Translation: Melissa Tanaka
On first hearing of its premise, Flying Witch sounded like secondhand Hayao Miyazaki. A teenage witch in training “packs up her belongings (including a black cat familiar) and moves in with her distant cousins in rural Aomori to complete her training and become a full-fledged witch.” But the manga is actually closer to the popular Yotsuba&!, with the lead character Makoto Kowata as the oddball outsider inserted into the lives of a nondescript family. The magic she occasionally demonstrates is mostly played for comedic effect. Every mundane thing is a source of wonder to her. Creator Chihiro Ishizuka even draws in a streamlined style reminiscent of Kiyohiko Azuma.
With a story like this, a lot depends on the lead character. This is where Flying Witch falls short. As mentioned above, Makoto doesn’t perform a lot of magic. She’s actually not supposed to talk about her abilities to the uninitiated. But the irrepressible Makoto immediately babbles to a classmate she only just met. And her one act of flying in this volume occurs when she puts a broom through its paces at the local market. Those particular scenes make an impact early on. But Makoto isn’t eccentric enough a personality to pull it off every time. Her primary character trait is that she easily gets lost. This plays to diminishing returns every time its used. And it doesn’t help that the people around her, especially most of the members of her host family, can be a little blasé about Makoto’s novice witch status.
Thankfully, the story picks up steam later when members of the magical community show up. A creature called the Harbinger of Spring looks like someone who came out of a Miyazaki feature. And a much more experienced witch drops by to demonstrate how to pull off an ancient spell to Makoto.
It's still not enough to enliven the ordinary setting. Ishizuka is sparing with the use of hyper-detailed backgrounds. The page layouts are pretty boring: rectangular panels composed mostly of talking heads, arranged in two or three tiers. The main characters are very similar in appearance and facial expression. Only Makoto’s ten year old cousin exhibits more varied reactions than the rest of her family. That’s because she’s the only one young enough to be still astonished by the revelation that witches are real, and one of them is now living under the same roof. As far as these opening chapters are concerned, Ishizuka still seems to be working out how to achieve the proper balance between the supernatural and the mundane.
