Scanlation groups are numerous enough that unless you've got a couple of hours each day to check in on dozens of different websites, they're best tracked through sites that specialize in that sort of thing, like the ever-reliable Manganews. I won't even pretend to be familiar with most of them. Generally, when I'm in the mood to check out new manga, I look for interesting-sounding titles at Manganews, hunt down the websites of the groups offering them, download a few and then, if I like what I've seen, look through their archives to see if there's anything else that might strikes my fancy. As you might expect, the results are usually hit and miss.

Self-knowledge comes a little too late in Yoshiyuki Sadamoto and Mako Takaha's short story, 'Dirty Work.'

One group with decidedly more hits than misses that I discovered in this fashion is Jinmen Juushin, who next to Mangascreener and Kotonoha probably offer the most quirky and interesting titles, even if they don't have quite the reach and productivity of the larger two. Their list of projects is fairly wide-ranging, and while the only underlying aesthetic seems to be "here's what we like," the folks at Jinmen Juushin are clearly knowledgable enough about their manga to have a fairly good idea of what's to like. They've obviously been around awhile -- you'll notice that a good portion of their back catalog has since been picked up for print by Tokyopop and Viz, to the point where it's starting to look fairly well cherry-picked. Still, there are a few good manga that nobody's gotten around to licensing left in their archives, and best of all, the direct downloads mean that you won't have to sully your hands with IRC. Why can't more scanlation groups be like this? And why can't more groups offer titles as good as these:

Haruna sees Yamada's 'treasure' for the first time in Kyoko Okozaki's gripping River's Edge.

• River's Edge: Clearly inspired by the moody, 1986 Tim Hunter film of the same name, Kyoko Okozaki's manga nonetheless manages a fairly original take on the time-honored theme of teenage alienation. Haruna Wakakusa is a teenage girl going to an average high school, vaguely disaffected but not making a big production out of it. Her life begins to get interesting when she starts defending Yamada, a waifish pretty-boy classmate rumored to be gay, from a group of bullies led by her ostensible boyfriend, Kannonzaki. Haruna and Yamada start hanging out, and eventually he shows her one of his secrets: a dead body down by the river. But is this his only secret?

  An air of ambivalence hangs over River's Edge, but not to the same degree as that found in Tim Hunter's film. While the film wanted to take you into an outlandish story of emotional numbness dragged out to monstrous degrees, Okozaki is more interested in demonstrating the extent to which people really don't know one another, ever close friends and lovers. Haruna and Kannonzaki, for example, are a "couple" because they once had sex a year ago, and while he insists that this makes them lovers, she's really just playing along out of sheer inertia, her ardor towards the brash boy long since cooled. Like everyone else in this story, the two semi-lovers never quite connected with one another so much as projected what they wanted to see and acted accordingly. It will take a major shake-up to wake these kids to the world around them and the people in it, and a major shake-up is exactly what they're about to get.

  Okozaki's linework and storytelling sensibilities are obviously part of the josei tradition, her characters having the same sketchy features as those found in comics by Moyoko Anno and Erica Sakurazawa. Her point of view, however, seems uniquely her own, and encountering it for the first time leaves one unsure of where things are going to go next. That feeling of uncertainty and creeping worry fits her River's Edge perfectly, but having now been exposed to it, I'd like to see more. I'm curious to see if she can surprise me a second time.

Ummm... this shouldn't be happening in a comedy starring fifth-graders, should it? Sequence from Today in Class 5-2, by Koharu Sakaraba.

• Today in Class 5-2: The tagline given to Today in Class 5-2 by the scanlators -- "The way fifth grade never was." -- is completely and totally false. Fifth grade is exactly when I remember boys and girls starting to act like this, and Koharu Sakuraba's funny, knowing vignettes capture the atmosphere perfectly. Starring a classroom full of everyboys and everygirls that you've either known or been, looking at the world with eyes you're likely to find awfully familiar, this may well be the sweetest, most perceptive sex comedy every written starring elementary-school children.

  Oh, I am so going to Hell for this one.

