Satoko and Nada

today was a random pickup that turned out to be very fun. Satoko and Nada is a 4 koma manga with words and art by Yupechika with the help of a Muslim journalist named Marie Nishimori. Apparently originally published on seikaisha's 4-koma twitter account, Seven Seas started publishing it in English at the end of 2018.

According to Anime News Network this is Yupechika's debut work and I could not find that much else easily accessible to an English monolingual. Nishimori on the other hand, is described in the Metal Archive as a Japanese journalist and translator, born in the UK to a Dutch father and Japanese mother Nishimori also speaks Arabic and is a Muslim. Who is in the Metal Archive because they've translated about a dozen metal songs from the 90's. Talk about random and awesome!

The official description of this first volume is as follows: A charming fictional manga about the friendship between a Japanese woman and her Muslim roommate! Satoko, who is Japanese, has a new roommate in America: a Saudi Arabian woman named Nada, who practices Islam and wears a hijab. While under the same roof, Satoko and Nada learn how to live together with very different customs and still have all the fun young women crave! Through mutual respect—and the hilarious adventures of their daily life—Satoko and Nada prove that friendship knows no borders.

While that perhaps sounds a bit preachy and/or contrived - aka globalization brainwashing perhaps - I thought the end product was pretty well executed. It certainly helps that both of these women are coming from somewhere else and meeting in a location that neither of them grew up in. Instead of feeling like one is the inside and the other is the outsider, both women are learning about America and each other at the same rate. And as fairly standard with 4-koma comics (in my limited experience anyway) everything is pretty light and fluffy, making it a very pleasant (not preachy) read.

Not deeply intricate or detailed, Satoko and Nada definitely leans a bit more towards the simple side of things artistically speaking. As with most comics that skillfully leans this way, strategic detail helps direct the reader's eyes to what's important. And the art is overall just not the most important thing, but it's done well.

Not the most intersectional comic so far, the cultural differences are clearly where the focus is going (besides the fact that all characters are female identifying). I really would not be surprised if sexuality in particular is not touched upon, despite the fact that I've seen more then one headline about American Muslims being statistically more OK with LGBTQ2S+ then American Christians. It's still a pretty touchy subject and this book does seem to try and avoid serious controversy. IDK.

Otherwise, if you want a more serious read - have you read Persepolis yet? And on the TV front you have CBC's Little Mosque on the Prairie.