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Amazon.com: Land of the Blindfolded - Volume 7 (Land of the Blindfolded (Graphic Novels)): Books: Sakura TsukubaI like CMX, I like the titles they choose to publish. Put they hit one of my pet peeves with land of the blindfolded. They changed the design of the spines on the books halfway through! Books one through five have white spines with a bit "CMX" on the top, a little thumbnail image on the bottom and then the volume number in a white, large font against a green. Then books six through nine have green spines with a little logo on top and a little volume number in a dark green half circle. That means when they're lined up on a shelf together they don't match and look like two different series. This has nothing to do with the quality of this book, but it annoys me. And now to talk about the book.
In Land of the Blindfolded there are people who are born with talents to read the future in the past. Kanade sees flashes of people's future when she touches them, she can't control it so she never knows when it might happen. Arou can read the past with a touch and has great control. Namaki can see the future like Kanade but can control it turning it on and off with a touch. By this book they've mostly come to grips with their abilities.
Kanade even goes so far as to decide to confess to her best friend Eri about her abilities. At the same time Arou's uncle, his mother's brother, Sou turns up after a seven year absence. He invites them all, Eri and her boyfriend, Namaki, Kanade and Arou to a hot spring. He shows Arou to a house where his deceased mother had lived. By touching places and things she touched in the house Arou can see glimpses of his mother, which is a siren call he has battled since he was child.
They seem like really simple storylines, a confession and a temptation, to take up a whole book. There was a cute fall festival chapter that got the ball rolling on the entwined storylines, but it is mostly Arou sitting in a room by himself and Kanade trying to get Eri alone so she can confess. Tsukuba is good at slowly building tension without making the story drag or feel boring. I don't think many could pull that off. I like the subtle hint of threat she gives to Sou at the end to hook you into the next book. It's not a cliffhanger, but it defintely makes you want to read the next one even though there isn't a current obvious storyline that carries over to the next book. Oh! And two people manage to do the old "opps wrong gender bath!" mistake, for a little fanservice.
I really like the artwork in this series. This volume is fun because, between the fall festival and hot spring, there were a lot of kimonos and yukata. The girls look cute and the boys look handsome (and you can even mostly tell them apart!) I'm especially how the expressions are done. Tsukuba uses her characters' eyes to do most of the work. They narrow, widen, go blank, distant, or intense, usually with the clever application of screentone and detail. Instead of using super deformed characters to express extreme emotion, she'll just deform their eyes turning them into dots, dashes or making them disappear completely. It's very engaging and expressive without being distracting.
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