Review By Jong Chung
Spice & Wolf is Isuna Hasekura's debut work, which was first published by ASCII Media Works under their Dengeki Bunko imprint in Feb 10, 2006. Since then, there have been a total of 13 volumes in print . We are able to enjoy the Spice & Wolf series in English thanks to Yen Press' ever-impressive efforts.
Many images may run through one's head simply by reading the title and looking at the cover. Couple that with the tagline “Merchant meats spicy wolf” and I can imagine it may be of one of the most violent acts of wolf consumption yet.
Among other things, Spice & Wolf is a very charming story of a young (or old, depending on your perspective) veteran merchant named Kraft Lawrence, the mysterious (and self-proclaimed) Holo the wisewolf and their travels. Now... readers here may or may not have seen the book at their local bookstore. For the uninitiated... one might wonder, having seen the cover, what it could possibly have to do with Anime and Manga. Well first, the work is considered a light novel in Japan. It had a distinct cover that one could even mistake for a manga. That is, save for the fact that light novels are printed in a tiny book-format in Japan, roughly the size of one's hand. So how did this change occur?
While we may think otherwise due to the size of the communities of English speaking Anime/Manga fans online, it is not all that widely known in the US. Not enough so that light novels sell well without any assistance, in any case. The cover change is one such support that Yen Press felt was necessary in order to not alienate the non-fan. For those of us that have seen and loved the original cover, Yen Press kindly put the original cover as a dust jacket insert in the December issue of their print magazine, Yen Plus. If it is still available, these can be found where your bookstores stock magazines if not the manga section.
Since the Haruhi Suzumiya series, the trend of giving popular light novel series anime adaptations has boomed over the past few years. Spice and Wolf is no exception, and rightfully so. The series, for all intents and purposes fall under the familiar genre of fantasy. However, it fits neither extremes of high fantasy or grim/macabre fantasy, while yet keeping away from the expected “swords and sorcery” type of stories, one would expect from any other fantasy sub genre. Spice and Wolf follows the tale of a merchant and his newly found companion in the form of a wolf-turned-woman and their journey to the ultimate destination of Holo's homeland, Yoitsu. While they do run into troubles along the way via various forms, (rival merchants, travels through dangerous woods in an escort “quest,” or even the church) the story finds action is a more unique fashion than most of us are used to: economics.
I cannot make any bold claims that one will enjoy Spice & Wolf if they did not like economics classes in high school or college. Volume one follows one story “arc” of Kraft's run in with another merchant's information about profit to be had in a change of currency in the near future. To clarify, the information has to do with the change of purity found in one of the coin currencies in the world of Spice & Wolf, known as a Trenni coin. Kraft goes through several venues and with the aid of Holo's ability to discern lies from the truth, tries to find out whether he could truly make profit off of this or not. If your heads are tilted sideways with tongues lolling out, I would not recommend this series to you. At least not in the light novel form, in any case. The anime (in Japanese dub) does offer what the novels are unable to. Obviously, the most important thing would be visual action. If one considers the type of trouble Kraft goes through in the first volume, most of the action is to be had in the conversations and interactions between characters, which is rather intriguing, at least for myself. Another important point is the manner of speaking. Literally.
This is a bit of personal preference, but one can only truly enjoy Holo's archaic manner of speech through the anime more so than the translated novels. It is difficult to portray the same kind of language in English I would think. Thus, in the English version of the novel, Holo's manner of speech only sounds like a half way point between modern and Shakespearean language.
For the impatient, the review can be summed as such: For those looking for high-flying, sword-swinging, bow-slinging action–sit this one out, it most certainly does not cater to those tastes. For those who can appreciate depth of character interaction and the general lack of physical action (Oh! And can appreciate a bit of economics here and there) then this book is more than worth a read by any account.
Look forward to more volumes of Spice & Wolf to follow in 2010 from Yen Press.
© 2009 Linda Thai
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