Hiroki Endo is best known for his epic manga series Eden: It's An Endless World. Tanpenshu is a two-volume collection of short pieces -- "tanpenshu" translates as "short stories" -- that reveal Endo's range and a taste for the surreal elements of life.

Volume 1 is composed of three stories, beginning with "The Crows, the Girl & the Yakuza," in which a gang member fleeing from the mob takes refuge with a horribly disfigured girl who has made a promise to the crows. Aoki, the yakuza, is tracked down by the gang, but things don't go as they expect.

"Because You're Definitely a Cute Girl" in some ways recollects the movie Carrie, without the supernatural element. A young teenage girl, awakening to the world of love and sex, is confronted by her father's decision to take a lover. That and her own confusion prove to be too much for her to deal with.

"For Those of Us Who Don't Believe in God" follows a theater company as they rehearse a play about a serial killer confronted by the sister of one of his victims. Interspersed with their rehearsals are episodes from their own somewhat screwed up lives; the play and life interact to force some uncomfortable self-realizations.

Endo's visual style is pretty much comic realism, lacking the stylization of many manga, and follows a normal comic sequence of frames in order across and down the page (rather than some of the freer arrangements found in shoujo manga and in American graphic novels such as Matt Wagner's Grendel series).

The surrealism in the stories comes not from events so much as from the psychology of the characters. Perhaps it would be clearer to call it Endo's slant toward extremes of behavior. The girl in "The Crows, the Girl & the Yakuza," for example, is somewhat strange, but not unrealistically so, given her deformity and the fact that she lives alone and subsists on the trash of the city. The oddness comes from her relationship to the crows. It's an extraordinarily powerful story, when all is said and done, and carries a clear message of hope and redemption. The girl in "Because You're Definitely a Cute Girl" is, perhaps, unstable enough and confused enough by her life that the story is not terribly surprising, although not, thankfully, terribly normal. The actors in "For Those of Us Who Don't Believe in God" find themselves in situations framed by the drama they are rehearsing, itself a departure from normal reality, but the story retains a surface patina of normalcy that only underscores the unreality of the situation and the extremity of their responses.

Regrettably, Dark Horse sent only the first volume of this two-volume set, which is somewhat disappointing; it would have been far more satisfying for me to be able to discuss the entire group of stories, and I think would have made it possible for me to offer more insights into Endo's work in this area.

As it stands, however, if you've discovered manga -- and even if you haven't -- Tanpenshu offers a good look at some of the possibilities of the form.