Becchin to Mandara
Velveteen & Mandala

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Becchin to Mandara is best described as a psychological slice of life. Set in a ruined, post-war Japan, the manga shows the bizarre day-to-day lives of two girls, Becchin and Mandara. However, unlike other stories with a post-apocalyptic setting, Becchin to Mandara isn’t a story about survival or adventure. Instead, it completely defies the genre’s conventions by being utterly abstract. Constantly shifting tones between twisted humour, disturbing imagery, and zombie-killing action, Becchin to Mandara will have the reader wrapping his head around its story (mainly, lack thereof) in the most unpleasant fashion possible. The manga is grounded (or ungrounded) by the twisted interactions between Becchin, ... Mandara, and the anomalies (namely, swarms of ladybugs, large, flying insects, and fully sentient corpses) surrounding their countryside abode. To give you a little taste of the manga, here’s a description of its two main characters:

Mandara is as batshit crazy as a girl can get. Energetic and always referring to herself in the third person, she constantly shows sporadic behavior and thoughts. Of this behavior, she seems to be fond of imitating things – hillbillies, animals, and “crabvaders”? She also has a peculiar obsession with tape recorders, whereas any mention of this specific object leads to Mandara flailing her arms and breaking out into hysterical, tear-filled fits. If her dialogue doesn’t consist of incomprehensible rabble or delusional ranting, then it probably has something to do with the repetition of the words “tape recorder”. Like a broken tape recorder herself, another quirk in Mandara’s speech is that she tends to speak in loops, repeating her thoughts endlessly until interrupted.

“Who is Bill Gates?”
“The first man who succeeded in reaching the South Pole.”

Although a bit more mentally sound than her schizophrenic friend, Becchin suffers from a mild case of paranoia. She’s shown to hallucinate, and have conversations with herself on a regular basis. It’s through these hallucinations that we also see glimpses of Becchin’s pre-war life, as fragmented and far in-between as they may be. Although she takes pills to mitigate her hallucinations, the reader is left to wonder how much of the manga’s world has been distorted by Becchin’s mind, as we see it as Becchin does… Floating pianos, swarms of ladybugs, and all.

At first glance, Becchin to Mandara has all of the makings of a subtle, anti-war allegory – a post-apocalyptic setting, the defense of a dried out riverbed against “invaders”, and socially dejected, mentally unstable main characters. However, a complete lack of narrative, a scatter-brained introduction and conclusion, and failure to maintain a consistent plot made the manga almost incomprehensible, let alone able to convey any sort of message. Even the tidbit of social commentary introduced towards the ending seemed arbitrary, given the incoherent nature of the manga. Well, where does that leave the reader? What were the intentions of the author when writing Becchin to Mandara, if the story itself lacks any meaning or coherency?

Welcome to the twisted world of Jiro Matsumoto.

Ever wondered what it’s like to peer into the mind of a potentially insane mangaka? Well, Matsumoto’s stories will take you beyond the fine line of dementia and lunacy. Like all of his manga, Matsumoto doesn’t hold back on disturbing and graphic scenes. This is a man who will pull out all the stops for the sake of shocking readers, and he’s as unflinching as he is… Imaginative. On the milder side, the girls are often shown nude, or having vivid chats about sexuality and sexual acts. Or, in the middle of a conversation, another character will suddenly reveal a fully drawn, flaccid phallus. However, at its most brutal moments, the author doesn’t even bat an eye at, say, a teenaged girl wearing a school uniform, laughing maniacally while getting violated by a hoard of zombies in a horrific scat orgie.

… What? Yeah. Unfortunately, this is just senseless shock value. There’s little context behind these acts, and they exist simply to appall readers.

Becchin to Mandara isn’t without its black humour though. Throughout the manga, Matsumoto throws around not-so-subtle allusions to popular anime: Princess Mononoke, Evangelion, Gundam, My Neighbor Totoro, Nausicaa, and even Full Metal Panic. There are also comedic elements in the manga’s styling, such as the use of a game’s inventory system when one of the characters was taking stock of her belongings, or the appearance of a JRPG battle menu when the same character later encounters a zombie.

Like all of Jiro Matsumoto’s manga, Becchin to Mandara’s artwork is… Unique, to say the least. The artist manages to make each panel highly detailed, yet crude at the same time. Matsumoto makes great use of etching, but these details create two effects. At its best, and quite often, these etchings create diverse facial expressions and highly intricate environments with fantastic shading. On a few rare occasions though, Matsumoto’s etchings can make for overly clustered panels.

Overall, Becchin to Mandara left me disappointed with a half-realized story, poor flow of narrative, and thoughtless imagery. Nonetheless, don’t let this manga deter you from reading Matsumoto’s other works. I was lead to Becchin to Mandara by Freesia (which is fairly underrated, yet highly praised by some), and Yuretsuzukeru, one of the few erotic works that isn’t overtly smut. It’s a dark collection of short stories that deals with psychology – what Becchin to Mandara could have and should have been with a little more care and restraint.

I love a story that will make me think. I love to question reality, even the reality of a fictional universe. If I need to watch or read something several times to understand it, then it is almost a guarantee that it will go in my closet full of wonderfully strange and complicated things. Velveteen & Mandala is not such a thing. It had the potential to be, but the presentation or lack of information and sheer intense strangeness of the story muddles this up.

The art is different, to say the least. It is very sketchy, while remaining quite detailed. I think this adds to ... the story considerably, almost speaking to state of the title character’s minds. This being said, I am not familiar with Jiro Matsumoto’s work, and as such don’t know if this is intentional or a fluke. I was able to see the emotions on every character’s face quite plainly, though, from the variety of annoyances that cross Velveteen to the sheer emptiness of Mandala’s head, everything is quite clear.

The book itself does not know what it wants to be. It jumps from a cute black comedy focusing on the relationship between two mentally disturbed girls to disgusting rape/scat porn with the change of a chapter. This is interesting when handled well, but this was not handled well. Everything seems to come together in the end, but is too scattered in the beginning for that to really matter. I believe that Matsumoto had a concept in mind and just did not know where to start or how to get his points across.

Velveteen & Mandala is not nearly everything it could be. I was thoroughly intrigued by the world the characters lived in, but I feel as though it required a considerably larger amount of thought and story before it would have been able to reach its full potential.

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