Chain Mail: Addicted To You
by Hiroshi Ishizaki

    CHAIN MAIL: ADDICTED TO YOU by Hiroshi Ishizaki
    Category:  Manga/Comics/Pop Fiction
    Age Recommendation:  Grades 6+
    Release Date:  1/9/07
    Publisher:  TokyoPop
    Reviewed by:  Mechele R. Dillard
    Rating:  4 Stars


    Hiroshi Ishizaki’s premise for this novel is an interesting one: Have characters who do not know each other writing a
    novel within a novel. Four lonely teens--Yukari, Sawako, Mai, and Mayumi--enter into the world of role playing
    through an anonymous chain e-mail, allowing them to create a fictional world in which each girl assumes the role of a
    character. The girls then write scenes from their respective character’s point of view, building a story with the
    intention of creating their own private, if fictitious, world of mystery and intrigue.

    Eventually, however, the words of the created heroine begin to ring true in the girls’ real lives: “When you talk about
    scary things, people start to think that you’re the one who’s scary” (p. 38). Only, in this case, those coming to
    consider the girls scary are not outsiders, but the girls themselves.

    CHAIN MAIL  was originally published in Japan by Kodansha Ltd., Tokyo, in 2003. It was later translated into
    English by Richard Kim and adapted by Rachel Manija Brown. While the overall concept is good, the translation
    does lapse into stilted, unnatural language on occasion, and American teens may find it hard to bond with the
    characters. From the girls’ names to the situations in which they find themselves--stressing over “cram school;”
    removing their shoes and storing them in “shoe lockers” while attending classes; Mayumi “treating herself to a bowl of
    barbecued eel over rice” (p. 107)--many American girls will be unable, initially, to relate to these characters, and may
    give up on the story too early.

    But footnotes are included for the more confusing aspects—“cram schools,” for example, are described as, “Schools
    in Japan that prepare students for university entrance examinations by way of an accelerated curriculum” (10)--and if
    the reader is willing to embrace an unfamiliar culture, she, too, may find herself slipping breathlessly into the fictitious
    world created by Ishizaki and, within its pages, the world of mystery and intrigue created by her central characters.