うみべの女の子

UMIBE NO ONNANOKO

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
2
RELEASE
January 8, 2013
CHAPTERS
20

DESCRIPTION

Koume Sato and Keisuke Isobe are two teenagers living in a sleepy seaside town. After getting used and dumped by her crush, the emotionally damaged Koume decides to start a sexual relationship with Keisuke, without any emotions involved. However, they both soon discover that sex with no strings attached leads to unexpected complications, not just for themselves but also the people surrounding them.

CAST

Keisuke Isobe
Koume Satou
Keiko Kobayashi
Shouta Kashima
Sanzaki Misaki

CHAPTERS

REVIEWS

BloomReviews
80/100
Inio Asano brings us a story of adolescent love, sex, and mental illness between two middle school friends.
From the creator of Oyasumi Punpun, Inio Asano brings us a story of adolescent love, sex, and mental illness between two middle school friends. Originally published in Manga Erotics F, it was picked up for western publication by Vertical where they released all 20 chapters in one omnibus version. I honestly haven’t had to chance to check out Punpun for myself yet, but if it’s anything like A Girl on the Shore, I’m excited to see what kind of story Asano crafts and what kind of art he presents us with. After reading this manga, I almost want to say that this was what I was looking for when I went into Scum’s Wish, a gritty story about casual sex between two people who have a relationship complicated by fear and mental illness. And, while it doesn’t hold back on its displays of sex and exploration, I never felt like these scenes were there purely for our titillation rather they acted as a key component in our understanding of these two juvenile’s relationship to themselves and each other.

A Girl on the Shore follows the lives of two middle school students, Koume and Keisuke, as they develop a relationship based around casual sex and the need for something more. Koume looks to Keisuke as a rebound companion after the playboy Misaki loses interest in her, but soon finds herself enjoying their time together. Keisuke has confessed his love for Koume multiple times before, and agrees to help her get over the self-involved Misaki, but things quickly become clouded as the anniversary of his brother’s suicide fast approaches.

One of the best things about this manga is definitely the art. I was looking back over some information about Inio Asano and his art style, and there was some talk about him editing photographs in order to make more detailed backgrounds. I’m not sure if he used the same technique here, but almost all of the backgrounds I saw in this manga were highly detailed to the point where a few did make me question if they were actually photographs. The amount of detail and the almost photographic quality of the backgrounds add to the realistic feeling of the whole manga, supporting the impression that this is a story about real teenagers in the real world. In contrast, the character designs can be fairly simple especially when it comes to faces, yet I don’t think Asano really skimps out on his facial expressions. Koume and Keisuke go through many moments of high emotion and Asano manages to capture that fairly well in how much detail he chooses to add to a face.
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atomx
100/100
Inio Asano's controversial masterpiece
Review contains spoilers.

"Wanna see if I can fit my arm up your pussy?" 
"...what?" 
"I want to drink your pee." 
"or eat your shit, I don't care but I'm serious"

In 2009 Inio Asano would start publishing what would become his most controversial manga in Manga Erotics F, a magazine for "artsy sex comics" where authors such as Jiro Matsumoto and Usamaru Furuya had previously published their works.

Reading reviews of it, one will instantly note how dividing this work is. Reviews ranging from "I gave this manga a 10/10 across the board because I believe that the story is excellent" to "Umibe No Onnanoko is quite possibly the worst piece of literature" left me intrigued by what possibly could be so amazing/terrible about this manga.

Failed relationships, shitty family members and depression aren't new themes for Asano but the plot for Girl on the Shore takes us to a new setting that isn't a crowded modern city full of people.

Koume and Isobe are 15 year old teenagers who live in a seaside town in the middle of nowhere. School is boring and the only thing that seems to distract from it, is having sex with eachother. From the start of the manga it becomes very clear how dependent both teens are on eachother: Koume needs Isobe to feel wanted and liked after her relationship with a local playboy fails and Isobe desperately needs someone to remind him that he has a right to exist.

Both characters have no goals in life and live purely based on their current feelings without even being able to understand them. Dialogue between Koume and Isobe feels awkward and painful. Isobe spouts about how terrible the world is while sounding like a teenager who just got his first copy of "Thus spoke Zarathrusta" and Koume talks about escaping from their boring life without even really knowing where to go. Both of them are very immature but try their hardest to seem grown up.

