December 20th, 2023
Shimeji Simulation Review
Anime Relations: Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou
This review is copy and pasted directly from my Wordpress Blog: https://meganeluvr.wordpress.com/2023/12/21/shimeji-simulation/, which is why it looks so strange. If you head on down there, there's images and footnotes that go along with it (accounting for the large gaps and lack of formatting). MAL doesn't allow me to post my review under ShimSim's reviews, but they said nothing about posting a long blogpost (unless this is also wrong... then I guess I'll delete it.) ALSO THERE ARE LOTS OF SPOILERS IN THIS BLOGPOST. DON'T READ IF YOU HAVEN'T READ SHIMEJI SIMULATION...
TKMZ’ Shimeji Simulation is one of the best mangas I’ve ever read. I guess I just really “jelled” with it (“jell” because one of the eight reviewers on MAL said that they didn’t “jell” with it as much, which I found amusing)! Now, I’m not going to pretend like I remember the entire plot because each chapter felt like it was its own contained story and lesson, tying together at the end. One day, I’ll just binge the entire manga. And then to go back and read through it slowly, over and over again. Also, there’ll be spoilers in this review, so please don’t read this review before reading the manga (seriously, you’ll be so bummed if you do.)
I know that I’m in the minority here when I say that I enjoyed Shimsim more than Girls’ Last Tour. When I first picked up a copy of Girls’ Last Tour in a bookstore, I had an inkling that it would become something big, but had no idea that it would take the seinen world by storm with its anime. After all, it has cute anime girls and depression! Wow!! Who wouldn’t enjoy that?!
Well, I didn’t. Not to be a contrarian (but also to be a total contrarian because this entire WordPress website is a bunch of gibberish about mangas that I like.) Is it so contrarian to stop enjoying something once other people enjoy it and muddle its popular perception with their obviously incorrect interpretations of the manga?1 Maybe. But I felt like Girls’ Last Tour had something missing, with its abrupt ending and TKMZ’s continuous illustrations of Chito and Yuuri afterwards. It felt like everybody who watched/read GLT wanted the two to have a happy ending, including TKMZ himself. It didn’t feel like a true ending when the characters kept living on in our world afterwards, and evidently TKMZ didn’t even really see them as dead. The ending wasn’t sad because it wasn’t the last time we saw Chito and Yuuri, literally, since we see them again in Shimsim.
So, Shimsim. Why do we see them in Shimsim?2 Why is this manga so weird? What the hell is happening? I think it’s pretty self-explanatory if one reads it in a nice, quiet environment and takes maybe around fifteen minutes to think about it.3 But if you’re still looking for someone’s rehashed and dumbed-down explanation… it’s about loneliness. Much like GLT, Shimsim is a reflection on what it means to feel alone in a world and how to keep going even when there’s not much at all.
In the beginning, Shijima (whose real name I’ve forgotten by the time everyone called her “Shimeji” for the umpteenth time) and Majime live in relatively normal circumstances. Except, Shijima, with her two shimeji mushrooms has been a hikkikomori for two years. Also many of their classmates have inexplicable objects on or covering their heads, like Majime with her fried egg, Yomikawa with her books, and that one octopus girl with her octopus sibling. These peculiarities aren’t mentioned besides as running gags, both visual and spoken jokes by the characters. To them, their world is just built like that.
Shimsim gets into a comfortable SoL 4-koma rhythm until eventually, you remember that this is a TKMZ manga and the world goes batshit insane thanks to his self-insert(?)4, Shijima’s older sister, who is only known as “Sis.” It becomes clear that Sis is the one of the few characters that knew what was really “going on” the entire time of their existence. As Yomikawa explains later, she, the Gardener, and Shijima’s older sister were all “Angels,” beings with incredible powers and determination to the exploration of what their world truly was. The Gardener seems to have figured it out early, and works throughout the manga to keep everything in order. Yomikawa may have known the entire time, and decided to keep her easygoing role as a book-loving student, never graduating, and content in never moving forward. Sis, however, figures it out relatively quickly, publishing her studies and building a machine that fundamentally breaks the order that the Shimsim world operated under.
Even by the end of the manga, we don’t understand what this “order” was. Sis tries to explain it all as a dream, which she incorporates into her solution later on5. But for all we know, and for all Yomikawa explains, the world may just operate in a dreamlike state constantly due to outside forces. Perhaps they’re all components in a program crammed like sardines into a small lemon-shaped spaceship hurtling towards the end of the universe. Maybe they were all created by a God in the process of making soup. It really doesn’t matter to them, and ultimately every great creation myth is why they exist in the first place. Every story exists, each impossibly false and true at the same time.
