Maison Ikkoku - Collector's Box Vol. 3
Autumn comes to the rundown rooming house of the title, bringing not elegiac poetry, but confusion, misunderstanding, and chaos--just like every other season. Relatives play unusually important roles in the third collection of Rumiko Takahashi's popular romantic comedy. Godai's wizened grandmother arrives for a visit and immediately begins meddling in his relationships with Kyoko and Kozue. Kyoko is haunted by memories of her late husband when she receives the diary he kept during his student years, and when Soichiro, the dog they once owned together, runs away.  To everyone's surprise, the long-lost husband of the hard-drinking Mrs. Ichinose suddenly appears to attend a school festival with their son, Kentaro. An unemployed little blob of a man, he manages to come through at the last minute. But after seeing his parents together, Kentaro must be hoping he got some recessive genes.The rest of the stories unfold with the special mixture of insanity and sentiment that's madeMaison Ikokua long-running favorite in Japan and America. A series of miscommunications causes Godai to move out and find a supposedly vacant room over a pachinko parlor, with disastrous results. If the other tenants would mind their own business, life would go much more smoothly at Maison Ikoku. But if the other tenants could mind their own business, they wouldn't be living there. (Unrated, suitable for ages 13 and older: risqué humor, brief nudity, alcohol and tobacco use, slapstick violence)--Charles Solomon