  Okay, it isn't a "sex comedy," exactly, unless of course by sex you mean gender. It's toward the end of elementary school that boys and girls start to lose their innocent interchangability and start becoming boys and girls in the true sense of the term, and Sakuraba astutely captures the flavor of being just on the cusp of that change without having quite crossed the line. Girls begin to realize that they're either starting to develop breasts or going to very shortly. Boys first begin to wonder what's underneath that skirt. Girls begin to realize, "Holy crap, the boys are starting to wonder what's underneath this skirt." It's right at the dawn of the part of life where girls start threatening to become women, and boys start threatening to become complete doofuses.

  A cute moment from Today in Class 5-2.

  Capturing this point in life is such an agonizingly dangerous trick that I'm not surprised more Western artists haven't made the attempt -- the only example that comes to mind is Gilbert Hernandez' first Heartbreak Soup story, "Sopa de Gran Pena," and even then it was only one element in a larger tale. Given the disturbing popularity of "lolicon" (short for "Lolita complex") in Japanese pop culture, I'm likewise not surprised that so many manga-ka fail to hit the mark. The most common reason for failure, I suspect, is the tendency to introduce adult prurience into situations that call for more childlike curiosity. One story I didn't link to in Kotonoha's archives, Chokotto Sister, is an excellent example -- it's the story of a college student who gets a sudden ten-year-old sister from out of nowhere, and there are cute elements and heartwarming aspects to this slick, well-drawn story... but there's also a college boy periodically reacting to his new sisters' tendency to fall into states of partial nudity that just creeps the hell out of me. (A reversal of this scenario caused me to pan Ken Akamatsu's popular series Negima!)

  By contrast, it's the lack of such an adult viewpoint that allows me to give Today in Class 5-2 a pass: There's the occasional flash of "TV nudity," but since the scenarios all involve kids getting into trouble and embarrassment over violated social taboos rather than any real sexual undercurrent, the series manages to come as close to the edge of acceptability as required to capture what Sakuraba's going for without crossing the line into pedophilic deviance. An adult sneaking a glimpse of a fifth-grade girl's panties is sick; a fifth-grade boy doing the same thing is a solid basis for comedy. It's a matter of the point of view being expressed. When, as in the second chapter, the girls catch series protagonist Satou faking unearned life experience to his comrades as he explains what it is about girls' collarbones that makes them so sexy, what's funny isn't Satou's false front so much as the fact that the other boys are gathered around listening so intently. Later, when he and one of the girls go to the drinking fountain and he finds himself trying to catch a glimpse of her budding breasts through her top as she bends over for a sip of water, her subsequent accusation that he's a perv for looking at her collarbones is equally funny. (Only one gag, a Three's Company-style compromising position/misunderstanding confronting the school's P.E. teacher in the third chapter, ever comes close to violating this formula, and while it's vaguely creepy, it's also the only time Koharu Sakuraba ever attempts such a thing. Thankfully.)

  In the end, whether or not Today in Class 5-2 crosses a line depends upon how rose-tinted are the glasses you wear when you look back upon the time you yourself spent staring at the doorway to adolescence. Either I've just found you a charming tale of boys and girls hovering a step away from first noticing that the courtship dance has just begun, or I'm a total perv who should probably be on some sort of watch list. I suppose it's not really for me to say, but I do think this series is sweet and funny, and recommend it to those of you who left their illusions of childhood purity behind in childhood. Caveat emptor, and all that.

Family relations take on new meaning in Shunji Enomoto's savage satire, The Family Zoo.

• "The Family Zoo": By contrast, if it's unrestrained deviance you want, you can't get much better than a comic by Shunji Enomoto. Regular Journal readers will recognize Enomoto's name from Bill Randall's review of his outrageous, surreal three-volume collection of gag strips, Golden Lucky, in TCJ #275. In this short-story collaboration with writing partner Chuya Chikazawa, Enomoto recasts a typical Japanese family as animals living in a zoo: Mom's a giraffe, Dad's an elephant, big brother's a lion, little sister's a snake, our protagonist (the little brother) is a monkey -- oh, and grampa's a toilet. In twenty-two pages, Enomoto and Chikazawa take you from one end of the food chain to the other, with stops for incest and scatological humor along the way and a decidedly dour view of life as your tour guide. Laugh all you want, but don't show this one to the kids.

A teenage girl learns just who she slept with in Yoshiyuki Sadamoto and Mako Takaha's dark short story, 'System of Romance.'

