Skip Beat! 10 by Yoshiki Nakamura: B+

From the back cover:
Kyoko’s been scouted for a role in this year’s most anticipated drama, a remake of the classic Tsukigomori. But shades of the past threaten to stifle the production as Kyoko struggles to get into the character of Mio, a young woman with a severely scarred face. Ms. Iizuka, the actress who played the original Mio, is now playing Kyoko’s mother, and has grave doubts about Kyoko’s ability to do justice to the role. She demands that Kyoko pass an acting test, and quit the production if she fails!

Review:
This volume primarily deals with Kyoko’s attempts to prepare for her role and then later to convince others that her interpretation (radically different from the original) is the right one. Tying in with this are the director’s struggles to find a vision of his own that will surpass the original. He, of course, finds the answer in Kyoko’s spin on the role.

While this isn’t bad, it gets a little tiring when most of the action is characters whispering doubtfully or experiencing extremes of emotion when watching Kyoko go through her in-character improv. Even Ren gets kind of swept up in it. It does represent genuine progress for Kyoko, however, who’s able to create a character herself and imagine their feelings as opposed to simply projecting how she’d feel in a given situation, which is what she did on a previous job.

Getting glimpses of the plot of this drama as we are, I feel like I want to see the finished product, but in reality I’d probably find that frustrating filler when we could be getting Ren and Kyoko goodness. Maybe Nakamura should put out a volume with the drama’s story, like Miho Obana did for the movie Sana did in Kodocha.

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Comments

  1. I know! Part of me really wants to find out what the drama’s all about, but I know I would hate plowing through it if it came up. I actually really like the way it’s handled here. Was the extra volume of Kodocha released outside the series, or as an extra bonus volume after the end of the story or something like that?

  2. Completely outside the series, if I recall rightly. It had Sana in character on the cover, but its title was the title of the drama.

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