Hunting the Elusive

Tsukiyo no Fromage (Moon Night’s Fromage) is one of Tinkle’s ongoing manga, and volume 2 was just recently released. Since we are mostly interested in colour illustrations, my coverage of this manga will be fairly short. As with most manga, there are a number of colour assets for this volume, and I have decided to look at the chapter pages for this book as well. Tsukiyo no Fromage Vol 1 was also briefly covered back in March 2009. I’ll admit now that I have yet to read Tsukiyo no Fromage Vol 1 and have only briefly perused vol 2. But pretty much all the characters in this manga are girls, unlike Nusunde Lilith. In other words, any ecchi is purely yuri. [Review][PNG]

Those familiar with Tinkle’s work (and I believe most readers of this blog would be) know of course that while extremely character designs are a major part of their appeal, the flowery and frilly romantic elegance is also key to the style.

Within this volume of Tsukiyo no Fromage, I counted two yuri-tastic bathing scenes (one of which is a rose bath), and lost count of the number of scenes involving food/tea. It’s really easy to get pulled into the fantasy of European decadence.

The manga opens with a coloured page, then there are a number of colour illustrations. The fold-out poster is situated at the back of the volume, as opposed to being on the front.

Each of the chapters are pretty short, and seem pretty much standalone. That is, unlike action-oriented manga, I noticed continuity is not such a big issue for Tsukiyo no Fromage.

Instead, what we get are little slice of life stories, which is pretty appealing on its own, especially since it’s Tinkle’s stuff.

There is, however some background stuff which I have yet to really explore. For example, characters like Miu (short purple hair) and Fiyu (dark hair, twin tails) are humans, while Marye (blonde, long hair) and Ruri (dark long hair, scythe) are Shiro Baku and Kuro Baku respectively. They seem to feed on dreams.

As another commentator noted in the coverage of the first volume of Tsukiyo no Fromage, the manga includes furigana for the kanji, allowing us gaijins to read it with relative ease – of course, you must have hiragana/katakana reading skills already, and have some base knowledge – my anime-derived level seems to be sufficient for around 80% comprehension.

Of course, only in the realm of manga can you eat snacks all the time and still weigh only 27kg – is that with the scythe or without?

The colour fold-out posters, featuring Marye in the rose bath and Miu, who was originally a guy, but became a girl, and is the butt of much teasing by Marye.