The manga this week
Hataraku Saibo (Cells at Work!)
By Akane Shimizu (Kodansha)
Yasutaka Tsutsui's short story "Saigo no Denrei" (The last messenger) is about a city where a chaotic disaster is looming. A young intelligence officer dashes off to report this danger to the headquarters. He takes a subway from the Liver to the Spleen and then transfers to a monorail to the Gastric Cardia. On the way, he witnesses the Abdominal Wall that is about to burst open. "The end of the world" is just around the corner.
This intelligence officer is in fact a cell that informs the brain of any emergency happening in the body's internal organs. In other words, this story personifies human cells as human characters. It was written in 1991, so the idea of the manga this week -- personifying various cells in the human body -- is not a first or original. Moreover, the human body is envisioned as a city in this manga, which is also somewhat similar to the short story. But in spite of it all, this week's manga "Hataraku Saibo" (Cells at Work!) is quite entertaining.
A Red Blood Cell, personified as a young woman, delivers oxygen to various places in the body, just like a door-to-door parcel delivery service. One day she is attacked by a monstrous Pneumococcus bacterium that enters the bloodstream. Then a White Blood Cell, a really cool man whose job is to drive away bacteria and viruses, rushes to her rescue. He saves her but cannot stop a wave of Pneumococcus bacteria from invading the body, so the Killer T Cells military unit, clad in head-to-toe black uniforms, is also dispatched. Pneumococcus' favorite food is Red Blood Cells that carry nutrition, and they are determined to get the young woman. Will the White Blood Cell succeed again in rescuing the Red Blood Cell from danger?
Alongside this first episode, there are also easy-to-visualize action-packed descriptions of the body mechanisms and how humans suffer from hay fever and influenza, for example. This manga is therefore also instructive as an "educational manga," and so offers a good deal.
Characters are skillfully designed to be convincing and entertaining, with Platelets personified as girls who are apparently elementary schoolers, a Naive T Cell as a truly naive person, and Cancer Cells described as tragic characters since they are considered evil from the moment they are born. I've heard the author Akane Shimizu is not a medical specialist, so this manga artist must have studied very hard in order to create this story.
"Saigo no Denrei" is a depressing story describing how living an intemperate life can lead to death from an inside-the-body point of view. By contrast, the tone of "Cells at Work!" is cheerful. Cool and smart cells work really hard inside our bodies -- imagined this way, it makes me feel like I should be taking better care of my daily life. This manga motivates you to live in a healthier way. In this respect, you could call it a "functional manga."
I should also draw your attention to the fact that more and more spin-off series, such as those featuring bacteria at work and cells in inferior environments, are being created based on this manga. I suppose it is easy to make variations from this story format, leading the original manga to diversify and proliferate endlessly. Just as cells divide and increase, indeed!
Ishida is a Yomiuri Shimbun senior writer whose areas of expertise include manga and anime.
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