starts spinning and pounding simultaneously. The French makes the most sense to my Anglophiled ears, mainly because of 6 years of course work, to little avail. It's just enough to read short sentences, with a dictionary in hand, and ask a waiter for a beer. Je voudrais un biere s'il vous plait. Useful, no?
Regardless, a few weeks ago I picked up The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the manga-ized version of one of my all time favorite video games, at Kinokinuya, New York's premiere Japanese language bookstore. Even if I couldn't read the dialogue, or descriptions, or anything apart from its title, I thought I knew the plot well enough to comprehend what I was getting into. It was cheap too, $6.75 for almost 200 hundred pages of black and white illustrations. Not exactly from the bargain bin, but cheaper than most mass market paperbacks today.
The first challenge I faced was reading in reverse, actually, just holding the book backwards was an awkward enough challenge. Intuitively, I knew the story should flow from right to left, top to bottom, but for about 10 pages I still had difficulty following one panel to the next, especially when larger "open" panels obscured this flow. This confusion passed quickly, in part due to the nature of manga illustration. It uses a combination of stark, serious drawings for monsters, caves, and fight scenes, and then jokey, "Sunday funnies" illustrations for the pratfalls, sight gags, and love scenes. Often the characters' illustration in one style will differ so intensely from the other that they will be nearly unidentifiable. This manga-zation of Ocarina of Time is basically a melodrama of illustration. The changes in visual style cue the reader to laugh, cry, feel anxious or be frightened, or at least make that attempt. Normally, I'd take offense to such a heavy handed narrative, but when you can't read the words, that melodrama sure is helpful.
As for the story, this manga-zation stays fairly true to the original plot of the N64 console game. Link, our greenjerkin-clad, pointy-eared, ageless boy-wonder and hero is summoned by the Great Deku tree to rescue some magical pendants from dungeon monsters, find the pieces of the mythical Triforce, and save Princess Zelda from the evil Gannondorf, all while traveling back and forth in time. Unfortunately, whoever wrote the book limited all these exciting events to just a few pages, and beefed up the roles of trifling supporting characters for superfluous comic relief. A bully who serves an inconsequential role in the video game is given new life and expanded to serve as Link's sidekick in one of the dungeons. While any good adaptation builds on its source material, this particular choice is puzzling, especially when there are so many other interesting characters left behind, or set aside. Perhaps if I could understand the dialogue between the two I'd be a little more sympathetic to the author's descision, but the sheer fact that the majority of the game's plot, that is Link's individual exploration of Hyrule Kingdom and conquering its many enemy dungeons, is often reduced to simple, 2-page spreads. He never solves any puzzles, simply waltzes into the dungeons and defeats their Big Baddies unharmed, and then disappointingly moves on to the next plot point, with annoying sidekicks.
Yet after 200 pages, I could still follow along and was rather enjoying Ocarina of Time, only to find out the book is a two-parter. Ah, the barriers of language! I was caught completely by surprise because the book store had only one copy of this title, compared to other Zelda manga (i.e., Oracle of Seasons, Majora's Mask), which each had multiple books under the same title. I mistakenly assumed that if there was just one set of Ocarina of Time, then the whole story was in that one book. I also have the feeling that the second part of Ocarina of Time, where Link is transformed into an adult by the powers of the magic Master Sword, would have been darker, and less jokey, and more up my alley. Alas, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is a fun read, even in another language, but not nearly as emotionally rewarding as the 20+ hours it takes to complete the video game's complexly layered puzzles. Yes, the plot is the same, but their methods of narrative are entirely different, and the manga-zation is, without a doubt, inferior. But then again, maybe they're just apples and oranges.
