Books: Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei Vol. 5

Back when Mangajin was still in print, they ran regular installments of a 4-koma comic named A Visual Glossary of Modern Terms (Zusetsu Gendai Yōgo Benran), which mercilessly dissected all those quirky little aspects of modern life, and with great visual flair. E.g., here’s a gallery of people you’d meet in a dark alley, ranked and rendered like monsters in a console RPG. (Hint: Button-mashing will not help you here.)

I suspect most people reading this have never read, let alone heard of, Visual Glossary, which is a big part of why I held off paralleling it to Sayonara, Zetsubo-sensei for so long. But here we are, five volumes in, and a better parallel has yet to suggest itself. Others have described Zetsubo as a harem story (sure, maybe a harem story on heroin), but the harem stuff is there mostly to provide Koji Kumeta for a container into which to pour his jaundiced observations about modern Japan being a den of duplicity, cowardice, back-stabbing, insincerity and buck-passing. Still others, me included, have simply described Zetsubo-sensei as really freakin’ funny. That also works.

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