Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru (SoreMachi: And Yet the Town Moves)

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Synonyms: SoreMachi

Japanese: それでも町は廻っている

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Information

Type: Manga

Volumes: 16

Chapters: 130

Status: Finished

Published: Mar 30, 2005 to Oct 28, 2016

Genres: Award Winning, Slice of Life

Demographic: Seinen

Serialization: Young King OURs

Authors: Ishiguro, Masakazu (Story & Art)

Statistics

Score: 8.13¹ (scored by 2,561 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #534²

² based on the top manga page. Please note that 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #2057

Members: 10,220

Favorites: 405

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Wikipedia

8.13

Ranked #534Popularity #2057Members 10,220

MangaYoung King OURsIshiguro, Masakazu (Story & Art)

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Volumes: /16

Chapters: /130

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Synopsis

Hotori Arashiyama is an average high school girl; that is, if the definition of "average" includes having an obsession with detective novels and working at a maid cafe to pay off an enormous debt incurred from years of eating "free" curry. Whenever she is not working, she can be seen hanging out with her friends, taking care of her younger siblings, or annoying her math teacher. However, while she lives the fairly run-of-the-mill life of a teenager, she is no stranger to the paranormal and unexplained.

Sprinkled in with Hotori's everyday antics are occasional run-ins with the supernatural—including taking an unexpected tour of Heaven, discovering a ray gun that creates giant holes, and accidentally interfering in a dispute between some aliens. In addition, she tends to spontaneously investigate cases that strike her fancy, like uncovering the true purpose of some paintings left in a will, identifying a strange man walking the hospital grounds, and going on a treasure hunt in a far-off village.

Hotori manages to find herself in the middle of some strange circumstances, and yet the town moves on in spite of the oddity of it all.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Background

Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru won the Excellence Award in the Manga Division at the 17th Japan Media Arts Festival in 2013. In 2018, the manga was also awarded the Seiun Award for Best Comic, and ranked 20th in the Kono Manga ga Sugoi! for the Male Readers division.

The series was published digitally in English as And Yet, The Town Moves by Crunchyroll. It was also published as SoreMachi: And Yet the Town Moves by Shonen Gahosha through Manga Planet from May 20, 2020, to May 26, 2021. The manga was released in Chinese by Ever Glory Publishing Co., Ltd. from October 18, 2006, and November 13, 2020; and in Italian as Eppur... la città si muove! by GP Publishing from June 23, 2012, to October 20, 2012—with the company only publishing the first three volumes.

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Characters

Arashiyama, Hotori

Main

Kon, Futaba

Main

Tatsuno, Toshiko

Main

Sanada, Hiroyuki

Main

Isohata, Uki

Main

Josephine

Supporting

Moriaki, Natsuhiko

Supporting

Kameidou, Shizuka

Supporting

Haribara, Harue

Supporting

Sanada, Yuuji

Supporting

Reviews

Jan 4, 2017

Maggot_Brain

Recommended

This manga deserves more reviews, and so I am writing one.

The synopsis gives a good description of the events at the beginning- the first 2, 3 chapters. I will be clear that this is not a romance manga and there will be no resolution to any love stories. I wish it was not so, but things stay exactly the same at the end as they were in the beginning- apart from Hotori moving to her 3rd year of high school and one of her seniors (Kon-senpai) graduating.

The characters are where the real charm of SoreMachi lies. You have the Arashiyama family, the 3 regulars to ...

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Jul 3, 2021

Ryan_Melvin15

Recommended

There's something really special about Soremachi as a manga that really gets me. A manga from the talented Masakazu Ishiguro, it has gone pretty much unnoticed among the Western community but has gotten critically great reception and awards from Japan, winning the Excellence award for the Japanese Media Arts Festival in 2015 and amazingly, the best scifi manga in the Seiun Awards.

People say slice of life as a series can get boring over time but Soremachi has proved that wrong time and time again. In Soremachi, you follow the charismatic and bumbling but lovable fool of a character in Hotori Arashiyama - a high ... school student working in a maid cafe for 3 years of her high school life. That's it. Yet, the story of Hotori's life throughout these 3 years is so well-done, seamlessly weaving through her life - interacting with the many characters, solving various mysteries and dramas, and just living her life her own way. What really stands out is the growth of Hotori in these 3 years, you can truly feel that she has evolved as a person the more you read the manga and by the end, I couldn't help having tears in my eyes like a proud father watching her daughter grow up.

What Soremachi does right, among many things is quite simply knowing how to nail slice of life in the best way. The series is full of life with many diverse characters from all walks of life in the small bustling town of Maruko Shopping District. And they aren't cookie-cutter characters either, but characters that have their own story, personalities, quirks and charm to them with great interactions with the main cast. They have their own families, brothers and sisters as well as parents which do not magically disappear like most manga do. It feels so goddamn organic and that's why they feel so real as well as the town itself and the moment I flipped the last page, I already have missed the characters like they were my very own family.

The many stories in this series really appeal to me. They never come off as generic but instead feels natural with every chapter building up to a certain event in a future chapter and there's this feeling of continuity that is oh so satisfying. Some chapters can be real emotional and some can be super funny. This mix really shows the many colours of life one can go through and it never gets old. The comedy in this series as well is top notch. It stands out simply because it is so different (and much better) from the many romcoms and SOL type of comedy out there. There are no cheap and overused gags with random references but very smart comedy with a lot of buildup which gets so satisfying when you reach the punchline. I adore this kind of comedy, smart and interesting.

