Captain Momo’s Secret Base (2023) manga review
Kenji Tsuruta’s slow-burning space story where nudity, books, and cats fill the void of isolation
Editor’s note: all manga pages in this review are read from right to left in the traditional Japanese fashion.
Alone aboard the space freighter Blue Chateau, Moshi-Moshi Momo sits upon piles and piles of books, working out how to make sure the ship and its cargo reach their interstellar destination with the limited resources available. It’s a lousy job, but somebody’s gotta do it.
There are perks, though: Momo, being the only human aboard the ship, never has to wear clothes except for the few times when she checks in with her boss. The sheer number of old books around her means there’s always something to read. She has VR games to play, vintage model trains to build, and she tweaked the onboard meal replicator to create things for her besides food, like more books!
Oh, and she’s not actually alone: always underfoot is Grandpa John, a mysterious cat who stowed away on the ship and has become Momo’s sole companion. She considers him the ship’s first officer, though how useful he is in the role is debatable.
Captain Momo’s Secret Base is a fun little manga volume by Kenji Tsuruta, which, according to his postscript, was created over the span of a dozen years for a magazine called Rakuen three times a year in eight-page installments. Tsuruta refers to it as a hitahita manga, with hitahita translating roughly to the sound of waves lapping against the shore, just enough water to submerge an object, or something done in short order. All of these translations kind of work in describing the manga. While its short chapters are easy to read through, the story (as much of one as there is) takes its time, as does Momo herself. Yes, there’s the possibility of her running out of oxygen, of the ship not having enough power for the trip, but neither Tsuruta, Momo, nor Grandpa John is all that bothered by it, nor are they in any hurry to fix the problem. The art has a fresh, loose feeling to it, as though it were casually made whenever Tsuruta had the time to spare between other projects, and it’s written and drawn with a lot of humor.
Despite the amount of time it took for each chapter to come together in one volume, it feels very contemporary: Momo’s situation feels familiar these days, after the world momentarily shut down during the (still ongoing) Covid pandemic, especially the pivot to work-from-home jobs and frequent isolation we all experienced. Momo’s sole human interactions are basically Zoom meetings with her boss, and Tsuruta even includes a gag where Momo forgets that she’s naked below the waist in one chapter during their meeting. The company she works for feels like so many others these days: stripped down to the bare essentials, pinching every penny they can in order to maximize profits. The ship is old, with a crew of one, and only just enough fuel to make the trip, so long as nothing goes awry. Momo is frequently figuring out how to conserve power; things frequently break down or don’t work at all. Having just recently taken up a retail job with one of the largest bookstores in the United States and experiencing firsthand how bare its operations are, I can relate to how disillusioned Momo can be.
It’s worth mentioning that this manga really isn’t all that out of character for Tsuruta at all: Momo looks like nearly all of his female protagonists from previous works, and cats always show up too. Heck, I have a double-sided poster of a couple of illustrations he did for Shin Godzilla, and he included a cat and a similar-looking bikini-clad woman in those! The man knows what he likes to draw. That said, I’m always kind of bummed when an artist only seems to draw one specific (and conventionally attractive) body type, especially with women.
There’s also the question of the male gaze: on the one hand, Momo’s nudity and casual behavior, often sitting with her legs wide open, suits her character and her isolation. After all, she doesn’t have to worry about manners or other people. In a way, she’s feral, and not unlike Grandpa John the cat in how she chooses to live aboard the Blue Chateau. On the other hand, it feels a bit gratuitous. She’s drawn frequently in full, her body filling the pages, with her pubic hair being quite prominent throughout. It’s not by any means off-putting, it’s just something I think about constantly as an artist myself when drawing and painting nudes, and it’s admittedly a very subjective thing in this case. Nothing explicit is taking place, but I can’t help but feel just a little voyeuristic when I flip through the manga’s pages, especially since we have no way of knowing if this is how Momo would behave in any social settings, if it’s how she herself would want to be seen.
I mean, either way, if I were in Momo’s position, stuck in space on an old ship with a cat, I’d be behaving exactly the same way. But with more sneezing because I have allergies.
Captain Momo’s Secret Base was published last year by Dark Horse, and is available in physical and digital formats. It’s an easy, but entertaining read. It’s labeled as volume one, but there’s no telling whether or not we’ll get any more like it in the future, especially considering how long it took Tsuruta to produce these pages. That just means you should take your time with it, like one would watching the gentle lapping of waves on a beach shore. 🪐
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