Saturday, May 22, 2010

saturn apartments

saturn apartments is a new manga series by Hisae Iwaoka about people who clean the exterior windows on a space station. One of the first questions that comes to mind with this premise is: If this space station is so advanced to actually allow people to live there full time, couldn't they have made self cleaning exterior windows or robots that will clean those windows? Actually the cartoonist kind of does address that, but mostly if you're going to enjoy saturn apartments, which I did, you're going to have to just accept that people cleaning exteriors on a space station is a job that needs to be done by people.

In the future setting of saturn apartments, people don't live on Earth anymore as it has become endangered, thus people have to live in this huge satellite that orbits Earth in order to preserve the planet. A class system exists on this satellite, just as class systems exist / existed on Earth, with the higher classes residing on the higher floors.

The central character of saturn apartments is Mitsu, whose father was a window washer who died, leaving Mitsu to have to take over from him and quit school. While I wanted to like saturn apartments more then I did, there are some good sad moments within and despite my rambling, aimless entry about this manga in which I'm trying to say something worthwhile (and flopping), I do think that it's a series that others may like (I don't know how long this series is, actually I thought it was a single volume when I ordered it originally, but this can be okay as long as it's not padded like this entry - sorry!).

1 comment:

Andrea Walter said...

Hmmm I'll give it a look next time I am in store. I am curious.