• "System of Romance" and "Dirty Work": These two short stories by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto and Mako Takaha each depict teenagers crossing into the dark side of human nature. "System of Romance" recounts a naive girl's tryst with a serial killer, and the change it produces in her outlook on life, while in "Dirty Work," a selfish teenager leads her love-stricken paramour farther down the road to evil than he really wants to go. In each case, the actual plot itself is secondary to listening in on each lead character's thoughts as he or she enters a forbidden landscape and discovers that it's far more tolerable than they'd expected it to be. These stories are short, but they each pack a punch.

If the above works sound like the glimmering of an aesthetic viewpoint, bear in mind that these are the stories that the mainstream American manga publishers didn't license; the only thing that unites them is that they all go a little too far in one direction or another for people hoping to attract the attention of the Barnes & Noble purchasing department. Likewise, if the vast majority of works that we've looked at so far seem a bit on the adult or twisted side, well, you can probably blame publishers like Viz, Tokyopop and Del Rey for a bit of that, too. Not that anyone has any right to complain, of course -- scanlations are at best tolerated for being early looks at works that otherwise aren't accessible to English-speaking readers, and one doubts that the cartoonists being scanlated prefer that their work be distributed free of charge. Published volumes should be the end result of the cycle, and readers should be doing their part to add to creators' royalty statements when they read works by said creators. Fair's fair. If there's a slew of intelligent, adult manga available in the scanlations scene, it's only because the market for such works still hasn't matured enough to support a wider selection in print. In a perfect world, scanlations wouldn't be necessary for readers looking for quality manga, and we'd all be buying this stuff at our local bookstore.

A typical evocative sequence from Hitoshi Ashinano's contemplative masterpiece, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.

Still, it begs the question: Is there any good material out there that's suitable for all ages? Not just the easy-to-like genre work currently available in print, but work that a parent would be happy to see their kids read yet good enough that it wouldn't insult an adult's intelligence? If you've guessed that this is a rhetorical question, go straight to the head of the class: We conclude our survey of amateur manga translations with a good comic for younger children, a good one for older pre-pubescents, and finally a work meant for older audiences but still all-ages accessible. Let's look at the children's manga (or kodomo manga, as it's called in Japan) first:

• Bernie's Drawing Diary: If there's a scanlations group with a weirder self-defined mandate than Doki-Doki, I have yet to hear of them. Doki-Doki specialize in three things: yaoi, Fullmetal Alchemist and Gundam fan-created minicomics... and comics about cats. There are exactly two examples of the latter in their projects list, and while Chii's Sweet Home, a series about a family adopting a small kitten as seen from the kitten's point of view, is a perfectly nice and heartwarming comic, it's the other one that I really want to talk about.

  An idyllic family picnic from Mineco's children's manga, Bernie's Drawing Diary.

  Bernie's Drawing Diary is a slice-of-life children's comic with cats taking the place of human beings, and takes for its setting a small seaside village where people live in quiet harmony. Our protagonist, the titular Bernie, is a young boy whose mother has passed away and whose fisherman father is often gone for extended periods of time, as is the case when the series opens; a relative serves as the adult of the house during such times. Bernie worries for his father, but not so much as to turn this into the manga's sole concern; rather, we are invited to follow Bernie and his friends as they go to school and hang out around the village, fishing at the local watering hole and paying occasional visits to the kindly old Jewish astronomer who lives in the "bombshell lighthouse" on the shoreline, all of which Bernie then renders in the picture diary given out to everyone in his class on the first day of school. (There are brief allusions to a war that killed off all the people, leaving the cats to live in harmony afterward, but one suspects that this is only present should a young child ask where all the people went to.) Primarily, our heroes exist to demonstrate how good children interact with one another and their surroundings, and how to deal with uncertain times by remembering that there are good people all around who love you. It sounds saccharine, but works as an entertaining, easily-read tale thanks to creator Mineco's delightful art and expert sense of storytelling and layout, which makes Bernie's Drawing Diary read like a children's picture-book expanded outward into a well-crafted comic. Four of the volume's six chapters have been translated as of this writing, and direct downloads are available from the above-linked project page.

Tsubomi's mother reassures her that she needn't freak out over what her body's doing, in this sequence from Yabuuchi Yu's sensitive coming-of-age story, Naisho no Tsubomi.

