This week's manga
Kesshite Mane Shinaide Kudasai
(Please do not attempt, never)
By Hebi-zou (Kodansha)
"Kesshite Mane Shinaide Kudasai" (Please do not attempt, never), published in three paperback volumes between 2014 and 2016, managed to escape my notice until recently. I was amused by the late-night drama of the same title on NHK, found out that it was based on this manga series, and hastily began reading it.
The story is about Satoshi Kakeda, a student majoring in theoretical physics at a technical college. He is so much of a science fanatic that when he tries to say "I love you" to school cafeteria worker Ms. Iijima, it instead comes out as, "Would you like to analyze our potential convergence and summability using i?"
Not surprisingly, Ms. Iijima fails to notice that he was actually asking her out. Kakeda feels ignored and rejected, and despairs that he will never find a girlfriend. However, he decides to persevere with his bizarre experiments after receiving encouragement from his supervisor Prof. Takashina, who tells him, "A scientist's job is to keep dreaming."
Why don't stunt performers in movies get burned when they are enveloped in flame? What happens when electricity is transmitted through a human body in the way of Nikola Tesla's dream of wireless power transmission? Like the title suggests, the experiments to answer these questions are dangerous, but they are also grounded in real science. Besides these grand experiments, the manga is also full of knowledge useful for everyday life, such as "how to salvage ketchup left at the bottom of the bottle" and "how to turn a stripped screw using a screwdriver."
I was astonished by one experiment that uses an ultrasonic cleaning device for glasses and a drop of soy sauce to make cheap red wine taste like a high-quality vintage. I tried it at home with my family. In the manga, red wine was poured directly from the bottle into the device's metal container, but we poured the red wine into a glass first before submerging the glass in water in the container and flipping the switch. I'm happy to report that the results were the same -- it worked!
This manga is basically a comedy, but it also includes mini-biographies of historical figures in the world of science and medicine, making it highly educational as well. It's packed with surprising vignettes, such as how the word "oxygen" entered common usage despite 18th-century French scientist Antoine Lavoisier coining it based on a misconception, and how Dr. Dolittle and the protagonist in "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" both came to be modeled on British doctor John Hunter.
Mangaka and author Hebi-zou seems to be well versed in science, since he is also one of the writers for the new manga series "Ten-De-Bu: What a Strange Animal!" I admire how, in that manga, he takes up the subject of biological evolution to create gags involving heavenly gods entering a competition to design "strange" creatures on earth.
When we talk about educational manga nowadays, history or classic literature come to mind first, but "Kesshite Mane Shinaide Kudasai" proves that science can also be a good subject for manga. The TV version has its fair share of exciting experiments, but based on my own "scientific" comparison, I personally find the manga more enjoyable.
Ishida is a Yomiuri Shimbun senior writer whose areas of expertise include manga and anime.
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