Strawberry Marshmallow, Volume 1

Do you love candy? Cake? Chocolate cake with tons of chocolate chips, chocolate fudge and chocolate icing on top? With chocolate ice cream and chocolate milk? You don't? Well, than get away from this book.Nobue Ito, smoker, older sister and shape changer, lives with younger sister, Chika. They also have two friends. Miu, a self centered, impulsive, unbalanced fashion freak and Matsuri, a girl with weird hair, a ferret and a need to cry about everything. Well, now that I think about it she has good reasons to cry but the others act as if she is over reacting. I've never cried over pudding. Not in public anyway. But I do think getting beat up in a Kendo duel does give one permission to cry. Does Miu HAVE to stomp on her head?The artwork is cute, the humor hits you from out of nowhere and Nobue's character design changes a couple of times in the first few stories. Also sometimes the wrong person says the wrong lines. Or maybe the right person says the wrong lines? Well, it is not perfect. But it still gets high points, five stars, for being so sweet, so cute, so sugar injected into the blood stream, that I can't help but enjoy it.

It's a really good story and the book was in perfect condition other than a tiny bit of ink on the front cover! So happy!

My daughter recently got into this series and it has become her favorite! We are now starting to collect them all and the DVDs too.

The official tagline for Barasui's "Strawberry Marshmallow" is "Kawaii wa seigi" or "Cute is justice," which exactly describes the spirit of this Japanese manga itself. Originally serialized in a shonen (boy's) manga comic "Dengeki Daiou" (since 2001 and unfinished), "Strawberry Marshmallow" follows the lives of five cute (and slightly unique) girls - Nobue, Chika, Miu, Matsuri and Ana. (But sorry, Ana does not appear in volume 1.)Nothing big happens in each episode. The girls' "adventures" usually means chatting, eating delicious cakes, buying clothes, going to the beach, playing baseball, quarrelling (sometimes), and always having fun. Each story, or vignette, consists of small things that mean a lot to the girls. The laidback style of the comic may remind you of another popular manga Kiyohiko Azuma's "Yotsuba&!" (published in the same magazine), but with more eye candies.Also, I have to tell you that these girls are cute and adorable, but, except timid Matsuri and "generic" Chika, they are not exactly the kind of girls you will refer to as "model students." Nobue smokes and drinks a lot (and she is only 16); unpredictable Miu does outrageous things like ... sorry, I cannot write it here. Like many Japanese manga, the characters refuse to be stereotyped.[TRANSLATION] As one of the charms of manga in general is the language it uses, I have to give a few words about the book's translation. Tokyopop's "Strawberry Marshmallow" did a decent job, I think, considering the girls' colloquial and informal speech in Japanese, but it seems the English translation overreaches itself at times. Here is one example, a line from Miu's homework, "observations of my friends." Miu writes:[Tokyopop edition's translation goes] Nobue decided to move to London, where she's pretending she's from Paris. "I'm in it for the glamour," she announced. (p.154)Actually, in original Japanese, Miu writes "Nobue oneechan-ga "Parijennu-ni naru" to itte igirisu-ni ryugaku shimashita." which literally means:[My translation] Nobue said, "I wanna be a Parisienne" and she went to England.I don't say the translation is bad, but it totally ignores the comic effects of the original language, or the off-beat tone of Miu's (totally false) commentaries. More inexplicable is the occasional omission of honorifics (chan, san, etc) and the changed names of the girls. Nobue is "Noby" (p.172) Matsuri is "Mats" (p.171) when Nobue-neesan and Matsri-chan will do.[ART] One more thing about the differences between editions. The four-page prologue of the original Japanese book is printed in color, but Tokyopop edition's prologue (p.5-p.8) is changed to usual black-and-white style, making the characters' faces grayish. Why can't they just do it the same way?I love "Strawberry Marshmallow" series and hope you will too. To conclude, here are a few fan facts fro the readers:1: The comic is set in the city of Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture in Japan. You can see the city's name in the driver's license Nobue has in the first page. Some of the landmarks that appear in the comic series (and animated series) really exist. Creator Barasui is born in Hamamatsu.2: The TV show "Toon Zone" they are watching (p.121) is in the original book "Waratte-iitomo" a popular TV program aired every weekday. The show starts at noon, which means the girls spent the whole morning "determined dead."

The mangaka Barasui makes his first series with a cast of little girls. Chika,12 and her cancerstick puffing sister Nobue. Along with timid Matsuri and weird irritant Miu,they go through one situation to another. There are two stories in the manga that Barasui drew before he started the series so Nobue and Miu look different. Funny and entertaining.

So cute!!

This Manga is adorable!! ^_^I love the art work and the characters are so cute!I'm going to buy Vol. 2 for sure! ^_^

I read a lot of manga, and Strawberry Marshmallow has always been one of my favorites in terms of just how funny it is. It's slightly more mature than the cutesy cover and characters might suggest, though, so I'd recommend it for kids 13 and up.

I loved this (short) series for its quirky, slice-of-life humour. The main characters are cute and funny. The situations they get into are so true to life that I could imagine myself as a part of their group of friends.

不定期で、何度かに分けて１〜５巻を購入しました。翻訳や海外の取り扱い業者など、中間マージンが発生するために価格がそれなりにするのも仕方がないものだと思いますが、それにしても紙質が悪い。繊維が粗くザラザラした質感で、茶色の繊維が全編に渡って分布しています。加えて届いた時点で、何年も経ったような、周囲がやや茶色に変色しているものも。本の厚みも日本版より1.2倍ほど厚い。それと、日本版と比べて、ややサイズが大きくなっています。横幅はほとんど変わらないものの、縦が7mmほど高いです。中身（絵）も拡大されていますが、横幅は日本のものと変わらないので、そのはみ出た分がカットされています。しかし、本編はほぼ問題ないものの、各話の間に入る挿絵が、出版社から生データを貰っていないのか、本来「線」である部分が、スクリーントーンのようなブツブツになっている。その為、ボヤけた感じの絵に……orzただし、４巻以降は問題なく、紙質もやや改善（荒さ変わらず、茶色繊維減少）されている様子。ちなみに、日本版の冒頭にあるカラーページもモノクロになっています。ペーパーバックであるので、コンビニ本のように、表紙は直接本に印刷されており、カバーはありせん。本体の質という部分ではあまり良いものではありませんが、内容面ではなかなか上手く翻訳されていて満足しています。品質まで気にする方は、とりあえず好みの巻だけでも購入して、確認してからの方が良いかと思います。

Many thanks.

原作とアニメだけでは飽きたらず購入。作品カテゴリが "commedy" にされている事でまず笑い、たまに原作以上に笑える表現もあって翻訳の妙味を感じさせる。ごくまれに英検準１レベルでも初見のマイナーな単語があり、さらに口語体（一部キャラクターの性格付けのために卑俗な口語が使われていることもある）が多いので受験英語の頭だと理解しにくいが、文法自体は英検３〜準２レベルであり、個々の単語を調べる方法さえ持っていれば難なく読み進められる。原作と並べて、オリジナルと翻訳を比べながら読むとかなり面白い。