Lastly, this series has this amazing blend of what is already amazing SOL elements with surrealistic and sci-fi elements as well. It's a masterpiece in a sense that it never feels out of place when something out of the ordinary happens and that I felt that it actually suits the town in a way. It's hard to describe but it really does feel special and I always smile reading these chapters and how genius it turns out to be.

I urge everyone to try giving this a read and def stick with it for a few volumes or more for this manga as the introduction of the characters happen early on. Once I started getting into more chapters, this is when Soremachi really started being a masterpiece. You know it's a great manga when it all ends and that emptiness starts filling your heart as you leave the town of Soremachi behind - and yet the town moves.

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Jul 27, 2023

William278

Recommended

Like standing next to a hot oven after coming in from a cold, damp day, SoreMachi: And Yet The Town Moves is soothing wonder. It's a timeless must-read manga that deserves far better than it has gotten in the west.

While many slice of life manga fixate themselves on the daily routine of ordinary people, SoreMachi concerns itself with the extraordinary—and maintains an obsession not just with relationships, but with the invisible glue that binds together the balance of human interaction.

SoreMachi features an ensemble cast, that gradually unfurls itself as the chapters go by. Friends, townsfolk, teachers—not to mention a dash of the supernatural—fill the world, ... beautifully realized by the talented Masakazu Ishiguro ("Heavenly Delusion"). At the center of its ambitious cast is the lovable Hotori Arashiyama, who is clutzy and airheaded—but never stupid—and movingly ambitious. Impressively, both in design and personality, every character is amazingly distinct. Ishiguro draws round faces with big expressions, bigger mouths and even bigger hearts. Love triangles form, friendships falter, and the town changes at the whim of its residents.

Seeping through the lines of the comic cell borders is an occasional air of mystery and unknown. One chapter involves a ray-gun from an alien civilization; another tackles the the misadventures of a character's pursuit of a mystery sweet left behind by a time traveler from the future. Ishiguro portrays these themes with a dreamlike quality that challenges the reality and canon of the world he creates. It's left ambiguous whether such events really occurred, and the lines between truth and fiction within its word are frequently left blurry. Perhaps it's all just in Hotori's head? Or perhaps that's what *they* want you to think...

Time is both the least and most important element of SoreMachi. While there is a canonical timeline of events, the manga is presented achronologically. Chapters flow continuously into the next at times, while others cut back and forth across the story. In one chapter, Hotori has a haircut go wrong, leading to her cutting her hair short; a moment whose butterfly effect ripples through the space-time (by which, I mean, paper) of the rest of the manga. The progression in SoreMachi, then, doesn't necessarily materialize within the characters so much as it does in the understanding the reader has *of* the characters and the relations between them. Is Hotori a better person at the end of everything? Sure. Does Kon open up as the manga progresses? Absolutely. But the true genius here is the way in which it compels the reader to understand and appreciate different people, their perspectives, what makes them tick, their mannerisms and worldviews. In a polarizing age where hate dominates so much of human discourse, this resonated with me in a profound way.

This ties into Ishiguro's remarks in the afterword of the first volume. In it, he talks about how through his work he aimed to write a "textbook on communication," with the manga is largely based on his own experiences moving to a new part of Tokyo. After just ten chapters, SoreMachi earns the right to call itself a textbook, but perhaps more fascinatingly stays consistently relevant a hundred chapters later—which is over ten years in publishing time. Being released over the epoch (2005-2016) of society's digital upheaval, I found myself in awe at how I never felt it dated like so many of its contemporaries. I feel like this is a work you could read at any age and get something different out of it. In this regard, it's less of a textbook and more of a bible.

SoreMachi ends just as thoughtfully as it begins. It leaves you little empty. It makes you smile a little. It makes you cry a little. It's not overly conclusive, necessarily dramatic, or overwhelmingly loud even. But it's there, and those last few pages will live with me for a long time.

In summary: Rarely a page was turned without me having to correct the smile that had formed between each of my ears to ward off strange looks from others in public. In a way, I think that element of wariness about people judging me for a smile sort of represents this manga perfectly; it's confusing underappreciation in the west could be attributed to poor luck with licensors, but ultimately I think it's case of people rolling their eyes.

Whether just a hundred or a billion people have read SoreMachi, though, doesn't ultimately matter; the manga is brilliant all the same. It's a cult classic, just without the cult. Even so, the town moves—and I hope the passage of time treats these words as kindly as it has to Ishiguro's quiet masterpiece. Maid-o.

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Poll: Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru Chapter 137 Discussion gedata - Oct 22, 2016	7 replies	by HibiChika »» Jan 8, 2023 11:09 AM
Poll: Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru Chapter 79 Discussion HibiChika - Jan 7, 2023	0 replies	by HibiChika »» Jan 7, 2023 5:08 AM
Poll: Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru Chapter 29 Discussion hellogoodbye - Mar 22, 2013	2 replies	by Ryan_Melvin15 »» Jun 18, 2022 5:26 PM
Poll: Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru Chapter 1 Discussion Eris-w- - Sep 8, 2020	1 replies	by Gosplan14 »» Apr 1, 2022 7:26 PM
Poll: Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru Chapter 138 Discussion gedata - Nov 5, 2016	32 replies	by Ackackack »» Mar 3, 2022 5:55 AM

Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru
SoreMachi: And Yet the Town Moves
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