Reviews in Brief: Mizuna Kuwabara's Mirage of Blaze, anime dir. by Susumo Kudo

This is really more by way of a heads-up than an actual review: I'm watching a version of this one with German subtitles. Those of you who have been following my adventures in resurrecting dead languages (dead to me, at least) are aware that I've been working for almost a year (albeit in a fairly desultory fashion) to get some comprehension of German back. (I was once fluent enough that I could carry on a decent conversation, but that was thirty years ago.) I'm happy to report that I've gotten enough back so that I'm able to follow the story in this one, but please don't ask me for specific points of dialogue.

This is another one of those supernatural/reincarnation things that, to be quite honest, I tend to like quite a bit. So far it hasn't gone into any great detail on the previous incarnations of the characters, but I'm only up to episode 7. (Which means that at some point you can expect an update to this.)

The story so far centers on Takaya Ohgi, a high-school student, and his friend Yuzuru Narita, who start having bizarre experiences -- Yuzuru is beset by the ghosts of long-dead warriors (in his bedroom, no less), while they both see a girl burst into violet flames. They rush her to the hospital; when she regains consciousness, she has no burns, but doesn't remember anything.

The boys also encounter a stranger, whom Takaya almost thinks he's met before. This is Nobutsuna Naoe, a "Seelenwandrer" (wandering soul) who not only shows up in Yuzuru's bedroom to exorcise the ghosts, but also tells Takaya that he is also a Seelenwandrer and he is actually Lord Kagetora, the adopted son of Kenshin Uesagi, a feudal lord of several hundred years before. You can imagine how Takaya reacts to this, but his doubt starts to crumble when Yuzuru is possessed by the spirit of a long dead warrior chieftain, which marks the beginning of another stage in one of those ongoing Japanese civil wars that never seems to die, even though all the combatants have.

The drawing style is what I'm starting to call "high shoujo" -- definitely a bishounen aesthetic behind the character renderings, and enough differentiation that I can actually tell the characters apart. I'm realizing that one thing I like about manga and anime is the degree of abstraction in the character designs. I find it very appealing, but if you're really into the comic realism of American superhero comics, you may not enjoy it as much.

I'm told there's a BL element in this one (which actually comes out much more clearly in the sequel, Rebels of the River Edge, which I have seen with English subs), mainly in the relationship between Takaya and Naoe, but it's still pretty subliminal.

On the whole, the production values are fairly high -- the incidental music is unobtrusive, and while the opening title song (in English, for some reason) is a little over the top, the closing title is a nice, melancholy string quartet arrangement.

Part of the reason for doing this, aside from working on my German, is to help me decide if this is a DVD I want to own. So far I'm leaning toward buying the series, so I guess that makes it a thumbs up.