• Naisho no Tsubomi: Tsubomi is an older elementary-school girl with a secret: Her mother is about to have a baby. Why is it a secret? Well, because one of her classmates told her that in order for her mother to get pregnant, her parents had to do "indecent things." Wait a minute... what indecent things are we talking about? And with that, this tale of a group of schoolchildren learning the facts of life begins.

  When was the last time you heard that asked in a children's comic? Panel from Naisho no Tsubomi.

  You could best describe Naisho no Tsubomi as Today in Class 5-2's less-mischievous, socially approved stepsister. While Class 5-2 is a gentle but naughty comedy of manners and taboo-skirting presumably meant for older readers, Naisho no Tsubomi is an earnest attempt to teach growing children about the upcoming changes they'll go through during puberty, and what they mean for the reader. In this story, you'll see a girl get her first period, a boy deal with his first nocturnal emission, and follow Tsubomi's mother through the various stages of pregnancy on the way to blessing our heroine with a baby sister -- all carefully framed as natural parts of the cycle of life, and all perfectly normal things about which one shouldn't be ashamed. Indeed, Naisho no Tsubomi is so wholesome in its approach to puberty instruction that I could easily see it being used in a sex-education class for fifth- and sixth-graders. Oh, it'd never replace the core cirriculum, but as a means of tying in the biological basics of puberty and what it means for young people to practical, real-world examples, it'd do the job just fine, and while sex itself is never depicted or described in clinical detail, this series does a fine job of preparing pre-adolescents for the biological trickery they'll experience in the next few years of their lives.

  Creator Yabuuchi Yu's art and storytelling are both well-suited for it, too -- I can't think of a better educational use for that manga style that Kids These Days love so much, offhand. It isn't condescending (well, too much so, anyway), and it makes use of the tropes and techniques of Japanese comics storytelling in a polished and engaging fashion. So long as you didn't tell 'em it was instructional, I bet you'd have no difficulty whatsoever in getting the target audience to read this series of charming and sharply-crafted vignettes. The first volume, a complete story, has been translated and can be downloaded at this mirror page. I haven't read any of it yet, but translation on a second volume featuring different characters (and starring a different girl with the same name) has begun and is also available from the same link.

I've saved the best for last. Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou -- the name translates as "Record of a Yokohama Shopping Trip" -- can perhaps best be described as what would happen if famed animator Hayao Miyazaki were to begin loosely adapting John Porcellino stories to manga. Toward the second half of this 140-chapter, fourteen-volume series, creator Hitoshi Ashinano starts adding the English-language subtitle Quiet Country Cafe to some of his chapters, and it describes the story as well as any three words possibly could. I discovered this series early on in my exploration of the world of scanlations, and it's what first convinced me that there were real diamonds out there among the sea of coals. Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou isn't just one of my favorite manga stories; it's one of my favorite comics, period. It's the only multi-volume manga series for which I own all the original Japanese tankouban softcover volumes; there's a fifty-dollar artbook floating around out there, and I keep meaning to buy that too, if I can ever spare the cash.

This panel and below: Alpha gets lost in the contents of her shed, in this panel from Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.

In theory, it's a science fiction story: Several decades after an unspecified eco-apocalypse has decimated Japan's population and plunged half the island nation underwater, a very human-seeming female android named Alpha keeps watch over a small coffeehouse in the countryside while her never-seen owner wanders on an equally unspecified trip abroad. She keeps a small pistol nearby, but otherwise makes no mention of it; her routine revolves around waking up each morning, brewing a pot of coffee and opening the small adjunct to her house that serves as the cafe. Every once in a while, she even has a customer, though just as many stories take place when she doesn't as otherwise.

Alas, the set-up implies a plot, or at least some sort of story progression, and Hitoshi Ashinano seems never before to have heard such words used in a sentence. The few actual incidents that occur in this series -- Alpha getting hit by lightning and recuperating in a hospital, or running out of coffee beans and riding her scooter to Yokohama to get more -- punctuate a calm, endless sea of chapters wherein she does little more than sit by the window, drink coffee, wander the fields with her camera, visit the beach with friends or pay leisurely visits to the town's few remaining human citizens. The aforementioned gun is never seen again after the first few chapters. Actually, I take it back. One thing does happen, midway through the series: A particularly intense thunderstorm destroys the cafe one night, while Alpha is elsewhere hiding from the weather. She'll rebuild it eventually, but uses the opportunity to take a little trip around Japan, during which she visits a small airport, stays in a motel or two and spends a brief period selling corn on the cob from a small roadside stand near Mt. Fuji. In other words, nothing in the way of plot really happens on the road, either. On second thought, I don't take it back.