“Sex with love is an illusion, y'know!!”

The most striking thing in the whole manga is Isobe and Koume's sexual relationship. Not because both of them are only 15 years old but because it is completely devoid of love. Sex between them is not a romantic act of passion but a way for both of them to explore what is going in their mind and with their bodies. It is a desperate attempt from them to feel anything in this town that is just as empty as they are. 
May it be masturbating in front of someone or eating someones shit, what Asano draws is not made for pleasure but as an attempt to show how these teens cope with their situation and how they manipulate each other. 
Regardless of the fact that these are teens, the sex scenes are simply not erotic: they are awkward and messy, immature and experimental, and most of all they are normal. 
Asano has said in interviews that sex is not a taboo for him. It's normal for him to draw a character eating lunch and them having sex in the next panel. Sex is the most normal thing in the world, so why be surprised that it is in a normal manga.

It is totally fine to dislike the sexual scenes or feel uncomfortable by them but dismissing the whole manga as “hentai” is ignorant and immature.

  "In town, there's a tiny beach that's never busy, not even in the summer... You basically never find what you were expecting to. And maybe you weren't expecting to find anything right from the start..."

Koume and Isobe never end up together, what could have ended in a beautiful relationship with both of them overcoming their issues ends in another broken relationship for Koume and Isobe's childish dream of finally getting to meet the Girl on the Shore.
 What Asano tries to tell us is that life is like a shore. Things come and go, new people come along and with them come new memories and new emotions. But these things don't always stay, some of them get washed away never to be seen again. Everyday we experience new things that we would have never thought of, good and bad. Everything in life is temporary, we change and things come and go just like the storm that severs Isobe and Koume's relationship. 
What's for sure is that the sea does not stop flowing and storms will come and go, don't give up on your dreams, find new ones and make sure not to lose sight of the future, for it is the only thing that is certain.  
__ "In the end there is something bigger than everything else... The Sea!!"__
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arborday
80/100
A simple story gives us time to appreciate the little things.
The first panel of A Girl on the Shore, is the thin gradient of a sky. Asano's backgrounds are derived from photos he takes, and converts to black and white before adding his own details and shading. To contrast this gorgeous, impossible-by-hand-alone haze of clouds, two manga speech bubbles float alone in the aether. Down below, on the ground, Koume Sato confesses to Keisuke Inobe, beginning the primary relationship of the manga.

In isolation the photo-derived backgrounds could sound lazy (if one didn't know about Asano's own additions to them), but as you flip the page and see the dense panel composition, panels all shoved together with speech bubbles often poking out the edges, each one with its own unique background with its own unique details, and the character art, so rich with detail and expression, that kind of impression is instantly washed away. There's a million candid idle shots in this manga - getting schoolbooks, sharing glances, simply staring off into the distance - but each is done with such a wonderful care that a slow ambling reading is rewarded. Both natural features and inanimate objects are rendered beautifully every time.

The story, to offset this, is simple - poignant! - but simple. Keisuke Inobe is an utter shut-in; absent parents and a witness to family tragedy and relentless bullying have formed him into a young man who seems to loathe humanity. He aspires toward kindness but, having never truly had it in his life, has no point of reference. Koume Sato is a growing woman reaching the same conclusion of Inobe by the opposite logic; she is so steeped in the artifice and humdrum of adolescence, school culture, and toxic men, that she struggles to find authentic connection with anyone.

For a time they complete each other's malformed desires by entering a relationship, as they make the grand leap into high school.

And, on the off-chance a reader has never heard of this manga I should clarify that it does contain sexual acts between 14/15 year olds. It gets genuinely uncomfortable and this is an understandable deal breaker, but in my mind there is little attempt at latent eroticism here. The scenes of sex are brutish communications between two people who want very deeply to be in their ideal of a relationship, but find themselves unable to due to their own inhibitions. It's painful to see them - and a surprisingly rich albeit small cast of side characters - go through the motions of teen romance, at that stage of life where each and every thing is a world ending theatre of catastrophe.

If you grew up in a quiet town where the greatest entertainment was inside one's own head, if you fell in love with a teenager before really understanding the devotion it requires - hell, if you just love beautiful penmanship and bumbling, heartbreaking, life-affirming dialogue and scenery - you will get something out of this manga. Highly recommended!
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