Tesla Note GN 1 – Review

Oslo, Norway is probably not one of the places you expect to be the setting for a science-fiction spy caper manga, but that’s precisely where most of the action of Tesla Note‘s first volume takes place. The reason for this is that Norway is where the first of an unknown number of artifacts known as “Tesla Fragments” pops up, and it immediately begins teleporting speeding vehicles into its vicinity, causing untold deaths and panic. Who could possibly help to stop this disaster? Because this is manga, the answer is, of course, a seventeen-year-old high school girl named Botan.

Botan Negoro has been raised by her grandfather to be a ninja, or in more modern terminology and interpretation, a superspy. We don’t entirely know how she feels about this, but there’s some implication that she may be concerned that it’s robbed her of a normal childhood. Part of her training has been to be completely inconspicuous, and that means not making friends or being noticed by her classmates, and certainly no fun after-school activities. In fact, when Botan gets to Norway, she remarks that it’s her first time out of Gifu Prefecture, never mind the country. She’s giddy at the thought of getting to try foods she’s seen on the internet or walk around a new place, and it’s not hard to see that this, plus the scars revealed when she wears short sleeves, speak of a very grueling, not terribly fun life.

Whether this contributes to her relatively miserable people skills is up for debate; it could just as easily be that Kuruma, her new partner, is the most obnoxious human being on the planet. He doesn’t appear to have had a similar upbringing to Botan, because he’s very much shocked by each new reveal about her past. It clearly never occurred to him that someone would raise a child in the way that Botan was brought up. That actually becomes an interesting theme in this volume across two separate chapters of the Oslo storyline – Botan is obviously the main case, but after they more or less resolve the train portion of the case, wherein a high-speed train suddenly materializes downtown with a cargo of gruesomely dead passengers (this makes up the first episode of the anime adaptation), they track down the whereabouts of the Tesla Fragment. It’s in the possession of a child named Petter, whose father has him picking pockets as a way to bring in income. Botan very quickly empathizes with Petter. Nominally this is because he’s also a child being forced to function in ways no child should have to, but there’s also a link in that his mother has died – and Botan, it is implied, still feels the loss of her own mother very keenly.

Petter’s story is in some ways more interesting and developed than the more stock train of the dead plotline of the first chapter. In large part that’s because it deals with a subject that we don’t often see in action manga – Petter is biracial and his father, a Black man who married a white Norwegian woman, is unable to find work because of his race. This has forced him to take out a loan from a very shady group, and in his attempts to pay it back he’s turned to using his child as a thief. Omar’s problem is very specifically spelled out – he’s discriminated against because of his skin and the fact that he’s an immigrant. We don’t know what that has meant for Petter beyond the fact that he’s being made to steal, but even just this small bit of information is enough to give Tesla Note‘s first volume a bit more to stand on than it might otherwise have had. That’s not to say that this is brilliantly handled; it lacks subtlety and isn’t hugely well-developed. But it also gives us a break from Botan and Kuruma’s bickering and is prevalent enough in the real world to ground things a bit more than the main plot of “Nikola Tesla used magic crystals to hide his inventions.”

Because the anime adaptation made some questionable artistic choices, it’s worth mentioning that the manga is much more attractive on the art front. Although it has an overreliance on weird outfits (something the text acknowledges; it’s not just my opinion calling them odd) and beauty marks for main characters, it does manage to come up with distinct character designs for everyone and there’s a decent sense of space and action. Angles don’t always work, particularly where Botan is involved, but they aren’t overtly fanservicey, which they very easily could have been. Faces made by the characters are deliberately ugly and don’t really work as the humor they’re plainly meant to be, but overall it looks much better than its adaptation, which landed in English ahead of this book.

Tesla Note‘s first volume isn’t a ground-breaking revelation in the spy genre. It can be irritating, particularly when Botan and Kuruma are interacting. But it’s also a decent amount of fun and it tries to branch out beyond its genre to look at some more serious, real-world issues, and that works a bit better than you might expect. It’s a perfectly serviceable opening gambit, and if the story itself interests you, I suspect that following the original rather than the adaptation may be the best way to enjoy the adventure.