The few science-fiction elements in Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou are less plot devices than aids to symbolism. Take, for example, the androids. They're almost all female, and virtually indistinguishable from humans. Throughout the story, just four distinctions are made between Alpha and her kin and the rest of humanity: the camera she owns was made for androids (she can see the pictures it takes in her mind by putting the plug into her mouth); they're virtually all female; they can communicate and pass memories and images to one another by kissing, an element that pops up two or three times, and is the closest YKK ever comes to either shoujo-ai or any other kind of sexuality; and they never age. There are a few other fantastic motifs that show up occasionally -- a sylph-like feral woman who lives in the woods and whose appearance is treated as a lucky sign akin to witnessing a unicorn by the townspeople, a futuristic plane that watches over the world -- but they're clearly window dressing, an added bit of dreamy reverie meant to accentuate the spell of magic realism cast by Ashinano's pen. I suspect the sci-fi premise allows its author exactly two things: a depopulated, picturesque countryside for Alpha to wander through, and an immortality that over the course of the series allows her to watch children grow into parents and adults into old age, which in turn allows us as readers to experience the slow-motion passage of time as though it were a tranquil river of molasses, framed in a perpetual sunset. By the time we reach Volume Fourteen's concluding epilogue, we've met the now-grown daughter of a woman that appeared in the series' earliest chapters as a young girl -- and while we're told that the ocean continues to claim the remaining lands, everything still looks the same as it did when we first arrived at Alpha's quiet country cafe.

The scanlators responsible for the English-language version of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou are anonymous, but a sort-of publication history can be inferred by the websites that host the files. The series was originally posted to Misago.org, but after 121 chapters its initial translator(s) apparently abandoned the project; thankfully, he/she/they still maintain the website, and the chapter translations produced can be downloaded from this page. At this point, another translation team took over and brought the project to its conclusion -- the results can be read online from this page and most easily downloaded in Zip archives at this link (Update 5-8-07: That last link seems to be down, I'm afraid). Occasionally, you'll see the translation teams collectively referred to as "the elves" on Misago.org's YKK forum, but no one has ever stepped forward to claim credit for the work, and there otherwise doesn't seem to be much ego involved in the translations -- something that may well be unique in the world of scanlations, so far as I know. These translations were created solely as an act of love for the work, and I can think of few other comics novels so deserving of such an effort.

Alpha enjoys a quiet sunset in Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.

I've heard YKK described as a manga meant to help middle-aged businessmen relax as they ride the train home from work, and both the setting and the quiet, empheral nature of the story seem to indicate that it would do a good job of it. A romanticized rural peacefulness fairly permeates Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, and its gentle atmosphere is almost narcotic in its calming effect. Nothing ever seems to happen in this series, but it does so (or perhaps it doesn't so) beautifully; this may well be the most zen comic I've ever read. I imagine Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou would most likely look like commercial suicide to your average manga repackaging house, but of all the works I've found in the online-scanlation underground, this is the one I most want to see translated in book form.

And there we are, our survey at last concluded. Thirty-two highlighted works, a number of other fruitful possibilities from the same scanlators, and all the means to seek out more yourself, should you so choose. If nothing else, I hope I've demonstrated that there's a much wider variety of manga available than just what the major publishing houses have chosen to offer for sale; that what appears on the shelves of your local bookstore is just the tip of the iceberg; and that the Japanese tradition of comics storytelling is among the richest and most multifaceted of any ever produced. I'd prefer to own all of this work in English-language book form, of course; as it is, when I find a series that I especially enjoy, I always make an effort to seek out and buy the original Japanese-language volumes, preferring to put a little money into the pockets of the artists responsible, rather than simply being a freeloader. Consequently, I now own several dozen volumes of comics that I can't actually read... but what the hell. One day, hopefully, we won't need scanlators to enjoy the kinds of work we've examined throughout the course of this essay, but until then, let's be thankful that there exists a breed of manga fans willing to go to great efforts to translate and distribute comics we might otherwise never get to see, for no other reward than the satisfaction of a job well done.