Downsizing this theory a bit is Sis’ explanation that the world (more specifically, the town) that they live in is simply a result of somebody’s dream. It’s an empty calculation left at the mercy of a sleeping god’s will. Strange things occur because of the battle between Sis and the Gardener. Sis being chaos, a harbringer of what she believes is justice for the townspeople, who are simply going along with whatever’s happening. The Gardener being order, a “damper” meant to stabilize the town whenever things go awry.
After Sis alters the very foundation of their world, every townsperson is able to alter reality to an extent. This is used as a clever visual gag and worldly mechanism in some instances (such as Majime constantly riding foods and the townspeople creating a library of cocoa beans to keep their memories of objects (mostly food) intact). After brief initial concerns of whether this will change life as they know it, everybody accepts it and moves on. We don’t see Sis much after this. One can assume that she kept working on discovering the next groundbreaking invention, maybe even taking it a step too far.
In the meantime, Majime and Shijima are busy creating cloud and tofu houses. Life goes on. All of this newfound freedom doesn’t really seem to affect people as much as one would imagine. The world of Shimsim is a bright and whimsical one. The important storyline is that Majime and Shijima build connections, with the people around them and themselves. Shijima’s inner monologue starts to drift off a little. We hear other people’s thoughts. She goes along with what Majime and the others want. She’s happy. But ultimately, there’s something a bit wrong with the picture that she’s looking at. Sis is nowhere to be found until the School Festival Arc.
Oh look! She seems to be working with Ayaka’s band on something… And now it’s revealed that she’s split into two personalities. A refraction of the original Sis. One wants freedom and is willing to turn their entire town into embodiments of chaos, able to change themselves at will with no inhibitions, while the other wants order. It seems that Sis wasn’t able to overcome her dilemma in time and her thoughts escaped from her.
Very clever foreshadowing TKMZ!! There’s actually a lot of these foreshadowing tidbits once you reread. As a sidenote, I can’t figure out how to CENTER IMAGES…
As Shijima is plunged into making a choice between freedom and subjugation; chaos and order, the two sides that her sister was caught between, she wavers and thinks for a moment that she has no right to make such a decision as an indecisive and cowardly person herself. Ultimately, however, she’s too late and the world is plunged into another bout of chaos.
The ending of Shimsim is probably its best part, as nice as the SoL and chaotic yet whimsical middle section was. The transition from manga panels to text in Chapter 446 and the entirety of Chapter 46 are such awe-inspiring moments in what could be seen as a silly moe manga.
Bask in her glory!!! All hail Egg God.
Up until this point, I haven’t really discussed Shijima and Majime’s relationship. Other than their names being near opposites of each other and their head items being complimentary breakfast ingredients, it’s clear from their dark and blonde hair that TKMZ has made them out to be a pairing. At first, Shijima is wary of Majime’s unsavvy approaches. Of course she is, considering the fact that she’s been holed up in her closet for the past two years due to the Tsukishima family tendencies towards asocial personalities.
There’s a reason, however, that the manga ends with their reunion after the Great Schism Solution that Sis caused. The entire manga is from Shijima’s point of view, with her internal thoughts giving us insight into her fears of being both alone and too connected with others. This fear manages to “save” her from being absorbed into the big consciousness slurry7. Overcoming this fear and repenting for her sorrow of pushing Majime away before is also what allows the train–
The train.
–to connect her with other planets. Through this, she reconnects with old friends and meets new ones. She meets Chito and Yuuri (epic reference!), multiple characters that give one-line snippets of wisdom, and the Principal of her old school. (TKMZ loves giving us snippets of characters’ lives through interactions that feel as though they occur at 3am in a drunken visit to the local 7-Eleven.) Just before she finally arrives at Majime’s planet, she meets a tall stranger who reminds her of her sister8. It is through this stranger’s experiments that Shijima comes to peace with the inescapable algorithm that seems to rule their world. The strong overcome and the weak die. There was no sense in separating right from wrong. It all hinged on pushing forward and living.
The world deconstructed, TKMZ style.
So, Shijima decides to head forward and take the train that seemingly heads nowhere to her next destination. And with that, the two find each other, Shijima no longer afraid, and Majime having created the perfect home for them that she wanted to create in Chapter 31. Ultimately, Shimeji Simulation is about many subjects, most of which I didn’t even go into in this review. But it’s an understanding about the art of interpretation, no matter if it’s right or wrong. The world may seem so overwhelming and foreboding until suddenly, you leave your closet for the first time in two years and meet a silly egg girl who’s also struggled her whole life to find you. Maybe that’s too literal. Hopefully, you know what I mean.
