Count Five To Dream Of You – Review

Last September it was released in Italy for BAO Publishing this brand new manga written and illustrated by the award-winning artist Machiko Kyo. A single volume that tells the story of a group of idolthe Five Stars, who find themselves having to face the many impositions that the ruthless world of entertainment has in store for them. Despite being inspired by Tokyo Girls’ Style, Japanese musical band formed in 2009, and despite bearing the same names, the five members of the group are the fruit of the author’s imagination, who has given life, once again, to an exceptional work, of the same caliber as her previous ones Cocoon And Distance Watashi no #stayhome nikki: an unpublished story between dream and reality, which we at Akiba Gamers we have read and reviewed for you!

The story does not follow a real plot and is divided into five chapters (plus an extra entitled The dream continues)each of which is told from the point of view of one of the different members of the musical group: we have AyanoThen Miyu, Mei, Yuri and finally Hitomi. Each of them lives and deals with the fact of being one idol in a completely different wayand this mainly depends on the different aspirations and dreams that each of them has for the future, as well as on the interpersonal relationships that the girls have with their neighbors. What they have in common is certainly their lively spirit, due to their young age, combined with a great desire to grow and discover life and the world.

On this shore there is reality. On the other, the dream.

As mentioned above, the protagonists are very different from each other and this is reflected in their way of living the experience as a idolbetween passion and joy of dedicating oneself to something pleasant on the one hand, and worries and responsibilities that derive from this profession on the other. There are numerous metaphors that Machiko Kyo uses to represent the emotions of the five girls and to leave the reader with an implicit moral, susceptible to various interpretations.

This is how, therefore, the themes of fear, death, the end of one’s career are discussed, but also growth and maturation, the aspiration for perfection, the dream as opposed to reality; we also talk about appearance and fiction, which often characterize the world of entertainment, we deal with disappointments in love and the lack of freedom. The strong point of this josei in my opinion lies in knowing how to talk about many current topics that revolve around the world of men and women idolbut which also characterize the life of today’s young people in general and which can be summed up in one continuous struggle between the desire for normality and that of standing out from the crowd, one contradiction which the author highlights well and also mentions in the afterword of the work.

Simple, but impactful

From a technical point of view, we can notice a a trait absolutely marked by simplicity and to minimalism, through which the mangaka realize tables with little attention to detail, with stylized figures and almost completely absent backgrounds. This is the style that the author prefers, whose the intent is to ensure that the reader focuses on the depth of the dialogues (whether direct or internal) and on certain evocative images which, paradoxically, only thin and confusing lines are capable of highlighting. At an editorial level we can express a appreciation for the quality of the paper usedthick and soft at the same time; noteworthy is the dust jacket and the first color pages, made with a mix of warm and cold shades rendered in a watercolor pastel style.

Perhaps the price of €9.90 is a little above average, but both the format, a little larger than usual (21 x 15), and the number of pages (176) must be considered, in addition to the fact that a once the volume in question is purchased, the story ends as it does not open a series.

Who do we recommend Count Five To Dream Of You to?

Count Five To Dream Of You it’s the manga right for you if you love music, dance and the world of entertainment in general, but it’s also right for you if you like the sea, flowers and cats! It’s a a story apparently made of lightheartedness, which however contains more in-depth reflections; in short, a path to be taken trying to understand who we really are and what our role is in the world, even though the future and difficulties can put us to the test and scare us.