Mushrooms and fried eggs, one of the quickest and comfiest breakfasts to exist.
Score: 10/10 (will read again!)
TKMZ’ Shimeji Simulation is one of the best mangas I’ve ever read. I guess I just really “jelled” with it (“jell” because one of the eight reviewers on MAL said that they didn’t “jell” with it as much, which I found amusing)! Now, I’m not going to pretend like I remember the entire plot because each chapter felt like it was its own contained story and lesson, tying together at the end. One day, I’ll just binge the entire manga. And then to go back and read through it slowly, over and over again. Also, there’ll be spoilers in this review, so please don’t read this review before reading the manga (seriously, you’ll be so bummed if you do.)
I know that I’m in the minority here when I say that I enjoyed Shimsim more than Girls’ Last Tour. When I first picked up a copy of Girls’ Last Tour in a bookstore, I had an inkling that it would become something big, but had no idea that it would take the seinen world by storm with its anime. After all, it has cute anime girls and depression! Wow!! Who wouldn’t enjoy that?!
Well, I didn’t. Not to be a contrarian (but also to be a total contrarian because this entire WordPress website is a bunch of gibberish about mangas that I like.) Is it so contrarian to stop enjoying something once other people enjoy it and muddle its popular perception with their obviously incorrect interpretations of the manga?1 Maybe. But I felt like Girls’ Last Tour had something missing, with its abrupt ending and TKMZ’s continuous illustrations of Chito and Yuuri afterwards. It felt like everybody who watched/read GLT wanted the two to have a happy ending, including TKMZ himself. It didn’t feel like a true ending when the characters kept living on in our world afterwards, and evidently TKMZ didn’t even really see them as dead. The ending wasn’t sad because it wasn’t the last time we saw Chito and Yuuri, literally, since we see them again in Shimsim.
So, Shimsim. Why do we see them in Shimsim?2 Why is this manga so weird? What the hell is happening? I think it’s pretty self-explanatory if one reads it in a nice, quiet environment and takes maybe around fifteen minutes to think about it.3 But if you’re still looking for someone’s rehashed and dumbed-down explanation… it’s about loneliness. Much like GLT, Shimsim is a reflection on what it means to feel alone in a world and how to keep going even when there’s not much at all.
In the beginning, Shijima (whose real name I’ve forgotten by the time everyone called her “Shimeji” for the umpteenth time) and Majime live in relatively normal circumstances. Except, Shijima, with her two shimeji mushrooms has been a hikkikomori for two years. Also many of their classmates have inexplicable objects on or covering their heads, like Majime with her fried egg, Yomikawa with her books, and that one octopus girl with her octopus sibling. These peculiarities aren’t mentioned besides as running gags, both visual and spoken jokes by the characters. To them, their world is just built like that.
Shimsim gets into a comfortable SoL 4-koma rhythm until eventually, you remember that this is a TKMZ manga and the world goes batshit insane thanks to his self-insert(?)4, Shijima’s older sister, who is only known as “Sis.” It becomes clear that Sis is the one of the few characters that knew what was really “going on” the entire time of their existence. As Yomikawa explains later, she, the Gardener, and Shijima’s older sister were all “Angels,” beings with incredible powers and determination to the exploration of what their world truly was. The Gardener seems to have figured it out early, and works throughout the manga to keep everything in order. Yomikawa may have known the entire time, and decided to keep her easygoing role as a book-loving student, never graduating, and content in never moving forward. Sis, however, figures it out relatively quickly, publishing her studies and building a machine that fundamentally breaks the order that the Shimsim world operated under.
Even by the end of the manga, we don’t understand what this “order” was. Sis tries to explain it all as a dream, which she incorporates into her solution later on5. But for all we know, and for all Yomikawa explains, the world may just operate in a dreamlike state constantly due to outside forces. Perhaps they’re all components in a program crammed like sardines into a small lemon-shaped spaceship hurtling towards the end of the universe. Maybe they were all created by a God in the process of making soup. It really doesn’t matter to them, and ultimately every great creation myth is why they exist in the first place. Every story exists, each impossibly false and true at the same time.
Downsizing this theory a bit is Sis’ explanation that the world (more specifically, the town) that they live in is simply a result of somebody’s dream. It’s an empty calculation left at the mercy of a sleeping god’s will. Strange things occur because of the battle between Sis and the Gardener. Sis being chaos, a harbringer of what she believes is justice for the townspeople, who are simply going along with whatever’s happening. The Gardener being order, a “damper” meant to stabilize the town whenever things go awry.
After Sis alters the very foundation of their world, every townsperson is able to alter reality to an extent. This is used as a clever visual gag and worldly mechanism in some instances (such as Majime constantly riding foods and the townspeople creating a library of cocoa beans to keep their memories of objects (mostly food) intact). After brief initial concerns of whether this will change life as they know it, everybody accepts it and moves on. We don’t see Sis much after this. One can assume that she kept working on discovering the next groundbreaking invention, maybe even taking it a step too far.
In the meantime, Majime and Shijima are busy creating cloud and tofu houses. Life goes on. All of this newfound freedom doesn’t really seem to affect people as much as one would imagine. The world of Shimsim is a bright and whimsical one. The important storyline is that Majime and Shijima build connections, with the people around them and themselves. Shijima’s inner monologue starts to drift off a little. We hear other people’s thoughts. She goes along with what Majime and the others want. She’s happy. But ultimately, there’s something a bit wrong with the picture that she’s looking at. Sis is nowhere to be found until the School Festival Arc.
Oh look! She seems to be working with Ayaka’s band on something… And now it’s revealed that she’s split into two personalities. A refraction of the original Sis. One wants freedom and is willing to turn their entire town into embodiments of chaos, able to change themselves at will with no inhibitions, while the other wants order. It seems that Sis wasn’t able to overcome her dilemma in time and her thoughts escaped from her.
Very clever foreshadowing TKMZ!! There’s actually a lot of these foreshadowing tidbits once you reread. As a sidenote, I can’t figure out how to CENTER IMAGES…
As Shijima is plunged into making a choice between freedom and subjugation; chaos and order, the two sides that her sister was caught between, she wavers and thinks for a moment that she has no right to make such a decision as an indecisive and cowardly person herself. Ultimately, however, she’s too late and the world is plunged into another bout of chaos.
The ending of Shimsim is probably its best part, as nice as the SoL and chaotic yet whimsical middle section was. The transition from manga panels to text in Chapter 446 and the entirety of Chapter 46 are such awe-inspiring moments in what could be seen as a silly moe manga.
Bask in her glory!!! All hail Egg God.
Up until this point, I haven’t really discussed Shijima and Majime’s relationship. Other than their names being near opposites of each other and their head items being complimentary breakfast ingredients, it’s clear from their dark and blonde hair that TKMZ has made them out to be a pairing. At first, Shijima is wary of Majime’s unsavvy approaches. Of course she is, considering the fact that she’s been holed up in her closet for the past two years due to the Tsukishima family tendencies towards asocial personalities.
There’s a reason, however, that the manga ends with their reunion after the Great Schism Solution that Sis caused. The entire manga is from Shijima’s point of view, with her internal thoughts giving us insight into her fears of being both alone and too connected with others. This fear manages to “save” her from being absorbed into the big consciousness slurry7. Overcoming this fear and repenting for her sorrow of pushing Majime away before is also what allows the train–
The train.
–to connect her with other planets. Through this, she reconnects with old friends and meets new ones. She meets Chito and Yuuri (epic reference!), multiple characters that give one-line snippets of wisdom, and the Principal of her old school. (TKMZ loves giving us snippets of characters’ lives through interactions that feel as though they occur at 3am in a drunken visit to the local 7-Eleven.) Just before she finally arrives at Majime’s planet, she meets a tall stranger who reminds her of her sister8. It is through this stranger’s experiments that Shijima comes to peace with the inescapable algorithm that seems to rule their world. The strong overcome and the weak die. There was no sense in separating right from wrong. It all hinged on pushing forward and living.
The world deconstructed, TKMZ style.
So, Shijima decides to head forward and take the train that seemingly heads nowhere to her next destination. And with that, the two find each other, Shijima no longer afraid, and Majime having created the perfect home for them that she wanted to create in Chapter 31. Ultimately, Shimeji Simulation is about many subjects, most of which I didn’t even go into in this review. But it’s an understanding about the art of interpretation, no matter if it’s right or wrong. The world may seem so overwhelming and foreboding until suddenly, you leave your closet for the first time in two years and meet a silly egg girl who’s also struggled her whole life to find you. Maybe that’s too literal. Hopefully, you know what I mean.
Mushrooms and fried eggs, one of the quickest and comfiest breakfasts to exist.
Score: 10/10 (will read again!)
Posted by fatcatballs | Dec 20, 2023 9:22 PM | 0 comments